Stolen Limelight: Gender, Display and Displacement in Modern Fiction in French by Margaret E. Gray

Abstract

Reviewed by: Stolen Limelight: Gender, Display and Displacement in Modern Fiction in French by Margaret E. Gray Jennifer Carr Gray, Margaret E. Stolen Limelight: Gender, Display and Displacement in Modern Fiction in French. UP of Wales, 2022. ISBN 978-1-78683-860-5. Pp. 257. Visual culture is increasingly ubiquitous, suffusing everything from entertainment to political rights claims staked in visibility. Meanwhile, gender studies and its disciplinary tributaries have couched our understanding of gender in terms of performativity and display, further reinforcing visuality's primacy in daily life. Against this backdrop, Stolen Limelight explores how twentieth-century French and Francophone fictions have harnessed readerly fluency in viewing practices through their narrative framings of gender, with Gray's analysis hinging on scenes of slippage, when seemingly legible instances of gendered display cede to a destabilizing hypervisibility. Gray foregrounds literary representations of excessive, even monstrous gendered display, productively complicating the tendency to conflate visibility and agency, and to reduce dynamics of spectatorship to the stable binary of observer and observed. Rather, she suggests, textual scenes of gendered display can displace both subject and object of the gaze—whether these positions are embedded in the narrative or embodied by readers—sowing epistemological doubt in their wake. Borrowing from psychoanalysis, art history, museum studies, and film theory, Gray attends to the effects of this "visuality of text" (6) in a corpus that spans the twentieth century and multiple geographies, resolutely canonical authors and lesser-studied ones. Stolen Limelight is divided into two sections of three chapters each that focus, respectively, on culminating scenes of corporeal display in Colette's Le blé en herbe, Ferdinand Oyono's Une vie de boy, and André Gide's La porte étroite, then on more abstract narrative strategies of display in François Mauriac's Thérèse Desqueyroux, Sébastien Japrisot's Piège pour Cendrillon, and Marguerite Duras's dual renderings of the same narrative: L'Amant and L'Amant de la Chine du Nord. Gray acknowledges the disparate contexts that produced these fictions (and subsequent film adaptations) while teasing out their shared investment in a dynamic of display-as-displacement that is inextricable from gender politics. Incidentally, this dynamic is echoed in Gray's analytical moves, which effect their own displacements by insisting that previous scholarship has looked in the wrong places, focused on the wrong things. For instance, in the chapter on Piège pour Cendrillon, Gray identifies generic subtexts—namely, the feminine-coded love story and fairy tale—that surreptitiously displace the novel's obvious engagement with detective fiction. Reprising Shoshana Felman's analysis of Japrisot's text, Gray contends that Felman's investment in Piège pour Cendrillon's undoing of detective genre conventions neglects the love story between women that is the narrative's foundational impetus. Gray's readings of Oyono and Duras likewise refocus critical attention, in this case on gendered displays whose stakes are heightened [End Page 274] by colonial contexts of racial oppression. These chapters highlight the risks of dissonance attendant to thematically uniting a disparate corpus, as Gray's instructive insistence on racialized gendering in Oyono's text is seemingly diluted by her interpretation of L'Amant's Chinese lover as a mother-surrogate whose feminization enacts a salvatory displacement of maternal madness, its potential imbrication in racist logics addressed only glancingly. Still, Stolen Limelight consistently offers engaging models of creative close reading that will appeal to literary scholars interested in interdisciplinary analyses' capacity to locate "trans-versal connections" (177) among apparently dissimilar texts. [End Page 275] Jennifer Carr Wellesley College (MA) Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French