Fille De Research Articles

Choristome osseux de la conjonctive bulbaire chez une jeune fille de 9 ans : aspect clinique et anatomopathologique

Choristome osseux de la conjonctive bulbaire chez une jeune fille de 9 ans : aspect clinique et anatomopathologique

Framing homosexual identities in Cameroonian literature

What language exists to describe the lives of women and sexual minorities who live in Cameroon? In this paper, I demonstrate how a selection of contemporary works of fiction use their narratives to create a space and language for the experiences of LGBT individuals within the cultural imaginary of Sub-Saharan Africa. Texts such as my own Jeune fille de Bona Mbella (2010), Max Lobe’s 39 Rue de Berne (2013) and Chimamanda Adichie’s “Jumping Monkey Hill” describe the personal lives of both women and sexual minorities, and show how their experiences are intertwined with socio-political realities. I give close attention to the stories’ different possible meanings, and place them in their socio-historical contexts in order to make an important intervention into the literary history of Cameroon: LGBT work must be included in our discussions of contemporary Cameroonian cultural production. It is part of our modernity.

La femme au Colt 45 par Marie Redonnet

La petite fille de Monsieur Linh (2005), also about an immigrant, though his trauma is induced by war, may be less surprised by the denouement, though appreciative of its probing toward integration. Regional distinctiveness and local color also pervade. Overall, this timely novel deals sensitively and deftly with the effects of natural disaster and loss, as well as nurturing, accepting relationships, on the human psyche. Rockhurst University (MO) M. Kathleen Madigan Redonnet, Marie. La femme au Colt 45. Paris: Tripode, 2015. ISBN 978-2-37055075 -0. Pp. 112. 15 a. A fiftyish woman, having left her career as the star actress of the“Magic Théâtre,” having become separated from her husband and her son during an insurrection in her native country, having traversed a dense and apparently endless forest, finds herself alone, perched on the edge of a tall cliff, with an old Colt 45 pistol in her hand. Clearly, the time for decision has come. Thus begins Redonnet’s new novel, her first since Diego (2005). Its heroine is “Lora Sander,” who has made her way out of a war-torn “Azirie” in order to seek refuge in “Santarie.” Sometimes we hear her own account of events, sometimes her speech is framed by that of another narrator. What becomes clear quickly is that life in Santarie is in many ways just as difficult as in Azirie. Readers familiar with Redonnet’s work will recognize the declarative simplicity and narrative naiveté that have been the hallmarks of her style since the beginning of her career.Yet they will also be greeted by new features in her writing that amply affirm Redonnet’s growth as an artist. Salient among those features is her focus on the political dimension of human experience—an impulse that was largely absent (or muted) in much of her earlier work. She asks a series of timely questions in this novel. How do people react to organized violence, and how do the terms of human behavior change during a time of war? How does society view refugees, and particularly female refugees? How do people live clandestinely, and what consequences does that have for their identity? Can non-violence and passive resistance be efficient tools in the face of utterly ruthless oppression? How do individuals survive disaster, and what are the wages of such survival? What kinds of priorities govern the relations of the personal and the collective? Does the work of art have a role to play in the political world, and what is its horizon of possibility therein? For her part, Lora Sander is struck by the way that fiction inflects our understanding of the real. As she makes her way toward the city of “Santaré,” she muses, “j’aurais pu croire que je roulais vers la frontière américaine et que je jouais dans un film” (38). Yet she realizes that such a dynamic can also be reversed. Speaking of a man she met in exile, she remarks,“sa vie a dû être un roman qu’il n’a jamais écrit, comme les vies de ces morts enterrés à côté de lui” (60). In a similar vein, she wonders how she ought to read her own story. Her husband, Lora 224 FRENCH REVIEW 90.2 Reviews 225 reflects, would certainly have seen it as Greek tragedy; she prefers to view it as a“drame moderne” (102). They are undoubtedly both right, and simultaneously so, because Redonnet presents this story both as fable and as urgent, immediate testimony, neither mode quite trumping the other. University of Colorado Warren Motte Redouane, Najib. L’année de tous les apprentissages. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2015. ISBN 978-2-343-07470-2 Pp. 298. 25 a. Après avoir fini ses études au Canada, où il a laissé son grand amour Sarah, le jeune Wahid est de retour au Maroc dans le but d’accomplir son service civil. Devenu “civiliste” dans un ministère, il tente de s’intégrer à la société mais découvre rapidement qu’il est devenu un étranger dans son propre pays.Les incompétents,en revanche, ont obtenu de bons postes grâce à leur art de graisser les pattes. C’est...

