Forgotten Engagements: Women, Literature and the Left in 1930s France (Faux Titre 291)

Forgotten Engagements Women, Literature and the Left in 1930s France

FAUX TITRE 291 Etudes de langue et littérature françaises publiées sous la direction de Keith Busby, M.J. Freeman, Sjef Houppermans et Paul Pelckmans

Forgotten Engagements Women, Literature and the Left in 1930s France

Angela Kershaw

AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2007

Illustration cover: © Pablo Picasso, Buste de femme lisant, 1920 c/o Beeldrecht Amsterdam, 2007. © Succession Picasso © Photographie Musée de Grenoble. Cover design: Pier Post. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence’. Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents - Prescriptions pour la permanence’. ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2169-3 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in The Netherlands

Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations

vi vii

Introduction

1

1 Women, Politics and Fiction in 1930s France

9

2 Gender and Genre: The Political Novel

39

3 Fictional Representations of Female Commitment

107

4 Politics and Female Sexuality

161

5 Politics and the Maternal Body

221

Conclusion

267

Bibliography

279

Index

303

Acknowledgements This book is based in part on research I undertook as a doctoral student at the University of Nottingham between 1994 and 1998. I should like to begin by expressing my sincere gratitude to Rosemary Chapman who supervised my thesis with care, patience and generosity. I should also like to thank the many other colleagues and friends at the universities of Nottingham, Leeds and Aston who have supported and encouraged me as this work has progressed. I owe particular thanks to John Gaffney, who kindly gave up his time to read the manuscript: his comments and criticisms have made this a better book. Patrick Ramseyer of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, and Fred Bud Burkhard of the University of Maryland University College have been extremely generous in sharing with me their knowledge and their resources relating to the biography of Henriette Valet. I should also like to acknowledge the support of Pat FitzGerald for her excellent work on the manuscript. This book would not have been possible without the constant support of my family: my parents, John and Irenee Kershaw, without whose moral and financial support the project could not have been undertaken, and my husband, John Snape, who has helped me in innumerable ways to bring it to its conclusion. It was once suggested to me that much research is at least partly autobiographical. If this is true of the present book, then it was inspired by my grandmother, Constance Mary Kershaw (1911–2003), who never stopped defending her own political commitments from the 1930s into the twenty-first century. Whilst I could not agree with her politics, I always admired her commitment.

Abbreviations The following abbreviations have been used to refer to titles of primary texts: FV Madeleine Pelletier, La Femme vierge VN Madeleine Pelletier, Une Vie nouvelle FL Simone Téry, Front de la liberté. Espagne 1937–1938 CV Simone Téry, Le Cœur volé OA Simone Téry, Où l’aube se lève R Edith Thomas, Le Refus TC Edith Thomas, Le Témoin compromis MSB Henriette Valet, Madame 60BIS D Louise Weiss, Délivrance

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Introduction On 28 June 1919, in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, the settlement which concluded the First World War was signed. Among those who witnessed this historic event was a young journalist called Louise Weiss. On 30 May 1942, Jacques Decour, French communist intellectual and founder of the clandestine literary Resistance group Le Comité national des écrivains���������������������������������� (National Writer’s Committee, or CNE), was executed by the German occupying forces. Henceforth, this group, which enjoyed the participation of many well-known French intellectuals including Camus, Sartre and Mauriac, would meet at 15 rue Pierre-Nicole, Paris, the home of archivist and writer Edith Thomas. Research in the fields of women’s history and of women’s literary history, which has grown exponentially since the 1970s, has shown that a consideration of any period from a gender-sensitive perspective will reveal women whose contribution to their age has been unjustly elided by the narratives of history and the canon of literary history. The task of rediscovering forgotten women writers is by no means completed. This rediscovery implies an ongoing process of re-assessment and re-evaluation of existing accounts of the past, and this book is part of that process of recuperation. One of the most important gains made by feminist scholarship over the last forty years or so has been to establish the validity of the tasks it has set itself, and whilst incomprehension and even hostility do still persist in some corners of the academic community, it is fair to say that the intrinsic interest of forgotten women’s literature of the past, as well as the importance of revising existing categories of analysis in the light of such texts, is now widely accepted. Most readers of this introduction will not have heard of, let alone have read, the novels this book discusses, but most will not need to be convinced that women writers and female-authored texts which have been forgotten have not necessarily been passed over for good reasons.

 �������������� Louise Weiss,

Mémoires d’une Européenne, Tome I: 1893–1919 (Paris: Payot, 1968), pp. 297–99.  �������������� Edith Thomas, Le Témoin compromis (Paris: Viviane Hamy, 1995), pp. 103–12.



Forgotten Engagements

The biographical and historical snapshots with which I began are suggestive from several points of view. They define both a geographical space and a historical timescale: France in the inter-war period. They show what we already know: that female intellectuals were active in the defining events of the twentieth century. They suggest that that activity was circumscribed: no woman signed the Treaty of Versailles, but one at least saw it signed and reported on its effects; no woman founded the CNE, but one hosted its meetings and contributed to its development. They point to the two key and intersecting concerns of this study: writing and politics. They situate the texts on which my analysis is based: whilst the novels themselves are unfamiliar, the contexts in which they were produced and the issues they discuss are well known. They also situate the authors of these novels: whilst their names may be unfamiliar, the names of those with whom they interacted professionally and personally are well known. This book is a study of five politically committed women writers – Louise Weiss, Edith Thomas, Simone Téry, Henriette Valet and Madeleine Pelletier. Few scholars of twentieth-century French literature are familiar with their work. All of their interwar novels are now out of print. Because of the gendered nature of canon formation and of traditional historical narratives, the names which might help the reader to place these authors are generally men’s names. I cite them here not, of course, to suggest any sort of dependence or inferiority, or to define women authors in terms of the men they knew, but simply as points of reference. This will have to suffice: feminist scholarship is gradually making women’s names into points of reference too, but it cannot change the past, and the fact remains that those who held high-profile positions of responsibility within literary, political and journalistic organisations in inter-war France, and who have therefore been remembered, were mostly men. Louise Weiss’s political and journalistic activities brought her into contact with leading figures such as Aristide Briand, Léon Blum, Jean Monnet, Charles de Gaulle and, later, Jacques Chirac. Weiss is known to historians of French feminism for her activities with the organisation La Femme nouvelle (The New Woman) between the wars, and to historians of European construction for her postwar activities, but few remember that she had been a novelist in the 1930s. Edith Thomas worked with the left-wing intelligentsia of her generation, including Louis Aragon, Paul Nizan, Jean



Introduction



Guéhenno, Claude Morgan and Jean Paulhan. Thomas is known as a Resistance writer, but her 1930s fiction is rarely considered. Simone Téry worked with French Communist Party luminaries such as Jean-Richard Bloch and Aragon, and wrote Paul Nizan into one of her novels, in disguise. She is known to historians of the French Communist Party and also is occasionally referred to in analyses of the role of French intellectuals in the Spanish Civil War. Henriette Valet’s name has now fallen almost completely from memory. She was the wife of the Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre (and the mother of his son Francis), and was ‘discovered’ as a writer by Henry Poulaille. Madeleine Pelletier was associated before the First World War with the revolutionary socialist Gustave Hervé but otherwise resists location in terms of recognisable male names. As a feminist, she worked both with and against Caroline Kauffmann, Marguerite Durand and Arria Ly. She is now well known to historians of French feminism, but her fiction is usually only referred to in passing. This brief overview indicates the sorts of intellectual circles in which the writers in this study moved, and suggests that, despite their relative obscurity, they are not marginal figures, but rather, ones who made significant contributions to significant debates. The male-dominated nature of literary-political debates in inter-war France was the starting point of the research on which this book is based. To date, research on women in the inter-war period in France has focused either on politics or on literature. It has not sought to investigate the links between these two areas of inquiry. My research began with a deceptively simple-sounding question: were women writing fiction about politics in France in the 1930s? Thanks to the advances in scholarship which have resulted from feminism and from the New History, which does not see history only in terms of ‘the great deeds of great men’, researchers interested in French women’s history have been able to show that inter-war women were politically active. Research in the fields of literary criticism and 

Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p. 4. Burke’s introduction charts the development of the New History (or la nouvelle histoire) in the twentieth century. On the history of women between the wars, see Laurence Klejeman and Florence Rochefort, Égalité en marche! (Paris: des femmes, 1989), Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), Albert and Nicole du Roy, Citoyennes! (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), Christine Bard, Les Filles de Marianne: Histoire des féminismes



Forgotten Engagements

literary history, including, most recently and most comprehensively, Jennifer Milligan’s The Forgotten Generation: French Women Writers of the Inter-war Period, has confirmed that French women’s fictional output in the inter-war period was considerable. Literary history has described, for example, the popular, almost feminist novels of Marcelle Tinayre, the equally popular but less feminist novels of Colette Yver, and the symbolist poetry of Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, so that these names are now more familiar than they once were. Colette, Rachilde, and Marguerite Yourcenar are recognised as literary landmarks. But literary history has not so far attempted to investigate the points of contact between inter-war writing by women and the genre which is often taken to characterise French inter-war literature, and particularly 1930s literature, namely, the literature of commitment, or littérature engagée, to use Paul Nizan’s term. That is the purpose of this book. In rescuing female-authored political literature of the 1930s from critical oblivion, my study has three main aims. Firstly, it seeks to establish, through close textual analysis, the aesthetic relationship of the novels to models of political literature which were developing in France between the wars and in relation to which the novels were written. Analysis of contemporary reviews of the novels also shows how they were received into the highly politicised literary environment of 1930s France. Secondly, my study aims to explore the ways in which women in inter-war France were able to relate to politics and to fiction. This exploration is based on evidence contained within the novels themselves, insofar as all the novels en France 1914–1940 (Paris: Fayard, 1994), Siân Reynolds, France Between the Wars: Gender and Politics (London: Routledge, 1996), Paul Smith, Feminism and the Third Republic: Women’s Political and Civil Rights in France 1918–1996 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) and Helmut Gruber and Pamela Graves (eds.), Women and Socialism/ Socialism and Women. Europe Between the Two World Wars (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 1998).  Jennifer Milligan, The Forgotten Generation: French Women Writers of the Inter-war Period (Oxford: Berg, 1996). See also Margaret Crossland, Women of Iron and Velvet (London: Constable, 1976), Dominique Desanti, La Femme au temps des années folles (Paris: Stock, 1984), Domna C. Stanton, The Defiant Muse (New York: Feminist Press, 1986), Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900–1940 (London: Virago, 1987), Jennifer Waelti-Walters, Feminist Novelists of the Belle Epoque: Love as a Lifestyle (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990) and Waelti-Walters and Steven C. Hause, Feminisms of the Belle Epoque: A Historical and Literary Anthology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994).



