`I am not a woman writer'

MLR, 104.1, 2009 149 Manson:AmericanIcon'(Stephen Perrin). A lesscontroversial andmorediscursive workshopconsiderstheroleof theacademyas a cultural ambassador, withpapers on theimpact ofstudy-abroad programmes (Mark Bernheim),faculty and student exchange programmes (Giovanna Franci),andnewAmericanstudies programmes inEastern Europe (Rodica Mihaila). One workshopbears theprovocative title'What Was Modernism?'. Itspapers offer theoretical perspectives (Jonathan Culler, RonaldBush,AndersonAraujo) as well as practicalreadings of MarianneMoore (PaolaNardi),Mina Loy (Antonella Francini), DerekWalcott (Andrea Molesini), and 'contemporary modernist' Amy Newman (Paola Loreto). But the reader will seek invain for a simple answer to the title question. The lasttwo workshopsare more compact, oneof them considering 'TheImpact ofAfrican AmericanStudies'(Annalucia Accardo onGrace Paley) and theother addressing from a historian's perspective thetimely issueof 'Democracy in Amer icaafter TwoCenturies'. As an indication ofhowAmbassadorsoftensucceedsin surprising thereader, thelatter workshopcontains a paper inItalian byFerdinando Fasce,ominously entitled'Esportare lademocrazia?', which,however, turns out to be devoted to an important radio show of the 1950S, America's Town Meeting of the Air,a programme thatfostered faith inUS democracy bystimulating exchange. Fasce'spaperconcludes withananecdote aboutanoccasion when the Americansin volved with theradioshowfound that they couldnotdinetogether ina Washington hotel,someofthem beingblack.Fascequotesfrom a report: InEurope,the MiddleEast,in Asia and Africathetwenty-six Americans couldassociate together incomplete democracy-in Washington they couldnot. Onewonders whatthe episode willdo totherecently renewed faith in US democracy whichthe Town Meeting party created. One can only hope that along with the news of discrimination by the Hotel Carlton will travel the fact that rightacross the street theStatlerHotel served the party promptly andcourteously. (p.509). CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OFMILAN FRANCESco ROGNONI Women's Writing inWestern Europe: Gender, Generation and Legacy. Ed. by ADAL GISA GIORGIoand JULIA WATERS. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2007. xi+463 pp. ?44.99. ISBN 978-1-84718-165-7. In a lecture givenat the University of Warwickon 16 June 2007,entitled'Wanted Dead orAlive:LocatingContemporary Women'sWriting', Mary Eagletondrew attention tothefactthat while thecategory of 'Women's Writing'seemstobe dying inbookshop managementand academicpublishing, and inconsciousopposition to the'death of theauthor'proclaimed byRolandBarthesand embraced bypost structuralist thought, individual womenwritersarevery much aliveandpromoted bycritics and reviewers. Thisvolume-collectingtwenty-seven papersdelivered ata conference held in2005-is testimony totheimportant workstill beingcarried out onwomenwriters as a field ofenquiryinliterary studies. Itsaim isto 'draw compar isonsandcontrasts between different generations of writers andcritics andbetween 150 Reviews different countries, and toexamine howwomen's literary production has responded tothesocio-political anddemographic changesthat have shapedan ever-evolving Europe' (p. 1). In the wake of literary-critical feminist projectsandothertheoreti callyinformed work,the volumeposesquestionsconcerning contemporary women writers'relationship with their female predecessors asevidencedinthetexts, aswell as their self-identity aswriters'of a truly international women'sculture acrossever more fluid national borders'(p.xi),who repeatedly distancethemselves from a now established line of women's writing andabodyoffeminist criticism outsidethetexts. Afterintroducing thevolume'skey areas of commonconcern-'gender', 'ge neration', and 'legacy'-theeditors definetheseterms. The chapters fromthefirst section cover Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (Nancy K.Miller);Colette'slegacy(Diana Holmes); parodyandpasticheinthereworkings ofaGerman feminist text byIrm traud Morgner (Lyn Marven); foremothers inItalian women's fiction of thel990S (ClaudiaBernardi);PascaleRoze's explicit acknowledgement ofdebtto Marguerite Duras (Julia Waters); feminist reinterpretations ofcanonicalBritishtexts bymale authors(Monica Germania); howexplicit disavowal ofdebttofemale precursors and disconnection from politicsarecontradicted bytextual evidencein worksbyJudith Hermann,SarahKirsch,andChrista Wolf (ClaudiaGremler)and in thenew ge neration ofFrench womenwriters(Shirley Jordan); ElsaMorante's legacy(Adalgisa Giorgio). The first four chapters whichmake up thesecondsectionreinvestigate thecen trality of the mother figure in feminist theories and inwomen'swriting. Maggie Humm examinestheintertextual influence ofVirginia Woolf on SimonedeBeau voir. Heather Ingman applies French feminist theories of thematernal to three contemporary Irishnovelsbywomen.NicolettaDi Ciolla investigates female sub jectivity incrimefiction by Italian womenwriters, andElianaMaestri showshow Irigaray's theories of the maternal influenced theItalian Diotima group'snotion of 'female realism', and how this in turn informs the representation of themother in the Italian translation of works by A. S. Byatt. The texts covered in the sub sequentthree chapters-which bypassthevexed mother-daughter relationship in favour ofa re-evaluation ofthefather figure-areconcerned with therepresentation of illegitimate daughters intwentieth-century Portugueseliterature (ClaudiaPazos Alonso); maternal and paternal paradigms in Sibilla Aleramo and Dacia Maraini (UrsulaFanning);and intertextual links betweenJulia Kristeva'sTalesofLoveand Nadia Fusini'sI voltidell'amore (Elena Minelli). The remaining chapters fromthis sectionfocus on the grandmother as analternative modelof intergenerational influ ence:Claudia Capancioni explorestheinfluence of...