Les désancrés par Marie-Thérèse Humbert

Reviews 265 dos pour qu’elle se tienne droite, suit le mouvement, s’éveille à la vie par ses discussions avec George sur Thomas Hardy et Joseph Conrad,ressent même des pulsions criminelles et sexuelles—auxquelles elle ne se laisse toutefois pas aller. Le dérèglement du temps saisi par Hochet ne signifie pas comme dans Shakespeare “le début de la tragédie” (131), et contrairement aux pièces du barde, après le topsy-turvydom provoqué par George, l’ordre ne sera pas rétabli. La fin du roman laisse entrevoir, avec Jack dans la RAF en 1940, un autre dérèglement socio-historique. Jouant de l’inspiration première de ce roman, la vie de l’auteure de A Room of One’s Own, un article paru dans le magazine Elle titrait“Si vous aimez Virginia Woolf, vous aimerez Stéphanie Hochet”— titre racoleur pour un roman certes agréable à lire mais qui n’exploite pas complètement le potentiel et la force de son personnage principal et le laisse disparaître alors qu’il se libère, nous abandonnant avec un épilogue hâtif et peu convaincant. Eastern Connecticut State University Michèle Bacholle-Bošković Humbert, Marie-Thérèse. Les désancrés. Paris: Gallimard, 2015. ISBN 978-2-07014744 -1. Pp. 656. 25 a. After a fifteen-year hiatus, Humbert offers an epic family saga that begins in a real, yet ghostly Louisiana and continues to Vesania, an imaginary island.Artfully revealing via the intermingling of past, future, and conditional tenses where characters’ paths cross at one time or another, Humbert builds a multi-dimensional mind map in which one follows the characters’ memories, emotions, obsessions, fantasies, desires, and frustrations. The heroine, Jane Harcourt, is fleeing a rich southern family by finding refuge on Vesania with her son Vincent, her friend Abigail Dodds (a large and very elegant black woman, daughter of Jane’s father Keith W. Canning and the Canning family cook Betty Dodds) and Abigail’s daughter Sarah. Bound by love and blood, they seal their fate in Jane’s wild hope of finding William, Jane’s second husband, who is nine years her junior, and Vincent’s father. Yet when a detective locates him, Jane claims he is dead. The reader is then left to wonder what exactly Jane seeks while on Vesania and what she is attempting to escape. Forewarned by Humbert in the novel’s “Avertissement”that her goal in writing Les désancrés was not to bear witness to events nor to denounce them. Rather, she takes great inspiration from painting, an art she admires despite her inability to paint. Thus, the reader comes to understand Humbert’s literary motives: “Alors je me suis servie de mon matériau privilégié: les mots” (9). Continuing to speak directly to her readers, Humbert elucidates that what one holds in one hand is “une manière de tableau romanesque, constitué de lieux autant que de fantasmes, et où s’entrelacent un certain nombre de trajectoires humaines imbriquées les unes dans les autres” (9). A family tree of the principal characters originating in Louisiana immediately follows Humbert’s warning. It is key to navigate the troubled, choppy waters of the narrative as the novel opens with “Vestibule: la fille de Kubla Khan,” which could be the beginning or the end of the story as the action takes place in Riverside Home, Louisiana, a few years before or after the stay on Vesania. Born in 1913, Jane is already senile at the age of fifty-four years and ends her days regularly visited by her friend Abigail. In the segregationist Louisiana, the relationship of these two women, one white and one black, is intriguing. The “vestibule” is also the place where Jane’s fantasies and memories are formed. For example, her father, Keith, the great seducer, was nicknamed“Kubla Khan”for having built a palace of Asian inspiration ; and, when she was only five, Jane witnessed the death of her mother, Marie Dufour, by the intermediary of a mirror, which has the long-term effect of Jane always needing some type of intermediary, such as Abigail, to...

L’Arlésienne: Drame en trois actes et cinq tableaux. Version originale de 1872 pour ensemble instrumental et chœur by Georges Bizet (review)

THE ORIGINAL VERSION OF BIZET'S L'ARLESIENNEGeorges Bizet. L'Arlesienne: Drame en trois actes et cinq tableaux. Version originale de 1872 pour ensemble instrumental et choeur. Edition critique de Herve Lacombe. (Musica Gallica.) [London]: Choudens, 2010. [Forces in Fr., p. 8-9; introd. in Fr., Eng., p. 11-40; sources in Fr., p. 41-43; bibliog., p. 44; contents, p. 45; score p. 47-210; critical appara- tus in Fr., p. 211-22; facsims., p. 223-35. ISBN 978-1-84772-839-5; pub. no. ACF100056; plate no. ACF021309. $113.35.]The music from Bizet's L'Arlesienne is, af- ter Carmen, the most familiar of his works, yet it has very rarely been heard in its origi- nal form, and will continue to be circulated as two popular orchestral suites, not as inci- dental music for the play by Alphonse Daudet, first performed at the Theâtre du Vaudeville, Paris, in September 1872. The play's beginnings were unpropitious, since it was not well received and it survived only nineteen performances, not a good num- ber for a fully staged play at that time. Its revival at the Theâtre de l'Odeon in 1885 was a quite different matter, for it was regu- larly staged in Paris at the turn of the cen- tury, reaching its 1,000th performance in 1951 (see Peter Lamothe, Theater Music in France, 1864-1914 [Ph.D. diss., Univer- sity ofNorth Carolina, 2008], 68-90, 267).The irony is that the 1885 revival was not an expression of interest in Daudet the playwright, but a response to the enormous popularity of Bizet's music. In its original form and its original light orchestration it was forgotten, but as orchestral suites it was a favorite of the conductors Jules Etienne Pasdeloup, Edouard Colonne, and Edouard Deldevez. The first suite was hur- riedly put together by Bizet after the play opened. In the Menestrel of 13 October 1872 Gustave Bertrand had suggested that the music could be arranged as a concert work, and four days later Massenet heard talk of a suite, a form which he himself par- ticularly cultivated in the early 1870s (Mina Curtiss, Bizet and his World [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958], 340), and on November 10 it was performed by Pasde- loup in one of his Concerts Populaires, at- tended by thousands. The suite drew on four movements (Prelude, Minuetto, Adagietto, Carillon), and filled out the orchestration with full woodwinds, extra brass, and a harp. It was heard at least fif- teen times in what was left of Bizet's lifetime.The success of the suite led the publisher Choudens to commission a second suite in 1879. This has always been attributed to Ernest Guiraud, although his name appears nowhere in the score. There were not enough substantial pieces in the original L'Arlesienne music to fill out four move- ments, so Guiraud (if it was he) stole a movement from Bizet's suite drawn from the opera La jolie fille de Perth entitled Scenes bohemiennes, which at that time was pub- lished only in a piano arrangement. This movement was the Menuet, a lovely and very familiar flute solo, which is conse- quently thought by many to be part of the L'Arlesienne music. The Menuet had there- fore to be replaced when the full score of the Scenes bohemiennes was published, for which purpose Guiraud (or someone else) arranged the Marche nocturne.Two popular orchestral suites based on L'Arlesienne being played constantly in Paris and elsewhere in the 1880s, when Bizet's music enjoyed a worldwide surge of popular- ity, led to the revival of the play in 1885. But rather than revive the original scoring, a full orchestra was engaged by the theater, conducted by Colonne, and the fuller or- chestrations of six of the longer movements were borrowed from the suites and played in the theater. Choudens then published a full score which represented the music as it was then played, that is, with enlarged or- chestration and a number of cuts. Further popular attention was then drawn to two adaptations of this music. The theme that comes at measure 90 of the Prelude, known as LTnnocent's theme, was issued in a vari- ety of arrangements with the words of the Ave Maria attached, while the Entr'acte no. …