Introduction



in question have an autobiographical element, and on other texts in which the authors comment on their own political and literary practice and experience. Finally, my study opens up the question of how the history of political literature in inter-war France might be re-assessed in the light of the novels. As regards the corpus of texts chosen for analysis, I do not suggest that it is exhaustive. Indeed, I hope that, as a result of this book, further examples of female-authored political fiction will be rediscovered and analysed. Margaret Cohen has described the task of rediscovering texts by forgotten nineteenth-century French women writers as ‘the usual unquantifiable interaction of serendipity and sleuthing through which the critic stumbles across an unsolved scholarly question’. In my own case, this process of informed serendipity was based on the dossiers of press cuttings relating to women writers in the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand and the Fonds Bouglé in the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, and on the index to the journal of the communist Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires (Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, or AEAR) contained in Wolfgang Klein’s Commune: Revue pour la défense de la culture 1933–1939, as well as on a good deal of rather less scientific trawling through the old, leather-bound catalogues of the Bibliothèque Nationale, compiled in the first half of the twentieth century, for female names and suggestive titles. Dreher and Rolli’s Bibliographie de la littérature française 1930–1939 also yielded a not inconsiderable number of female entries. Whilst my study does not claim to offer an exhaustive account of women’s literary-political production in 1930s France, the corpus is sufficiently coherent and diverse to yield a satisfactory analysis; I consider only left-wing writers, but the authors represent a range of different positions on the left. The task of identification is of course only the first step in a process which must then progress from recuperation to reassessment. Feminist scholarship has moved in recent years from an almost exclusive focus on ‘women’s history’ to the more outward Margaret

Cohen, The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 21.  ���������������� Wolfgang Klein, Commune: Revue pour la défense de la culture 1933–1939 (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1988).  ������������������������ S. Dreher and M. Rolli, Bibliographie de la littérature française 1930–1939 (Lille: Librairie Giard and Geneva: Librairie E. Droz, 1948).



Forgotten Engagements

looking perspective of ‘women in history’. I do not believe that we should lose sight of the progress which has been, and still can, be made through a focus on the specificity of women’s experience of a given historical or cultural moment (‘women’s history’), and it is for this reason that I devote a considerable amount of space to detailed analysis of the texts which can reveal this experience. However, I also believe that it is crucial to situate this experience within the bigger picture, and to reconsider the bigger picture in the light of women’s experiences (‘women in history’), which is why, in each chapter, I also devote attention to the literary, historical and social contexts in which the novels were written. This is also the reason why, in the conclusion, I ask how previous approaches to, and existing definitions of, inter-war French political literature might begin to be re-evaluated and modified. All aspects of my study are rooted in the interdisciplinary character of French Studies in Englishspeaking universities. In particular, my study is a product of a crossfertilisation between political and literary and/or cultural studies which is part of a more general turn towards a contextualising approach to literary analysis and away from an exclusive focus on ‘textuality’. As Raylene L. Ramsay has recently pointed out in a study of modern female political writing, narrative theory has begun to break down barriers between academic disciplines and textual genres such that ‘plurality and uniqueness’ are captured thanks to an ‘[i]nterest in the role of literature in the production of political representations and in a narrative approach to politics’. Ramsay’s study is particularly interesting in relation to the corpus of texts I have analysed. Ramsay argues that the body of female-authored texts she has assembled, which are all by or about modern female politicians and in which interviews, autobiographies, biographies and ‘autofiction’ (Serge Doubrovsky’s term) are all represented, constitutes a new mode of writing in France which both reflects and constitutes women’s experience of/in politics. Ramsay may be right in asserting that this group of texts indicates the existence of a new genre. Indeed, there are significant differences between the post-war texts Ramsay analyses and my own corpus from the interwar period. Firstly, the authors/subjects of Ramsay’s corpus belong  Raylene

L. Ramsay, French Women in Politics. Writing Power, Paternal Legitimization, and Maternal Legacies (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003), pp. xiii–xiv.



Introduction



to a historical moment in which women are eligible to vote and stand for election. Secondly, many of the texts Ramsay analyses are characterised by the sort of narrative self-reflexivity which is part of the Doubrovskian definition of ‘autofiction’ and which is not generally a feature of the inter-war texts. However, female-authored political narratives of the 1930s do display the features which, for Ramsay, define ‘women’s political self-writing’: self-dramatisation, self-justification and self-vindication (characteristic, in my corpus, of the more directly autobiographical texts), and self-exploration and the quest for self-knowledge (characteristic of the predominantly fictionalised texts). Ramsay suggests that the works of modern female writer-politicians are related to a tradition which goes back to the works of nineteenth-century female political activists such as Pauline Roland and Jeanne Deroin.10 The present study tells another part of the story of ‘women’s political self-writing’ in France, a part which has not, until now, been told.

 Ibid., 10 Ibid.,

pp. 131–32. pp. 33–34.

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1 Women, Politics and Fiction in 1930s France And if I could not grasp the truth about W (as for brevity’s sake I had come to call her) in the past, why bother about W in the future? Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)

Virginia Woolf found much to dislike in women’s literature of the past. She criticised its excessive emotion and lack of engagement with the public domain. However, unlike many of her contemporaries, she sought to show how women’s literary production was determined by material and economic factors and not by any innate and unalterable gender identity. By contrast, Jean Larnac, who published his Histoire de la littérature féminine en France in the same year as A Room of One’s Own, portrayed women’s literary production in terms of their essential and biologically-based ‘femininity’. He distinguished a female proclivity for inspiration, sentiment and passion from a male propensity for reason, argument, judgment and abstraction. According to Larnac, this has an effect on the subject matter of women’s writing: because of women’s natural predispositions, ‘l’amour ������������������������������� sous tous ses aspects fait le centre de leurs romans’ (love, ������������������������������������������� in all its guises, is at the centre of their novels), whilst ���������������������������������������� ‘l’homme a d’autres soucis que l’amour, nécessités par l’existence qu’il mène’������������������������������� (man has other concerns apart from love, because of the sort of life he leads). Thus, ‘l’homme ��������� écrit les rumeurs du monde. La femme entend les rumeurs de son être’���������������������������������������������������������� (man writes the resonances of the world. Woman hears the resonances of her being). Larnac was convinced that women had no predisposition towards philosophical thought, and he noted with satisfaction that �������� ‘le mot historienne n’existe même pas dans notre vocabulaire’������������������������������������������������������� (no female form of the word ‘historian’ exists in our vocabulary). This was proof for Larnac that factual discourse was not a female domain. Similarly, Marcel Braunschvig, in his study of contemporary French literature first published in 1926, and revised and augmented for the eleventh edition of 1947, remarked: 

Jean Larnac, Histoire de la littérature féminine en France (Paris: Éditions Kra, 1929).  Ibid., pp. 252, 269.  Ibid., pp. 256–57.

10

Forgotten Engagements Elles [les femmes écrivains] se détournent des recherches patientes que réclament l’histoire et des efforts de pensée abstraite qu’exige la philosophie; la critique littéraire et artistique, qui demandent toujours un certain détachement de soi, les attirent fort peu; elles s’intéressent médiocrement aux questions politiques�. (They [women writers] shy away from the patient research called for by history and from the abstract thought demanded by philosophy; they are hardly ever drawn to literary criticism or art criticism, which require a degree of detachment; they are barely interested in politics.)

Larnac concluded that in the case of women, the writing of literature fulfilled ������������������������������������������������������������ ‘une valeur de remplacement’ ������������������������������� (a replacement function), that is, it compensated for some failure in their lives. Thus, ‘[t]el �������������� est le drame du génie féminin: il ne peut exister dans le bonheur d’une vie normale’��������������������������������������������������������� (such is the tragedy of the female genius: it cannot coexist with the happiness of a normal life). The ‘normal’ woman was, predictably, ����������������������� ‘celle qui s’abandonne ��à ������������������������������ son sort d’épouse et de mère’� (she who accepts her destiny – to be a wife and a mother). The comments of Larnac and Braunschvig illustrate the literary and cultural context in which the authors in this study undertook to write fiction about politics. Their comments show that the age-old equation of women with emotion and with the private sphere, as opposed to the male sphere of reason and public activity, still obtained in the inter-war period. Modern theorists of women’s literature have pointed to a network of constructions of female identity which have been used by critics throughout the centuries to separate women from creative and artistic activity. Woman is variously constructed as muse and inspiration rather than creator; her reproductive function is seen as being in contradiction with, or as replacing, any artistic creation; female creativity is considered as another weapon in a woman’s amorous armoury rather than as an autonomous activity which might produce a valuable art object; creative genius in a woman is deemed to be incompatible with love and domestic happiness. Geneviève Fraisse has categorised these myths into three types: firstly, arguments relating to history (there have been no female geniuses); secondly, arguments relating to nature (women are biologically less capable than men); and thirdly,  Marcel

Braunshcvig, La Littérature française contemporaine étudiée dans les textes (Paris: Armand Colin���������������� , 1947), p. 284.  �������� Larnac, Histoire de la littérature féminine en France,�������������� pp. 276, 274.



Women, Politics and Fiction in 1930s France

11

arguments relating to society (knowledge in a woman destroys her relationship with men). The repercussions of discourses such as these go far beyond the sphere of artistic creation, as Madeleine Pelletier argued in an article entitled ‘������������������������� Les Femmes peuvent-elles avoir du génie?’������������������������������������������������� (Can Women Possess Genius?): ������������������� ‘Le refus du génie aux femmes est le dernier retranchement de ceux qui ne veulent pas qu’elles se fassent une place dans la société’�������������������� (The argument that women cannot possess genius is the ultimate refuge of those who do not want women to make a place for themselves in society). A woman writing fiction about politics in the inter-war period in France thus found herself placed in a doubly problematic relationship to literature. To adopt the identity of the writer was to refuse her ‘normal’ female identity. And in choosing politics as her subject, she was committing an act of disobedience in relation to narrative and intellectual traditions, or at least, in relation to the common (mis)conception of those traditions, since writing which explores the domain of the political turns around precisely the issues for which women, according to Larnac and Braunschvig, have no predilection. Nonetheless, some women did pursue this problematic path; there is a corpus of inter-war political fiction by women which has been neglected both by studies of inter-war French fiction and by histories of French women’s writing. The purpose of this book is to bring their texts to light and to analyse their attempts to negotiate their difficult position in relation both to politics and to literature. Because these writers are little-known, it will be useful to provide some brief details about their lives and work. Madeleine Pelletier (1874–1939) is know to historians of French socialism and suffragism as an ‘integral feminist’ who tried to combine feminism and revolutionary socialism. A medical doctor by profession, Pelletier turned to writing late in life and produced two novels, Une Vie nouvelle (A New Life) (1932) and La Femme vierge (The



Geneviève ������������������� Fraisse, Muse de la Raison: Démocratie et exclusion des femmes en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1995).  Quoted ����������������������������� in Geneviève Fraisse, La Controverse des sexes (Paris: PUF/Quadrige, 2001), p. 115��������������������������������������������� . The date of Pelletier’s article is unknown.  For a biographical study of Pelletier, see Felicia Gordon, The Integral Feminist. Madeleine Pelletier, 1874–1939 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).

