Women’s lives in Contemporary French and Francophone Literature

186 Pages·2016·1.77 MB·English

by  Florence Ramond Jurney, Karen S. McPherson

Women’s Lives in
Contemporary French
and Francophone
Literature
Edited by Florence Ramond Jurney
and Karen McPherson
W omen’s Lives in Contemporary French
and Francophone Literature
F lorence Ramond Jurney • K aren M cPherson
E ditors
W omen’s Lives in
Contemporary French
and Francophone
Literature
E ditors
F lorence R amond Jurney K aren M cPherson
D epartment of French D epartment of Romance Languages
G ettysburg College U niversity of Oregon
G ettysburg, P ennsylvania E ugene, O regon
U SA U SA
I SBN 978-3-319-40849-1 ISBN 978-3-319-40850-7 (eBook)
D OI 10.1007/978-3-319-40850-7
L ibrary of Congress Control Number: 2016951737
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2 016
T his work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole
or part of the material is concerned, specif cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microf lms or in any other physical
way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer
software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
T he use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specif c statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
T he publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
C over illustration: © Anne Byrne
P rinted on acid-free paper
T his Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature
T he registered company is Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland
P REFACE: WHERE T HE LINES CROSS
T he metaphor of a web can throw light on the idea of the self and its poli-
tics. I t, too, is intricate, entangled and interlaced, with each part connected
to other parts. A value of this metaphor is its f exibility. Looked at in some
ways, the self is like the whole web. Looked at in others, it is more like the
nodes where the lines cross, or where the individual stitches resolve them-
selves into patterns and pictures as a result of the other individual stitches.
— Morwenna Griff ths (2)
W e write about what we know, what speaks to us, what matters to
us. Our work as writers and as feminist scholars ref ects—and ref ects
upon—the constantly changing contours of our lives. We are in and
of this web, these webs, individually and collectively. This book probes
some of the tensions and challenges that many of us confront as we
attempt to integrate and negotiate our multifaceted identities as women
and as scholars. Indeed, our roles as women are continually evolving
but also inevitably overlapping. At any given moment, we may be self-
identif ed as daughters, mothers, sisters, grandmothers, granddaughters,
while at the same time assuming a variety of roles and positions within
the academy. We are being mentored and we are mentoring. We are
establishing peer relationships with our maturing daughters and f nding
ourselves mothering our elderly mothers. We are writing critically and
analytically about the very women’s lives that we are living in far more
messy and subjective ways.
T he project of W omen’s Lives in Contemporary French and Francophone
Literature is a personal one for the two of us. It emerged from our
v
vi PREFACE: WHERE THE LINES CROSS
ref ections on some of the many discussions we have witnessed and
engaged in over the past two decades: women talking with one another,
often informally in campus off ces and at conferences, about the complexi-
ties and challenges of our sometimes conf icting roles as mothers, daugh-
ters, wives, grandmothers, scholars, teachers, mentors, and so on. We have
been observing the ways in which personal and professional situations,
concerns, and priorities have evolved over the years. We have recognized
that our distinct and individual stories may be shared, that there are com-
mon threads that run through many of our lives, that some of the knots
and tangles actually connect us. And not surprisingly, our readings and
our writings have been integral to these realizations. The literary works
and critical writings that have inspired and challenged recent generations
of women scholars have fueled our discussions of how women’s identities
are shaped and transformed as they pass through def ning stages in their
lives. Convinced that literature may offer unique and valuable perspectives
on women’s lives and that some of these perspectives, considered together
and in resonance with one another, might allow us to grasp and begin
to conceptualize crucial moments and passages in those lives, we set out
to collaborate on the present volume. Our goal has been to gather and
assemble critical studies that explore how women’s “selves” are being nar-
rated and how two key stages in women’s lives are being def ned in con-
temporary French and francophone f ction. The essays in this collection
bring much deserved attention to recent works by women writers writing
in French. They also provide an overview and critical account of some of
the prevalent trends and theoretical arguments informing current investi-
gations into literary treatments of motherhood and aging.
