French Women Writers Research Articles

Close-up and Impersonal: Sexual/Textual Bodies in Contemporary French Women's Writing

New women's writing in France persistently engages us in the meticulous observation of bodies. In this article I analyse the most' salient aspect of such observation, namely its overwhelming insistence on sexual experience. How do recent female-authored writings address the sexual body, and what are productive strategies for interpreting them? I refer to a range of works published since the early 1990s and concentrate especially on four: Catherine Millet's La Vie sexuelle de Catherine M. (2001), Catherine BreilJat's Pornocratie (2001), Plaisir d'ojJrir, joie de recevoir (1999) by Anna Rozen and Et fes fevres et fa bouche (2002) by Marie-Laure Dagoit. 1 My purpose is to highlight some common strategies and effects in the writing of sexual bodies, to draw out the specificity of written representations of sex, and to suggest a productive proximity to the cinematic. Like much of the writing I explore, my primary consideration is the female body. I ask how female bodies are sexualized by women in literary texts and how such representations inflect reader/writer relations. In particular I explore the affective and political dimensions of the distancing procedures which characterize much contemporary body writing by women. Increasingly, this writing is forensic in focus and de-eroticized. Structural devices such as cataloguing, as well as narratorial detachment, frequently cut across the expected intimacy of sexual narrative and render re-mappings of the sexual body paradoxically impersonal. In 2002, Elisabeth Roudinesco notes the emergence of a pornography which she defines as puritanical 'dans la me sure OU elle livre une classification froide,

Registering Trauma: the Body in Childbirth in Contemporary French Women's Writing

Childbirth is a uniquely female experience, even if not all women experience it, and even if, for those that do, there are many different experiences to be had. Indeed, as contemporary theorists of the body argue, such experiences bodily experiences are, at the very least, inflected or, more fundamentally, constructed by the ideological discourses that traverse them. 1 Throughout history, the female reproductive body, in particular, has been the object of a range of competing discourses, which in tum have shaped to a greater or lesser degree individual women's experiences of both their bodies and their sense of self. This article considers three very different literary narratives of childbirth, all coincidentally first appearing in 1995: Christine Angot's auto fictional Interview; Virginie Despentes's short story, 'A terme'; and Camille Laurens's autobiographical recit, Philippe. Between them, they illustrate some of the challenging, unsettling harrowing ways in which the body is being figured in contemporary women's writing in France, notably by inscribing the birthing body into problematical social contexts respectively, incest, infanticide and infant mortality. My analysis explores what is at stake in these remarkable narratives, both on an individual level and in relation to the cultural moment of which they are a part. First, I situate the texts in a theoretical and literary context, and then examine them individually, before going on to draw the analyses together in a consideration of how these disturbing representations of the body in childbirth in contemporary literature operate on a number of different levels.

Accursed Politics: Some French Women Writers and Political Life, 1715–1850

Accursed Politics: Some French Women Writers and Political Life, 1715–1850

Contemporary French Women's Writing: Women's Visions, Women's Voices, Women's Lives

Contemporary French Women's Writing: Women's Visions, Women's Voices, Women's Lives

Colette by Julia Kristeva (review)