12

Forgotten Engagements

Virgin Woman) (1933). Her first novel is a futuristic work of science fiction which describes the creation and functioning of a postrevolutionary political regime in France. In this imaginary society, gender sameness, Pelletier’s ideal, has been achieved and there is no sexual discrimination. Pelletier uses the novel to investigate the possibilities and problems of communist revolution for society and the individual. La Femme vierge has an obviously autobiographical source. The ‘virgin woman’ of the title is Marie Pierrot, a woman who commits her life to feminism and socialism after having escaped the poverty of her childhood by pursuing her education and becoming a teacher. Marie is disappointed by the disorganisation and inefficiency of contemporary feminist groups, a situation she finds replicated within French socialism. Marie’s engagement only finds an effective outlet when she emigrates to Germany and is elected as a minister, a role which inter-war France could not offer her. However, Marie’s political career is cut short when she dies the victim of a random bullet during a demonstration. Simone Téry (���������������������������������������������� 1897–1967) was the daughter of two well-known journalists, Gustave ��������������������������������������� Téry��������������������������� , founder of the newspaper L’Œuvre,����� and Andrée Viollis������������������������� , reporter and author of Indochine SOS� (1935), prefaced by André ������������������������������������������������������ Malraux. Téry����������������������������������� , herself a journalist, joined the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1935 and remained a loyal comrade until her death. Before beginning to write novels, she had written a political play, Comme les autres (Like the Others) (1932). Her 1937 novel Le Coeur volé (The Stolen Heart)10 recounts the tale of the abortive attempts of a flighty bourgeoise to achieve the sort of commitment of which Téry’s life was to be an example. Between the wars, Téry worked as a correspondent for the communist organ L’Humanité ��������������� as well as for Vendredi ���� and Regards. The latter post took her to Spain during the Civil War. Front de la liberté. Espagne 1937–1938� (Freedom Front. Spain 1937–1938) (1938) is a factual but politically partisan work of reportage which recounts Téry’s experiences alongside the republican troops fighting against Franco in Spain. Téry left France for Mexico on the last boat on  ��������������������� Madeleine Pelletier,

Une Vie nouvelle (Paris: Eugène Figuière, 1932) and La Femme vierge (Paris: Valentin Bresle, 1933).��������������������������������������� Further references to these works are given after quotations in the text. 10 Simone Téry, Le Cœur volé (Paris: Denoël, 1937).���������������������������� Further references to this work are given after quotations in the text.



Women, Politics and Fiction in 1930s France

13

15 June 1940, and it was whilst in exile that she wrote Où l’aube se lève (Where the Dawn Breaks) (1945), a novel which reworks the material presented in Front de la liberté.11 This novel is similar in structure to the earlier novel but presents a positive apprenticeship story in which a female bourgeois protagonist successfully achieves commitment thanks to her involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Edith Thomas (1909–1970) was an archivist and historian by profession. Her work was brought to the attention of the French reading public in 1995 when Dorothy Kaufmann published Thomas’s memoirs and extracts from her journal.12 Thomas became a communist fellow-traveller between the wars. She was active in the Resistance and joined the Communist Party in 1942, but was to resign in 1949 in the wake of the Tito affair. She published her first novel, La Mort de Marie (Marie’s Death) in 1934, for which she was awarded the Prix du premier roman (Prize for a first novel). In Le Refus (Refusal) (1936), her third novel, Thomas addresses the question of political commitment through the story of her female

11 ������������� Simone Téry,

Front de la liberté. Espagne 1937–1938 (Paris: Editions sociales internationales, 1938)����� and Où l’aube se lève (New York: Brentano’s, 1945). Further references to these works are given after quotations in the text. For biographical information, see Nicole Racine’s entry on Simone Téry in Jean Maitron’s Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français, IVeme partie: 1914–1939 (Paris: Editions de l’Atelier, 1997)����������� on CD ROM. 12 Edith Thomas, Le Témoin compromis and Thomas, Pages de journal, 1939– 1944 (Paris: Viviane Hamy, 1995),������������������������������������������� both edited by Dorothy Kaufmann. Kaufmann has recently published a full-length biography, Edith Thomas. A Passion for Resistance (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004). There is an entry on Thomas by Kaufmann in J. Julliard and M. Winock (eds.), Dictionnaire ����������������� des intellectuels français: les personnes, les lieux, les moments (Paris: Seuil, 1996)��, p. 1111, and Thomas also figures in the Maitron dictionary on CD ROM (see note 11 above). Kaufmann has published a number of articles on Thomas: ‘“Le ������������ Témoin compromis������������������������������������������������������������� ”: Diaries of Resistance and Collaboration by Edith Thomas’, L’Esprit créateur 33.1 (Spring 1993), 17���������������������������������������������� –��������������������������������������������� 28; ‘Uncovering a Woman’s Life: Edith Thomas (novelist, historian, résistante)’, The French Review 67.1 (October 1997), 61����� –���� 72; ‘Resistance and Survival: Edith Thomas: Simone de Beauvoir’s Shadow Sister’, Simone de Beauvoir Studies 12 (1995), 33�������������� –������������� 37; ‘Against “Troubadourism” ������������������������� in Vichy France: The Diaries of Edith Thomas’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27.3 (Fall 1997), 507������������������������������������������������� –������������������������������������������������ 19; ‘The Story of Two Women: Dominique Aury and Edith Thomas’, Signs 23.4 (Summer 1998), 883�������������������������������� –������������������������������� 905. Sonia Madrona wrote a DEA thesis on Thomas (University of Orléans, 1996) entitled ‘����������������������� Edith Thomas: la quête inlassable de l’absolu’.

14

Forgotten Engagements

protagonist’s personal and ideological development.13 The novel begins with Brigitte’s return home after a long illness, and traces her gradual renewal of contact with her family and her refusal of their bourgeois lifestyle and ideology in favour of the politics of the left. Henriette Valet (1900–1994) is certainly the least known of the women writers in this study.14 Valet, a telephonist, met by chance a group of revolutionary intellectuals in Paris including Henri Lefebvre, whom she would later marry; it was as a result of this chance meeting that her work came to the attention of Henry Poulaille, the theorist and practitioner of proletarian literature. Valet was associated with the proletarian factions of French communism which marked her out as a dissident, like Lefebvre.15 Very little is known about her life, even by Lefebvre’s biographers. It is not clear whether or not she ever actually joined the Communist Party, but she was certainly committed to socialist revolution. She was closely involved with the short-lived review Avant-Poste founded by Lefebvre in 1933; her name and address are given for correspondence on the journal’s title page. We can then assume that she subscribed to its literary-political credo, expressed in the first issue in the following terms: Dire l’oppression, la détresse et la colère des opprimés; dire le malheur de vivre dans la société capitaliste; chanter le désir d’un monde nouveau, contribuer à la transformation des forces de la sensibilité en forces révolutionnaires.16 (To express the oppression, distress and anger of the oppressed; to express the misery of living in a capitalist society; to give voice to the desire for a new world; to contribute to the transformation of awareness into revolution.)

13 �������������� Edith Thomas, Le Refus (Paris: Éditions sociales internationales, 1936����������� ). Further

references to this work are given after quotations in the text. 14 Brief biographical details about Valet can also be found in the Maitron dictionary on CD ROM (see note 11 above). Other than the facts mentioned in this source, very little is known about Valet’s life. Fred Bud Burkhard maintains that Lefebvre does not mention Valet’s name in any of his memoirs, and remarks: ‘Exactly how and when Valet fit into Lefebvre’s life is difficult to determine’. Burkhard, ‘Henriette Valet’s Madame 60 BIS: French Social Realities and Literary Politics in the 1930s’, French Historical Studies 18.2 (Fall 1993), 503������������� –������������ 19 (p. 523). 15 ����������� Rémi Hess,� Henri Lefebvre et l’aventure du siècle (Paris: Editions A.M. Métailié, 1988)���������������������� , p. 88; Rob Shields, Lefebvre, Love and Struggle (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 97. 16 Avant-Poste, No. 1, 1 June 1933.



Women, Politics and Fiction in 1930s France

15

Her two novels, Madame 60BIS (Mrs 60a) (1934) and Le Mauvais temps (Bad Weather) (1937), reveal this theory in practice.17 Her first novel is an autobiographical account of the horrors of giving birth in poverty. Madame 60BIS recounts the story of the eponymous firstperson narrator from her arrival at the ���������������������������� Hôtel-Dieu������������������ to her departure with her newborn child. The narrator acquires her nickname from the positioning of her makeshift hospital bed squeezed in between the beds of Madame 60 and Madame 61. The only ‘plot’ is the progression of various bodies from pregnancy to labour and birth. Louise Weiss (1893–1983) is by contrast the best known of the writers I discuss.18 Weiss’s bourgeois background no doubt facilitated the development of a network of contacts with many of the key political players of both the pre- and post-Second World War periods. The First World War had persuaded Weiss that the future of Europe could only be guaranteed by European construction and the re-integration of Germany. She documented her own life in relation to the political events of her time in her six-volume autobiography Mémoires d’une Européenne (Memoirs of a European Woman). The second volume, Combats pour l’Europe����������� , 1919–1934 (Struggles for Europe, 1919–1934) traces Weiss’s pacifist activities with the League of Nations and her involvement with the journal L’Europe nouvelle (The New Europe), and the third, Combats pour les femmes, 1934–1939 (Struggles for Women, 1934–1939), recounts her feminist activities.19 Primarily a political journalist, Weiss directed the influential centre-left L’Europe nouvelle from 1920. She founded the suffragist group La Femme nouvelle (The New Woman) in 1934. Her 1936 novel, Délivrance �(Deliverance) recounts the meeting between the text’s first person narrator, Marie, and Noémi, a woman with a successful political career in the League of Nations.20 Marie intends to confess her life story to Noémi in the hope of thus discovering a new definition of her self. Marie does not in fact divulge her own 17 Henriette

Valet, Madame 60BIS (Paris: Grasset, 1934������ ) and Le Mauvais temps (Paris: Grasset, 1937���������������������������������������������������������������� ). Further ������������������������������������������������������������� references to these works are given after quotations in the text. 18 There is one full-length biography of Louise Weiss: �������������� Célia Bertin, Louise Weiss (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999). 19 �������������� Louise Weiss, Combats pour l’Europe, 1919–1934 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1979) and Combats pour les femmes, 1934–1939 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1980). 20 Louise Weiss, Délivrance (Paris: Albin Michel, 1936). Further references to this work are given after quotations in the text.

16

Forgotten Engagements

story to Noémi: instead, Noémi recounts the death of her child and her subsequent involvement in pacifist politics. The chapters which follow show these writers responding in different ways, via their fictional texts, to the complex problems which arise when women attempt to engage with, and participate in, politics. The aim of the present chapter is to outline some of those problems. The remaining chapters describe and analyse the different solutions explored by inter-war women writers through their fiction. Chapters 2 and 3 explore the key concepts which define my area of inquiry: literature and commitment. Chapter 2 examines the genre choices made by female writers in the context of the French left’s theorisation of the political role of literature. Chapter 3 examines the different modes of gendered commitment explored in the novels. No consensus emerges as regards the relationship between gender and politics, with some writers rejecting ‘femininity’ and others attempting to integrate conventional gender identifications into their understanding of commitment. Chapters 4 and 5 explore two further thematic aspects of the novels where gender is particularly significant: the representation of sexuality, and the representation of the body. Henriette Valet’s introduction of the body into the heart of the question of female politicisation is not shared by the other authors. It raises the important issue of the concept of the citizen as an abstract, and therefore bodiless, construct conventionally posited by political theory. The universalist notion of the citizen as a gender-neutral, and therefore necessarily disembodied, concept has, according to feminist political theorists such as Ruth Lister, disguised the fact that, in practice, ‘citizen’ has meant a white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied subject, with the result that other subjects are effectively excluded from citizenship and politics.21 The French inter-war context One of the assumptions of this book is that inter-war women authors who wrote fiction about politics had to contend with a twofold exclusion from politics – legislative exclusion, since they were debarred from voting and standing for election, and cultural 21 Ruth

Lister, Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), in particular Chapter 3, pp. 68–92.



