Vie De Research Articles

Relational Virginity and Nonbinary Gender: La vie de sainte Euphrosine and La vie de saint Alexis

ABSTRACT “Virgins,” to quote Sarah Salih, “are good to think with.” This holds true for medieval saints and twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary critics alike. Scholars of medieval gender have demonstrated that virginity functioned as a sexuality, a form of devotion, and even a gender unto itself in the Middle Ages. In that spirit, and drawing on recent work in transfeminist studies, this article proposes virginity as a form of nonbinary gender—as opposed to femininity, androgyny, or third gender, as it has previously been understood—in Old French hagiography. Works like La vie de sainte Euphrosine and La vie de saint Alexis ask us to account for virginity’s relationality and its embrace of contingency, a convergence that transfeminist medieval and virginity studies can together provide. Virginity as nonbinary gender, in turn, points to the relationality of all gender, to the inherent disorganization and enmeshment of gender itself.

Who reads Renan

This article claims Virginia Woolf as a historian of the period 1880–1937 in Britain. In her 1937 novel The Years, Woolf employed the religious and cultural history of Ernest Renan, most likely his Vie de Jésus (1863), to produce her own. By unravelling what Renan wrote, what Woolf read and wrote, and what Renan meant, in his own terms and to a contemporary British audience, we can begin to consider the role of religious criticism in the making of historical and literary modernity.

Archipelagic Stories, Anguilliform Resistances

This article addresses the persistent anthropocentric bias of archipelagic studies. It asks: What would it mean to invite more-than-human and transspecies perspectives into our theorizations of archipelagoes? This interrogation is addressed by following the meanderings of the eel—famously recognized as “the most mysterious creature in the natural world”—through two Francophone texts arising from the Indian Ocean: the first is Mauritian author Ananda Devi's novella La vie de Joséphin le fou (2003), and the second is Comoran author Ali Zamir's novel Anguille sous roche (2016). Through detailed literary analysis, this article demonstrates that in both prose narratives, the perspectives of marine creatures are crucial to the complete telling of intergenerational violence: in particular, the seemingly “infinite” memory and determination of eels becomes an antidote to the fragmentation caused by human trauma. Additionally, this article argues that in both texts, the anguilliform is not simply a theme but also a method, which allows for novel archipelagic forms of storytelling and memory that are as slippery and sinuous as the animals who inspire it. The eel's anguilliform movement thus becomes a source of stylistic and narrative renewal, which allows both texts to embody commentary on the ethical slipperiness of their narratives, as well as on readers’ positionality and complicity.

Le fantastique dans les romans d’Ananda Devi

In the article, the author analyses the fantasy elements noticeable in some of Ananda Devi’s novels. In her first novels as well as in her recent ones, the writer resorts to solutions from the fantasy genre. In L’Arbre fouet, Moi, l’interdite, La Vie de Joséphin le Fou, Pagli, Soupir, Indian tango, Les Jours vivants, Manger l’autre and in Le Jour des caméléons, the Mauritian novelist presents mysterious incipits and open-ended, dreamlike endings, introduces hybridised, often insane characters half animal half human, describes metamorphoses and transformations of man into animal, mentions imaginary sobriquets, ghosts. The aim of the analysis is also to try to explain for what purpose the writer uses fantasy in her work. In the analysis, the author also draws on the research of T. Todorov, P.-G. Castex, L. Vax and V. Tritter.

A Lost Copy of the Old French Vie (or Chanson) de Saint Alexis (Alexandrine Quatrain Version)

The Municipal Library of Tournai was struck in an air raid during the Second World War. Among the valuable manuscripts that were lost was Bibliothèque de la ville de Tournai MS 129, a fragmentary manuscript containing the alexandrine quatrain version of the Old French Vie de Saint Alexis. This poem, also known as the Chanson de Saint Alexis, represents one of the oldest surviving poetic traditions in French and enjoyed considerable popularity during the centuries after it was produced. Despite considerable scholarship on the Vie de Saint Alexis, the Tournai MS has gone largely unnoticed and is not mentioned in editions of the decasyllabic version of the Vie, nor is it mentioned in the only edition of the quatrain version. Thankfully, a nineteenth-century transcription of the lost Tournai copy survived the war. This article compares this transcription to surviving versions of the Vie de Saint Alexis to explore how the lost Tournai text intersects with, and illuminates, the broader tradition of the poem.

