Jeune Fille Research Articles

Late essays and articles

General editor's preface Prefatory note Acknowledgements Chronology Cue-titles Introduction Late essays and articles: Note on the texts Mercury [Return to Bestwood] Getting on Which class I belong to Newthorpe in 2927 The 'Jeune Fille' wants to know Laura Philippine That women know best All there Thinking about oneself Insouciance Master in his own house Matriarchy Ownership Autobiography Women are so cocksure Why I don't like living in London Cocksure women and hen-sure men Hymns in a man's life Red trousers Is England still a man's country? Sex appeal Do women change Enslaved by civilisation Give her a pattern Introduction to pictures Myself revealed Introduction to these paintings The state of funk Making pictures Pornography and obscenity Pictures on the wall The risen lord Men must work and women as well Nottingham and the mining countryside We need one another The real thing Nobody loves me Appendix 1. Early draft of 'The 'Jeune Fille' Wants to Know' Appendix 2. Vanity Fair version of 'Do Women Change' Appendix 3. 'Mushrooms': an autobiographical fragment Explanatory notes Textual apparatus A note on pounds, shillings and pence.

Women's Writing in Nineteenth-Century France by Alison Finch (review)

Book Reviews1 1 7 stopped reading when Chopin died), the book is a broad mural of Parisian manners, preferences, interests, preoccupations, and dreams in this period. This portrait of an era contains many curious little known facts. How many Americans realize that, before inventing the telegraph, Samuel F.B. Morse was an art student in Paris or that he, along with James Fenimore Cooper, helped Lafayette to raise money for displaced Poles after the fall of Warsaw to the Russians in 183 1? How many French people know that both Hector Berlioz and Alfred de Musset were destined for medical careers and abandoned them when faced with the horror of the dissecting room? This work shows evidence of being carefully researched from many sources, and one suspects that quite a few of the chapters could stand alone as an introduction to opera, theatre, or art, etc. in the nineteenth century. The only unifying theme for the disparate essays is the presence ofChopin in their midst. Nevertheless, the book is quite enjoyable and permits one to image s/ he is actually living in the Paris ofthe nineteenth century. Lucy M. SchwartzBuffalo State College (SUNY) Alison Finch. Women's Writing in Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2000. ISBN: 0-521-63186-6. Pp. 316. $57.47. Alison Finch's Women s Writing in Nineteenth-Century France is breathtaking in scope and impressive for the depth of analysis and synthesis the author brings to this vast subject. Finch's survey encompasses more than ninety women writers and a wide range of literary genres including not only novels, drama, and poetry but also politics,journalism, history, travel, children's literature and life-writing. By providing such an extensive overview, Finch hopes to "give a sense of what women writers were doing in the century as a whole" that will serve as a background and complement to more specialized studies focusing on individual authors, themes, genres, or periods (1). While demonstrating how these women established "a distinct female tradition," Finch is also concerned with "repositioning" them in other traditions, such as socialist theory and life-writing (23 1). In her first two chapters, Finch discusses the conditions that these women writers faced, the prejudices that have led to their omission from the literary canon, and the continuing need for a reassessment of their contribution to French literature. Following these introductory chapters, the book is divided chronologically into three sections, each preceded by an overview of the period: "The Early Nineteenth Century: The Age ofNapoleon and the Aftermath ofRevolution (1 800-1 829)"; "Mid-Century: George Sand and Her Contemporaries (1830-1 869)"; and "Naturalism and Symbolism: The Beginnings of a New Era (1870-1899)." Within each section, chapters are most often organized around figures who are representative of certain genres or themes, for example, "Rank and race: Claire de Duras" and "Adventure and travel: Flora Tristan and Léonie d'Aunet." 1 1 8 Women in French Studies In her selection of authors to highlight, Finch has chosen "those who seemed most likely to give a sense of both general currents and the variety of individual temperaments" (2). In some cases, these are well-known authors such as Germaine de Staël, George Sand, Marceline DesbordesValmore , Louise Michel and Rachilde. In other cases lesser-known writers are highlighted, such as Henriette de La Tour du Pin (1770-1853) whose memoirs were not published until 1906 but who provides an example of women's approaches to history as well as how women all too often "having produced obviously talented work . . . leave it unpublished or complete" (40). Likewise, in a chapter dealing with "Confidence and the woman writer," Finch focuses on two mid-century authors who depict societal pressures on women to abandon literary achievement: Amable Tastu in her poem "L'Ange gardien" and Sophie Ulliac-Trémadeure in her novels Valérie ou le jeune artiste (\ 836) and Emilie ou la jeune fille auteur (1837). A chapter on naturalism and symbolism highlights the contributions of Marie Krysinska, one of the innovators of free verse and "the woman writer most successfully air-brushed from the literary history of nineteenth-century France," (189). Finch also includes...