Women, Politics and Fiction in 1930s France

17

exclusion, since dominant discourses represented femininity as the antithesis of politics. I do not pretend here to offer an exhaustive history of suffrage debates and women’s political activities between the wars in France: that history is now well documented. Instead, I highlight certain tension points arising from that history which manifest themselves in the novels this book analyses. The suffrage question provided a framework for debates around ‘the woman question’ in inter-war France. Paul Smith has argued that ‘votes for women was seldom off the political agenda between the two world wars, forming part of an open and sometimes vicious debate over the gender of citizenship’.22 In all, thirty-five suffrage bills and resolutions made their way onto the agenda of the Chamber of Deputies between 1927 and 1935, and four votes were taken in the Senate.23 Other forms of suffrage in which women would play at least some part in the polity were also debated. At the end of the First World War it had been suggested that women vote in municipal elections. ‘Le suffrage des morts’ – that widows should vote in place of dead soldiers – was also raised as a possibility, as was a family vote in various guises.24 Bearing in mind that historians justly warn against an exclusive focus on the suffrage question in any account of women and politics between the wars in France,25 it is nonetheless not without significance that the novels this book examines were all produced in a political culture which formally excluded women from the basic unit of political participation – the vote.26 Legal exclusion was bolstered by discursive constructions of femininity, the aims of which were arguably political – to ensure that women’s exclusion from suffrage was preserved. Anti-suffrage 22 Smith,

Feminism and the Third Republic, p. 10. The Chamber of Deputies voted in favour of women’s suffrage in 1919, 1925, 1932, 1935 and 1936, but on each occasion reform was blocked by the Senate. See du Roy and du Roy, Citoyennes!, p. 113; Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, pp. 145–49 and pp. 331–42, and, for an exhaustive account of the progress of the various suffrage bills, Smith, Feminism and the Third Republic, pp. 104–62. 23 Smith, Feminism and the Third Republic, p. 151. 24 Ibid., pp. 105–106, pp. 226–46. 25 See for example Siân Reynolds, Alternative Politics: Women and Public Life Between the Wars (Stirling: University of Stirling, 1993), pp. 1–2. 26 Anne Phillips, in Engendering Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991) refers to the vote as ‘the least demanding task of political participation’ (p. 99) and identifies as a minimum criterion for democracy that ‘governments should be elected and all adults have the equal right to vote’ (p. 10).

18

Forgotten Engagements

arguments were cast in similar terms to Jean Larnac’s discussion of women’s literature, and drew on the same stereotypical constructions of female identity. They maintained that women were physically too weak and too emotional for politics, that their role was to reproduce the species and to care for the home. Women were declared not to be intelligent enough to vote, and to be too delicate to be subjected to the violence of the political arena, which would either destroy or masculinise them. To grant women the vote would undermine the authority of the husband and father and would be in conflict with a woman’s legal status as a dependent minor as enshrined in the Code Civil.27 In any case, it was asserted, women did not want to vote and would vote ‘wrongly’ and further threaten France’s political stability because they were not really interested in politics.28 The political reasons for French women’s exclusion from voting until 1944 are complex. It is not a simple question of misogyny. The frequently cited fear of a clerical and rightist female vote played a large part, especially within the Radical Party which dominated the inter-war parliaments and thus had the power to block female suffrage. The Communist Party, theoretically in favour of women’s emancipation, saw no urgency in the matter, and no cause for a separate campaign, believing change would come in any case with the revolution of the proletariat. The left-wing coalition which culminated in the Popular Front government of 1936-1937 did not advance the cause either, despite Léon ��������������������������������� Blum’s���������������������� appointment of three women ministers. Margaret H. Darrow has suggested that French women’s claims for suffrage between the wars was significantly weakened because, during the First World War, the French authorities did not militarise women, as the British government did, but employed them as civilians.29 All in all, no one had a strong political interest in promoting female suffrage. According to Smith: Woman’s suffrage did not come about because it was not acceptable to important political players, and could only have occurred if one or a number of significant changes took place: either the Radicals changed their views 27

For a discussion of women’s status under the Code Civil and inter-war attempts to reform it, see Smith, Feminism and the Third Republic, pp. 163–211. 28 See du Roy and du Roy, Citoyennes!, pp. 130–42 for a summary of anti-suffrage arguments, and also �������������������� Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1976���������������������� ), vol. I, pp. 211–12. 29 Margaret H. Darrow, French Women and the First World War. War Stories of the Home Front (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000), pp. 233–34.



Women, Politics and Fiction in 1930s France

19

on votes for women, or the Radicals diminished as a political power in the Republic, or an individual of equal power and prestige imposed women’s suffrage by act of fiat. In the end, it took a combination of the last two to see women vote in France.30

Despite women’s exclusion from suffrage, the inter-war period in France did see a slow but marked increase in possibilities for female political activity in the form of party membership. Organised feminism maintained a meaningful dialogue with ‘mainstream’ party politics, which began to make female politicisation thinkable if nonetheless problematic.31 Various parties created women’s sections between the wars, some having previously admitted women to their ranks. Louise Saumoneau and Elizabeth Renaud had set up the Groupe ���������������������������������������������������������� féministe socialiste (Socialist Feminist Group)���� in 1901. However, after its re-launch in 1914, it was suppressed by the French Socialist Party (SFIO) in 1917, and it was only in 1931 that the Conseil ���������������������������������������������������������� national des femmes socialistes������������������� (National Council of Socialist Women), officially recognised by the SFIO, came into being. The PCF had established a women’s section in 1921 and its journal, L’Ouvrière �(The Woman Worker) existed until 1935, when it was replaced by a women’s page in L’Humanité.������������������� The page’s title, ‘��������������������������������������������������������������� La Femme et l’enfant’������������������������������������������ (Woman and Child), indicates the general direction of the development of the party’s views on the role of women. The Radical Party established a women’s section in 1935, having admitted women to party membership in 1924. Such groups did not cure the contradictions which plagued female politicisation. For example, the priority of class struggle over gender struggle in both socialist and communist thinking demanded of women primary allegiance to their comrades rather

30 Smith,

Feminism and the Third Republic, p. 162. See also du Roy and du Roy, Citoyennes!, pp. 190–95 and Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, pp. 356–61. Also of interest is ��������������������������������������������������������������� Jean-Louis Robert, ‘Le PCF et la question féminine 1920�������� –������� 1939’, Bulletin du Centre de recherches d’histoire des mouvements sociaux et du syndicalisme 3 (1978�������������� –19����������� 79), 56���� –��� 82. 31 Although the history of inter-war feminism is well documented, less material exists on women’s participation in mainstream political parties. The information which follows is drawn in very large measure from Paul Smith’s detailed investigation of the topic in Feminism and the Third Republic, pp. 63–103 and from Smith, ‘Political Parties, Parliament and Women’s Suffrage in France, 1919–1939’, French History 11.3 (September 1997), 338–58.

20

Forgotten Engagements

than to their sisters.32 Bourgeois feminism was to be seen as a class enemy, particularly in its concern over married women’s property rights, rather than as having any community of interest with women on the left. Thus women’s political interests could be torn. The case of Cécile Brunschvicg illustrates some of the difficulties faced by a woman active in party politics in 1930s France. Brunschvicg was one of three women ministers nominated by Léon Blum in 1936. A Radical, she was appointed junior minister for education in the Popular Front government. Brunschvicg, described by Christine Bard as ‘������������������������������������������������������������ l’animatrice de la plus importante association suffragiste’ (the organiser of the largest pro-suffrage association), the ������ Union française pour le suffrage des femmes��������������������������� (French Union for Women’s Suffrage), thus found herself very publicly allied to a party which continued systematically to oppose female suffrage, a contradiction which less generous observers such as Louise Weiss did not fail to point out.33 Also, like her colleague Suzanne Lacore whose ministerial responsibility was the protection of children, Brunschvicg was ‘type-cast’ in a female role – education.34 Irène Joliot-Curie was given responsibility for scientific research, but was to resign her post within two months to a male colleague.35 As Louise Weiss remarks, the three women ministers were nominated rather than elected and therefore were reliant on male patronage:36 accordingly when Blum resigned the brief political careers of Lacore and Brunschvicg were also over. Brunschvicg’s case in particular demonstrates the precarious position of the professional female politician in inter-war France: neither elected nor elector, she was bound by narrow notions of what constituted ‘female’ political concerns and could not expect even the party which supported her as an individual to subscribe to an egalitarian doctrine of female political participation. Nonetheless, 32 See

Richard J. Evans, Comrades and Sisters: Feminism, Socialism and Pacifism in Europe 1870–1945 (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1987). 33 On the appointment of women ministers to Blum’s Popular Front government, see Siân Reynolds, ‘Women and the Popular Front in France: The Case of the Three Women Ministers’, French History 8.2 (June 1994), 196–224 and Laure Adler, Les Femmes politiques (Paris: Seuil, 1993), pp. 120–28. Misquoting Aristotle, Louise Weiss comments on their appointment in Combats pour les femmes, p. 123ff under the title �������������������������������������������������������������������������� ‘Trois hirondelles ne font pas le printemps’ (Three ����������������������������� swallows don’t make a spring). See also Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, p. 31. 34 Reynolds, France Between the Wars, p. 210. 35 Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, pp. 352–56. 36 Weiss, Combats pour les femmes, p. 123.



