Alone of All Her Sex? Delphine Gay de Girardin's Humor

Abstract

The 1991 film Impromptu (Lapine) might seem an unlikely departure point for approaching nineteenth-century French women writers’ literary humor since its heroine, George Sand, is not particularly known for it. The film does offer, though, a familiar scenario pertinent to the ways in which women are still, following Reginald Blyth, quoted by Regina Barreca, the ‘unlaughing at which men laugh.’ (1998: 2) At the time of its release, feminist scholars hoped that Sand might get her cinematic due, or at least a more nuanced portrait than the one in George Vidor’s 1944 A Song to Remember. However one feels about Judy Davis in the role of Sand, it turned out that Impromptu’s portrait of les enfants du siecle recycles caricatures of literary women perfected in nineteenth-century French print culture. Indeed, what the film does and does not say about writing women is a sign that after years of feminist efforts to question the canon, the audience is still steered to identify with male artists, endowed in this case with the most obvious comic force. In one burlesque scene at a provincial aristocrat’s chateau, to which a host of parasitic Romantic artists and writers have been invited, Sand’s spurned lover of the moment, Mallefille, challenges Alfred de Musset to a duel. Sand’s wine guzzling, bitter ex-lover literally steals the show. Preparing to meet his death in the duel, he drinks himself into a stupor, rides his horse into George’s bedroom, and vainly tries to woo her. When the horse defecates on Sand’s manuscript, Musset erupts into laughter and guffaws, ‘The horse is a critic!’ Of course, the audience is meant to laugh with him and it does. Sand does not. Of course, what is wrong with this picture depends on how and why we look at it, and who the ‘we’ is, since, as Regina Barreca puts it, ‘[c]omedy, out of all the textual territories explored, is the least universal [...] rigidly mapped and