The earliest known literary productions by women living in Europe were probably written by French writers. As early as the 12th century, women troubadours in the south of France were writing poems. French women continued writing through the ages, their number increasing as education became more available to women of all classes. And yet, of the great number of works by women writers who preceded the current feminist movement, very few have survived. A few writers such as Marie de France, George Sand, and Simone de Beauvoir became part of the canon. But critics, mostly male, had judged the works of only a few women writers worthy of recognition. As part of the feminist move to reclaim women writers and to rethink literary history, scholars in French literature began to take a new look at women writers who had been popular during their lifetimes but who had not been admitted into the canon. This reference book provides extensive information about French women writers and the world in which they lived. Included are several hundred alphabetically arranged entries for authors; literary genres, such as the novel, poetry, and the short story; literary movements, such as classicism, realism, and surrealism; life-cycle events particular to women, such as menstruation and menopause; events and institutions which affected women differently than men, such as revolutions, wars, and laws on marriage, divorce, and education. The volume spans French literature from the Middle Ages to the present and covers those writers who lived and worked mainly in France. The entries are written by expert contributors and each includes bibliographical information. The entries focus on each writer's awareness of how her gender shaped her outlook and opportunities, on how categorizations, structures, and terms used to describe literary works have been defined for women, and the ways in which women writers have responded to these definitions. The volume begins with a feminist history of French literature and concludes with a selected, general bibliography and a chronology of women writers.

This thesis examines the development of female subjectivities as presented in the short stories of women writers who started writing In Arabic in the second half of the 20th century in Egypt and the Levant (represented by Lebanon, Syria and Palestine), Iraq and the Gulf (represented by United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia) and North Africa (represented by Morocco and Tunisia). My theoretical approach draws on the theories of subjectivity elaborated by Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir and other critical re-elaborations of Foucauldian concepts by several feminist theorists. This thesis aims at filling some of the lacunae in the available studies of Arab women literary achievements, which tend to be scarce, geographically limited, and concentrated on few famous names, dealing mostly with the novel and history of literature. Therefore the geographical area covered is extensive, showing the cultural, social and political variety of Arab countries against its mass media image of a monolithic whole. Whenever possible the authors have been selected among the younger, little known or translated women writers. The focus on the short story rather than the novel provides an insight into a dynamic area of Arab women's literary production which is widely understudied. Selecting subjectivity enables the study to move from the phase of history of literature to a deeper critical appreciation of women's literary achievements. Moreover subjectivity allows one to meet and hear the voices of female subjects with differences, opinions, sexualities, and so forth, and hence overcomes the many stereotypes diffused by mass media about 'Muslim women', transformed into a homogeneous, ahistorical and universalised category.