Zagreb par François Leblanc

Reviews 269 fille de joie dont il tombe amoureux. Rejetant sa proposition de mariage, elle l’éconduit froidement et brise ce cœur trop candide. Il retombe amoureux d’Irène, une belle passante qui lui demande de choisir entre l’amour et la boxe. Enchaînant les victoires, il atteint le sommet de la gloire dans un combat contre le champion d’Afrique du Nord à Alger: “C’est une ville mythique [...]. Aucun étranger de passage ne la quitte sans emporter quelque chose dans sa valise. Quand on passe par Alger, on traverse le miroir. On arrive avec une âme et on s’en va avec une autre” (340). L’hommage à Camus au temps du Premier homme adolescent, est palpable. Toutefois, Turambo n’échappera pas à son destin qui le condamnera au bagne.Rappelant Céline et Steinbeck par moment, Khadra bouscule la langue française. Très bien écrit, riche en personnifications et en néologismes, son texte pullule de maximes succulentes. De par son style superbe et la beauté de ses deux derniers romans, Khadra est en train de s’imposer comme l’un des plus grands écrivains de langue française. University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point Alek Baylee Toumi Leblanc, François. Zagreb. Montréal: Triptyque, 2013. ISBN 978-2-89031-859-5. Pp. 170. $20 Can. Leblanc completes his“trilogie carcérale”in this short novel that pits two grieving men against each other in a tense urban setting. Just out of jail after serving time for a crime he always claimed he did not commit, Roy Berthiaume plots his revenge against the probation officer whose testimony was the strongest evidence of his guilt. That agent, Bernard Telmosse, has still not recovered from the death of his teenage daughter in a traffic accident three years earlier. He wanders about in a fog of grief, unaware of the danger stalking him. The tale unfolds in a milieu readers of Leblanc’s first two novels are familiar with: mostly the apartments, probation offices, and streets of contemporary Montreal. In Zagreb,we see less of the bureaucracy of the correctional system—before and after—than the private anxieties of two particular men, fighting off their own peculiar demons. Berthiaume inhabits the kind of stressed-out, handto -mouth daily life characters like Leblanc’s parole officers are all familiar with. He studies Telmosse’s daily life, stalking him and imagining all the ways he might hurt him, but Berthiaume must always contend with the crowded, impoverished world he has returned to: “Quand il se réveille le matin avec les sous-vêtements de sa mère accrochés à toutes les poignées de porte, Roy pense qu’il n’est sorti de prison que pour entrer à l’asile”(25). He is also distracted from his revenge fantasies, by righteous and even tender thoughts about the step-daughter he was sent to jail for abusing. Telmosse had given testimony that led to Berthiaume’s conviction, but did he know what had really happened? “Savait-il que Keyla ne sautait pas de repas quand Roy veillait sur elle, qu’elle arrivait à l’heure à l’école, qu’il n’y avait pas de trous dans ses souliers?” (79). At the beginning, this thuggish stalker is frightening. By the middle of the novel, one starts to sympathize with him a little, or at least to wonder. Telmosse seems to spend his days replaying his daughter Audrey’s accidental death (she is hit by a car crossing a major street with her bicycle). His relationship with his wife Suzanne has unraveled, and his interactions with Audrey’s surviving sister, Ophélie, also suffer from his unending grief. Leblanc has even woven excerpts from Audrey’s diary into the text, lending a surprising elegance to the portrayal of the grieving father’s pain and confusion . Revealing how the seemingly inevitable encounter between Berthiaume and Telmosse plays out would be a disservice, since that encounter is both central to the experience of the novel as a whole and also somewhat stunning. Leblanc’s economy of language is striking in this third novel. His first two, Quinze secondes de célébrité (2009) and Quelques jours à vivre (2012...

