Female Friendship as a Literary Fact

Abstract

The Bechdel Test, sometimes called the Mo Movie Measure or Bechdel Rule, is a simple test which names the following three criteria: (1) it has to have at least two women in it, (2) who talk to each other, about (3) something besides a man. Bechdel Test Movie List Friendship is one of those incidentals in history, a biographical note in the margins of a larger, longer story of movements, schools, and traditions. I propose, however, to linger in those margins in order to pursue the implications of friendship for French women writers of the mid-twentieth century, because it seems to me that there is a bigger story to be discovered there concerning women's abjection within the institution of literature and some of the solutions they found to it. Simone de Beauvoir and Violette Leduc were friends--albeit with differing degrees of investment in their friendship--and although neither of them knew Monique Wittig (nearly thirty years their junior), all three women had friendships with Nathalie Sarraute, who belonged to the same generation as Beauvoir and Leduc and became a lifelong friend of Wittig's after the publication of L'Opoponax in 1964. Sarraute's connection to these three writers makes her a necessary part of the story of female friendship in the French institution of the twentieth century, and what interests me about these friendships is precisely their rather than their personal or private significance--in other words, their status as a fact. In adopting the term literary fact, I am appropriating the expression first coined in 1924 by the Russian Formalist Yuri Tynyanov, who clinched its currency in 1929 with the inclusion of his essay Literaturnyi fakt in the volume Arkhaisty i Novatory (Archaists and Innovators). (1) I use the term in the first instance to refer to something like the event described by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own as she reads an imaginary novel, Life's Adventure, by an imaginary woman writer, Mary Carmichael. By nice coincidence, Woolf's essay was also published in 1929. At that time, Nathalie Sarraute was pursuing a desultory career in law and expecting her second child. She did not begin writing until three years later, but it's quite possible that she read the essay in the original English when it appeared, since she much admired Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and, having spent a year studying at Oxford in 1920-21, she would most certainly have appreciated the contrast that Woolf draws between men's and women's colleges in Cambridge. (2) For Simone de Beauvoir, 1929 was the year in which her great childhood friend Zaza died. It was also the year in which she passed the agregation, ranking second to Sartre's first, which set the course for the remainder of her life. Violette Leduc, meanwhile, was working in a menial capacity in the service de presse of the publisher Plon, where, during her lunch hour, she read the new French translation of Rosamond Lehmann's Dusty Answer (1927), a novel in which, as Leduc later put it, Deux adolescentes s'aimaient, une femme osait l'ecrire (Batarde 170). (3) Monique Wittig was still six years from being born. But to return to A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf describes herself reading the first novel by her imaginary woman writer: I may tell you that the very next words I read were these--Chloe liked Olivia ... Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women. liked Olivia, I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. Cleopatra did not like Octavia. [...] Cleopatra's only feeling about Octavia is one of jealousy. Is she taller than I am? How does she do her hair? The play, perhaps, required no more. But how interesting it would have been if the relationship between the two women had been more complicated. …