The Allusive Complex of Balzac's Pierrette

Despite its popularity, if one can consider successive paperback editions an indication of popularity, Balzac's Pierrette (1840) has had remarkably little attention from critics and scholars, no more than passing references and a very small handful of introductions and studies. 1 These professional readers have frequently mentioned Balzac's early plans for the work, indicated in a letter to Mme Hanska on 4 June 1839: "la première œuvre un peu jeune fille que je ferai, je la dédierai à votre chère Anna ..." While everyone understands that the expectation for what Jean-Louis Tritter calls "une œuvrette plus ou moins à l'eau de rose" was set aside, this comment promising a nice little story does not give much hope for a powerful masterpiece, and it remains to consider the mechanisms through which Balzac turned that same story into "une des scènes les plus désespérées de La Comédie humaine" (4 June). 2 Tritter's excellent edition makes it clear that the work's creation was not easy, involving as it did many false starts (Tritter counts sixteen) and numerous corrections. Balzac's promised dedication to Anna de Hanska and the text itself leave no doubt that the work became anything but "jeune fille." Balzac apologizes for its bleakness and explains that he had no choice: "Il est si difficile, Anna, de vous trouver, dans l'histoire de nos mœurs, une aventure digne de passer sous vos yeux, que l'auteur n'avait pas à choisir" (4.29). Conditions in France, particularly for young people, had grown so bad that edulcoration was impossible.

Art in Detroit Public Places

“There has always been art in public places. Long before it was made for private consumption and enjoyment, art functioned for societies in very basic and far-reaching ways,” writes the author in his introduction to the revised edition of an excellent guide first prepared twenty years ago to the wealth of public art to be found in the Detroit metropolitan area. Nawrocki, professor of art history at the Center for Creative Studies-College of Art and Design in Detroit, notes that from ancient times public works of art sought to teach and to commemorate, as well as to delight the viewer and enhance the environment. Detroit continues the tradition, celebrating its own history and heroes and ethnic diversity, while enriching its urban and suburban surroundings with an infinite variety of works of art. In 1874, Julius Melchers, Detroit’s first sculptor, carved larger-than-life figures of the four French pioneers, Marquette, LaSalle, Cadillac and Richard, who helped establish Michigan Territory and the city of Detroit. Originally installed in niches in the facade of the old, demolished City Hall, they now grace Wayne State University’s campus. A gift from the People of Krakow, Poland, to the city of Detroit in 1976, is a bronze cast of General Thaddeus Kosciusko astride a prancing steed. He doffs his hat to motorists and pedestrians in true cavalier fashion. Nearby, set against a white marble semi-circular wall is the Spirit of Detroit. A sixteen-foot high seated bronze figure with arms gracefully outstretched, it projects a sense of welcome. Newly selected for this edition is Sentry, a ten-foot high black and gold mask poised above the main entrance to the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. Modeled on the mask style of the Bambara people of Mali, the contrasting hues create a dazzling, powerful image. Charming examples of whimsy abound also. Alexander Calder’s Jeune Fille et Sa Suite, painted bright redorange, displays her saucy twenty-ton steel self on a triangular space in front of the Ameritech Building. A children’s favorite is Silverbolt, a lively, shiny, chrome-plated horse, fashioned out of automobile bumpers. Each of the 120 selected art works appears in a photograph accompanied by Nawrocki’s lyrical descriptive text. The book has been organized into five geographical sections covering a twenty-mile radius of the City of Detroit. A map is provided for each section showing the location of the works in that area. It is a practical guide, a carefully researched art history textbook and a fresh approach to the heart and history of an important American city-all in one easily portable volume. JOYCE MOORE (December 16, 1999)

Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity

Reviewed by: Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity Katharine Conley Sawelson-Gorse, Naomi, Ed. Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. Pp. xviii + 686. Women in Dada is a worthy introduction to the many women in the United States and Europe who participated in Dada. Women artists studied in the volume who were living in New York during the Dada years include the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Katherine Drier, Beatrice Wood, Florine Stettheimer, Mina Loy, Georgia O'Keefe, Clara Tice, and the Little Review editors, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap. Essays are also devoted to the European Dada artists Suzanne Duchamp, who worked in Paris, Hannah Höch, who participated in Dada in Berlin, and Emmy Hennings and Sophie Taeuber, who lived in Zurich. Women in Dada highlights both how international Dada was and how mobile were many of its participants, including the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and Man Ray, who lived and worked on both sides of the Atlantic. As the essays by Elizabeth Hutton Turner and William Camfield indicate, in addition to the women themselves, certain key views of women, created by both men and women, also circulated freely from one shore of the Atlantic to the other. The image of "la jeune fille américaine," for example, originated in the American cinema with the performances of Mary Pickford in such roles as Annie Oakley, argues Turner, and then surfaced in Paris in Picabia's oil painting Udnie (jeune fille américaine: danse), (1913-1914) and in Jean Cocteau's scenario for the ballet Parade (1917). Camfield begins his essay on Suzanne Duchamp by pointing out that when she produced Un et une menacés in 1916 in Paris, a mixed media work which identifies inanimate geometrical forms as animate beings, "only five other artists had produced anything resembling it," and all of them were then working in New York (82). One of the strengths of Women in Dada is the quantity of close readings of works by women. As already mentioned, William Camfield studies the Dada work of Suzanne Duchamp, particularly ARieTe d'oubli de la chapelle étourdie. Barbara Bloemink does delightful readings of Florine Stettheimer's paintings Family Portrait No. 2, Nude Self-Portrait, and Portrait of Myself. Carolyn Burke reads Juliette Roche's verbal/visual poem "Brevoort" and "N'Existe Pas." Paul Franklin does a detailed reading of Beatrice Wood's painting Beatrice et ses douze enfants. Eleanor Apter analyzes Katherine Drier's work in light of Drier's close friendship with Marcel Duchamp. Apter sees in their respective productions a dialogue that mirrored their personal relations and that culminated in Drier's poignant lost portrait of Duchamp. This portrait, of which only a photograph remains, was possibly not lost at all but "thrown out by Duchamp himself," when he acted as Drier's executor (398). Maud Lavin, in an article that is reprinted from her book on Hannah Höch, does a thorough reading of Hoch's photomontage series, From an [End Page 175] Ethnographic Museum, in light of contemporary views of ethnography and gender. She concludes: "Höch deviated from the nonambiguous, folkloric representation of African and other tribal peoples . . . and laid the foundation for a critique of racism, even if she did not pursue it further," because what most preoccupied Hoch was "the display of culture marked as different" which for Hoch in the early 1920s was primarily "the modern European woman" (352). Renée Riese Hubert does a carefully nuanced reading of the more ephemeral work of Emmy Hennings and Sophie Taeuber, who were both performers and dancers. Taeuber was a gifted costume designer, as well. Particularly strong is Hubert's focus on a memorial essay written by Hennings about Taeuber, whose style of dance was nevertheless "so different from her own" (572). Also included in Women in Dada are several critiques of how women were represented in Dada art by men. Dorothea Dietrich analyses representations of women in the collages of Kurt Schwitters. Amelia Jones and Marisa Januzzi read Man Ray's Catherine Barometer sculpture. Barbara Zabel, Amelia Jones, and Willard Bohn all pay close...

Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel.

