Identity Politics and Confessional Acts: Suzanne Voilquin's Souvenirs d'une fille du peuple

Abstract

WOMEN IN FRENCH STUDIES Identity Politics and Confessional Acts: Suzanne Voilquin's Souvenirs d'unefille du peuple If, as William Spengemann asserts, "the self is a hard ground to plough" (xiii), then to this newcomer, the field of autobiography is yet more obstinate and fertile. I will not attempt here a discussion of "this gerne which is not one"; rather, I will situate Suzanne Voilquin's memoir in the framework of the social production of memory and identity. In Souvenirs d'unefille du peuple ou la Saint-Simonienne en Egypte, first published in 1866, Voilquin both recounts her Saint-Simonian "vie apostolique" and presents a frank account of her experience as a working-class woman in a bourgeois, capitalist world. From the very title of the memoir, Voilquin wears her marginal status as a badge: not only is she a "fille," she is also "du peuple," and one of those feminist "SaintSimoniennes " to boot. Identity—or the creation of the self—is clearly at stake in Voilquin's Souvenirs. As opposed to Leslie Rabine's interpretation of Souvenirs as structured around an overlapping of the reader-writer, motherdaughter , and doctor-patient relations,1 I will be studying Voilquin's autobiographical narrative through the lens of confession. As it is presented in Souvenirs d'une fille du peuple, the act of confession serves as a model of reading, of narrating, and, in the larger picture, of organizing social relations. Voilquin chooses this confessional mode not only to present her life story, but also to re-fashion the "autobiographical pact" in order to accommodate women's stories. And although the memoir follows a rather conventional style, Voilquin's challenge to both the social contract and the autobiographical pact is anything but conventional. But before turning to Voilquin's Souvenirs, I will first determine the differences between confession and contract, and examine the role confession played in the Ecole Saint-Simonienne. The model of confession serves to convey Voilquin's experience and to position the reader and the writer in a non-contractual bond. When I refer to "contract," I refer both to the social contract—or the political fiction detailing the individual's entry into society—and to the autobiographical pact—or, as Philippe Lejeune would have it, the implicit agreement between the reader and the writer to a "commitment to telling the 'truth,' use of ?,' etc." (130). Both compacts, or agreements, presuppose the ability to contract, which in turn already presupposes an autonomous (male, bourgeois) subject.2 I am not suggesting that women are by "nature" not autonomous, but rather that they are perceived as such, and therefore construed as unable to contract. Sidonie Smith comments that according to the ideology of "western selfhood," "the essential self is ... a 'free' agent, exercising self-determination over meaning, personal destiny, and desire. Neither powerless nor passive, it assumes and celebrates agency" (8). Although Lejeune assures us that he chose the word "pacte" more for its romantic than its political resonance, the romantic and the political are 55 WOMEN IN FRENCH STUDIES not so easily disentangled, since both the autobiographical pact and the social contract are predicated on an ideology of the self, on the myth of the autonomous subject. The autobiographical pact mirrors the social contract: the reader enters into an agreement with the writer, just as an individual enters into an agreement with society, through mutual recognition and implicit approval of certain laws and conventions. If the "pacte autobiographique" structures the presentation of the self through the form of contract, what happens to voices that are by law unable to contract? The Civil Code of 1804 constructed women as legal minors, outside the social contract and unable to represent themselves. Voilquin neatly evades the form of contract (and its bourgeois liberal overtones) by appropriating the form of confession. Whereas the bourgeois public sphere endorses liberty, yet reserves natural rights for white, property-owning men, every race, class, and gender has access to the confessional. According to its traditional definition, confession is a sacramental act, in which the priest gives pardon in exchange for the narrative of sins committed. Confession rehabilitates the sinner, and marks the penitent's re-entry into if not...