Gender and Genre: Maurice, Moret and Duras

Abstract

For a number of French women writers, the political and cultural climate of the 1970s and 1980s provided them with the opportunity to reinterpret prevalent resistance images of the war years. A wave of historical and literary texts challenging official Gaullist memories of French wartime activities created a renewed interest in previously marginalized perspectives on the Occupation. Frédérique Moret’s Journal d’une mauvaise Française, Marguerite Duras’ La Douleur and Violette Maurice’s Les Murs éclatés all chart changes in perceptions of les années noires, reworking representations of women in conventional wartime narratives.1 The emergence of such texts, bridging an ever increasing gap between historical events and their literary representation, suggests that a number of French women writers were prepared to use writing as a means of challenging the hegemony of résistancialiste constructions of the war years in France.KeywordsConcentration CampShort StoryWoman WriterDiary FormDiary AccountThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.