Playing with Variables: Leduc au village

Abstract

Violette Leduc is known for books, fictional and autobiographical to varying degrees (Ravages, Therese et Isabelle, La Batarde), that include scenes recounting in detail sexual relations between women. Her books also include accounts of her unrequited love for a series of gay men (including Maurice Sachs, Jean Genet, and Jacques Guerin), her physical and emotional feelings for Simone de Beauvoir (never reciprocated across the several decades of their friendship, a word that perhaps cannot quite do justice to the odd and unbalanced relation they had), her marriage, and her relationship later in life with a construction worker she calls Rene in her writings. Sexual outsiders of many kinds fascinated her, and, it should be added, it does not seem that the categories that other people used to talk about her sexuality or sexuality in general had much pertinence for her. Consider the extraordinary letter she writes to Beauvoir in late summer 1950 about her feelings for Beauvoir and her feelings toward a couple of women who run the hotel in which she is staying in the village of Montjean: That you should not love me in the way that I love you is well and good, since that way I will never grow tired of solemnly adoring you. My love for you is a kind of fabulous virginity. And yet I have passed through, and am still in the midst of, a period of sexual frenzy [...]. I have been obsessed by, hounded by, that couple of women I wrote you about. I have been humiliated, revolted. They have found in this village, they have made real a union, whereas I have for fifteen years been consumed by, and am still consumed by solitude. I have often felt as if I were in Charlus's skin as I spied on them, as I envied them, as I imagined them. They never even spend fifteen minutes apart, and I often cry with rage and jealousy when I notice this fact. They are mistrustful, they are shut up inside their happiness. One night I told them, after all the people summering here had left, I told them in very nuanced terms that I loved you and about your beautiful friendship for me. It was a one-sided conversation. I gave, but got nothing in return. They are even more extraordinary than Genet's maids. The difference in their ages--I have also already told you about this, one is thirty, the other fifty-six--is something I find enchanting and consoling [...]. How simple they are, I keep coming back to this, how unrefined, how sure of themselves. The younger one has the face of a brute. Their fatness is the weight of sensuality. When seated they open their legs wide, like soldiers, whereas so-called normal women keep them crossed or closed tight. They are a torment to me without even knowing it but they also intensify my love for you because you are a part of the disaster that I am. I often think about lesbians in their cabarets, who exist on another planet, who are nothing but sad puppets. (1) The letter is typical of Leduc in all her idiosyncrasy: verging here and there toward the preposterous without ever quite tipping over into it, excessive in its emotivity, self-consciously obsessive, and also profoundly curious about the way sexuality functions (which doesn't mean she can't make the odd homophobic remark) and about the lack of fit between her sexuality and everyone else's (in this case, Beauvoir's, the two women in question, and lesbians who frequent queer bars and cabarets). She is attentive to a number of characteristics--axes of variations in sexualities we might say--that aren't always factored into typical discussions of sexuality: that sexualities have a class or regional component, that age difference is important in some sexualities, that girth can have a relation to gender and sexuality, that sexualities such as her own and that of this couple apparently are sometimes best understood by way of representations from the world of literature (Genet's two maids), and that the representations chosen can sometimes rely on transgendered forms of identification (her link to Proust's Charlus). …