In the Echenozian Discomfort Zone: Desire and Creativity in the Shadow of Death

Abstract: Critics welcomed a return to richly plotted imaginative fiction in Jean Echenoz’s most recent novels ( Envoyée spéciale , 2016; Vie de Gérard Fulmard , 2020). Yet these novels are also striking for how they intensify a previously perceptible posture of narratorial fatigue, even to the point of death, as well as for their staging of self-conscious stylistic poverty. More than the seductions of plot, they foreground the seductive “grain” of the storytelling voice, its offering of jouissance through breaches of the fictional world (intertextual allusion, versificatory units etc), now in the mode of decline and failure.

« Ramasser ses mots parmi les détritus » : l’écriture de l’abjection dans Za de Raharimanana et La Vie de Joséphin le fou d’Ananda Devi

Partant du postulat que l’écriture de l’abjection produit chez le lecteur un vertige, voire un choc, tout à fait particulier, notre article s’intéresse à la façon dont celle-ci constitue dans les romans La Vie de Joséphin le fou d’Ananda Devi (2003) et Za de Raharimanana (2008) une formidable puissance de remise en question des normes et des limites qui fondent ce qu’on peut appeler avec Julia Kristeva « l’ordre social et symbolique ». Il s’agit en d’autres termes d’explorer la puissance propre à l’abjection qui permet au récit de dépasser à la fois la simple satire socio-politique et la jubilation de l’obscène, au profit de représentations plus ambivalentes, mouvantes et dérangeantes, qui touchent aux fondements mêmes de notre humanité. Nous nous efforcerons ainsi de dépasser la sidération dans laquelle plonge la violence parfois difficilement soutenable de l’écriture pour envisager la façon dont l’abject, la pourriture et le grouillant apparaissent en creux comme le terreau fertile d’un contre-pouvoir sur les plans aussi bien éthique qu’esthétique. Parce que ces bas-fonds abjects sont aussi le lieu d’une vie proliférante, multiple et anarchique, la parole qui s’y ancre et s’en revendique peut en effet être comprise comme une poche de résistance face à la menace de la tyrannie de l’Un, du vide et de la pétrification qui caractérisent le pouvoir postcolonial.

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

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

Vie de Saint Alexis : the elements of the antique novel live on in a holy life

One of the most well-known legends of the Middle Ages, the life of Saint Alexius, has been immortalized in both Latin and French poetry. The story, known from Latin and French sources, has been combined from several previous versions into a single legend over long centuries. My essay analyses the earliest Old French version of Saint Alexius's story, showing how a relatively dryly written sacred life can transform into a narrative enriched by romantic turns and emotional lyrical inserts.

Queering the Enlightenment: Kinship and Gender in Eighteenth-Century French Literature by Tracy L. Rutler

