Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose: Léontine Zanta’s La science et l’amour (1920)

Abstract

Léontine Zanta, the first woman docteur ès lettres at the Sorbonne, affirmed in her essay on feminism that the landscape for career women had improved since the publication of Colette Yver’s Princesses de science, a novel about women doctors. For her, “le nouveau problème,” which she hoped to solve in La Science et l’amour, was to determine if “la vie de l’intelligence et celle du coeur” could be reconciled. But this was in fact an old problem, one at the heart of two representative Belle Époque novels by women. Zanta uses the Belle Époque template but situates her narrative in a society torn apart by war, adding a religious element that further problematizes the “heart” half of the enduring head/heart binary. Though the title of her novel hints that love and intellectual pursuits may at last be on equal footing, juggling the personal and the professional remains problematic.