Jeune et jolie by François Ozon

l’époque rejeté par une partie de la critique française à cause de son réalisateur danois, Carl Dreyer—ce livre devrait se trouver dans toutes les bibliothèques universitaires. Western Washington University Edward Ousselin Ozon, François, réal. Jeune et jolie. Int. Marine Vacth, Géraldine Pailhas, Frédéric Pierrot. Mandarin, 2013. Six months after the release of Dans la maison, Ozon again trains his lens on adolescent sexuality. In Dans la maison, the theme provided the occasion for drawing attention to the artifice of storytelling and filmmaking. In Jeune et jolie, it inspires a work of poetic composition, underscored by its billing as“le portrait d’une jeune fille de 17 ans en 4 saisons et 4 chansons” (all Françoise Hardy hits) and a scene in which students at the Lycée Henri-IV analyze Rimbaud’s four-part poem “Roman,” better known as “On n’est pas sérieux quand on a dix-sept ans.” Jeune et jolie tells the story of Isabelle (played by captivating newcomer Marina Vacth) who, in part one of the film, loses her virginity while on summer vacation with her loving, well-to-do Parisian family (which includes a little brother who makes his big sister promise to share the details of her first sexual experience with him). In part two, as high school classes resume, Isabelle is working as a prostitute. She keeps her family in the dark by meeting clients in hotel rooms only on weekdays and during the day, but when a much older client (of whom she has grown fond) dies of heart failure while having sex with her, police investigators bring Isabelle’s secret life to her mother’s awareness. Her heartbroken mother (Géraldine Pailhas) and more “understanding” stepfather (Frédéric Pierrot) see to it that Isabelle gets therapy, but, as happens in numerous Ozon films, her presence now unsettles family order in disturbing and slyly comical ways. Nevertheless , therapy seems to have worked its magic, and by the end of part three, we see Isabelle at a party, dancing with kids her own age and starting a relationship with Alex, one of her classmates.With part four, it is springtime and household order appears to be restored: the family, now including Alex, is seated around the breakfast table happily discussing plans for the next summer vacation.Only moments later,Isabelle announces to Alex that she is breaking up with him, and in an ensuing scene, she is consulting her hidden cell phone for messages from clients. Among those messages is one from her dead client’s wife (played by Ozon favorite Charlotte Rampling) requesting a meeting with Isabelle. Together they go back to the hotel room where her husband died; she asks Isabelle to lie on the bed beside her. When Isabelle awakens, she is alone, wearing a smile that is as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa’s. Some critics and viewers complain that the film does not make sense because Isabelle has no“good”reason (i.e., lack of money, family dysfunction, mental illness) for becoming a prostitute. Perhaps they missed the scenes in which Isabelle is clearly in it for her own sexual pleasure. In Jeune et jolie, 200 FRENCH REVIEW 87.4 Reviews 201 Ozon dares to take adolescent sexuality seriously, and more important perhaps, he manages to portray his runway model-turned-actress more as the subject of her own desire than the object of someone else’s. Union College (NY) Michelle Chilcoat Silverman, Max. Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film. New York: Berghahn, 2013. ISBN 978-0-85745-8834 . Pp. 216. $90. What do François Emmanuel’s La question humaine, Didier Daeninckx’s Meurtres pour mémoire, and Leïla Sebbar’s La Seine était rouge have in common? Quite simply this: each superimposes events in the narrative present onto one or more traumatic events of France’s recent past, namely World War II and decolonization, or, more specifically, the Shoah and the Algerian war. They also happen to provide an ideal introduction to Max Silverman’s insightful study into the workings of memory as it appears in...

La deuxième fille de Cluny: Grandeurs et misères de Saint-Martin-des-Champs by Alain Mercier (review)

Reviewed by: La deuxième fille de Cluny: Grandeurs et misères de Saint-Martin-des-Champs by Alain Mercier Constance B. Bouchard La deuxième fille de Cluny: Grandeurs et misères de Saint-Martin-des-Champs. By Alain Mercier. (Grenoble: Livres Glénat, in association with the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. 2012. Pp. 576. €59,00. ISBN 978-2-3554-5008-2.) This large and lavish book is the first comprehensive history of the Parisian priory of Saint-Martin-des-Champs from its foundation in the mid-eleventh century to its dissolution in the French Revolution. The Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, originally founded in 1794, was established in the priory buildings four years later, and this volume is intended as the first of a three-volume set commemorating that institution. It is intended for an educated lay audience rather than for scholars; and yet it has much to interest the scholar, including hundreds of color images of Saint-Martin's buildings, architectural features, artwork, and archival documents—the latter usually not seen in art books. There is an extensive bibliography, which includes an impressive list of manuscript sources (although the secondary works are all in French), a good starting point for any future histories of the monastery. The book begins with the Merovingian-era sanctuary and sarcophagi recently found under Saint-Martin-des-Champs. Quickly, however, it turns to King Henry I of France and his decision to found a Benedictine house in 1059, establishing it on the ruins of the old sanctuary, and to Henry's son Philip I, who soon gave the house to Cluny. The account then proceeds chronologically, prior by prior, discussing especially building programs and grants of property and rights. The focus is more on architecture and recent archaeological discoveries than on the monks themselves. Mercier's specialty is not medieval history, and his description of the social milieu in which the priory began is very old-fashioned: feudal anarchy, a papacy plotting dominance, Cluniac monks seeking to expand. He relies for much of the early narrative on works written in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. It is not even clear that Saint-Martin really was Cluny's second daughter, as the title suggests, because the Burgundian priories of Paray-le-Monial and La Charité had already been established. (Mercier mentions La Charité but not Paray.) Mercier seems to comes into his own when he reaches the late Middle Ages and the early-modern period, when the house lost most of its monks and much of the regularity of its life. Still very wealthy, it fell under the control of commendataires, secular clergy, or even laymen who took control of the house's property and possessions, in spite of intermittent efforts at reform. Not until the seventeenth century did the house, under the direction of Cardinal Richelieu, return to a strict observance of the monastic life, and then the monks spent much of the eighteenth century rebuilding and expanding, little anticipating the coming destruction of the French Revolution. [End Page 533] The book is beautifully produced. Mercier's own photographs of architectural detail illustrate many of his points, and century-old photos show what the buildings looked like before the most recent round of renovations. One of the book's chief strengths is that it traces the evolution of the priory buildings from the eleventh century to the twenty-first. Mercier clearly knows the structures intimately. The historical narrative is in some ways just an excuse to discuss lovingly all the details of the buildings and the priory's artwork and manuscripts. For the reader who has never been to the museum of Arts et Métiers, it is, shall we say, striking to see pictures of, for example, the gothic nave turned into an expo center for early automobiles (p. 99). Constance B. Bouchard University of Akron Copyright © 2013 The Catholic University of America Press