From the late seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, no figure was more central to debates in England about the relations between the sexes than that of the modest woman. Drawing on a wide range of narratives from the period, Ruth Bernard Yeazell analyzes the multiple and conflicting wishes that were covered by talk of and explores some of the most striking uses of a modest heroine. Combining evidence from conduct books and ladies' magazines with the arguments of influential theorists like Hume, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft, this book begins by asking why writers were devoted to the anxious remaking of women's nature and to codifying rules for their porper behavior. Fictions of Modesty shows how the culture at once tried to regulate young women's desires and effectively opened up new possibilities of subjectivity and individual choice. Yeazell goes on to demonstrate that modest delaying actions inform a central tradition of English narrative. On the Continent, the English believed, the jeune fille went from the artificial innocence of the convent to an arranged marriage and adultery; the natural modesty of the Englishwoman, however, enabled her to choose her own mate and to marry both prudently and with affection. Rather than taking its narrative impetus from adultery, then, English fiction concentrated on courtship and the consciousness of the young woman choosing. After paired studies of Richardson's Pamela and Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (even Fanny Hill, Yeazell argues, is a modest English heroine at heart), Yeazell investigates what women novelists made of the virtues of modesty in works by Burney, Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Gaskell. A speculative postscript briefly addresses the discourse of late nineteenth-century science in order to show how Darwin's theory of sexual selection and Havelock Ellis's psychology of sex replicate fictions of female modesty. While those who sought to codify modest behavior in previous centuries often appealed to Nature for support, our modern understanding of the natural, Yeazell suggests, owes something to the work of the novelists. Sharply reasoned and witty, Fictions of Modesty will appeal to all those interested in women's studies, the English novel, and the continuing history of relations between the sexes.

Marcel Proust: Selected Letters. Volume 2, 1904-1909 , and: Proust and Venice (review)

Reviewed by: Marcel Proust: Selected Letters. Volume 2, 1904-1909, and: Proust and Venice Laurence M. Porter Philip Kolb , ed. Marcel Proust: Selected Letters. Volume 2, 1904-1909. Trans. Terence Kilmartin. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. 482 pp. $23.95. Peter Collier . Proust and Venice. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. 185 pp. $39.50. A survey of professors of French literature conducted by the Modern Language Association about a decade ago indicated that more of these scholars—well over 500—considered themselves specialists in Proust than in any other French author. The publication of Proust's letters in English (the first volume appeared in 1983 with Doubleday, translated by Ralph Manheim) raises two issues: of how much interest is Proust to students of national literatures other than French, and how [End Page 634] great is the intrinsic interest of Proust's correspondence? Despite an abundance of excellent criticism in English (such as Roger Shattuck's masterful overview, Marcel Proust, in 1974) devoted to this author, Proust has remained an isolated monument, considered as a belated nineteenth-century author whose novel is too long to teach except in a seminar; who is inaccessible to most undergraduates; who exerted little discernible influence on later writers; and who was outdone by James Joyce. Such a climate of opinion obviously affords rich opportunities for revision. The short story, "La Confession d'une jeune fille," for example, is eminently teachable. But the letters do a disservice to Proust's reputation, for they were definitely not written for publication. Critics have outgrown their early disappointment or embarrassment at finding in Proust the correspondent a social-climbing sycophant who awkwardly concealed his homosexuality and who maintained relations with anti-Semitic journals in hopes of being published, although his mother was Jewish. Nevertheless, these letters from the period during which Proust was discovering his artistic vocation are tediously preoccupied with his asthma (a convenient excuse for evading social obligations and visits). He flaunts his illness as Woody Allen flaunts his neurosis but without ever managing to exploit it as a source of humor. He focuses almost entirely on maintaining emotional relations with others, on expressing feelings and clearing up misunderstandings. The tone often is effusive and rhapsodic. Apart from aesthetic objects and high society, the external world scarcely makes itself felt. Topical Belle Epoque gossip predominates. Proust is at his most interesting (in this particular period) when he talks about Ruskin or reacts to the creative and critical works authors send to him. He keeps the elaboration of his novel to himself, jealously guarding his privacy even from intimates. As he wrote to Georges de Lauris late in 1909, "There will be time enough when my thoughts have run their course to allow free rein to the stupidity of others." Philip Kolb has been publishing his definitive edition of Proust's correspondence with Plon since 1970. Fifteen volumes have so far appeared and six more should complete the set. Proust wrote about one letter every other day. Thirty per cent of these have been preserved in the English version. Both editions contain ample notes identifying persons referred to, suggesting sources for À la recherche du temps perdu in Proust's social experience and providing cross-references to other letters. The French edition adds to the scholarly apparatus notations of the kind of paper on which the letters were written; details about the forms of dating and about miswritings; references to studies by other scholars; quotations from poems to which Proust refers; and the facts of publication of the books he mentions. Baudelaire, Hugo, Maeterlinck, Montesquieu, Anna de Noailles, Racine, Ruskin, and the painter Whistler predominate. The notes are impressively erudite. The selection and translation of the letters are uninspired. In a sampling of the eleven letters (of twenty-three) chosen from January 1907 (the numbers refer to the numbers of the letters in the English), three should have been omitted because they are routine congratulations (180, 184) or thanks (182). The last two lines of a post-scriptum are silently omitted (175). Italics (to indicate a colloquial expression) are omitted (175), and the punctuation is changed on four other occasions. False cognates are literally translated: invite becomes "invitation" rather than...