:<i>Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century</i>

Feminist criticism arose in response to developments in the field of the feminist movement. Many thinkers such as John Stuart Mill, Mary Wollstonecraft raised their voice against the injustice done to women in every sphere of life. As this gained momentum throughout the world, feminist also awakened to the depiction and representation of women in literature which is one of the influential medium of socialization and culture. They argued that woman and womanhood are not biological facts but are given social constructs. One is not born a woman, but becomes one through culture and socialization. At first, feminist criticism was reactionary in the nature in the sense that they exposed stereotypical images of women in the literature. These images of women were promulgated by the male writers. These images of women were what men think of women. Gradually, feminist criticism moved from this phase to more constructive work. They unearthed many women writers that were either suppressed or neglected by the male literary tradition. In this way, they created a separate literary tradition of women writers. Feminist critics divided this tradition in such phases as feminine phase, feminist phase and female phase. They also studied the problems faced by female creative writers. They used theories from post-structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis to study the nature of female creativity. They also realized that there is an innate difference between male and female modes of writing. Feminist critics also exposed the sexiest nature of man-made language. They also exposed phallic centrism of much of the western literary theory and criticism. They also started to study the language used by the women writers. Simon De Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Elaine Showalter and Juliet Mitchell are some of the feminist critics discussed in this paper.

Introduction Fiona Paisley and Kirsty Reid Part I: Writing Back to Colonial and Imperial Authority 1. Denouncing America's Destiny: Sarah Winnemucca's Assault on U.S. Expansion Frederick E. Hoxie 2. Chinese Warnings and White Men's Prophecies Marilyn Lake 3. Orality and Literacy on the New York Frontier: Remembering Joseph Brant Elizabeth Elbourne Part II: Speech Acts 4. History Lessons in Hyde Park: Embodying the Australian Frontier in Interwar London Fiona Paisley 5. Patriotic Complaints: Sailors Performing Petition in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain Isaac Land Part III: Mobilities 6. Zulu Sailors in the Steamship Era: The African Modern in the World Voyage Narratives of Fulunge Mpofu and George Magodini, 1916-24 Jonathan Hyslop 7. me. Write me.: Native and Metis Letter-Writing Across the British Empire, 1800-70 Cecilia Morgan 8. Littoral Literacy: Sealers, Whalers and the Entanglements of Empire Tony Ballantyne Part IV: Fragmented Archives 9. Four Women: Exploring Black Women's Writing in London, 1880-1920 Caroline Bressey 10. The Power of Words in Nineteenth-Century Prisons: British Colonial Mauritius, 1835-87 Clare Anderson Part V: The View from Above 11. Postcolonial Flyover: Above and Below in Frank Moraes's The Importance of Being Black (1965) Antoinette Burton

Simone de Beauvoir presents a considerable challenge to anyone attempting to identify the crucial influences in her life and work since in a very important sense they can be summarised by naming Jean-Paul Sartre. This is not, as it might first appear, the suggestion that this brilliant (and productive) woman writer only achieved prominence because of a relationship with a man. This was far from the case (and there is some evidence to lead us to speculate on what de Beauvoir gave to Sartre rather than the reverse) but what we have to acknowledge is the close association (both social and intellectual) between these two figures and the dialogue between them that was so crucial to both. In biographical terms, there is little doubt that Sartre led de Beauvoir away from idealist philosophy and towards existentialism; at the same time de Beauvoir’s work was organised around (and here the idea of dialogue is central) the working out, in both fiction and non-fiction, of Sartre’s ideas on morality and the limits of personal responsibility. Both individuals, it must be emphasised, have to be located firmly within European modernism. In terms of both philosophy, and politics, de Beauvoir and Sartre entirely endorsed, for most of their adult and working lives, the Enlightenment’s expectations of the rule, indeed the possibilities, of the rational. In de Beauvoir’s case this discourse made her profoundly sceptical of all religions and of psychoanalysis: the world, as far as she was concerned, could be rationally understood and rationally organised. That emotional life did not always lend itself to such rational principles was a constant theme of de Beauvoir’s fiction: from her first published novel She Came to Stay she was preoccupied with the problems of subjectivity and the irrational.1