Turning Tricks, Turning the Tables: Plotting the Brasserie à femmes in Tabarant's Virus d'amour

This article examines the space of the brasserie à femmes, a female-staffed beer hall and house of clandestine prostitution where the servers sell stories as a supplement to beer and sex, in Adolphe Tabarant's forgotten naturalist novel Virus d'amour (1886). Simultaneously fueling novelistic and sexual desire in fin-de-siècle Paris's aimless bachelors, the brasserie prostitute turns the Balzacian arriviste plot on its head by appropriating the art of writerly tease—by knowing how to (in the words of Huysmans) "make them wait." Inscribing her client into narrative and thus positioning herself as author, the fille de brasserie troubles her own textual inscription, complicating authorial mastery of both the prostitute and the city.

“She Was Too Black for Rock and Too Hard for Soul”: (Re)discovering the Musical Career of Betty Mabry Davis

“She Was Too Black for Rock and Too Hard for Soul”: (Re)discovering the Musical Career of Betty Mabry Davis Cheryl L. Keyes (bio) Betty Mabry Davis is an artist whose name has gone unheralded as a pioneer in the annals of funk and rock. Most writing on these musical genres has traditionally placed male artists like Jimi Hendrix, George Clinton (of Parliament-Funkadelic), and bassist Larry Graham as trendsetters in the shaping of a funk rock music sensibility. During the heyday of these artists, it was Betty Mabry Davis who meshed both musical styles equally well. However, her contribution as a pioneer of funk rock was eclipsed by her contemporaries. I was first made aware of Betty Mabry Davis via Miles Davis’s autobiographical sketch (M. Davis 1990). Here, he describes his second wife, Betty Mabry, who was then twenty-three-years old, nearly half his age. Upon seeing her, Miles Davis was initially captivated by Mabry’s beauty, and he chose her as the face to grace his album Filles de Kilimanjaro (1968). Among the five tracks on the album was “Mademoiselle Mabry,” composed by Miles as a salute to his soon-to-be wife. In September with Filles de Kilimanjaro was released, Betty Mabry and Miles Davis were married and she became his second wife, thus acquiring his last name, Davis. However, Miles Davis would soon realize that his wife was more than a pretty face. She was a gifted musician who became his muse: [End Page 35] I had met a beautiful young singer and songwriter named Betty Mabry, whose picture is on the cover of Filles de Kilimanjaro (1968). . . . Betty was a big influence on my personal life as well as my musical life. She introduced me to the music of Jimi Hendrix—and to Jimi Hendrix himself—and other black rock music and musicians. She knew Sly Stone and all those guys, and she was great herself. If Betty were singing today she’d be something like Madonna; something like Prince, only as a woman. She was the beginning of all that when she was singing as Betty Davis. She was just ahead of her time. (M. Davis 1990, 290) Although their marriage was short lived, Betty Davis stepped beyond the shadows of her well-known ex-husband and became a reigning funk rock diva during the 1970s. Her voice resembled a belter, a style that fitted neatly into the rhythmic grooves or “pockets” of any hard-driving funk rock band of the time. Capitalizing on her successful career as a fashion model, Betty Davis’s signature outfits included fishnet stockings, thigh-high leather boots or high-heeled shoes, hot pants or teddylike wear, a quasi-cosmic-like or Amazon-woman-warrior look, and she donned a big Afro hairdo, as seen on her first three albums: Betty Davis, They Say I’m Different, and Nasty Gal.1 While there is no stage performance footage of Davis to date, just by her album covers and musical performance alone she undoubtedly exploited the erotic. However, Betty Davis was by no means just a physical presence. Unlike funk rock women performers during her time, she also succeeded in songwriting, composing, and arranging, and she owned her music publishing company. Between 1973 and 1979, Betty Davis recorded five studio albums: Betty Davis (Just Sunshine, 1973), They Say I’m Different (Just Sunshine, 1974), Nasty Gal (Island Records, 1975), Is It Love or Desire (Island Records, 1976), and Crashin’ from Passion (ZYX Music, 1979). Disillusioned by the politics of the music industry and her refusal to compromise, Betty Davis then retreated from public view, but on her own terms. Within the last few years, there has been a growing interest in the music of Betty Davis. In spring 2007, she appeared on the cover of the music vintage trade magazine Wax Poetics. The Seattle-based independent label of vintage classics, Light in the Attic, rereleased her first three albums and, for the first time, released her fourth album, Is It Love or Desire (B. Davis 2009b). Some of her music from her early years is sampled by hip-hop artists from Ice Cube and Method Man to Redman...

The Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet, 1965–68 (review)

The Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet, 1965–68 (review)

La Jolie Fille de Perth de Bizet ou comment trahir et honorer Walter Scott

What remains of Walter Scott’s Fair Maid of Perth in Bizet’s 1867 Jolie Fille de Perth, an opera in 4acts on a libretto by Jules Adenis and Vernoy de Saint-Georges? Not much when compared to other Scott-inspired operas. Little historical context or local colour, even in Bizet’s music. Some characters remotely linked to Scott in a libretto that mostly abides by the rules of French opera or opéra-comique of the time and recycles the dramatic ingredients favoured by Saint-Georges, a purveyor of libretti for opera or the ballet second only to Scribe, who engendered such international successes as Flotow’s Martha and Balfe’s Bohemian Girl, whose gipsy, long before his Carmen, haunts Bizet’s “Scottish” opera. Yet the work pays indirect homage to Scott, whose historical novels contributed to the birth of the French “grand opera”, by rewriting scenes or situations drawn from Scott. In spite of borrowing freely from French grand opera and opéra-comique, Bizet here attempts to find his own musical expression and his opera reflects aspects of Second Empire French society and the roles it assigned to women, before the appearance of his revolutionary Carmen on the stage.