Reviewed by: Queering the Enlightenment: Kinship and Gender in Eighteenth-Century French Literature by Tracy L. Rutler Antoinette Sol Tracy L. Rutler. Queering the Enlightenment: Kinship and Gender in Eighteenth-Century French Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, coll. Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2021. Pp. xxi + 291. Price $99.99. In Queering the Enlightenment, Tracy Rutler examines the "ailing state of the patriarchy" in novels and plays during the 1730s and 1740s by analyzing alternative systems of filiation and kinship played out in the narratives. These alternative systems reflect contemporary anxiety about the state of the monarchy and challenge the patriarchy. Combining psychoanalysis and structuralism with political theory, Rutler offers a different way to read canonical eighteenth-century texts by focusing on narrative substitutions for heteronormative familial relations. The interpretations of the texts are not necessarily new ones, but the journey to get to them is. By "reading queerly" new significations are teased out. Reading queerly means "seizing [the] disjunctions between the part (the subject) and the whole (the Order) by paying particular attention to the fruitful fracture between and within narration and language" (21). Rutler shows how Voltaire, Prévost, Crébillon fils, Marivaux, and Graffigny offer new paradigms of subjectivity and re-vision social organization by taking familiar heteronormative relations and rendering them unfamiliar. Importantly, Rutler shows how relevant the creation of alternative intimate communities in eighteenth-century texts is to our time. The introduction ably reviews the political and social situation in the wake of the death of Louis XIV and the theoretical framework that grounds Rutler's reading. Chapter one, "Towards [End Page 178] a Queer Politics of Kinship," finds value in a reconfigured familial space in Voltaire's Candide as a "thrown-together community of […] misfits "built upon a politics of collective action" (40), one that frustrates genre expectations and challenges the notion of family not organized around heterosexual reproduction. In the second chapter, "Oedipus interrupted: Prévost's Regime of the Brother," asks what difference the absence of women characters makes in the transfer of masculine power and in circuits of male desire. In chapter three, "Wandering Souls: The World of Cré-billon, fils" Rutler applies notions of "cruising" to the work of Crébillon fils and discusses how his characters refuse the "forward motion through time implied by heterosexual marriage and its goal of reproduction" (153) and where cruising "creates an astonishing egalitarian form of human and (nonhuman) relationality" (162). If the previous chapters explored formations of masculine subjectivity and circulation of desire, chapter four, "Origin Stories: Maternal Enlightenment in Marivaux," looks at the very different female subject formation through a compelling discussion of the maternal symbolic. Rutler reads Marivaux's La vie de Marianne and three of his plays as an exploration of various permutations and failures of the family romance. Reading for "political construction of female subjectivity" (184) reveals freely chosen and created female alternatives to the patriarchal traditional family. Chapter five, "Knotty Relations: Graffigny's Regime of the Sister," continues the discussion of female subjectivity and calls for a reevaluation of Graffigny's legacy. Rutler concludes her study by emphasizing that the texts studied "attempt to represent the emergence of alternative kinship structures […] characterized by forms of relation that exceed and undermine both patriarchy and heteronormativity" (272). This study is a fascinating and valuable contribution to the field. [End Page 179] Antoinette Sol University of Texas at Arlington Copyright © 2023 L'Esprit Créateur

Female Genealogies of Creation: Marie Darrieussecq and Paula Modersohn-Becker, Tatiana de Rosnay and Tamara de Lempicka

ABSTRACT Excluding women’s art from public attention significantly affects the possibility of building female genealogies of creation. As such, women artists must constantly recreate their foremothers, because all too often history has erased them from view. Nonetheless, women creators are redressing this imbalance, by rewriting women into history. This article analyses two such contemporary examples: Marie Darrieussecq’s text on Paula Modersohn-Becker [Être ici est une splendeur: Vie de Paula M. Becker (2016)], and Tatiana de Rosnay’s work on Tamara de Lempicka [Tamara par Tatiana (2018)]. Paula Modersohn-Becker was an artist of many firsts, having painted the first (known) nude self-portrait by a woman, the first (known) nude pregnant self-portrait in art history (destroyed in 1943), and having the first museum in the world dedicated exclusively to the works of a woman (opened in 1927). Tatiana de Rosnay in collaboration with her daughter, Charlotte Jolly de Rosnay, unpacks the glamourous life of Tamara de Lempicka, the queen of Art Deco, highlighting the struggles and identity quests of a woman artist in the Parisian art world of the 1920s. This article comparatively examines the way Darrieussecq and de Rosnay adapt the traditional artist’s biography to facilitate the emergence of female genealogies of creation.