Book Reviews159 other letters, she adopts a "naughty" tone with overt references to Hugo's "dickybird" and requests more sex with him (62). Nonetheless, she attacks Hugo more than once, in one retaliatory letter calling him a "monster" and a "rascal" (104). Finally, Drouet can be very compassionate, an admirable trait best illustrated in letters that try to comfort Hugo over the loss ofhis children. Larson has skillfully translated the text and has meticulously pointed out in her notes the difficulties oftranslating certain insidejokes and puns, not to mention slang that has all but disappeared or has changed in usage since Drouet first wrote the letters. In addition to the excellent overview of Drouet's life Larson presents in the introduction, her supplements to Blewer's notes forAnglophones who might be lacking in knowledge about nineteenth-century politics, literature, and culture are very helpful, as is the glossary of Hugo's works and contemporaries . In conclusion, this collection of riveting letters beautifully renders the colorful, ifnot often tragic, life ofan actress turned correspondent. It will surely intrigue feminist scholars interested inthe plightofthe single working-classwoman in the nineteenth century. Courtney SullivanWashburn University Kristeva, Julia. Colette. Jane Marie Todd, trans. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Pp 448. ISBN 0-231-12896-7. $37.00 (Cloth). Pp [i]-ix; 521. ISBN 0-231-12897-5. $20.00 (Paper). Julia Kristeva's trilogy on female genius concludes with this final volume devoted to the life and writings ofone ofthe twentieth century's most renowned French women writers, Colette. While Kristeva's first two volumes, focused respectively on philosopher HannahArendt andpsychoanalyst Melanie Klein, are characterized bytheir emphasis on the historical horror and collective anxiety that are descriptive of much ofthe century just past, this volume turns instead to the world ofwriting and to love. The reader may well ask with Kristeva herself: why Colette? As Kristeva puts it in her introduction: '"Finally, a Frenchwoman, after Hannah Arendt and Melanie Klein!' some of my readers exclaim approvingly, relieved to hear Colette's name announced. ? genius, Colette?' others protest. 'Well then, it's the genius ofan outdated and bygone France, and one we prefer to forget!'" (1). Yet for Kristeva the choice of Colette as her third exemplar of female genius is anchored in the fact that Colette found "a language to express a strange osmosis between her sensations, her desires, her anxieties . . . and the infiniteness ofthe world" (1). The entire book is Kristeva's complex interwoven analysis ofthe ways in which Colette's life andwriting are inextricably bound and thus define female genius. The text is divided into ten well-organized chapters. In Chapter l,"Why Colette? She Invented an Alphabet," Kristeva lays the groundwork for Colette's importance within the sphere offemale genius, while Chapter2, "Life orWorks?" considers the problems ofhow to deal with the co-mingling ofbiography, autobiography , and 'fiction' within Colette's oeuvre. Chapter 3, "Writing: Tendrils of 1 60Women in French Studies the Vine," takes us directly inside the writing world ofColette, while Chapter 4, "Who is Sido?" brings us Kristeva's informative examination ofthe relationship, so critical in Colette's life and in her writing, between mother and daughter. Following this focus on the maternal, Kristeva turns her attention in Chapter 5, "Depression, Perversion, Sublimation," to Freudian psychoanalytical concepts in Colette, including an excellent discussion of melancholia and a provocative analysis ofthe writer's relationship with her father. Chapter 6 presents an imaginative discussion of "The Metamorphic Body: Plants, Beasts, and Monsters," and is followed by Chapter 7's central questions ofreal-life "Men and Women, Pure and Impure." Chapter 8, titled "ALittle PoliticsAll the Same," deals with the delicate question ofColette's actions or lack thereofduring World War II, and the penultimate Chapter 9, "Still Writing, Between Balzac and Proust," focuses on Colette's own attempts to situate her writing within a French tradition. The final chapter—aptly titled "Is There a Feminine Genius?"—not only concludes Kristeva's work on Colette but also attempts to bring closure to the entire trilogy. In Kristeva's words: "The genius ofwomen from the last century has invited us not to elude the question and to consider this: concerns about the...

The Power and Patronage of Marguerite de Navarre (review)