Bu calismada yirminci yuzyilin iki buyuk kadin yazari, Simone de Beauvoir ve Annie Ernaux’nun aile cevreleri uzerinden kendi kadin kimliklerini sorguladiklari Une mort tres douce ve Une Femme adli eserleri karsilastirmali olarak ele alinmistir. Calismada, her iki eserde uc kusak Fransiz kadinin (anlatici, anne ve buyukanne) ait olduklari aileler farkli donem kesitleriyle, her doneme ozgu deger yargilariyla, kadinin toplumsal hayattaki konumu goz onunde bulundurularak incelenmistir. Yasam oykuleri acisindan benzerlikler iceren her iki yazarin bireysel ve toplumsal planda kadin kimliklerinin olusmasinda buyuk oranda aile yasamlarinin belirleyici oldugu gorulmustur. Buyukanne kusagi, otorite ve korkuya dayali, kadin egitiminin nerdeyse hice sayildigi bir toplumsal ve kulturel ortamda yetismistir. Anne kusagi ise, gelenegin belirledigi otoriter aile kadini olmak ile, uygun firsatlarda da modern olana yuzunu donmek arasinda bir gelgit yasamis olsa da, kizlarinin daha mutlu yasayabilmesi icin egitimi ve okumayi onemseyip tesvik etmislerdir. Yazarlarin temsil ettigi kadin kusagina gelince; bu kusak kadinlar geleneksel degerlerin baskilayici kurallarina karsin, kendi adlarina, kendileri icin ve kendi kendilerine bir kimlik olusturma savasimi icinde olmuslar; kadin kimliginin toplumsal boyutunun bireysel boyutla ic iceligini one cikararak, kadinin toplumsal hayattaki yerini saglamlastirmanin, aile, gelenek ve toplumsal sinif aidiyetinin otesinde bireysel bilincten gectigini ortaya koymuslardir. Anahtar Sozcukler: Annie Ernaux, Simone de Beauvoir, Bir Kadin, Une mort tres douce, Kadin. THE SOCIAL DIMENSIONS OF THE IDENTITY OF WOMAN IN “ UNE MORT TRES DOUCE ”AND “ UNE FEMME ” Abstract : In this study, twentieth century’s two great works by women writers, Simone de Beauvoir’s “ Une mort tres douce ” and Annie Ernaux’s “ Une femme ”, in which they questioned their own female identity through their familial circles, will be comparatively studied. In both works, three generations of French women (narrator, mother and grandmother) are studied by focusing on different periods in their family history, values peculiar to every period, and women’s position in society. Many similarities can be seen between both writers and their identity as women are shaped by their familial lives. The generation of the grandmother grew in a cultural and social environment in which women are disciplined with fears and strict authority and their right to education was ignored. The generation of the mother lived through a turbulent transition period in which women were in-between the traditional female roles and models of modern womanhood, but they encouraged their daughters to further education. As for the generation represented by the narrator, women rebelled against the oppression of the traditional female roles, and they strove to build an identity particular to themselves, depending on their own resources. They revealed the intricate relations between the social and individual dimensions of female identity, and put forward that the empowerment of the women in social life is about the improvement of the individual consciousness more than familial, traditional and class identities. Keywords : Annie Ernaux, Simone de Beauvoir, Une Femme , Une mort tres douce , Woman.

Feminist autobiography is a genre with long-standing literary and philosophical tradition, still some aspects, like, autobiography as “death writing” have come to scholarly attention as of relatively recent. The conceptual framework hinged on the concepts of “tanatography” (defined as an account of a person’s death) and “autotanatography” (defined as an account of one’s own death) makes it possible to take a fresh look into feminist writings from 19th and 20th centuries (Alice James and Simone de Beauvoir). Among the questions for the critical reflection we can mention the following ones: issues of memory and forgetting, of death of the significant other, of aging, of suicide, of literary death (ending the writing career path). Autothanatography is self-death-writing, instead of self-life-writing, even if death is an experience that cannot be had for oneself. The current article takes a look into the auto-death-writing of two women writers: Alice James (1848-1892) – a sister of William and Henry James and Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986). Although both women’s lives are set almost a century apart and none of them define herself as a feminist writer, their memoirs are written from the vantage point of imminent death. In the first case (James’s) we can speak of her posthumously published diaries, especially their second part written after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Whereas in the latter (Beauvoir’s) case the autothanatological vibe is felt throughout the whole series of her memoirs (“Memoirs of a dutiful daughter”, “The prime of life”, “Force of circumstance”, “A very easy death”), but especially in the oeuvre “All is said and done” – the writing in anticipation of one’s death. The aspect that is common to both writers is that their memoirs exhibit the strategy of recollection, of re-reading their life events anew in the wake of the end (physical and/or authorial).