Simone de Beauvoir and the Writing Self

Simone de Beauvoir and the Writing Self Susan Rubin Suleiman H OW DID BEAUVOIR CONCEIVE OF HERSELF—or, putting it more strongly, conceive her self—as a writer? To conceive has multiple meanings, all of which are relevant: to form in the mind, to imagine; to understand; to express in particular words; to think; to become pregnant with. An autobiographer, we could say, is one who imagines, understands, expresses, becomes pregnant with, and conse­ quently gives birth to the self in writing. If the autobiographer is a writer par ailleurs—which means, in this instance, not on the side but centrally —the self she or he conceives and gives birth to in the process of auto­ biography is the writing self: How did I become a writer? What does it mean, for me, to write? These questions are not always asked explicitly, although they often are in a writer’s autobiography—in Les Mots, for example, or in Mémoires d ’une jeune fille rangée. But explicitly formu­ lated or not, I believe they are always present when a writer sets out to write his or her life. One important insight of contemporary critical theory has been that the very meaning of those questions, as well as the answers one might find for them, will differ not only according to individuals, but also, per­ haps primarily, according to the situation—the race, class, gender, and historical moment—of the person who is asking them or about whom they are asked. This may sound too much like a dubious pop psycho­ sociology (“ Who is the German-speaking Jew living in Prague in 1910, and how will his writing differ from that of the French homosexual thief living in a prison outside Paris in 1930?” ). What is at stake, however, is not a categorization or pigeon-holing, but rather, the recognition that the subject of writing is not a disembodied, transcendental ego. Hélène Cixous has written about the coming to writing, “la venue à l’écriture” —a process in which the place where one feels oneself to be starting from is of crucial importance. “ Everything about me joined together to forbid me to write: History, my story, my origin, my gender. Everything that constituted my social and cultural self—beginning with the essential, which I was lacking. . . : the language . . . I learned to speak French in a garden from which I was about to be expelled because I was Jewish. I was of the race of paradise-losers.” 1 42 W in t e r 1989 S u leim a n Feminist critics, including Cixous herself, have laid particular empha­ sis on the role of gender in the coming to writing. And indeed, one need not subscribe to a biologically deterministic view of femininity (or masculinity) to understand that a woman who writes will not have the same relation to language, and to that sacralized form of language we call literature, as a man, even a man of the same race and class. Here is Cixous again: “ Writing was reserved for the elect. It had to take place in a space inaccessible to the lowly, to the humble, to woman. . . . Writing spoke to its prophets from a burning bush. But it must have been decided that bushes would not converse with women” (21). As Cixous’ play with biblical allusions makes clear, one has but to look back with a certain ironic detachment at two thousand years of Western culture and at the discourses through which that culture has sought to define itself, to realize that sexual difference is not irrelevant to the writing self. But where is one to locate the difference? Does it reside in the body, male ver­ sus female, or in the places that have traditionally been assigned to the body by the culture and its discourses? Most feminists, I think, would argue the latter. Beauvoir certainly did. And yet, the body keeps intruding. We all have one; it is difficult to do without one. Our sense of who we are, and where we are in the world, necessarily passes through an awareness of ourselves as embodied beings. Even the language we use, no matter how abstract or...