Women, Politics and Fiction in 1930s France

21

the presence of the three women ministers had the positive effect of making the concept of women in government at least thinkable. In addition to ideological conflict, and at a more fundamental and personal level, the relationship between gender identity and political identity was also a potential source of contradiction for the inter-war politicised woman. Analysing variations in politicised women’s gender identities, Siân Reynolds points out that women of the Third Republic were obliged to imitate men to some degree if they were to gain access to politics. Politics was conducted in hitherto exclusively male spaces such as the café or the Masonic lodge, often on the basis of friendships formed at school, university or during military service. A woman who wanted to enter this closed sphere was obliged to play by its rules.37 On the other hand, Reynolds also shows that female difference could be a useful political tool. Excluded from mainstream politics, women resorted to direct action which deliberately stressed their female gender identity.38 In this context, Reynolds examines women’s involvement in social work, concluding that although this type of activity fell within conventional notions of female activity and although it was considered apolitical, it nonetheless allowed women to achieve something positive in political terms.39 Women’s involvement in pacifism also had its source in highly conventional constructions of femininity.40 Women were seen to have a natural, essential affinity with peace because of their biological role as mothers, as givers of life. Pacifist feminists placed themselves on the side of life and concord and associated men with death and discord, with war.41 There is a notable similarity between such potentially essentialist discourses and those surrounding modern women’s participation in anti-nuclear protests and, more recently, in the ecology movement.42 Christine 37 Reynolds,

France Between the Wars, pp. 175–76. pp. 177–80. 39 Ibid., pp. 132–55. See also pp. 156–80, where Reynolds develops the notion of apolitisme, using it as a springboard to redefine the parameters of the ‘political’. 40 Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, pp. 129–41 and ibid., pp. 181–203. 41 Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, p. 313. 42 Ruth Henig and Simon Henig, Women and Political Power: Europe since 1945 (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 39–40 and Gill Allwood and Khursheed Wadia, Women and Politics in France 1958–2000 (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 157–68. 38 Ibid.,

22

Forgotten Engagements

Bard’s assessment is that groups such as the French section of the Worldwide Committee of Women Against War and Fascism or the ����������������������������������������������������������� Ligue des femmes contre la guerre�������������������������� (League of Women Against War) were a real force within French pacifism. Norman Ingram agrees, maintaining that ‘[t]here is no doubt that women played an important role in the French pacifist groups of the twenties and thirties’.43 And as Siân Reynolds argues, pacifism was one of the ‘powerful forces at work in the inter-war years to draw women into public life in a multitude of ways’.44 Even if, ultimately, interwar pacifism did little to change the course of world events, it did change women by allowing them access to politics. According to Norman Ingram, ‘[f]eminist pacifism […] maintained close links with political society despite their espousal of an absolute pacifism’ and ‘women’s peace initiatives in interwar France became infected with the same dilemmas, distortions, detours, and hard political choices as did more ‘masculinist’ efforts for peace’.45 Such ‘infection’ played its part in encouraging female politicisation: women were politicising their experience from within the structures which had been oppressing them for centuries. Whilst pacifism could not provide the definitive answer to the dilemma of female commitment in inter-war France, it illustrates a tension between the potential oppressiveness of conventional constructions of femininity and the possibility of using them to achieve a degree of power and liberation. A whole spectrum of gendered positions existed between two extreme and problematic approaches to politics: the adoption of a ‘male’ mode on the one hand, or the creation of a ‘female’ politics on the other. Susan Bordo has suggested that the latter approach does not necessarily result in the entrapment of women within essentialist notions of ‘femininity’. Using a Foucauldian framework, Bordo investigates the relationship between gender and politics in terms of the role apparently oppressive structures might play in achieving political change: Foucault also emphasized […] that power relations are never seamless, but always spawning new forms of culture and subjectivity, new openings for 43 Norman Ingram, The Politics of

Dissent: Pacifism in France 1919–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 250. 44 Reynolds, France Between the Wars, p. 202. 45 Ingram, The Politics of Dissent, pp. 14–15, pp. 314–15.



Women, Politics and Fiction in 1930s France

23

potential resistance to emerge. Where there is power, he came to see, there is also resistance. I would add to this that prevailing norms themselves have transformative potential.46

Ruth Lister addresses this point in relation to participation by women in the construction of the modern welfare state, noting that this sort of political action ‘can simultaneously strengthen women’s citizenship and reinforce unequal gender relations’.47 Between the wars, some French women embraced ‘prevailing norms’ of femininity because they believed they had ‘transformative potential’, and some opted instead to pursue the male route, rejecting femininity altogether in their attempt to reject unequal gender relations. Modern resonances: suffragism and parity This book takes the problematic relationship between women and politics as the starting point for an investigation into how and why women wrote fiction about politics in the inter-war period in France. The novels it analyses show how political choices, commitments and action were experienced by women between the wars, and how these experiences were translated into literature. It therefore uses novels as primary source material in two different, but complementary ways – as documentary historical evidence, and as aesthetic products whose nature as literature – their ‘literarity’ – must be respected. The evidence shows that political activity in France between the wars – including writing about politics – was a gendered activity. In other words, it suggests that women experienced politics differently to men. The question of the problematic nature of women’s attempts to participate in politics is especially resonant in the context of recent debates in France around the question of political parity – the requirement that all electoral lists should be composed of equal numbers of men and women.48 As Françoise 46 Susan

Bordo, ‘Feminism, Foucault and the politics of the body’ in Caroline Ramazanogˇ lu (ed.), Up Against Foucault (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 179–202 (p. 193). 47 Lister, Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives, p. 170. 48 ��������������������� Janine Mossuz-Lavau, Femmes/Hommes: Pour la parité, collection La Bibliothèque du citoyen (Paris: Presses de Sciences po, 1997) ����������������� offers a concise account of the parity debates in France up to 1997. Although it is clearly partisan,

24

Forgotten Engagements

Gaspard has pointed out,�������������������������������������� ‘cette revendication d’un partage du pouvoir, comme le fut la bataille pour le suffrage, s’inscrit dans la longue lutte pour l’égalité et la démocratie’ ������������������������ (this demand that power be shared is part of a long struggle for equality and democracy, as was the battle for suffrage).49 Raylene L. Ramsay’s study French Women in Politics has demonstrated the relevance of fiction in the analysis of this struggle. The inter-war texts engage with many of the theoretical questions which underpin modern-day debates about female politicisation and which are far from being resolved. The same underlying questions of women’s active participation in politics, the gender of citizenship and the nature of political institutions are at issue. The inter-war texts ask questions about sexual difference, touching on the dilemmas which animated and ultimately divided ‘second wave’ feminism of the 1960s and 1970s into two camps, namely, an egalitarian feminism suggesting that women are fundamentally the same as men and therefore ought to enjoy the same rights, and a feminism of difference asserting that women are fundamentally not the same as men and ought to be respected and valued for their specificity. The inter-war texts engage with difference both as a biological phenomenon (sex) and as a cultural product resulting from society’s different treatment of men and women (gender). They question the nature of democracy and the potential role of women as agents of its improvement, asking on the one hand whether women can change politics for the better by their participation in it, and, on the other, whether politics can change women. They also question the nature of politics, pushing at its boundaries and problematising the (gendered) distinction between the public and the private spheres. They debate the merits of prioritising the fight for social rights over political rights. And they find themselves caught in the dilemma of either choosing separatism, with all its risks of marginalisation and inefficiency, or choosing to fight for their cause from within existing institutions and to face charges of collusion with the enemy and of maintaining, and benefiting from, the status quo. the arguments of the anti-parity lobby do get a fair hearing. For a more balanced account, see Allwood and Wadia, Women and Politics in France, Chapters 8 and 9, pp. 191–225, Ramsay, French Women in Politics, pp. 66–86 and Pouvoirs: Revue française d’études constitutionnelles et politiques 82 (1997). 49 ����������������������������������������������� Françoise Gaspard, ‘La parité, pourquoi pas?’, Pouvoirs: Revue française d’études constitutionnelles et politiques 82 (1997), 115–25 (p. 119).



Women, Politics and Fiction in 1930s France

25

Although it may be possible to trace a clear line of development from the suffrage debates of the Third Republic to the modern debates about parity, in attempting to draw parallels and suggest continuities, it is crucial to an understanding of our subject to avoid conflating terms: suffragism did not sum up all the permutations of Third Republic feminism any more than parity can be said to encapsulate modern French feminism in its entirety. However it is possible to compare the most prevalent elements of the battle for equality at certain moments of the last century, whilst recognising that this is to some extent a simplification. Most historians would agree that debates about women’s role and rights since the end of the First World War in France have crystallised around three historical moments: the inter-war period, when the suffrage question was dominant; the late 1960s and 1970s, when sexual politics took precedence over institutional politics in second wave feminism; and the 1990s, when the parity issue was dominant. The 1950s and early 1960s, as well as the 1980s, tend to be seen as fallow periods for feminism. The concerns of feminists and politicised women of the inter-war period appear to be much closer to the concerns of their granddaughters engaged in the recent parity debates than to those of their daughters during the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed there is an important distinction to be made between the concerns of the suffragists and the pro-parity lobby on the one hand, and second wave French feminism on the other. For second wave feminists, ‘politics’ took on a broad definition: they engaged with identity politics and sexual politics to bring issues such as abortion, violence against women, sexual harassment and the sexual double standard to the forefront of public debate. Situating the parity debates in relation to second wave feminism, Janine-Mossuz-Lavau points out that […] dans les années soixante-dix, le mouvement féministe ne s’est pas soucié de revendiquer le pouvoir politique, de faire pression sur les partis pour qu’ils accordent plus de responsabilités aux femmes. Le combat a parlé entre autres sur la libre disposition de soi, sur le travail domestique, sur l’égalité professionnelle, mais l’action à visage parlementaire n’a pas suscité de luttes�.50

50 Mossuz-Lavau,

Femmes/hommes: Pour la parité, p. 25.

26

Forgotten Engagements ([…] in the 1970s the feminist movement did not worry about demanding political power, about pressurising the parties to grant women more responsibility. The fight was about things like complete self-determination, domestic responsibilities and equality at work, but the question of parliamentary action did not give rise to any campaigns.)

Mossuz-Lavau cites this as a reason for the very small number of women active in institutional politics in France today. Claire Duchen, situating the �������������������������������������������� Mouvement de libération des femmes���������� (Women’s Liberation Movement, or MLF) in relation to feminism of the 1950s and 1960s, points to a general rejection of the ‘reformist’ feminism of the past: The achievements of the previous generation of women’s rights activists were not acknowledged by the MLF. Post-’68 feminists did indeed reject everything that had gone before in the sweeping gesture of starting afresh common to ‘revolutionary movements’, rather than acknowledging and incorporating the struggles of the previous generation. Elisabeth Salvaresi in her book on the May militants wrote: ‘who among us remembered that there had been feminist movements in the past and that they had died? Nobody.’51

Whilst agreeing that ‘[d]uring the second wave of French feminism […] parliamentary politics was of less interest’ and that the MLF ‘did not believe in working with or within political institutions’, Gill Allwood and Kursheed Wadia have recently argued for a more nuanced interpretation of second wave feminism which does not rely unquestioningly on a strict binary opposition between revolution and reform. They point out that the revolutionary focus of the MLF did not prevent it from attempting to reform existing legislation, most notably as regards abortion.52 Whilst this is an important insight, it seems clear that feminist activity in the inter-war period and feminist activity in our own time share a common focus on institutional politics which is not a primary characteristic of the intervening period of feminist activity. The considerable positive contribution of second wave French feminism to the struggle for equality is widely recognised today, perhaps most notably in its broadening of the notion of what exactly constitutes politics to include that which was previously designated as ‘personal’, and in its 51 Claire

Duchen, Women’s Rights and Women’s Lives in France 1944–1968 (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 208. 52 Allwood and Wadia, Women and Politics in France, p. 155, pp. 183–86.



