Having it All in the Belle Époque: How French Women’s Magazines Invented the Modern Woman par Rachel Mesch

Abstract

of Saül. In this chapter, Lestringant also considers the often-overlooked subject of the nude photographs Gide took of young male subjects mostly en berger while in Rome in the winter of 1898, which Lestringant likens to the photography of Wilhelm von Gloeden. This blend of literary and social history provides salient analyses of this important period of Gide’s life. Slightly longer and consisting of twenty chapters, the second volume is Lestringant’s greatest contribution to Gidian studies in that it poses as the first biography to consider in great detail the second half of Gide’s life. Part one,“Le contemporain capital,” consists of five chapters, each portraying with subtle tenderness Gide’s changing aesthetic. In the following sections, readers will appreciate Lestringant’s treatment of Gide’s entanglements in and out of Africa. Much attention is afforded to the year 1939, marked by the publication of “le grand œuvre littéraire de Gide”: Journal 1889–1939. The section devoted to Gide’s Carnets d’Égypte is particularly illuminating, offering new insight into the erotics of Gide’s imaginary, posing, according to Lestringant, as a sequel to Corydon. Lestringant’s fluid writing style, coupled with extensive notes at the end of both volumes,as well as dual indices,renders the work user-friendly to a wide variety of readers at the university level. Lestringant traces Gide’s life and literature without muddying his investigation with harsh judgment, deductive commentary, or a prohibitively complex structure. University of Miami Walter S. Temple Mesch, Rachel. Having it All in the Belle Époque: How French Women’s Magazines Invented the Modern Woman. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8047-84245 . Pp. xii + 241. $39.95. Mesch seeks to answer the oft-posed question‘was there a Belle Époque for women?’ by examining two ground-breaking magazines, Femina and La Vie Heureuse (launched in 1901 and 1902, respectively) which “offer an ideal vantage point from which to examine this moment of society in transition: poised to accept women in more powerful , visible roles than ever before, but not always certain as to how to imagine them inhabiting those roles” (4). Mesch uses the term ‘Belle Époque literary feminism’ to describe the magazines’unique stance of disavowing feminist movements—considered a threat to traditional values—while expanding opportunities for women. This feminism was above all “a work of imagination,” an exploration, carried out by men and women alike, of “what the fully realized modern woman could be” (8). In part one Mesch discusses the ways text and image created “a shared fantasy of modern femininity”(27), before turning, in part two, to the magazines’reception and influence. Of particular note are her analyses of differences between the magazines (photos of a woman writer in Femina would show her at a desk, for instance, aligning her “with a visual trope associated with the authority of the grand homme”[61], whereas those in La Vie Heureuse would have her on a sofa with children nearby, emphasizing the 226 FRENCH REVIEW 88.2 Reviews 227 “perfect conjugation of woman and writer through visual emphasis on her domestic fealty”[82]); of the disjunction between the women’s press and mainstream media; of the efforts to make the “chères lectrices” feel like collaborators rather than observers; and especially of the “interactive, almost symbiotic relationship” (27) between the magazines and popular women’s novels such as Marcelle Tinayre’s La rebelle and Louise Marie Compain’s L’un vers l’autre, both “feminist fables” (131) from which a rather paradoxical feminism emerges. Just how expertly Mesch navigates the “contradictory ideological terrain” of Belle Époque literary feminism, where a selfdeclared feminist can call her partner “master” if doing so might reconcile love, marriage, feminism, and femininity without requiring a choice between them (138) cannot be over-emphasized. In her conclusion Mesch grapples with a sobering reality: changes that seemed so nigh during the magazines’ heyday (suffrage, a more equal legal definition of marriage, the“academization”of women) would not be achieved for decades. But she argues convincingly for the significance of the magazines’“dreaming” and the momentous ideological shift it represents (187). Femina and La Vie Heureuse stand...