Burning Mont-Cinère

Burning Mont-Cinere Robert Ziegler Montana College of Mineral Science and Technology IfJulien Green considers himself"l'unique sujet de ses livres" (Petit 13), how can that view be reconciled with authors' alienation from their works, with the failure of the effort to transpose the self in writing—in the book, which, Blanchot says, "est justement moi-même devenu autre" (305)? In remarks that Green recorded at the start of his career, he often deprecated the function ofhis reader. "On dit peu de chose de Mont-Cinere," he wrote in 1926. "Si j'écrivais pour les autres, non pour moi, je serais triste" (Les Années faciles 37). For an author who sees his writing as birthing what he calls "ma vérité," it is not surprising that he might have feared another's appropriation of his text and that this same concern should have informed him in the writing of his first novel. The prideful kind of diffidence that characterized Green in the 1920s, his doubt that he could write a book "which a great number of people might want to read" (Memories of Happy Days 220), betrays a recognition that he could be delivered of his truth only if that truth were shared in the action of revealing it. What counts in Green is not so much the substance of his confession, his admission ofhomosexuality or oftroubling religious scruples, but rather that the secret be successfully imparted, and that the written text be freed through its assimilation by a reader. "Ecrire un livre ne suffît pas à libérer l'écrivain. Il faut que le public le connaisse, il faut que le public sache" (Journal 570).1 In Mont-Cinere, Green articulates his evolving attitude toward his work, no longer suggesting it is in the text that the writer grasps himself, but conceding that the value of literature must finally reside in the dynamic interaction between an author and his public. The novel is not a story, then, of simple loneliness or greed, but tells of the attempt to preserve what can only slip away, to materialize and amass what intends its own self-liquidation, and to possess what ultimately eludes the one who would possess it. On three different levels, Green's first full novel describes the way this failure happens for those who try to appropriate what is a source ofnegative energy. Money, as Mrs. Fletcher knows, is a transformational medium, and, for the miser, 35 36Rocky Mountain Review supplants the marketable goods from which it is obtained. Yet in addition to its inherent uselessness,2 it is inaccessible to its owner: "je ne touche pas à mon compte en banque," the old woman is fond of saying (Mont-Cinère 167). Like money, fire is generated by destroying that which fuels it, and, similarly, its light and warmth cannot be held or touched. The title explains the derisory wish to hoard what creates nothingness, in the homonymie "mon-Mont," as in "my fire," "my pile ofashes."3 The fledgling writer Green must have surely understood himselfthat his own creative language obliterates the real which it illumines, and that the text which promises wealth or fame is not a vessel of one's thoughts, but a sign of the extinguishing" of that which made it live. As Blanchot says, the purpose ofwriting is the act and not the object, the experience rather than the production ofthe dead "chose littéraire" (300). Yet from the start ofthe novel, Green's characters see experience in terms of ownership, the conversion of a living world into an aesthetically arranged one. Emily dissociates herself from the view outside her window, interiorizes it as an art object, and turns it into "une nature morte." "La jeune fille considérait ce paysage avec l'attention que l'on prête à l'examen d'une peinture et ses regards se portaient sans cesse d'un point à l'autre" (Mont-Cinère 70). Throughout the novel, there are references to the house as a container, a strongbox-reliquary housing functionless collectibles. "Représentez-vous une maison . . . bâtie en forme de coffre," Green writes (Mont-Cinère 77). To Emily, who associates Mont-Cin...