Reviewed by: The Power and Patronage of Marguerite de Navarre Glynnis M. Cropp Stephenson, Barbara , The Power and Patronage of Marguerite de Navarre ( Women and Gender in the Early Modern World), Aldershot, Ashgate, 2004; hardback; pp. xii, 214; RRP £45; ISBN 0754606988. Marguerite de Navarre's life and literary works have received less attention than those of Christine de Pizan, the French woman writer closest to her in time. But in sixteenth-century France, 'a society in crisis', as J. H. Salmon described it, Marguerite also had a very significant political role by virtue of both her position as the king's sister and the titles and authority she possessed. She actively assisted the interests of political and religious clients, served and supported François I, and defended and protected her family and household, as revealed in her correspondence (1516-1549). Barbara Stephenson has based her timely study on the 886 letters, written by and to Marguerite, which survive in the original or as a copy (p. 2, n. 4). The total number of correspondents is 146, of whom 116 are classed as clientage correspondents (p. 18). Some of the correspondence has been published, but manuscript sources are generally cited in the footnotes. Becoming a ducal peer in 1517 when the king gave her the duchy of Berry, Marguerite had unique status for there were then only six secular peerages, held by princes of the blood. Married firstly to Charles d'Alençon, then after his death to Henri d'Albret, king of Navarre, she had very extensive connections and held territories in her own name and right. Her keen intelligence, robust character and deep spirituality complete the profile of this extraordinary woman. The Introduction describes Marguerite's person, her power as duchess, peer and queen and her multiple social and patronage networks. Having set her subject in the context of recent studies of Early Modern patronage and their [End Page 217] models, Stephenson discusses in chapter one the tie between patron and client, network links, short-term relationships, five groups of correspondents, and the importance of honour, status and reciprocity. She examines Marguerite's power to act as patron and broker for nobility in her own lands and as part of the king's network, analysing her correspondence (205 letters) with Anne de Montmorency, Grand Master and later Constable of France. A quasi-official scheme of clientage (the term Stephenson prefers) thus existed at a time when seigneurial power was yielding to administrative bureaucracy dependent on the transfer of offices to the higher nobility who, in turn, distributed them to clients. By participating in clientage, women of the higher nobility acted politically, and none more so than Marguerite de Navarre. The second chapter deals with the language of salutations and signatures as recognition of correspondents' status and indicators of interpretation and purpose of the letter. Linguistic manipulation of relationship and of request or recommendation occurred. Current debate on language and meaning in early modern correspondence, strategic choice of formulaic and deferential language, and specific examples are discussed, leading to an excellent résumé of interesting findings (pp. 76-77). The following chapter concentrates on Marguerite's political authority in her territories where in her own name she exercised full power. There is no evidence that her authority was challenged on the basis of gender (p. 111), her formal status being recognized as equivalent to that of a high-ranking male noble. In the fourth chapter her fluctuating patronage relationship with her brother the king is examined. Her list of titles beginning 'sœur unique du roy' acknowledged the pre-eminence of this relationship. The final chapter concerns Marguerite's élite religious patronage, which extended beyond that usually practised by noble women. She moved easily between orthodox Catholicism and the reforming ideas of what is here designated 'French evangelicism' (p. 13), the movement for reform from within the Church. Marguerite advocated reform within the Church of certain practices and translation of Scripture. Her religious network was the most complex as the bulk of 235 letters testifies. She both supported orthodox clients and defended threatened evangelicals. The Conclusion re-assembles and reflects on the chapter findings, all previously summarized. The correspondence...

Nathalie Morello , Catherine Rodgers (review)