Circles of Love: Platonism in Clément Marot's Temple de Cupido

TEMPLE fe Cupido, composed by Clement Marot in 1513-14, narrates quest for love that is not susceptible to change--Ferme Amour. Some scholars consider this poem too artificial, imitative or immature (Pierre Jourda and C. A. Mayer). (1) Other critics examine only one meaning of love: the agape of the Christians (Edwin Duval, Cynthia Skenazi, Gerard Defaux). In my reading, I would like to show that the poem brings out all the possible meanings of the world love, the classical and the Christian. Lustful erotic love morphs into individualistic artistic creativity, artistic creativity changes into the selfless love of God. The critics failed to acknowledge and to explain how the various meanings of love, belonging to different philosophical systems, coexist peacefully in one allegorical domicile--the temple of Cupid. Is it not surprising that the narrator (the Pilgrim) sets out to find, and finds, perfect love after falling in love with woman? And is it not surprising that the Pilgrim leaves on quest for nobler love to flee Cupid (or Eros in Greek), but finds this superior love in Cupid's own home? Finally, how to explain that Cupid's worshippers are poets? I would like to read Marot's poem as map of Plato's conception of love, accompanied by Christian legend (or commentary). Diotima, the character of Plato's Symposium identifies love as the springboard to individual progress: for outstanding individuals, love for the beautiful person can grow into artistic creativity and into longing for the divine and absolute beauty. While in Plato the meanings of love can be represented hierarchically, as ladder, in Marot these meanings become the three concentric spheres, which compose the Temple de Cupido. Erotic love is the outer sphere of the temple. As the hero penetrates deeper into the temple, he observes that Cupid also awakens in his worshipers the love of art. In the choir (cueur), the central point of the temple located between the nave and the altar, the hero discovers yet nobler love Christian agape. The voyage ends in yet deeper sanctuary: Cupid's temple reveals itself to be the poet's own cueur, or heart. The poem is narrated in the first person and is composed of 539 lines. The imaginary voyage of the hero, who calls himself the Pilgrim, can be divided in five stages. 1) Pilgrim, escaping Cupid, sets out to find Ferme Amour, or true love vv. 1-98 2) Pilgrim enters Cupid's temple and describes its rituals as the love of art vv. 99-408 3) Pilgrim describes the rituals of Cupid's temple as anxiety and madness vv. 409-484 4) Pilgrim finds true love together with the royal couple in the temple's choir vv. 485-535 5) Pilgrim discovers that true love is found in his own heart vv. 536-539 The poem opens to show Nature awakening from sleep and Cupid surveying his obedient subjects. Taking notice of the hero, Cupid wounds him with his arrow. To spite Cupid and the beautiful lady who did not reciprocate his feelings, the hero flees. He sets out to find the divine lady, une haulte Deesse (60) which he calls Ferme Amour: chaste colombelle,/Fille de la paix (77-78). He searches high and low, but Ferme Amour is nowhere to be found. The people he asks on his way respond that true love was last seen here on earth thousand years or more ago (Mille ans, ou plus, y a v. 82). Surprisingly, the hero (who calls himself the Pilgrim) conceives plan to find true love in the abode of the same perfidious god of erotic love, Cupid, whom he had chosen to flee. ... Et si deliberay Pour rencontrer celle Dame pudique, De m'en aller au Temple Cupidique En m'esbatant: car j'euz en esperance Que la dedans faisoit sa demeurance. (90-95) What gives the Pilgrim the hope that he will find true love in the citadel of Cupid, or erotic love? Time and again, the Pilgrim notes that he is drawn to the temple because of its exquisite beauty. …

Sexual Cartographies: Mapping Subjectivity in the Cinema of Catherine Breillat

This article explores the mapping of female subjectivity as a dominant theme in the films of Catherine Breillat. Specifically, in Une vraie jeune fille (1976) and Anatomie de l’enfer (2004), Breillat’s female protagonists showcase the precarious space each woman occupies in terms of physical alterity and psychological unrest scripted on the female body. One should thus read these films as suggestive of the topography of a failed subjective encounter as these films, especially, challenge notions of the gaze with regard to female desire. The paradoxical position of each woman within the films’ narrative — marginalized in relation to male others and social institutions of authority, yet central to the narrative trajectory — mirrors the tenuous locus of autonomous identity and desire. Breillat’s explicit study of woman’s fragmented identity and graphic analysis of her (s)existential angst opens the dialogue of presenting such a paradox — and the limits that task entails — within the scope of contemporary visual culture.

Franco-Arab Dialogues in/between French, Maghrebi-French, and Maghrebi Cinema(s)