Zaza Mabille: Mission and Motive in Simone de Beauvoir's "Memoires"

The role of Elizabeth (Zaza) Mabille in Simone de Beauvoir's life has been described in Memoires d'une jeune fille rangde (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter)' and represented in fiction in Quand prime le spirituel (When the Spiritual Predominates).2 It has also been commented on by Elaine Marks, Francis Jeanson, Jean Leighton, and Carol Ascher.3 Nonetheless, Zaza's role has yet to be examined in depth as the powerful formative force it was in the early life of Simone de Beauvoir. The impact of Zaza's life and death on de Beauvoir also merits further study because it provided a wellspring of inspiration for her early attempts at writing. A significant portion of Mdmoires, the first of four volumes of de Beauvoir's autobiography, explores the friendship of Simone and Zaza. The parameters of this friendship determine the form of Mdmoires. Each of the four sections ends with a reference to Zaza, and the book itself ends with her death. Anne, the fourth of five loosely connected segments in the recently published (1979) but older book Quand prime, provides insight into de Beauvoir's feelings for

Picabia'sJeune fille américaine dans l'état de nuditéand Her Friends

Francis Picabia's enigmatic Portrait d'une jeune fille américaine dans l'état de nudité, 1915 (Fig. 1)1 captured my attention more than twenty years ago when I saw it in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. I returned to the picture repeatedly, trying to fathom the artist's intent in presenting American femininity in the guise of a spark plug. Previous writings on Picabia have done little to explain the artist's aims. In 1915, the critic of The New York Evening Sun stated without looking carefully at the work: “… Picabia has an admirable Patent Office diagram or design of a straight cylinder [sic] with bolts and washers firmly placed. It is labeled in French 'Portrait of a Nude Young American Girl.' And on part of the mechanism is printed the word 'Forever.' This may be intended to show that the young American girl is a hard, unchangeable creature without possibilities.”2 It has been referred to consistently as a generalized image of a young American girl, not a specific portrait, and most writers have followed Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia's quasi-sexual interpretation of the spark plug as a “kindler of flame.”3 George Heard Hamilton, however, saw it as a symptom of Picabia's “cynical estimate of American culture as one dominated by materialistic and technical values.”4 Although William Camfield, a leading authority on Picabia, has offered no additional explanations of the Jeune fille américaine, he has established the most widely accepted context for interpreting this work and four other “object-portraits” by Picabia that were published with it in the July–August, 1915 issue of 291 (Figs. 2–4, 9).5

Anouilh’s Little Antigone: Tragedy, Theatricalism, and the Romantic Self

Anouilh’s Little Antigone: Tragedy, Theatricalism, and the Romantic Self Michael Spingler The loss of a tragic sense in the theatre is a major concern of many modem dramatists and critics. In his Antigone, Jean Anouilh suggests that the reasons for this decline may be located within one of the fundamental developments of modem tragedy, that is, the replacement of action by character as the dramatic mainspring.1 He sees the predominance of character as a funda­ mentally romantic development which leads to the emergence of a protagonist whose self-consciousness diminishes the tragic event. Anouilh’s disenchantment with romantic posturing is expressed primarily in terms of a theatricalism which implies that tragedy based solely on character is really role-playing and self-dramatization. He does not see the role as a solution to the problem of writing a modem tragedy but as a reflection of the dilemma. In Antigone, the self-conscious role is inimical to the tragic spirit.2 There are three elements in the play which comprise the design Anouilh uses to dramatize his theme. At the heart of Antigone lies a persuasive denial of tragic vision put forward by Creon who, traditionally, should be the partner in the tragic action. In counterpoint to this, we find a highly sentimentalized and romantic rendering of Antigone which makes the play seem to be, at least superficially, a tragedy of character rather than of action. The unifying perspective through which we are invited to judge the conflict caused by a sentimental character replacing the moral structure of a tragic universe is provided by Anouilh’s use of the chorus as a distancing device. Anouilh depends primarily upon the chorus to establish the play’s essential theatricality. Anouilh’s chorus does not follow the Greek model of dancing 228 Michael Spingier 229 and singing the transcendent vision of the tragedy. It is com­ prised instead of a single actor, a commentator whose observa­ tions invite the audience to assume a detached and critical per­ spective toward Antigone and her drama. A frame for the play and a creator of distance between it and the spectator, the chorus’ presence on the stage recalls the Brechtian admonition not to mistake the staging of the event for the event itself. This function of the chorus is clear from the first words of the play in which he introduces the characters as actors waiting to play a part: “Voilà. Ces personages vont vous jouer rhistoire d’Antigone.”3 The key word here is jouer, and the use of histoire rather than tragédie is also significant. He clarifies Anti­ gone’s position within the play by referring to her as a character who has not yet become fully realized: “Elle pense qu’elle va être Antigone toute à l’heure, qu’elle va surgir soudain de la maigre jeune fille noiraude et renfermée que personne ne prenait au sérieux dans la famille et se dresser seule en face du monde, seule en face de Créon, son oncle, qui est le roi. Elle pense qu’elle va mourir, qu’elle est jeune et qu’elle aussi, elle aurait bien aimé vivre” (p. 9). Initially, these words seem to be an introduction to the tragedy which is about to unfold, a prepara­ tion of the audience in order that it be familiar with the plot. Yet, if we consider these words more carefully and ask who, precisely, at this very moment, is thinking these thoughts, it becomes apparent that Antigone is an actress thinking about the characteristics and demands of her part just before going on. This view of Antigone as both actress and character is essen­ tial to the play’s theme. The chorus repeats it when she is led in by the guards: “Alors, voilà, cela commence. La petite Anti­ gone est prise. La petite Antigone va pouvoir être elle-même pour la première fois” (p. 58). The sense of the importance of the role is very strong here, and the chorus has, in fact, pointed out the connection between Antigone’s role and the element of fate within the play: “. . . et il n’y a rien à faire. Elle s...