Women, Politics and Fiction in 1930s France

27

determination to develop a coherent theoretical and philosophical basis for feminism. However the parity debates suggest that the way forward is a renewed focus on the reform of political institutions in order to recognise women’s role within them. This is perhaps then the moment to look back at the relationship between women and politics in inter-war France to see what can be learned from their experiences. What are the similarities between the parity debates and the suffragism of the inter-war period? Firstly, both domains exceed ‘feminism’: what is at stake is the relationship between women and politics, and therefore the very nature of political representation. Unlike the post-’68 debates in France, which must be understood in the context of the general contestation of the Fifth Republic exemplified by the événements of May 1968, the parity debates have been largely conducted within rather than against the French republican tradition. It is no longer a question of contesting the French Republic per se, but rather of seeing how it can best realise the ideals of democracy and equality it purports to embody. With the exception of feminism on the far left, this was also true of the pro-suffrage debates of the inter-war period. For suffragists and the pro-parity lobby alike, women’s full inclusion in the polity is called for in the name of the universality of rights proclaimed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1791. It is argued that it is the abstract nature of the concept of the citizen, enshrined in the Declaration,����������������������������������� ����������������������������������������������� which permitted women’s exclusion from the polity for so long. Writing about the Declaration,����������� ����������������������� Élisabeth G. Sledziewski argues that it is the concept of the abstract citizen which has permitted discrimination within a system purporting to guarantee rights equally to all citizens: Comment la logique égalitaire de l’universalité peut-elle être contrecarrée, puis supplantée par une logique discriminatoire sans dommage apparent pour le principe d’universalité? Comment, en d’autres termes, le principe d’universalité sous-tendant les droits de l’homme et du citoyen peut-il autoriser un système de discrimination? Grâce à l’ambiguïté du sujet de droit auquel se réfère la Déclaration.53

53 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Elisabeth G. Sledziewski, ‘L’universalité trompeuse de la Révolution de 1789’ in

Gisèle Halimi (ed.), Femmes: Moitié de la terre, moitié du pouvoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1994)�������������������� , pp. 49–58 (p. 52).

28

Forgotten Engagements (How was it possible that the egalitarian logic of universality was countered, then supplanted, by a discriminatory logic without any obvious damage to the principle of universality? How, in other words, was it possible that the principle of universality underlying the rights of man and of the citizen authorised a system of discrimination? Thanks to the ambiguity of the subject of those rights to which the Declaration refers.)

Sledziewski goes on to note that whilst the Declaration guaranteed abstract rights, it did not provide for their concrete realisation: ‘��������������������������������������������� Ces mêmes droits, absolus dans leur création à�� l’échelle ������������������� du sujet individuel, deviennent bien relatifs dans leur réalisation sociale’� (These same rights, created as absolute at the level of the individual subject, become very relative when implemented in a social context).54 It is in part against this abstraction that those in favour of parity campaigned. They asserted that equality would only be achieved once the notion of a sexed subject was accepted and the notion of an abstract citizen rejected. Those in favour of parity claimed the paltry number of women holding elected office to be a betrayal of the principle of universalism; those against suggested that the introduction of categories of citizens implied by parity constitutes a betrayal of universalism. Like the feminists of the inter-war period, those in favour of parity argued in terms of justice, the modernisation of public life and the very nature of democracy.55 Bataille and Gaspard argue that their research demonstrates that women seeking election today display ‘un ����������������������������������������������������������� souci aigu de transformer la politique, son style, ses méthodes, ainsi que le mode de relation entre la population et celles et ceux qui sont appelés à la représenter’����������������������������� (a keen desire to transform the style and methods of politics, as well as the relationship between the population and the men and women who are called to represent them).56 As in the inter-war period, there is a current of opinion which suggests that the full inclusion of women in politics would produce a general change for the better in the domain of politics and of social relationships.57 Those less optimistic about women’s capacity to produce change, or who oppose such arguments because 54 Ibid.,

p. 54. pp. 86–87. 56 Philippe Bataille and Françoise Gaspard, Comment les femmes changent la politique et pourquoi les hommes résistent (Paris: Editions la Découverte, 1994), p. 148. 57 Ibid., p. 172. 55 Ibid.,



Women, Politics and Fiction in 1930s France

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they see them as rooted in an essentialist notion of what women are, base their pro-parity arguments on a straightforward notion of fairness: women constitute half the electorate and should therefore be entitled to be represented equally in political institutions. This is a logical development of the suffragist argument that since women make up half the population they should also constitute half the electorate. Those who have argued against parity have often done so on the basis that it opens the door to a disastrous ‘tokenism’ which gives misogynists a golden opportunity to revisit the sorts of arguments which were used against inter-war suffragists. Modern commentators have noted that women are still considered ‘sinon ������� comme inapte, en tout cas moins apte à mener le “combat”’ ���� (if not unfit, then certainly less fit for the political ‘battle’); family commitments are still considered incompatible with political activity and so ‘seules ����������������������������������������������������������� des célibataires, des veuves, des femmes ayant des enfants devenus autonomes seraient potentiellement disponibles’ (only single women, widows, and women whose children have grown up would be potentially available); female candidates are frequently constructed in terms of political inexperience, a lack of real enthusiasm for politics, and as an electoral risk. At the end of the day, ‘chaque �������������������������������������������������������� femme de plus, ce sera un homme de moins’������� (each 58 woman will mean one less man). Modern politicians are aware of this echoing of past debates. Describing Michel Rocard’s decision on behalf of the French Socialist Party to adopt electoral lists with equal numbers of men and women in the European elections of 1994, Pierre Encrévé recalled, ‘������������������������������������� je crois que ce qui a décidé Michel, c’est quand Alain Bergounioux, qui est historien, a rappelé que les mêmes arguments, exactement, avaient été utilisés pour interdire le vote et l’éligibilité aux femmes avant la guerre’�������������������� (I think that what decided Michel was when Alain Bergounioux, who is a historian, pointed out that exactly the same arguments had been used to ban women’s right to vote and to be elected before the war).59 Modern female politicians have met with similar sorts of difficulties as their inter-war predecessors. For example, Bataille and Gaspard note the persistence of perceived contradictions between feminist and socialist politics. The tensions between class 58 Ibid.,

pp. 92–103, p. 87. in ibid., pp. 87–88.

59 Quoted

30

Forgotten Engagements

struggle and gender struggle which plagued inter-war feminism on the left have retained their pertinence.60 There are also similarities between Alain Juppé’s ‘petite révolution’ (little revolution) of 1995 which raised the total proportion of female ministers to 28.5 per cent,61 and Léon Blum’s inclusion of the three women ministers in his 1936 Popular Front government, in terms of the way in which women accede to power, their political role, and the duration of their political careers. Geneviève Fraisse pointed out in 1994 that it was still easier, in the 1990s, for a woman to be co-opted (via male patronage) as a minister than to be elected as a deputy and therefore as a representative of a section of the electorate: […] je crois en effet qu’il est en république plus facile d’être nommée ministre que d’être élue député. Car le ministre est compétent plus que représentatif ; le ministre est choisi pour son savoir et son expérience et non pour être mandataire du peuple et symboliser la nation. Le ministre gouverne mais ne représente personne, ou lui-même. Et, dernier point, la femme ministre est nommée par un homme�.62 ([…] I think in fact that in a republic it is easier for a woman to be nominated as a minister than it is for her to be elected as a deputy. For a minister’s function is skills-based rather than representative. A minister is chosen for his knowledge and his experience and not to represent the people and to symbolise the nation. A minister governs but does not represent anyone, or only himself. And, finally, a woman minister is nominated by a man.)

Fraisse’s distinction between ‘to govern’ and ‘to represent’ is well illustrated by the examples of Blum and Juppé; the acquisition of the vote may have resolved the question of female participation, but it has not resolved that of the discriminatory discourse stemming, for Fraisse, from Salic law, according to which a woman is a less appropriate choice as a representative of the nation than a man is. As Allwood and Wadia note, While more women have entered higher positions of political power during both Mitterrand’s and Chirac’s presidential terms of office, their presence in such positions has been entirely dependent on the patronage of men. Thus, ministerial decision-making has included more, fewer, or no women 60 Ibid.,

p. 43. p. 46. 62 ������������������������������������������������������������ Geneviève Fraisse, ‘Quand gouverner n’est pas représenter’, Esprit 200 (March–April 1994), 103–14 (pp. 107–108).������������������� See also �������������� Fraisse, La Controverse des sexes, pp. 262–66 for a modified version of the earlier article. 61 Ibid.,



Women, Politics and Fiction in 1930s France

31

as and when it has suited presidents and prime ministers and this is as true these days as it was in the past.63

In the ministerial reshuffle six months after Juppé’s ���������������� ‘petite révolution’���������������������������������������������������������� , only four of the twelve female ministers retained their portfolios.64 Suzanne Lacore and Cécile Brunschvicg would have had every sympathy. As was the case with Lacore and Brunschvicg, the responsibilities of the twelve women appointed to office in 1995 did little to explode the traditional gendered division of labour.65 Henig and Henig note that across Europe, ‘it has been the case that women who have reached government have been placed in “soft” ministries such as social affairs, welfare, education and health, the so-called “ministries of reproduction”’.66 As we have seen, there is still an argument as to whether this can be read as a possibility for women to change received notions of what is seen as important politically, or whether women politicians are simply being sidelined by being given less important posts than their male colleagues: it is a question of whether or not prevailing norms concerning gender can have transformative potential. Literature and politics The history of women and politics between the wars in France remains one of questions. Historians have suggested answers; the female-authored novels this book analyses offer fictional investigations of those questions. How can a woman achieve political commitment when culture and the law do everything in their power to exclude her? What kinds of interactions are possible with conventionally ‘female’ political questions and subjectivities if oppressive essentialism is to be avoided? To what extent can norms of femininity be manipulated for positive political ends? What kinds of interactions are possible with the ‘male norm’ of politics? This 63 Allwood

and Wadia, Women and Politics in France, p. 32. Bataille and Gaspard, Comment les femmes changent la politique, p�������������� . 47; Allwood and Wadia, Women and Politics in France, p. 43. 65 See Allwood and Wadia, Women and Politics in France, p. 42 for a table detailing the positions held by the twelve female ministers. 66 Henig and Henig, Women and Political Power: Europe since 1945, p. 60. See also Duchen, Women’s Rights and Women’s Lives in France, pp. 55–57. 64

32

Forgotten Engagements

book considers fiction in which women unpick the seams of existing power relations to create openings for resistance to those norms and to create new forms of subjectivity in the shape of female political commitment. It remains then to consider the implications of the choice on the part of inter-war women to use fiction as the vehicle for their interest in politics. Geneviève Fraisse’s work on the relationship between women and literature in the post-Revolutionary period, and the political implications of this relationship, is particularly useful in this context. Fraisse points out that since women were excluded from the sphere of politics at the time of the Revolution, they instead fought within the symbolic space of writing.67 The foregoing discussion has shown that the question of women’s exclusion from politics in France had not been resolved a century and a half later. Thus, even in the inter-war period, women were still obliged to use writing as a medium of political expression, because culture and legislation prevented them from expressing their views in other ways. Legally disenfranchised, women had to use other opportunities to engage in political debate and action. Therefore the relationship between politics and fiction for the inter-war woman writer was in part one of compensation: writing fiction about politics could compensate for some of the avenues of political activity which were closed to her as a woman. This idea of compensation could not be further from Larnac’s negative concept of women’s literature as a fulfilling a replacement function – for Larnac, women’s literary endeavour compensates for a failure on their own part; what I am referring to here is a positive and creative solution adopted by women writers because society and legislation closed certain potential areas of activity to them. The inter-war woman writer was not of course in the same position as the women writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She benefited from a certain development during the course of the nineteenth century regarding the ways in which women’s roles and functions in society were viewed, and in particular from the growing acceptance of the woman writer. The female politician might still be anathema in the inter-war period, but the female writer had become an accepted element of the literary landscape. As Fraisse points out,��������������������������� ‘il y a pire qu’une femme 67

Fraisse, Muse de la raison, p. 8.