834 Reviews extensive analysis ofthe links between Bicentenaire Kit and Butor's other 'American' texts or between the Liechtenstein postcards and 6 810 000 litres d'eau par seconde, Description de San Marco, or Intervalle would undoubtedly have yielded illuminating results. Furthermore, although the link which Miller establishes between Bicentenaire Kit and home assembly kits is convincing, she does not address the issue ofthe work's artistic ancestry (e.g. Duchamp's Boite verte). Finally, the occasional authorial asides fitsomewhat uncomfortably within an academic study, though the enthusiasm they convey, combined with the generous illustration and translations, may well help to bring these works to the attention of non-specialist readers; it is certainly to be hoped that Miller's concluding plea forfurtherresearch will be heard by Butor specialists, as well as by supervisors and prospective doctoral students. Prisms and Rainbows offers sensitive, well-informed, and sympathetic readings of several challenging and multifaceted works and well prepares the ground for furtherexploration of this rich field. University of Edinburgh Jean H. Duffy Nouvelles ecrivaines: nouvelles voix? Ed. by Nathalie Morello and Catherine Rodgers. (Faux Titre, 230) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2002. 331 pp. ?65. ISBN 90-420-1043-6. This collection makes a rich and substantial contribution to the growing body of criticism preoccupied with the emergence in the 1990s of a new generation of women writers writing in French, and like Gill Rye and Michael Worton's 2002 collection of essays, Women's Writing in Contemporary France (see MLR, 99 (2004), 106061 ), provides ample evidence to support the contention that a thriving new wave of women writers has and continues to make a sizeable contribution to the contemporary French literaryscene. Each of its fifteenchapters is dedicated to the work of a different woman writer.These include some, such as Christine Angot, Louise Lambrichs, and Amelie Nothomb, whose work will be familiar to readers and scholars ofcontemporary French literature, as well as others with whose work they may be less familiar, such as Genevieve Brisac and Linda Le. The collection opens with an insightful and very useful introduction of more than forty pages in which Nathalie Morello and Catherine Rodgers examine the public reception in France of works by women and the many common textual preoccupations which unite an otherwise diverse group of writers. For Morello and Rodgers, the under-representation of women in the fields of publishing and academia, as well as a media-driven preoccupation with persona? lity rather than literary merit, has significantly contributed to the continuing poor visibility of women writers in France and a consistent failure to acknowledge their contribution to the contemporary French novel. In an attempt to address this apparent marginalization, Morello and Rodgers devote the second half oftheir introduction to a valuable discussion ofthe work of featured authors not only in the light of the thematic and formal features of ecriturefeminine but also from the perspective of numerous trends discernible within the contemporary French novel. The co-editors observe that, while female-authored texts of the 1990s share many points of contact with the work of previous generations of French women writers, the irony,intertextuality, and authorial aggression that mark contemporary French literary productions also characterize the work of many ecrivaines actuelles. Further, several contributions bear out the co-editors' observation that many recent textes de femmes display an ambivalence towards established feminist precepts. In their introduction Morello and Rodgers write: 'il semblerait que certaines ecrivaines des annees 1990 se sentent capables d'aller plus loin: de se concevoir implicitementfeministes tout en produisant des textes qu'il est difficiled'apprehender comme favorables a des pensees feministes' MLR, 100.3, 2005 835 (p. 45). Examples include Catherine Rodgers's searching discussion of the conflicting feminist interpretations invited by the many evocations of extreme states of being contained in early texts by Marie Darrieussecq. Shirley Jordan's exploration of the transgressive and often violent fictions of Virginie Despentes is marked by a similar interest in the feminist implications of female-authored textual productions. Despite the absence of an index, the collection is presented with a good deal of clarity.A short chapter summary?provided both in French and in English?appears at the head...