The Decay of Singing: Remembering the Castrato

AbstractThe advent of a new political regime in Italy in the 1790s led to decrees banning castrati from the stage and the closure of the singing academies where they taught. But seventy years later the composer Gioacchino Rossini looked back to the castrati as the last adepts of the art of bel canto: “As to the castrati, they vanished, and the usage disappeared in the creation of new customs. That was the cause of the irretrievable decay of the art of singing.” This essay focuses on the eighteenth-century castrato Gasparo Pacchierotti—friend of Charles, Frances, and Susan Burney, idol of William Beckford—and on the efforts of the novelist and critic Stendhal to “remember” Pacchierotti’s lost voice. Stendhal never heard Pacchierotti in his prime, but in his 1824 Vie de Rossini he declared that the art of bel canto had reached its apogee with Pacchierotti in 1778: five years before the writer’s own birth. Stendhal sought to demonstrate that the lost voice could be remembered by way of both historical evidence and the textual and viva voce “recordings” of earlier listeners: Beckford, the Burneys, and the singer Gabriel Piozzi. In Stendhal’s erotics or mnemonics of musical sensation, such textual and performative recordings allow us to remember the sensations elicited by an absent voice as vividly as the phonographic or digital recordings on which later listeners would rely.

Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography

Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography

Queer N/Oceans: Vore and Child Abuse in Ananda Devi’s La vie de Joséphin le fou

This article argues that in Ananda Devi’s La vie de Joséphin le fou (2003), the protagonist Joséphin assumes the form of a human-eel monster, engaging in acts of vorarephilia or “vore,” to satiate a murderous desire underwater. This analysis conceives Joséphin’s aquatic world as a paradoxically queer, abject, and maternal space in which Joséphin terrorizes two underage children as both their abductor and protector. Devi further reconfigures in her novel the archetype of the protective eel in Mauritian shamanistic practices by depicting Joséphin as a predatorial human-eel figure. Joséphin’s violence against the children as he assumes such a monstrous embodiment serves as a metaphor for child sexual abuse in Mauritius where, at the time of the novel’s publication, an estimated 2,600 children were victims of molestation.

Of No One Born: Queering Motherhood in Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne

Abstract This article proposes that, rather than a sentimental love story, Pierre de Marivaux’s unfinished novel, La Vie de Marianne ou les aventures de Mme la Comtesse de *** (1731–41), presents a form of queer motherhood that provides a counterpoint to the form of Republican motherhood and the ‘cult of domesticity’ championed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (among others) and critiqued by feminists such as Adrienne Rich and Élisabeth Badinter. Grounding the maternal experience in discourses of traumatic memory, it argues that, contrary to Sigmund Freud’s assertion that repeating is an act of repression (rather than working through), in this novel we see the opposite. The article demonstrates how trauma brings women together into polymaternal communities based on mutual affection that bypass the patriarchal structure that tends to shape eighteenth-century sentimental novels. For Marianne, re-enacting childhood trauma with others allows her to share the burden of pain and strengthen intimate bonds between women. More than being just a unique literary experiment, the queer articulation of family throughout this novel might help us to imagine an ontology of motherhood that is unencumbered by patriarchy.

Mirabeau’s (and Quesnay’s) Response to the De l’esprit scandal and Quesnay’s Break with the Encyclopédie (Complements to ‘‘La vie de François Quesnay’’ by Jacqueline Hecht)

Mirabeau’s (and Quesnay’s) Response to the De l’esprit scandal and Quesnay’s Break with the Encyclopédie (Complements to ‘‘La vie de François Quesnay’’ by Jacqueline Hecht)

The Life of Saint Eufrosine: In Old French Verse with English Translation ed. by Amy V. Ogden

