Abstract
In royal proclamations, legal and medical texts, and even newspapers, the vagabond is seen in France from the sixteenth century onwards as a shadowy figure who, according to sociologist Jean-Francois Wagniart, does not write and speaks little (Wagniart 1999: 9). This effacement is even more striking in the case of the female vagrant or vagabonde, doubly excluded by virtue of her gender and her sexuality. Historically associated with prostitution, marginalised and officially despised, this article explores the attempts by contemporary Francophone women writers Colette and Isabelle Eberhardt to recuperate the image of the vagabonde in their travel writing and autobiographical fiction, appropriating her image as a feminist forbearer or attempting to harness her illicit appeal. Their texts appear, however, to paradoxically reproduce the modes of repression they seek to circumvent, perpetuating the hierarchy of powerful writer and silenced vagabonde, or the conflation of vagabonde and prostitute. Through close readings of selected texts, this article questions therefore whether it is ever possible to truly voice the vagabonde.
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