The Return to Romance: Love Stories in Recent French Women's Writing

The Return to Romance: Love Stories in Recent French Women's Writing Diana Holmes LOVE AND DESIRE ARE CENTRAL to literature and to storytelling . Happy, mutual love perhaps lends itself more to poetry or music than to narrative (or as Colette put it, "L'amour parfait se raconte en trois lignes: 'Il m'aima, je /'aimai, Sa présence supprima toutes les autres présences; nous fumes heureux'".1 However, the unfulfilled desire for love's object drives a narrative of quest that is both hermeneutic (everything about the beloved is interesting and invites interpretation) and adventurous (the quest to win the beloved, to overcome obstacles, rivals, rejections in the pursuit of happiness is the stuff of stories from fairy tales to Harlequin romances). If love has figured more prominently and consistently in women's than men's writing over the centuries, this is unsurprising since in most cultures and at most levels of the social hierarchy women's lives—until quite recently—have been largely restricted to the private domain, and their dramas of self-discovery and the quest for happiness have necessarily been played out on a domestic and private stage. Though there are many remarkable exceptions , the plot of courtship, marriage, adultery has been the mainstay of women's writing through the centuries, from La Princesse de Clèves to George Sand and on to Françoise Sagan, taking in the durable form of the popular romance. Women's desires to explore the world and to live intensely have often been figured through narratives of passionate love. Throughout the twentieth century, women in Western societies entered the public world in increasing numbers. As their lives played out on a wider canvas, marriage, or even unmarried coupledom, ceased to be so powerful an imperative. The love story no longer seems to be the essential plot of female lives. Second wave feminism contested the "ruling myths of female sexual dependency and sexual availability"2 and downplayed the romantic love-plot in favor of a script of sexual liberation in which marriage spelt oppression, women's desire was by nature neither uniquely heterosexual nor monogamous , and True Love was shown to be an ideology that served to legitimize oppressive relations at both domestic and state level. In most serious or literary French women's writing of the late 1960s and 1970s, the heterosexual romance fades away or is carefully deconstructed. Annie Leclerc (at least in her most influential work Parole de femme), Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray Vol. XLV, No. 1 97 L'Esprit Créateur re-define female sexuality as profoundly different from male sexuality, but are little concerned with the dynamics of attraction to male otherness.3 Christiane Rochefort's heroines follow the socially prescribed script of the love story only to find out that romance is the sugar on the pill of female dependence and powerlessness, and moreover that marriage is the antithesis of eroticism.4 Rochefort's preferred model of heterosexual relations plays down otherness and emphasizes a comradely, sensual bond without commitment. Marie Cardinal is fully aware of the attraction of the romantic hero, and of the origins of this attraction in early relations with the father. Her novels acknowledge the power of romantic attraction but also treat it with great caution, locating the heroine's self-realization elsewhere.5 Duras's writing, it is true, deals persistently with love, revealing both a fascination with sexual difference and the attempt to disrupt it. The theme of love and desire does not disappear from women's writing at this period, but it is either marginalized or very self-consciously problematized. So what becomes of the female-authored love story in a postmodern, some would say a post-feminist, age?6 There is no doubt that the romance remains most women readers' preferred form of fiction. Harlequin France, the "leader de roman d'amour" as its website claims, is the second largest paperback publishing company in France, publishing over 500 new titles and selling 12 million books each year. Though a new collection is about to extend Harlequin's range beyond the "roman sentimental," the vast majority of its immensely popular novels are heterosexual love...

Liberty, Equality, Maternity in Beauvoir, Leduc and Ernaux by Alison S. Fell (review)

