Gallantry and Matrimonial Heterosexuality: Love and Friendship in Scudéry’s Carte de Tendre (1654)

This article reads Scudéry’s Carte de Tendre from the viewpoint of the history of sexuality. Scholars have argued that Scudéry’s map, by implementing a reconfiguration of emotions, paves the way for modern affective subjectivity. I suggest that by virtue of a deferral of sex typical of gallantry, the Carte de Tendre pictures a tension between two economies of feelings in relation to sex: two erotics. While drawing on a homoerotic conception of friendship — redefined as “tender friendship” once women are given access to it — the map points to a modern de-eroticized, or heterosocial, definition of friendship in contrast with (hetero)sexual love. It suggests that the access of women to friendship in seventeenth-century France has played an important role in the development of sexuality as a heteronormative apparatus in the modern era.