B y the end of the twentieth century, certain aspects of women’s lives
such as motherhood and mother–daughter relationships had found a com-
fortable place in the critical discourse and were already being explored and
1
theorized in exciting ways. Topics like female coming-of-age and wom-
2
en’s aging were also beginning to gain critical attention, while o thers
relevant to women’s lives, such as the intentional refusal of motherhood,
1
B eginning with the classic feminist texts of the 1970s (Adrienne Rich’s O f Woman Born;
Nancy Chodorow’s T he Reproduction of Mothering; Nancy Friday’s M y Mother/My Self) ,
there was steady production on the themes of motherhood and mothering in many different
literary contexts (e.g., Davidson and Broner; Hirsch; Buford; Gyssels; Jurney; Rye; Jensen).
2
K athleen Woodward was a pioneer in the study of women and aging, publishing A ging
and Its Discontents in 1991. Barbara Frey Waxman’s F rom the Hearth to the Open Road: A
Feminist Study of Aging (1990), focusing on English-language f ction, also opened up the
PREFACE: WHERE THE LINES CROSS vii
3
remained largely unaddressed. The f rst decade of the twenty-f rst cen-
tury then saw a steep increase in the publication of studies of some of the
less discussed and largely undertheorized topics: women began writing in
much greater depth and detail about formerly taboo topics such as rape,
incest, prostitution, and infanticide. Among subjects increasingly evident
in women’s writings were the experiences of women “post-m aternity”
4
and the implications of a woman’s decision n ot to have children. Non-
motherhood had long been a shadow-presence in critical work on moth-
ering and its emergence in the literature in the early twenty-f rst century
could be seen as ref ecting a changing landscape in feminist studies. As
Ameleena Damlé and Gill Rye note, critical perceptions of motherhood
have been continually reshaped and challenged by “changing family prac-
tices (single-parent families, multiple family conf gurations post divorce,
single-sex parenting, group parenting) as well as new reproductive tech-
nologies” and these new patterns have “allowed for new conf gurations of
the sedimented relationship between femininity and mothering by creating
opportunities for choice and control over mothering decisions” (Damlé
and Rye 8). In similar fashion, one might ascribe an increased interest in
the unique challenges and perspectives of aging women to changing real-
world circumstances, including the fact that second-wave feminists have
begun entering the later decades of their own lives. As a generation of
scholars in their f fties or sixties, women who have been witnessing their
own mothers’ aging, now f nd t hemselves aging, the relationship between
aging and gender becomes a compelling topic for study and ref ection.
f eld, and Germaine Greer’s T he Change in 1992 was a notable feminist intervention. Among
the signif cant studies that followed were those by Gullette, Ladimer, and Chivers.
3
A ctivists in the sixties and seventies campaigned for legalized abortion and a woman’s
right to choose; subsequent generations of feminists fought equally hard for social changes
that would support women’s right not to be forced to choose between motherhood and a
career, between family and an autonomous creative life. In some ways, the insistence that one
could and perhaps should strive to “have it all” led to a revalorization of motherhood that
reoriented discussions of women’s choice. A woman had a right to use birth control or to
terminate a pregnancy if circumstances were not right for her to procreate, but a woman’s
voluntary and considered decision not ever to become a mother was considered somewhat
suspect.
4
I n 2002, Margaret Morganroth Gullette proposed the category of “postmaternal
women” and called on “feminists [to] develop the concept and research the experiences of
postmaternity” (“Valuing ‘Postmaternity’” 553). The past few years have witnessed a f ood
of studies dealing with the topic of non-motherhood including the 2016 publication of
Natalie Edwards’s V oicing Voluntary Childlessness.
viii PREFACE: WHERE THE LINES CROSS
Finally, when speaking of the changing landscape in feminist studies, it
is crucial to note the extent to which intersectionality (“the relationships
among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relations and subject
formations” [McCall 1771]) and queer theory have also played a key role
in contextualizing and reconf guring feminist approaches to the topics of
5
both motherhood and aging.