MLRy 99.4, 2004 1059 major critical views and a pointer to the most useful further reading. A vast amount of critical work on Malraux has been done since the pioneering studies of half a century ago, and Shorley's extensive bibliography (seventy-three items) lists no fewer than thirteen differentmonographs devoted to this novel alone. Most of the general studies of Malraux also contain a competent chapter on La Condition humaine, while the Pleiade edition (Andre Malraux, (Euvres completes, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1989-96), vol. 1 (1989)) adds 94 pages of notes to the 250 of actual text. No serious study of Malraux can now neglect this, together with Christine Moatti's work on the manuscript. Inevitably, much ofwhat any new critic writes has by now been said before. Shorley is in fact operating on two levels: presenting a difficult work to students whose literary background is necessarily limited, while glancing over his shoulder at his peer group of scholars, to escape the danger of oversimplifying, if not straitjacketing, that more detailed analysis can avoid. On the whole he succeeds, but in places I suspect our student critics might feel the numerous quotations and page references (eighteen on one page) are piled on to the point of confusion. There is some overlap between Chapter 1, 'Contexts', and Chapter 2, 'History', and these could perhaps have been combined, with the potted history?never really satisfactory? pruned down. On the other hand, the two pages of his final chapter, 'Readings', cry out for development. The meat of the book is contained in two long chapters, 'Text' and 'Cosmos', where Shorley gives a detailed analysis ofMalraux's narrative and ideas. He is particularly good on metaphysical solitude, though he does not use this term, but some elements, such as six pages on a comparison with Pascal, could have been hived offinto a separate article. The Eurocentric aspect could also have been stressed: Chinese readers usually smile politely at any suggestion of Realism in this novel. The text is accompanied by a small map of East Asia, unfortunately both inaccurate and inadequate, and by a useful summary of relevant events, dates, and characters. University of Western Australia Denis Boak Liberty,Equality, Maternity in Beauvoir, Leduc and Ernaux. By Alison S. Fell. Ox? ford: European Humanities Research Centre ofthe University of Oxford. 2003. x + 2o8pp. ?35. ISBN 1-900755-73-4. Motherhood is an impassioned issue in feminist debates, but too few literary studies address it froman interdisciplinary perspective. Alison Fell does. The result is a highly readable, well-informed, and clearly argued study of the discourses of motherhood in twentieth-century France, with special emphasis on selected works of Beauvoir, Leduc, and Ernaux. The inclusion of 'liberty' and 'equality' in the title of the book, while making it catchy, is somewhat misleading?these are issues relevant to mater? nity,but are not fullyaddressed here. Yet even with this and some other shortcomings, the book is a commendable contribution. After a very brief overview of the dichotomous representation of motherhood by French women writers, Fell outlines the theoretical debate. Since she contextualizes the works of Beauvoir, Leduc, and Ernaux, her inclusion of American feminists such as Chodorowis slightly surprising. The emphasis on Cixous and Kristeva also denotes a certain Anglo-American standpoint, but the chapter offersa valuable summary of the main ideas on the subject. In order to avoid the ahistorical and universalizing pitfalls of psychoanalytical approaches, Fell adopts a Foucauldian grid of interpretation and presents the various discourses of motherhood that the French state, the Catholic church, and pressure groups, including feminists, have constructed throughout the twentieth century in France. This enables her to eschew the oppressor/victim dia? lectic and proves to be a powerful tool in the individual studies that follow, which 1060 Reviews constitute the most innovative part of the book. Nevertheless, one is leftwondering why Fell has chosen her three writers, even ifmotherhood is forthem doubtless a cen? tral question. This somewhat controversial, because unrepresentative, choice should have been justified. It has also regrettably dictated that once again the daughter's viewpoint has been privileged over that of the mother. For each writer, Fell...

Les belles [in]fidèles ou la traduction de l'ambiguïté masculine: Les Rondeaux d'Anne de Graville

This article explores the means by which Anne de Graville, a French woman writer of the early Renaissance, attempts to "rewrite", that is to say "translate", the ambiguous text of Alain Chartier, a master of 15th-Century courtoisie, so as to make it espouse the new values of 16th-Century courtly life, which is closer in spirit to Christian morality. Anne de Graville's Rondeaux, inspired by the Belle dame sans mercy of Chartier, strive to expose a new and improved courtoisie, one in which noble women, as well as chevaliers, will be encouraged to use their "libre-arbitre". The new courtly code will enhance each individual's capacity, men and women's, to earn the admiration of others, the former in refraining to expose his passion, the latter in making chastity a priority. In Anne de Graville's rewriting, the dialogue between a "lover" and a "dame" shows how, contrary to common belief, women need to be as eloquent as men in order to avoid the many traps of beautiful speech and love mendacities.

Reading for Change: Interactions between Text and Identity in Contemporary French Women's Writing (Baroche, Cixous, Constant) by Gill Rye (review)

Reading for Change: Interactions between Text and Identity in Contemporary French Women's Writing (Baroche, Cixous, Constant) by Gill Rye (review)

Early Modern Women’s Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz by Stephanie Merrim (review)