In both The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir appeals to writing as a means to transcendence. Insofar as the writer does not attempt to set up an absolute through his or her work, proposal explicitly links the project of writing with freedom both for the individual writer and for others as the writer's project discloses the world and opens up the future. But this proposal is not uncontroversial. While many have indeed found or expressed their freedom through creative literary experiences, many readers see in suggestion a justification for her own life's work. Whether or not proposal is simply an elitist approach that fails to acknowledge the plight of the average woman or a crucial element to her analysis and prescription for might be uncovered through a look at the writing Beauvoir creates in her literature. Catharine Brosman argues that Beauvoir makes a distinction between women and who are Women writers, on this account, compose a simplistic sort of literature aimed at describing feelings, sights, etc. Writers who are women, on the other hand, write a literature of commitment, engaging life's difficult questions, challenging and subverting the social order; to write is to engage in politics. That one is a woman simply further characterizes the writer without affecting the writing. Brosman argues that Beauvoir places herself in this latter category and thereby allies herself to men rather than to other (1991, 33). Obfuscating the distinction between the two categories, Brosman concludes by saying, Beauvoir's aim of illustrating a woman writer's life thus necessarily meant defending it: `It is the whole of a life that is structured by and on writing' [Dayan, 80] (1991, 34). This distinction between women and who are women, while initially quite attractive, may not completely or clearly describe position regarding and writing. Her position is complex; it involves a conception of different types of literary expression that each use language differently and contribute to women's emancipation in different, and at times conflicting, ways. In this essay, I explore the liberatory potential of writing for women. This essay contributes to the burgeoning scholarship on Beauvoir, breaking new ground by taking a philosophical look at an often ignored collection of short stories. I illustrate what Beauvoir says about writers in the Second Sex (1952) with her short story collection When Things of the Spirit Come First (1982). Combining these two will help to clarify what Beauvoir means when she appeals to literary artistic expression as a moral action in the face of oppression. I focus not on the plot of each story or specifically on the bad faith evidenced by each of the main characters. Instead, my aim is to bring out the more subtle theme of writing.1 Each story features a woman as a writer and it is through an analysis of the various modes and styles of writing presented that we come to a better understanding of own thoughts about language, writing, and women. Throughout all of the stories, it is evident that view of literature is intimately tied together with her view of existence. A literature that is detached from life cannot be a literature of commitment and the writer of such a literature does not experience transcendence. This connection between life and literature, as we shall see, is crucial to understanding position as it is developed in the five stories and in her philosophical essays. I In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir contends that literature and art are among the activities turn to for salvation. However, she also contends that women's situation as oppressed often results in rather poor literary outcomes. Due to lack of training, woman's artistic expression often reflects her situation, unfocused and not very good, she lacks discipline. …

This collection of twelve essays discusses the principles and practices of women's autobiographical writing in the United States, England, and France from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Employing feminist and poststructuralist methodologies, the essays examine a wide range of private life writings -- letters, journals, diaries, memoirs, pedagogical texts, and fictional and factual autobiographies. The concepts of theory and practice -- as opposing and mutually exclusive methodologies, as focal points for conflicting interpretations, and finally as complementary approaches to the study of literature -- are central to this collection. The Private Self explores the links between the historical devaluation of women's writings and the cultural definitions of women that have constrained their writing practices and excluded them from the canon of traditional autobiographical texts. Collectively, these essays expose the cultural biases that derive from notions of selfhood defined by a white, masculine, and Christian experience. In an effort to revise our prevailing concept of autobiography, these essays deal with differences of race, class, religion, sexual orientation, and gender. Discussed here are writings by more than two dozen women including Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Alice James, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Forten Grimke, Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Sophie Kovalevsky, Anais Nin, Hilda Doolittle, and Simone de Beauvoir. The work of these writers reveals a split between public and private self-representations, and it is the notion of a private self expressed through women's autobiographical writings that forms the link among all the essays.