Reviewed by: The Life of Saint Eufrosine: In Old French Verse with English Translation ed. by Amy V. Ogden Joan Tasker Grimbert amy v. ogden, ed. and trans., The Life of Saint Eufrosine: In Old French Verse with English Translation. MLA Texts and Translations. New York: MLA, 2021. Pp. 192. isbn: 978-1-60329-505-5. $17. A new edition (and translation) of the Vie de sainte Eufrosine (VSE) was long overdue, and doubtless no one was in a better position to undertake it than Amy Ogden. Early in her graduate studies, she read Raymond T. Hill's 1919 edition of the poem (Romanic Review 10: 159–69 and 191–232) and eventually chose to write her dissertation on VSE's clerical and secular culture, a study she published in 2003 as Hagiography, Romance and La Vie de sainte Eufrosine (Princeton: Edward C. Armstrong Monographs). The VSE is contained in four manuscripts and Ogden based her edition on the oldest one, which is catalogued as Canon. Misc. MS 74 in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University (O). It contains anonymous saints' lives and other didactic texts, including the Vie de saint Alexis and the Vie de sainte Marie l'Egyptienne. Linguistic features suggest that the VSE was composed around 1200 in the West of France or Wallonia and copied in western Wallonia shortly thereafter. Although Ogden uses the same base manuscript as Hill, she has taken a considerably less interventionist approach. MS O presents stanza-laisses of variable lengths (nine to forty lines), an arrangement that Ogden preserves, whereas Hill had reordered them as a series of ten-line stanzas and filled in 'missing lines' based on the other three codices. Ogden limits her corrections to nonsensical words or phrases and preserves the text's linguistic idiosyncrasies. The goal of her 'single-manuscript edition' is to replicate as much as possible the experience of someone reading MS O around 1200. Given current interest in LGBTQ concerns, this new edition is quite timely because Eufrosine is one of a group of saints known as monachoparthenoi ('monk virgins'), women who, eschewing the traditional role reserved for young ladies of their time (marriage and motherhood), don men's clothing and leave their parents' home to pursue a religious vocation. The VSE poet, though anonymous, was clearly someone who was educated in clerical subjects but also conversant with secular culture and knew how to apply some of the poetic techniques of epic and romance to hagiography. Since Eufrosine chooses to enter a Benedictine monastery, the poet may have been a Benedictine monk, or even a nun. Speculation that the poet was a woman has been fueled by certain passages in the VSE, but since the text offers contradictory clues to authorial gender, Ogden suggests referring to the author as neither she nor he. By using they, she notes, 'we not only [End Page 107] acknowledge the indeterminacy of the anonymous poet's gender but also respect the poet's apparent efforts to convey an identity that exceeds binary gender categories' (p. xiii). Ogden's excellent translation is idiomatic but hews closely to the Old French text. She is scrupulous about respecting the poet's indications of gender. But, as she explains (pp. xlvi–vii), it's a tricky business: possessive adjectives in Old French are ambiguous since they agree with the gender of the noun they modify rather than that of the subject, and the subject pronoun is often omitted. Moreover, Eufrosine herself complicates matters. She presents herself at the abbey dressed as a knight and claims to have served at court as a eunuch. When the abbot gives her the name 'Emerald,' he notes that it is a name given to both men and women. Since everyone at the monastery sees the new recruit as a man (albeit so beautiful that Emerald must live isolated from the other monks lest their sexual desires be aroused!), Ogden follows the VSE poet in referring to Emerald as a woman only when conveying her private thoughts or when she finally reveals her identity to her father. There is no evidence for the historical existence of Eufrosine (or 'Euphrosyne'), but she has been celebrated as a model...

Medieval and Trans Ways of Being

Medieval and Trans Ways of Being

Témoins de témoins : le témoignage indirect dans Vie de ma voisine de Geneviève Brisac

Vie de ma voisine (2017) is the true the story of Shoah survivor Eugénie Plocki told through the eyes of her neighbour and in the words of Geneviève Brisac. A life story, it is also a testimonial and a biography. This article examines narrative and linguistic choices that allow Brisac to demonstrate both the limits of her testimonial and her duty to stand witness. It also shows how the biographical pact she has committed to coincides with the birth of a friendship.

The Economies of Marriage in Madame de Villedieu's Mémoires de la vie de Henriette-Sylvie de Molière (1671-74)

In the present article, the author argues that despite the apparent unconventionality of the heroine of Madame de Villedieu's Mémoires de la vie de Henriette-Sylvie de Molière and her seeming bad luck, it is instead her own dependence on the trappings of mondaine society, such as wealth and reputation, that advance the narrative and motivate her decisions. Sylvie is loath to withdraw from the exchanges that define this society and are inherent to its functionings. In fact, she communicates in her narrative a constant awareness of how others perceive and judge her, or at least how she believes she is perceived. The two marriages in which she willingly and decisively engages exemplify this social dependence and thus betray her fundamental conventionality as a romantic heroine in spite of the reader's predisposition to viewing her otherwise.