Women, Politics and Fiction in 1930s France

33

auteur, c’est une femme politique’�������������������������������� (there are worse things than a woman writer, namely, a woman politician).68 Even if the woman writer was not universally admired, her existence had been well established during the nineteenth century; progress in literature came much earlier than progress in politics. The acceptance of the woman writer can be seen as a point along a continuum of change according to which the politicised woman would also eventually be accepted: since such a progression had been possible in literature, then surely it would possible in politics. The relationship between fiction and politics for the inter-war woman writer can thus also be seen as one of progression: literature functioned as a step on the way to politics. The political women of the inter-war period found themselves ahead of their time, just as the women writers of the post-Revolutionary period were ahead of theirs. Modern feminist theory has shown that there is an even closer relationship between politics and the female-authored text than that of compensation or progression. According to Martha Noel Evans, Women’s authority to speak and to write, to be heard and to be read as the origins of meaning, logically underlies and is fundamental to all the other demands they may make to achieve status in the polis. Until a woman can become the subject of her own sentences, specifically as a woman and not as an instance of a universalized mankind, she will continue to be a reflection of the males who have been given the responsibility to stand in for her; in her own right (write), she will be seen as a babbler and a scribbler, at best frivolous, at worst a silent hole in discourse.69

Through an analysis of Sylvain Maréchal’s 1801 Projet d’une loi portant défense d’apprendre à lire aux femmes� (Bill to Prohibit Teaching Women to Read), Fraisse also shows that reading and, by extension, writing, are central to women’s quest to find a public and equal role in democracy.70 Fraisse suggests that reading is part of a continuum with writing – like Evans, she argues that this forms the basis of an individual’s ability to enter into the public arena. Since ‘[a]u ���������������� moment où ������������������������������������� on croit passer de l’ère de la force à�� l’ère ������ 68 Ibid.,

p. 221. Noel Evans, Masks of Tradition. Women and the Politics of Writing in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 10. 70 Fraisse, Muse de la raison, pp. 21–74. 69 Martha

34

Forgotten Engagements

de l’intelligence, moment postrévolutionnaire, l’épée se transforme logiquement en plume’ (at ������������������������������������������ the moment of supposed transformation from the age of force to the age of intelligence, the post-revolutionary moment, the sword logically becomes the pen),71 it is necessary to keep women away from writing if they are to be kept away from power. Maréchal’s proposed legislation is significant because it is a means of preventing women from gaining access to public life: La lecture est dangereuse en ce qu’elle mène tout droit à l’écriture. Non pas l’écriture de lettres, de la correspondance féminine privée, de ce genre littéraire n’offusquant ni les hommes ni la société, mais l’écriture des romans, des pamphlets, des essais politiques, bref de tout texte transformant une femme en femme-auteur.72 (Reading is dangerous in that it leads straight on to writing. Not the writing of letters, of private female correspondence, that literary genre which offends neither men nor society, but the writing of novels, of pamphlets, of political essays, in short, any text which transforms a woman into a woman writer.)

Fraisse’s conflation of novels, pamphlets and political essays is noteworthy: although writing clearly is not synonymous with politics, and ��������������������������������������������������� ‘[ê]tre un membre de la société publique n’est pas nécessairement faire de la politique’ ���������������������������������� (to be a member of public society is not necessarily to be active in politics),73 there is nonetheless a link between the woman writer and the woman politician, since both represent a woman’s entry into the public arena. To write fiction about politics is not only doubly problematic in terms of the contravention of social and cultural norms, but also doubly potent as a means of creating a female political persona. The novels of Thomas, Téry, Weiss, Valet and Pelletier deliberately conflate the woman writer with the woman politician. The texts have been selected because they are all partisan, they all express a political prise de position. More precisely, they could all be termed romans à thèse (novels with a thesis). Susan Suleiman’s work, which dates from the 1970s and 1980s, has gone a long way towards rescuing the roman à thèse� from its predominantly pejorative

71 Ibid.,

p. 41. p. 35. 73 Ibid., p. 208. 72 Ibid.,



Women, Politics and Fiction in 1930s France

35

connotations.74 There is no doubt that there are many examples of romans à thèse in which the very overt presence of politics in the novel has a detrimental effect from an aesthetic point of view. However, as Suleiman’s work has shown, this is no justification for dismissing all political novels as aesthetic failures. The literary quality of the texts in my corpus is variable. However, even those which are least aesthetically successful can tell us something about the ways in which authors have attempted to combine politics and literature: literary failures also reveal something about the process of literary composition. Literary quality was not a criterion for the selection of texts in this study, however the corpus shows that some inter-war women writers – Edith Thomas and Henriette Valet in particular – did achieve aesthetically successful novels which also convey a specific political message. Suleiman’s work is a most productive point of entry into an area of literary production which has been extensively debated.75 This is how Suleiman describes her project at the beginning of Authoritarian Fictions: This book is about novels with a clear ideological message – novels that seek, through the vehicle of fiction, to persuade their readers of the ‘correctness’ of a particular way of interpreting the world. I call such novels ideological, not in the broad sense in which we can say that any representation of human reality depends on, and in some ways expresses, a more or less consciously defined ideology (in this sense, any work of fiction, indeed any work of 74 Susan

Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). See also Suleiman, ‘��������� Pour une poétique du roman à thèse: l’exemple de Nizan’, Critique 30 (1974), 995–1021 and ���� ‘Ideological Dissent from Works of Fiction: Toward a Rhetoric of the ������ roman ��à thèse��� ’, Neophilologus 60 (1976), 162–77. 75 See for example Catharine Savage, Malraux, Sartre and Aragon as Political Novelists, University of Florida Monographs: Humanities, 17 (Fall 1964), Maxwell Adereth, Commitment in Modern French Literature: Politics and Society in Péguy, Aragon and Sartre (New York: Schocken, 1968), Rima Drell Reck, Literature and Responsibility: The French Novel in the Twentieth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), J.E. Flower, Writers and Politics in Modern France (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977), Barrie Cadwallader, Crisis of the European Mind: A Study of André Malraux and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1981), Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious (London: Methuen, 1981), Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), Marc �������������� Angenot, La Critique au service de la révolution (Leuven: Peeters Vrin, 2000��������������������� ), and Benoît Denis, Littérature et engagement de Pascal à Sartre (Paris: Seuil, 2000).

36

Forgotten Engagements art can be considered ideological), but in the more narrow sense in which we might call a discourse ideological if it refers explicitly to, and identifies itself with, a recognized body of doctrine or system of ideas.76

My approach concurs with this formulation of the role of ‘message’ in a given text and with its working definition of ‘ideology’. Suleiman goes on to define the genre more precisely as follows: a roman ������ à�� thèse� ������ is a novel written in the realistic mode (that is, based on an aesthetic of verisimilitude and representation), which signals itself to the reader as primarily didactic in intent, seeking to demonstrate the validity of a political, philosophical, or religious doctrine.77 (Suleiman’s italics)

She specifies that ‘[i]n a roman à thèse, the ‘correct’ interpretation of the story is inscribed in capital letters, in such a way that there can be no mistaking it’.78 According to these definitions, the novels on which this book is focused can all be described as political romans à thèse. All are written in the realist mode, all have a clear political message, comprehensible in relation to some externally existing political ideas system, which they seek to convey to the reader. ‘Political’ in this sense refers to specific ideologies which aim to prescribe or confirm the distribution of power over the organisation and mechanisms of society; it is a question of the public face of politics. This is not to say that the authors in question did not question existing (gendered) definitions of politics; it is simply to reiterate that their primary concern was with institutional politics rather than with the more diffuse notion of the political which was embraced later by second wave feminism. A more recent essay by Steven Ungar will allow us to add a further element to these definitions. Describing the genesis of committed literature in France, he remarks: Well into the twentieth century, evolved forms of the Bildungsroman from Gustave ������������������� Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale (1869) to André ������������� Gide’s L’Immoraliste (1901) ������������������������������������������������������������ increasingly inscribed the thematics of decision and identity centred on the individual within issues of social involvement and allegiance to specific doctrines, world-views, and ideologies. Through the 1930s, this broadened sense of identity and apprenticeship remained integral to novels by established writers such as Gide, Marcel Proust and 76 Suleiman,

Authoritarian Fictions, p. 1. p. 7. 78 Ibid., p. 10. 77 Ibid.,



Women, Politics and Fiction in 1930s France

37

Roger Martin du Gard as well as those of a younger generation including Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Paul Nizan and André Malraux.79

Ungar’s stress on the relationship between identity and commitment is vital to a reading of 1930s texts by women, since it is at the level of the text’s concern with identities and subjectivities that the question of gender becomes relevant. By expressing the related themes of decision, commitment and identity through fictional subjectivities, female authors of political fiction in France between the wars opened up a space in which they could both fight actively for the causes in which they believed, and investigate the ontological repercussions of their politicisation.

79 Steven

Ungar, ‘Existentialism, Engagement, Ideology’ in Timothy Unwin (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 145–60 (p. 145).

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2 Gender and Genre: The Political Novel Paul Nizan addressed the question of fiction, politics and women writers in a review of Edith Thomas’s Le Refus and Henriette ���������� Valet’s Le Mauvais temps in L’Humanité ������������������������� in 1937. His approach to these novels illustrates the difficult position of the woman writer in relation to the new narrative traditions which were being forged in the literary pages of the left-wing press in inter-war France. Nizan’s starting point is women’s literary heritage: La littérature féminine n’a pas bonne réputation. On entend communément par ces deux mots une assez mauvaise sorte de littérature et il semble qu’on ne puisse faire à une femme de lettres un plus grand compliment que de parler de ses dons virils. (Women’s literature does not have a good reputation. These two words usually mean a pretty bad sort of literature and it seems that the greatest compliment you can pay to a lady of letters is to speak of her virile talents.)