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Notes 1. I am using the term “Maghrebi-French” as opposed to either “beur,” which has become problematic, or “Franco-Maghrebi,” which is fundamentally ambiguous. Although I am drawing on Maghrebi cinemas as examples of Arab cinemas, I recognize that the term Maghrebi includes other populations—Kabyl, Berber, Jewish, pied noir, etc. 2. Other films of the 2000s differ in tone and in outcome: in La Faute à Voltaire, the Arab migrant is eventually deported, while in Chouchou, a Utopian multicultural France is shown ready to welcome a cross-dressing, gay male Arab. But both engage audiences in a dialogue regarding the need for tolerance and acceptance of others, emphasising the conviviality that can arise from intercultural relationships (but ignoring the possibility of the main protagonist being a practising Muslim). 3. They include: L’Autre monde, La Fille de Keltoum, Un aller simple, Les Chemins de l’oued, Exils, Tenja, and Il était une fois dans l’oued. 4. In L’Autre monde and Les Chemins de l’oued, the Maghrebi-French traveler is eventually killed by Islamic fundamentalists; in La Fille de Keltoum, she cannot accept the way women are treated in the Arab/Berber sex/gender system. In Exils, however, the pied noir traveler and his Maghrebi-French girlfriend are literally entranced by Sufi mysticism, and appear to find some sort of reconciliation with their past. 5. Various 1990s films denounce the wearing of the veil (Douce France) and Islamic fundamentalism (100% Arabica); Abdelkrim Bahloul's La Nuit du destin provides a sympathetic portrayal of Islamic faith in France. 6. Bensalah's other feature films are Le Ciel, les oiseaux … et ta mère, Le Raïd, and Big City. 7. Other such films include Le Soleil assassiné, an account of the encounter between Algerian youths and the poet Jean Sénac, set in the 1960s; and Bab El Web, which centers on the relationship between a French woman traveler and her young Algerian hosts (see Higbee); in André Téchiné's Loin, set in Tangiers, the Moroccan character has a secondary role.

Women and Poor Relief in Seventeenth-Century France: The Early History of the Daughters of Charity (review)

Reviewed by: Women and Poor Relief in Seventeenth-Century France: The Early History of the Daughters of Charity Colin Jones Susan E. Dinan. Women and Poor Relief in Seventeenth-Century France: The Early History of the Daughters of Charity. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2006. x + 190 pp. Ill. $89.95 (0-7546-5553-9). The Daughters of Charity—or Filles de la Charité—were founded by Saints Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac in 1633. By the turn of the seventeenth century, they had been established and were managing more than two hundred charitable institutions throughout France (especially hospitals and home-relief agencies), as well as outposts in the Polish kingdom. Even by then they were probably the [End Page 719] most significant nursing order to emerge from the Counter-Reformation, and they have remained so to the present day. Historians have focused largely on male Tridentine and post-Tridentine orders, whereas the recent surge of interest in female spirituality has tended to benefit the higher profile female teaching orders. Strangely, then, the history of the Daughters of Charity is rather poorly known. This is all the more reason to welcome Susan E. Dinan’s Ph.D. book conversion on the early years of the community. Dinan covers the community’s history to 1700 and provides a clear, well-structured account. She writes lucidly and persuasively and does an excellent job of relating the history of the Daughters of Charity to the current historiographical contexts of women’s work, female piety, and the social role of the Counter-Reformation. Her work will be eagerly consulted by all historians working in those fields. It is one of those quirks of history with which all practicing archival historians are only too familiar that since Dinan has published her book, the Daughters of Charity have decided to open their archives fully to historical researchers and encourage lay interest in their history. As it was, Dinan was able to consult very little in the community’s maison mère on the Rue du Bac in Paris. Presumably problems of access also prevented her from consulting the archives of the Lazarist order, another of Vincent de Paul’s creations, which had a mentoring role over the community. A considerable part of the more bureaucratic documents of the community was expropriated by the state during the French Revolution, and these materials are still consultable in the Archives Nationales. They form the archival core of Dinan’s book. With one exception (the Maine-et-Loire department), she did not choose to make forays into the departmental archives, which certainly contain untold treasures concerning the early history of the community. If Dinan continues with her research in this area, they would be a rich source. The Daughters of Charity not only managed many poor-relief institutions, they also played a significant medical role within them. Indeed in many localities, the sisters represented the only practitioners with any formal and theoretical knowledge. Medical historians will be disappointed, then, that Professor Dinan shows no interest in the medical activities of the sisters beyond what has already been published on the question (mainly by myself, in fact). The medical ideas of the founders could have done with a new look. The culture of the community relating to bodily as well as spiritual health is largely unexplored. Dinan is excellent on showing how the community negotiated Tridentine rules on cloistering so as to legitimate their work “in the world.” But just how the sisters negotiated their service in the context of lay poor-relief administrators and the growing interest of physicians and surgeons in the bodies of the poor is a still-neglected question that it would be fruitful to explore. Professor Dinan’s book offers a sound foundation for such further studies on this neglected and admirable group of women. (One small, uncharacteristic howler regarding two Cardinals de Retz (p. 49): the second, better-known, Jean-François-Paul de Gondi (1613–79) was coadjutor to the archbishop of Paris beginning in 1644 and archbishop himself beginning in 1654—it was his uncle, François de Gondi, who was bishop of Paris...

Prayer, Pain, and Priestly Privilege: Claude Langlois’s New Perspective on Thérèse of Lisieux

In recent decades, scholars of religion have devoted much attention to the gender-specific nature of women’s spirituality. While much of this research has focused on the Middle Ages, there has been considerably less theological attention to date on Catholic women’s spirituality in the nineteenth century. This oversight might stem from the perceived lack of depth and originality of nineteenth-century Catholic spirituality, which has often been described as kitschy or, as Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar even more harshly characterizes it, “the great lie.” Nineteenth-century Catholicism indeed pales when compared to the towering achievements of medieval piety or even of the Catholic Reformation; nevertheless, the later era offers promising ground for the theological study of women’s spirituality, especially since this period saw great social transitions for women in church and society that still affect the church today. Recently, Richard D. E. Burton has begun to remedy this neglect by offering a sustained analysis of the spirituality of eleven nineteenthand twentieth-century Catholic women in France—the self-declared fille ainee de l’eglise (oldest daughter of the church). His study focuses on the effects of the secularization or “dechristianization” of French soci-