226 Reviews extremely fertile methodological approach to ltalian travel literature that might well be extended to the ltalian tradition at large, going back to Marco Polo and early modern ltalian travel literature, thus providing a powerful and timely antidote, par? ticularly in an age of 'globalizing literary studies', to the ltalian critical tradition's aversion to travel. University of Notre Dame Theodore J.Cachey Jr Early Modern Women's Writing and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. By Stephanie Merrim . Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 1999. xliv + 323 pp. ?17.95. ISBN 0-85323-784-0. This is a very important contribution to Women's Writing studies in early modern Spain and Latin America, a research field that has become increasingly popular in recent years. Stephanie Merrim, who has already published on Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, proposes a comparative study between the Mexican nun and other Spanish, French, and English women writers of her time, including Catalina de Erauso, Maria de Zayas, Mme de Lafayette, Anne Bradstreet, and Margaret Lucas Cavendish. To contextualize this project, it should be said that its interpretation upholds the view of her-storyagainst his-tory (p. xxxviii), with all the positive and problematic impli? cations of this approach. Covering a broad geographical frame, this book could be of use to academies in both the Hispanic and the European fields. This accounts for the translation of Spanish prose quotations from Sor Juana, Erauso, and Zayas into English, and although this makes it available forEuropean readers, fromthe perspec? tive of a Spanish-speaker it seems a shame not to offerthe Spanish authorial version alongside. Notwithstanding this small criticism, the comparative approach adopted by Mer? rim should be applauded. Hispanic literature does not need to be studied separately from the main European field (as it used to be in the past), and the author of this book shows convincingly enough that the feminine Hispanic Baroque has more in common with the rest of Europe than not. In the concrete case of Sor Juana, Merrim proves this assertion to be true: the scholar manages effectively to view the nun 'without walls', as she herself proposes in a useful metaphor in the introduction to her book, to situate the Mexican writer's works 'within a larger context' that will allow us to see 'the enhanced dialogue of commonalities that emerges from the interplay' (p. xv). Merrim's study tries to demonstrate how Sor Juana and other women of her time adapt the Baroque's main devices and strategies (created by men) to their own socalled feminist purposes. It is the same procedure that she had identified in a previous study (Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991)) and other scholars like M. L. Bretz (Voices, Silences and Echoes: A Theory of the Essay and the Critical Reception of Naturalism in Spain (London: Tamesis, 1992)) recognize in works written two centuries later, i.e. the manipulation of a prevailing ideology to defend a position, the strategy of assuming a man-created code in order to undermine it. Women situate themselves within the ideology ofpower with the purpose oftwisting itsmale forms. In this way,forexample, Sor Juana quotes Saint Paul, interpreting his unfeminist assertions in her favour (p. 203). It is the same subtle sabotage of dominant male discourse that Kathryn Joy McKnight perceived in The Mystic of Tunja: The Writings of Madre Castillo 1671-1742 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), dealing with Madre Castillo's work. Merrim shows how convents are 'written' in order to provide women not only with a place to escape from man, but also to fulfilthemselves and project an inner and safe MLRy 99. i, 2004 227 space. Canonical values are thus used to proclaim anti-canonical arguments. Once more, the official excuse of defending woman's education (in her role as guardian of her children) is evoked in order to achieve the more important goal of access to books and knowledge. This appealing thesis is accompanied by the attractive titles of the book's chapters, two of which, 'Women on Love', referto D. H. Lawrence's novel. How far can we believe that this was being...

Review: Reading For Change: Interactions between Text and Identity in Contemporary French Women's Writing

Review: Reading For Change: Interactions between Text and Identity in Contemporary French Women's Writing

Authorial Inscription and Its Subversion in the Novels of Camille Laurens

Camille Laurens is a complex writer. Her novel Dans ces bras–là (Prix Femina, 2000) openly declares itself as a feminine text, in which a number of aspects of gender roles within and outside the family are explored in autofictional form. However, this text can be seen both to reflect and deflect the autobiographical project of many French women writers, such as (in very different ways) Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux and Marie Cardinal. For if Laurens's writing overall engages specifically with the issues of language, gender, the body and transmission, it does so in a variety of ways, many of them ludic and humorous. This article proposes that reading Dans ces bras–là through the prism of Laurens's earlier novels leads to a fruitful problematizing of the questions of gender and gender(ed) relations in the novelist's works. Indeed, in Index (1991) and L'Avenir (1998) (the first and fourth novels of a loose tetralogy), Laurens explicitly writes herself into her plot and her characters (both male and female). In addition, her texts pick up on and subvert different 'genres' (the detective novel, the erotic episode, autofiction). Gender and genre thus go hand in hand, and, through a range of linguistic and narrative techniques (wordplay, plot, changes in tense and focalization), their specific configuration in Laurens's texts frequently de-stabilizes the relation of reader to text.

