Doctrine of female submission

The Doctrine of female submission prescribes women’s obedience and silence as religious duty, but the novel tests that rule against Marie-Josèphe de la Croix’s work as an observer, interpreter, and advocate for Sherzad. Its force lies not only in forbidding women to speak: it also helps determine whose knowledge is trusted, who may explain another person’s words, and who has authority to judge the truth.

Prescription and Enforcement

Pope Innocent XII states the doctrine most explicitly when he invokes an order from his predecessor that women should remain silent and obedient. Later, addressing Marie-Josèphe directly, he insists that women must be submissive, obedient, and quiet because this is God’s will. The repetition makes silence more than a matter of decorum: it is presented as a required form of religious submission, enforced by the highest ecclesiastical authority in the scene.

The rule is also visible in the smaller exchanges that precede this open confrontation. During Yves de la Croix’s presentation, Lucien de Barenton, Count de Chrétien, tells Marie-Josèphe that the sea monster must be silenced for the King’s sake. She quietly counters that she has fed it and that its cry does not sound like hunger; Lucien rebukes her for impudence. The exchange joins two kinds of silencing: the proposed suppression of the creature’s voice and the social correction of the woman who tries to interpret it.

Knowledge Under Suspicion

Marie-Josèphe’s claims meet a related form of discipline when she speaks before the natural philosophers. A senior scholar mocks her understanding of the sea woman, attributing her judgment to an assistant who has strained her mind with the Classics. Yves then dismisses her comments even as she speaks in Latin about an anomalous lobe in the sea woman’s lungs. Marie-Josèphe recognizes that he expects her to disclose a secret, but the claim she offers is a false secret. In this scene, learned language does not protect her from being treated as intellectually unreliable; authority can discount her voice even when she has command of the subject and is acting deliberately.

Lucien offers a counterargument to that dismissal. He asks Louis XIV to consider whether Marie-Josèphe is right, notes that she has shown the sea monster understands her, and urges that she be allowed to prove her claim. He frames the issue as one of evidence: if the creature speaks a human language, it cannot simply be classified as a creature. His intervention does not erase the gendered limits on her authority, but it opens a space in which her demonstration, rather than her presumed proper silence, may be considered.

Speaking for Sherzad

The stakes become sharper when Marie-Josèphe conveys Sherzad’s account before Louis XIV and Pope Innocent XII. She briefly considers whether she should make the sea woman sound more diplomatic, then rejects that course because it would entangle her in lies and Sherzad could correct her herself. The decision matters under a doctrine that denies women authority to speak: Marie-Josèphe refuses both silence and the easier authority of reshaping another woman’s testimony to suit her audience.

When the discussion turns to immortality and resurrection, Marie-Josèphe sings Sherzad’s account of life: people live, create new life, and die, but do not return. She tells Pope Innocent that she did not invent the story; Sherzad told it and does not understand the charge of heresy. Her defense is not a claim that Sherzad’s words conform to Church doctrine, but that they are Sherzad’s words and should be heard as such. Pope Innocent later concedes that Sherzad has told ugly truths, even while insisting that Marie-Josèphe is not entitled to determine truth for herself. His response reveals the conflict at the rule’s center: the testimony can be acknowledged as true while the woman who transmits and defends it is still denied interpretive authority.

Resistance and Significance

Marie-Josèphe challenges the doctrine on both ethical and religious grounds. She argues that women have souls and that Sherzad, as a woman, must not be killed; she presents such a killing as a mortal sin. Pope Innocent tells her not to lecture him on sin, but her appeal turns the language of religious authority against the silence imposed in its name. Her intervention makes Sherzad’s personhood, rather than obedience to the hierarchy, the immediate moral question.

The final exchange renews the conflict when Marie-Josèphe suggests that Pope Innocent could teach Sherzad about everlasting life. He orders her to stop meddling and again invokes women’s required submission and quiet. Lucien responds by defending Marie-Josèphe’s audacity and bravery as qualities God gave her. The doctrine is therefore left in active dispute: ecclesiastical authority continues to demand silence, while Marie-Josèphe’s speech, scientific judgment, and defense of Sherzad repeatedly show what that silence would suppress.