The disappearing danseur

ABSTRACTThe notion of studying the nineteenth-century danseur is problematic because of an anti-male strain in dance historiography that has led some to suggest that he virtually disappeared from the stage. André Levinson is largely responsible for the danseur’s poor reputation: he minimised the narrative aspect of nineteenth-century ballet and declared in 1929 that the ballerina Marie Taglioni had ‘evicted’ men from the stage. Levinson also canonised La Sylphide (1832), a ballet that he, like his nineteenth-century predecessors Théophile Gautier and Jules Janin, gendered as feminine. He promulgated the term ‘ballet blanc’, a feminising but misleading term now in common use and rarely interrogated. And yet men danced on the stage throughout the nineteenth century. In the case of the Paris Opéra, men contributed to ballet as principal dancers, soloists and in the corps de ballet. A brief study of La Jolie Fille de Gand, a ballet contemporaneous with La Sylphide, shows a rich set of male roles calling on men’s skill as mimes and dancers in various styles. Further studies of the long-maligned nineteenth-century danseur are needed.

Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818 by Ruth Perry

315 ner that, when all belief is in question, carries ethical import. Kant trumps Plato. Mr. Donoghue has organized his project around a series of couplings— Richardson and Pope, Sterne and Laclos, Diderot-as-philosopher and Diderot-asnoveliest , Radcliffe, Godwin, and Goethe , and Charles Brockden Brown and Sade—that are as productive as they are odd. While Pope implicitly and Richardson explicitly ‘‘bestow a surprising degree of legitimacy’’on human artifice for its moral and transformative potential, Sterne cannot, for all his efforts, discover in sensibility ‘‘anything apart from the purely earthbound’’ because it is inseparable from its foundation in ‘‘a materialist philosophy’’; Yorick is famously left at the conclusion of A Sentimental Journey with a handful of the Fille de Chambre’s —the uncertainty tellingly tied, Mr. Donoghue suggests, to a decidedly physical moment of ‘‘feeling.’’ Diderot, we are told, replaces Richardson as his model with Sterne largely because his devotion to philosophical skepticism salted the ground necessary to cultivate realistic fiction; the ‘‘disorderly quality of Diderot ’s novelistic discourse,’’ praised by postmodern critics for ‘‘mirroring the dissonance of the world,’’ is better seen as a ‘‘dissonance between form-giving and his materialist philosophy.’’ The examples and the argument grow with each chapter. In the ‘‘curiously stereophonic effect’’of Radcliffe’s treatment of the real and the unreal in her novels (where, however titularly supernatural the events they witness, readers always end in Northanger Abbey); in the violently sensible ‘‘little monster’’ Werther; in the theatrical factitiousness of Sade’s ‘‘sexual tableaux’’—in each case, and despite enormous and important variations , literary realism stands opposite, not alongside, skeptical materialism. And thus the title fits exactly, for it is Mr. Donoghue’s constant, provocative thesis: ‘‘the discourse of the novel’’—realistic fiction—enlightens. E. Derek Taylor Longwood University RUTH PERRY. Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2004. Pp. x ⫹ 466. $80. Ms. Perry argues that the concept of ‘‘family’’ and kinship obligations underwent drastic transformations as the primacy of blood relationships gave way to an axis of conjugality. Through casestudy based chapters of particular sets of relationships, she fleshes out the practical and psychological impacts. For instance , as sons were freed (or burdened) to accumulate capital and maximize economic opportunities, daughters sometimes became beggars, actually homeless people shuttled to relatives or friends as dependents vulnerable to being treated worse than servants. At every point she factors in such major forces as changes in economic systems, print culture, population growth, and urbanization, and most valuably brings together the best and most pertinent research in social history , cultural anthropology, psychology, and law. Brief comparisons to kinship practices in India, Nepal, and other places sometimes reveal the crass practices of English families. Ms. Perry knows this literature well and rightly pauses to inform the reader of controversies within , for example, interpretations of the Hardwicke Marriage Act. She is not shy about taking stands. She concludes that the Act was a key moment in the history of the family and unflinchingly records 316 her own judgment: ‘‘Concerned with legal contracts for the transfer of property rather than social relations between humans , the . . . Act constructed men’s and women’s rights as equal. . . . Ignoring the very real difference between men and women in social consequences for sexual experience . . . the Hardwicke Act created the need for the Magdalen Hospital for Penitent Prostitutes.’’ To some specialists, Ms. Perry tells a familiar story. In a variety of ways, women were better off in 1700 than in 1760. One of the epigraphs for her Introduction describes ‘‘the wreckage of families’’ in Austen’s novels as ‘‘unnerving’’ and in novels by other women as ‘‘appalling.’’ The first chapter is titled ‘‘The Great Disinheritance,’’ by which Ms. Perry means the psychological as well as legal and economic disinheritance of daughters , and the two chapters on marriage chronicle the Foucauldian pressures that confined not only what women could do but what they could assert their natures to be. From the valued and even indulged daughters in Jane Barker’s and Mary Davys ’ fiction, English novels came to Clarissa, epitome of what Ms. Perry describes as the new position of daughters in the family: ‘‘temporary...

Tous les garçons and toutes les filles

The televised series Tous les garcons et les filles de leur âge (1994), including nine one-hour films by contemporary French directors focusing on the periods of their own adolescence (from the early 1960s to the early 1990s), has been cited in numerous accounts of contemporary French cinema as heralding a new era of ‘young French cinema’. This essay focuses on four films in the series in which women directors explore female adolescence (Claire Denis's US Go Home, Chantal Akerman's Portrait d'une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles, Patricia Mazuy's Travolta et moi, and Emilie Deleuze's L'Incruste). In different ways, these four films highlight and explore the relationship between gender, memory, and film narration.