T he present study is implicated in many different ongoing conversa-
tions. Since the emergence of women’s studies in the late 1960s, numer-
ous books, articles, and edited volumes have addressed and analyzed
literary depictions of women’s life experiences. Studies have focused
on gender and identity, women’s voices, women’s agency, women and
work, women coming to writing, feminist histories, gendered sexualities,
women and the body, women in relationships, women and the family,
and women and violence. All of these topics resonate within the essays
in this volume. But our study is perhaps most directly and intimately
linked to studies of women’s autobiographical genres, with many of the
essays in this collection drawing attention to the intersections of gender,
writing, and women’s lived experiences. Indeed, it could be argued that
W omen’s Lives is by def nition “autobiographically” inf ected. Yet, this
inf ection does not lead to a summary distillation of those “women’s
lives”; this project makes no such claim and in fact resists any pressure
to f x or conf ne.
O ver the past couple of decades, a considerable body of work has been
published in both English and French on women’s autobiography. In these
analyses, theorists have pointed out how the def ning contours of the genre
have been evolving over time and how women have been instrumental in
pushing those generic boundaries. In the introduction to their edited col-
lection of essays, Natalie Edwards and Christopher Hogarth describe an
earlier autobiographical tradition that privileged men’s lives and stories:
[ I]n order to have a story to tell, one had traditionally to have a public life
with exploits, achievements and accolades, and this public imperative tradi-
tionally excluded women. While this is not to say that women did not write
autobiography in previous centuries, they did so in a private form, mostly
through letters or diaries, for example. (Edwards and Hogarth 3)
5
R ecent studies of aging informed to some degree by intersectional approaches include
Muhlbauer et al., Gilleard and Higgs’s A geing, Corporeality and Embodiment, and Sandberg.
PREFACE: WHERE THE LINES CROSS ix
T hey go on to note that women have begun to challenge these r estrictions
by “incorporat[ing] into their work narrative strategies that multiply the
voice of the autobiographer, thus resisting the singular ‘I’ upon which the
genre has traditionally been based” (1). Such narrative strategies are evi-
dent in many of the works analyzed in the present volume, texts whose f uid
and self-ref ective autobiographical voices suggest that these are “ narrating
selves. This plurality of authorial voice also weaves both diachronic and
synchronic connections across time and space as women narrating their
lives reach back to recuperate the voices of mothers and grandmothers,
reach out to engage with the voices of sisters, daughters, friends. In these
“autobiographically inf ected” writings, individual women are writing in
and of both generations and communities of women.
N ot surprisingly, this move from the individual and singular “self”
to a less rigid model of authorial identity is, in many recent women’s
autobiographical writings, accompanied by a tendency to resist and dis-
mantle rigid boundaries between autobiography and f ction, a remapping
of the terrain of both self and story. Damlé and Rye have pointed out
that “[t]he autof ctional genre seems to hold considerable appeal for a
great many contemporary women writers” (13), and, indeed, writing on
and across the blurred boundaries of autobiography and f ction seems to
offer women a particularly rewarding way to reclaim and redef ne their
6
personal histories.
D rawing together some of the many and disparate conceptual and the-
matic threads woven through the essays collected here, we conceive of this
book as offering a synthetic approach to two signif cant def ning stages in
women’s adult lives: motherhood and aging. At each of these junctures, a
woman makes choices or moves in directions that contribute to evolving
articulations of the self. By looking at these key moments and passages
in relation to one another and within the context of a continuing life
story, we can trace some of the complex ways in which women’s identities
are shaped by their conditions and experiences as women. Together the
essays in this volume begin to elucidate how these signif cant transitional
moments set the stage for women’s evolving def nitions—and interroga-
tions—of their multiple and dynamic identities and roles.
6
R enée Larrier and Barbara Havercroft have produced seminal works that are beginning
to map this terrain in exciting ways.