Advice on the Choice of a Library

Joseph François Malgaigne, eminent French surgeon of the 19th century, wrote for Mlle. Aline Chardin, the young daughter of an old friend, words of advice on the choice of a library. These remarks,<i>Conseils pour le choix d'une bibliothèque, écrits pour une jeune fille</i>, were not printed during Malgaigne's lifetime. The manuscript was given to his biographer and son-in-law, Edouard Pilastre, by the dedicatee, Mme. Aline Chardin Chazal. M. Pilastre, a lawyer who during his student days had listened to his medical friends praise the virtues of their great professor, reproduced the<i>Conseils</i>in his biography of Malgaigne, published in 1905.¹Thirty-one years later, the American bibliophile Frank Altschul produced the first separate printing of this French literary period piece.² Its author, Joseph François Malgaigne, was born on Feb 14, 1806, in the Vosges town of Charmes, on the left bank of the Moselle River. Son of the

William Dean Howells: The Indelible Stain

WV ILLIAM Dean Howells, our traditional prissy novelist, of course a leading member of the generation renowned for its denial of sex. In his opinion, however, nothing valid was denied and everything relevant was affirmed by writers who disregarded the passions of love. Only so did they truly represent the tone of American life. experience of passion, he said, does not come within the scheme of American fiction which honest only when it concerns chaste love. This the view for which has been famous and it has been so persuasive that nearly everyone has taken him at his word-as if a word has face value alone. The American girl a familiar figure in fiction, Henry Steele Commager remarks, but everyone believes that Howells created her.1 cliche has been given official sanction by Howard Mumford Jones, who tells us that is generally unsurpassed among American novelists in portraying the jeune fille of his period.2 It is, however, a fact of criticism that these young women invariably have a dual effect. author of the first critical biography of observed that they are somehow mysterious, indefinable: a typical heroine has no master but she appears, for all that, in a condition of subservience.3 Another writer noted that her illogicality mystifies and sometimes inspirits the men under her influence.4 Indeed, Howells' heroines have never provided unqualified delight and the reason that created very few feminine characters whose charm or beauty or virtue was not somehow vitiated. In his major work, a heroine paraded before us as the most wonder-

Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:RUSSIAN FAIRY TALES. An accented Russian Reader, with notes and vocabulary. By A. Brylinska, in collaboration with P. SmithRUSSIAN LYRIC POETRY. An anthology of the best 19th century lyrics. Selected, accented, and arranged with notes. By A. E. Tebbutt.COLETTE BAUDOCHE: Histoire d'une jeune fille de Metz: par Maurice Barrès: Edited with Notes and Vocabulary. By Marcel Moraud.AMÊRICA ESPAÑOLA. Edited with notes and vocabulary by the author, M. Romera Navarro, AND J. P. W. Crawford