This article1 provides an analysis of the critical reception of Françoise Sagan's first six novels (published between 1954 and 1965) before offering a rereading of these novels from a feminist perspective. The first part of the article is therefore devoted to highlighting the various devices used to discredit Sagan's literature. It aims to suggest that her personal and professional reputation was constructed around a set of sexist and elitist stereotypes concerning a woman writer and female characters typical of the time. The second part of the article argues that these six novels represent an interesting field of investigation for the study of women's quest for an autonomous identity, particularly as they were published after Simone de Beauvoir's Le Deuxième Sexe (1949) and before feminism started to have a significant influence on literary criticism.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) is renowned as one of the most extreme misogynists in the history of Western philosophy. However, women writers also promoted his works and also drew on his metaphysics and ethics as they developed their own philosophical and feminist positions. The chapter starts by sketching in the role and range of Schopenhauerian women philosophers and writers. The chapter then focuses on two case-studies: May Sinclair (1863–1946), a neglected British Idealist, and Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) whose early passion for Schopenhauer helped shape the negative view of female embodiment evident in her published works. The chapter ends with some comments on the relevance of Schopenhauer to post-1968 feminisms, including the “ethics of care”, and Luce Irigaray’s engagement with Indian philosophical traditions.

By HENRI PEYRE Elections to time-honored French Academy normally turn out to be mundane Parisian events, derided by young and by most intellectocrats; they stir up scant interest in country at large and even less outside France. The superannuated army generals, archbishops and retired university professors who, with an occasional sprinkling of dukes and of once authentic writers, make up body of would-be Immortals, are seldom eager to cast their vote for any author seventy who might disturb their slumbering peace of mind. A few who had once held out promises of revitalizing conservative ideology Jacques de Lacretelle, Pierre Gaxotte, Thierry Maulnier appear, once ensconced in one of forty armchairs, to have taken refuge in prudent silence once mockingly praised by Boileau as chief claim to fame of Conrart, originator of Richelieu's original Academy. Gide, Malraux and Sartre all spurned body which had once closed its doors on Balzac, Baudelaire and Zola. Camus might have agreed to accept election, had he lived; after his 1957 award from Swedish Academy he was sarcastically accused by some of his former friends of currying bourgeois approval and of adopting sumptuous manner of Chateaubriand. It had been taken for granted that women writers were never to be included in a traditional body as jealously male as conclave of Cardinals, House of Lords and German General Staff groups once singled out by Academician Paul Bourget as three other pillars of Western civilization. Anna de Noailles, Colette and one or two other women of letters had, as a compensation, been invited to join Belgian Academy, as had, in 1971, a French woman born in Belgium in 1903 and naturalized as an American citizen in 1947, Marguerite Yourcenar. Almost exactly ten years later, on 22 January 1981, at age of wisdom of threescore years and seven, Mme Yourcenar was officially received under cupola. She had, by a special decree, been restored to French citizenship; she was spared ordeal of paying visits of candidacy to established Academicians; she had kept out of Paris salons which boast of acting as antechambers to Academy. She praised with earnest conviction her predecessor Roger Caillois and, in her turn, was intelligently eulogized by another scion of Ecole Norm ale (the nursery of one-fourth of members), Jean D'Ormesson. He is one who had engineered and, despite reluctance of other members of academic profession hesitant to break with a hallowed tradition, secured her election. The gates seemed now ominously open to other septuagenarian female writers such as Nathalie Sarraute and Simone de Beauvoir, perhaps even one day to a matured Francoise Sagan (b. 1935), once favorite of insolent generation! That revolutionary election could not well be hailed as a victory for feminism. Yourcenar has evinced not a shred of interest in claims of the second sex. None of her successful novels and few of her early recits or plays grant much attention to female characters. Hadrian's wife and his occasional mistresses pale beside emperor's passion for Antinous. Zeno's encounters with women are merely episodic, in contrast to his moving friendship with Prior, with alchemists and with very ecclesiastics who sentence him to die. Yourcenar's grandfather and father monopolize her interest, and that of reader, in her autobiographical volumes; she hardly knew her own mother. Her most touching heroines neglected wife of Alexis, and Sophie, hopelessly and vainly in love with another homosexual male are as forlorn and as dolorously resigned as female characters in Gide. Electra herself, in undramatic play named after her, Phaedra and Ariadne in another mystery play, even less meekly obedient Alcestis these hardly stand as memorable portrayals of femininity. There occur a few touching pages on American woman poet Hortense Flexner introducing expert translation of her poetry by Yourcenar. One may regret that author has not as yet left a sketch of Grace Frick, her companion of many years on her Maine island and her gifted translator. Nor has Yourcenar ever condescended to yield to trends which have swept many French and some

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. …