What then becomes of femininity when la femme leaves her supposedly natural habitat of low style? In a system which relies for its effects of meaning on binary oppositions favouring masculinity, what position can she then take up vis-à-vis the masculine? Moreover, if, as Lévi-Strauss contends, a ‘structure is made up of several elements, none of which can undergo a change without effecting changes in all the other elements’ (Structural Anthropology 279), what happens to that ‘masculine’ when it cannot be signified by contrast to the feminine?

These are the questions with which I began this exploration, the questions Chapter 7 hoped to find answers for. But the situation has changed in the process of writing the book, especially the final chapter. I now want to interrogate my own questions. Those questions, I now feel, still privilege to some extent the sexual binarism set up by the trouvères. It is privileged in the assumption that femininity must take up a position in relation to masculinity, either the one the system affords or another. ‘Meaning’ must be preserved. In the trouvère system this position is provided generically. The emptiness of femininity is occluded by generic differentiation, as I have argued. Each genre or subgenre provides a woman who figures as ‘Woman’, and these generically differentiated manifestations, no matter how different they are, are elided back into Woman unless one keeps the differences in focus.