Authorial Inscription and Its Subversion in the Novels of Camille Laurens

Camille Laurens is a complex writer. Her novel Dans ces bras–là (Prix Femina, 2000) openly declares itself as a feminine text, in which a number of aspects of gender roles within and outside the family are explored in autofictional form. However, this text can be seen both to reflect and deflect the autobiographical project of many French women writers, such as (in very different ways) Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux and Marie Cardinal. For if Laurens's writing overall engages specifically with the issues of language, gender, the body and transmission, it does so in a variety of ways, many of them ludic and humorous. This article proposes that reading Dans ces bras–là through the prism of Laurens's earlier novels leads to a fruitful problematizing of the questions of gender and gender(ed) relations in the novelist's works. Indeed, in Index (1991) and L'Avenir (1998) (the first and fourth novels of a loose tetralogy), Laurens explicitly writes herself into her plot and her characters (both male and female). In addition, her texts pick up on and subvert different 'genres' (the detective novel, the erotic episode, autofiction). Gender and genre thus go hand in hand, and, through a range of linguistic and narrative techniques (wordplay, plot, changes in tense and focalization), their specific configuration in Laurens's texts frequently de-stabilizes the relation of reader to text.

Transforming the Canonical: Gender and the French Short Story in the 1980s and 1990s

This paper considers four short stories written in the 1980s and 1990s in response to the work of four canonical short story writers. The meanings and politics of the intertextual relations thus established are explored, both in relation to gender and to the theories of Genette, Bloom, and others. I conclude that both the short story form and the practice of rewriting or transforming canonical works appear to have been taken up with particular success by French women writers in the closing years of the twentieth century.

The bedside manners of contemporary French women writers (Hennezel, Ernaux, Nothomb)

The bedside manners of contemporary French women writers (Hennezel, Ernaux, Nothomb)

The bedside manners of contemporary French women writers (Hennezel, Ernaux, Nothomb)

The bedside manners of contemporary French women writers (Hennezel, Ernaux, Nothomb)

Mirrors, Marriage, and Nostalgia: Mother-Daughter Relations in Writings by Isabelle de Charriere and Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun

This article explains how Isabelle de Charriere and Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun take up where seventeenth-century writers Madame de Lafayette and Madame de Sevigne left off in portraying an intense narcissistic relationship between mother and daughter in which the daughter’s heterosexual desire threatens the primary dyad by defining the daughter as separate from her mother. Moreover, pressing beyond these specific French women writers of an earlier age, the essay argues that the mother’s nostalgia for reflective unity with her daughter is not different in kind from the daughter’s nostalgia in the twentieth century. Feminists’ longing for the preoedipal mother is based on the same fantasy of past reflective unity as the early modem mothers’ longing for their heterosexually undetermined daughters. The essay concludes by urging the importance not only of producing alternative models and metaphors for coexistent maternal and filial subjectivities, but of demanding cultural recognition for alternative models to rival and, if possible, supersede early modem, Freudian, and post-Freudian elegiac and nostalgic models alike.

REVIEWS

REVIEWS French Women's Writing 1848–1994. By DIANA HOLMES. London, Athlone Press, 1996. 320 pp. Hb £42.00. Pb £14.95. CLAIRE GORRARA CLAIRE GORRARA CARDIFF UNIVERSITY Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume LIII, Issue 1, January 1999, Page 83, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/LIII.1.83 Published: 01 January 1999