Nizan explains that the reason ‘women’s literature’ is ‘bad literature’ is that it is characterised by ‘����������������������������������������� de faciles effusions, un goût invincible du bavardage lyrique, le relâchement des idées, des passions et du style, un penchant à exposer, avec une impudeur qu’un homme égale rarement, les aventures de la vie privée dont on sort�’ (a lot of emotion, an invulnerable taste for lyrical chattering, loose ideas, loose passions and a loose style, a tendency to disclose the adventures of one’s private life with a lack of modesty rarely equalled by a man). Like Virginia Woolf, and unlike Jean Larnac, quoted at the beginning of Chapter 1, Nizan did not suggest that women were eternally condemned to produce such literature. On the contrary, he finds that Thomas’s and Valet’s texts are welcome exceptions to the rule: Une longue tradition serait-elle en train de changer ? deux livres m’en persuadent: Le Refus, d’Edith Thomas, et Le Mauvais Temps, d’Henriette Valet. Deux livres entièrement différents, mais où se découvrent également la pudeur, la force, le goût de la pensée et de l’expression serrées’�.  ������������������������������������ Paul Nizan, ‘Littérature féminine’,

L’Humanité,��������������� 20 March 1937. Nizan adopted the same approach to women’s writing when reviewing Elsa Triolet’s Bonsoir, Thérèse in Ce soir��, in 1938: ‘Il ����������������������������������� n’a jamais paru tant de livres féminins, presque tous gâtés par cette faculté d’expansion et d’effusion qui est  Ibid.

40

Forgotten Engagements (Might this long tradition be changing? Two books make me think so: Le Refus by �������������������� Edith Thomas and Le Mauvais temps by Henriette Valet. These two books are very different, but in each we find modesty, strength, a taste for controlled thought and style.)

Nizan’s review shows that although inter-war male literary critics were willing to acknowledge literary quality in the work of women writers, they would measure their texts according to positive values derived from male literary traditions and therefore qualified as ‘masculine’. Nizan remarks that these atypical female-authored texts are promising examples of women’s novels which accede to the realm of the masculine; avoiding the pitfall of subjective introspection, they instead reveal ‘la �������������� curiosité virile des vies étrangères’�������������� (my italics) (a virile curiosity about other people’s lives). Nizan suggests that in Thomas’s Le Refus, ‘il est significatif qu’une héroïne fasse écho aux héros de René Blech ou de René Trintzius’ (it �������������������������� is significant that a heroine echoes the heroes of René Blech or René Trintzius). He thus recognises the interest and perhaps the novelty of a female fictional political apprenticeship, but interprets it as an echo – an exact, but perhaps rather fainter replica? – of the nascent tradition of leftwing apprenticeship novels in which a hero abandons his class of origin to actualise his sympathies with the working class. Clearly, a positive engagement with a female literary tradition was not advisable for the inter-war woman writer seeking acclaim from the PCF’s leading literati – to write ‘as a woman’ was to write badly, and to write successfully was to write ‘as a man’, to echo male politicalcultural production. Nizan’s article does not ask whether women’s political literature might reveal different political experiences from those discussed in contemporary male-authored committed literature, or whether the inscription of those experiences in fiction might raise different questions about the nature and functioning of political literature. These are the questions with which the present chapter is concerned. l’un des pièges où tombent les femmes qui écrivent’ (There has never been such a volume of women’s novels published, and they are nearly all ruined by this gift for expansiveness and effusiveness which is one of the traps into which women who write fall)������������������������������������������������������������������������ . Triolet, like Valet and Thomas, is cited as an exception. Paul Nizan, review of Elsa ��������������� Triolet’s Bonsoir, Thérèse, Ce soir, ���������������������������� 15 December 1938. Reprinted in ������������ Paul Nizan, Pour une nouvelle culture, ed. by Susan Suleiman (Paris: Grasset, 1971), pp. 291–93.



Gender and Genre: The Political Novel

41

My discussion therefore engages with two separate, but, in the present context, related issues: the question of political literature, and the question of the relationship of women writers to narrative traditions. I first identify and explore the theories of political literature which were developed during the inter-war period in France by leftwing intellectuals such as Nizan. The present study is limited to a consideration of political fiction on the left. Right-wing committed literature in inter-war France has also been the subject of research, notably by Jeannine Verdès-Leroux. However, the relationship between fascism and cultural production poses a different set of questions, even though ideological polarisation between the wars might be understood in terms of the metaphor of a horseshoe, with the opposing factions shading into one another, despite their protestations to the contrary, as Verdès-Leroux has argued. The inclusion of examples of right-wing literature in the present study would have implied both analysis of a different body of theoreticalcritical material and some consideration of the relationship between women and fascism; the inclusion of this material would have widened the scope of the book enormously and thus precluded detailed analysis of the fictional texts themselves. Not all studies of political fiction in the period consider the left-right opposition to be relevant: for example, Susan Suleiman does not make distinctions between left-wing and right-wing writers on the basis that her study is about literary form. Because the present study is also interested in women’s experience of politics, ideological distinctions are relevant. A gender-aware comparative study of cultural production on the left and the right between the wars would be fascinating, but I have not undertaken it in this book. Secondly, I consider the relationship of women writers and their texts to the ideas about political literature which were emerging in France in relation to the aggressive cultural policy emanating from Soviet Russia. As intellectuals on the left tried to think through the relationships between literature and politics, they negotiated in an overt and self-conscious fashion the relationship of the ‘new’ literature to the literature of the past, but they did not, on the whole, take gender into account. But gender is crucial here: how could a  ������������������������ Jeannine Verdès-Leroux,

Refus et violences. Politique et littérature à l’extrême droite des années trente aux retombées de la Libération (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).  Ibid., p. 17.

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Forgotten Engagements

woman write in the context of widespread critical condemnation of ‘women’s literature’ as ‘bad literature’? To acknowledge her difference was to risk being read and dismissed as part of such a tradition. To refuse her difference was to fail to offer, through her writing, an authentic testimony of her particular relationship to politics and commitment which was, in large measure, what theorists of political literature required of the committed writer. By situating the novels in relation to this debate, this chapter considers whether women’s experience of politics in the inter-war period produced a different sort of political writing. To answer this question, I engage with feminist scholarship on the potential specificity of all writing by women, political or otherwise. This question was not invented by second wave feminist critics. Virginia Woolf was aware of it in A Room of One’s Own: her story of Shakespeare’s imaginary sister Judith indicates her profound awareness of the fact that social and political contexts define the conditions of possibility for women’s writing. Women do not relate to narrative traditions in the same way as men, according to Woolf, because ‘[t]he world did not say to her as it said to them, Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me. The world said with a guffaw, Write? What’s the good of your writing?’. More recent critics, particularly in the 1980s, took up this theme to argue for the specificity of women’s writing. For example, Martha Noel Evans asserted that: as a result of the differential roles assigned to men and women in our society, as a result, specifically, of the pre-eminent place assigned to men in written language and literature, women writers face a special set of circumstances and problems with respect to their writing. As the imaginative projection of their place in the world and the focus of their desire to write, literary works by women thus bear the imprint of these circumstances and problems as well as their reactions to them.

Nancy A. Walker reiterated this view in her 1995 study of women’s relationships to narrative tradition:



Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Oxford and New York: Oxford World’s Classics, 1992), pp. 60–62.  Ibid., p. 68.  Evans, Masks of Tradition, p. 4.



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axiomatic […] is the perception, which has gained force in recent decades, that women’s relation to language, literature, education, and cultural traditions has been made problematic and complex by centuries of unequal access to power and agency.

This is not to say that gender is the only defining category of women’s writing, as Evans points out: ‘To emphasize the genderbound nature of self-expression is not to claim it as the sole determinant of subjectivity, but rather to insist that it be considered as an essential and legitimate object of study for anyone who interprets the production of human meaning’. A focus on women’s distinct position within a nexus of social, political and aesthetic discourses permits an understanding of women’s writing as specific, but not biologically determined, as Gayle Greene implies when she argues that ‘it is the woman writer’s engagement with the tradition that is distinctive about women’s writing’.10 What is different about women’s writing is not fixed, as the catalogue of stereotypes chronicled by Larnac suggest, but rather is bound to the specific socio-historical and aesthetic conditions of the production of the text. The present chapter seeks to understand what was different about women’s writing in the context of a particular mode of writing – political writing – and of a particular historical moment – inter-war France. Modern approaches to political literature More than half a century of scholarship has produced many ways of formulating the problem of political literature. From his study of the communist literary-political journal Commune, Wolfgang Klein concludes: Si l’œuvre est une prospection menée par un individu, on ne doit pas s’attendre à trouver une esthéthique ou, plus encore, une méthode littéraire

 Nancy

A. Walker, The Disobedient Writer. Women and Narrative Tradition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), p. 2.  Evans, Masks of Tradition, p. 9. 10 Gayle Green, Changing the Story. Feminist Fiction and the Tradition (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991).

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Forgotten Engagements proposée par l’ensemble des écrivains du Front Populaire. Les conclusions littéraires qu’ils tiraient de l’engagement social étaient individuelles�.11 (If the work of art is an individual excavation, we should not expect to find one single aesthetic or, more importantly, one single literary method put forward by all of the Popular Front writers. The conclusions they drew from their commitment to social change were individual.)

However, as Klein goes on to point out, ������������������������� ‘[c]ela ne veut pas dire qu’il n’y avait pas une direction générale de pensée, une série de problèmes littéraires communs’�������������������������������� (that does not mean that there was no general line of thought, no common collection of literary problems).12 Political literature clearly admits many different genres, aesthetic choices and literary methods, however that is not to say that nothing coherent can be said about it. Modern critics have approached the category of ‘political fiction’, of which inter-war French literature forms a significant part, from various perspectives. In his influential Politics and the Novel, first published in 1957, Irving Howe rejected both a genre-focused approach and the search for definitions in favour of an analysis focusing on complex relationships: the relationship between politics and literature, and the relationship between writer and reader, relationships which vary from text to text. For Howe, the fact that a text has been designated as ‘political’ by critics is more significant than any intrinsic textual features. Lucien Goldman’s Pour une sociologie du roman (1964)� adopted a structuralist approach which sought to avoid pure formalism.13 Goldman saw a fundamental link between aesthetic forms and economic ones. He used a structuralist methodology in order to arrive at a sociology of the novel which would avoid an interpretation of the text as merely a reflection of the society in which it was produced, but would rather permit a reading of text and society as mutually constituting. Maxwell Adereth’s 1968 essay ‘What is littérature ���������������������������������������������������������� engagée��������������������������������������� ?’ analysed texts from the perspective of the author’s commitment and the latter’s desire to make writing synonymous with political action. For Adereth then, biography is 11

Klein, Commune: Revue pour la défense de la culture 1933–1939, p. 117. Commune was the review of the ������������������������������������������������������� Association des écrivains et artistes révolutionnaires� (Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artsits, or AEAR). 12 Ibid., p. 117. 13 Lucien Goldman, Pour une sociologie du roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1964��������� ), trans by Alan Sheridan as Towards a Sociology of the Novel (London: Tavistock, 1977).



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a significant factor. J.E. Flower’s ‘Writers and Politics’ series dating from the late 1970s was an attempt to move beyond a content-based criticism of political literature which sought either simply to elucidate the ideas expressed in the texts or to examine the uses made of literature by political parties.14 Flower aimed to show how political literature is written; his analyses reveal certain textual features common to political writing from across the political spectrum, such as the use of exemplary characters, the attempt to engage the reader’s emotional sympathies, the use of authorial interventions and of naïve symbolism, the creation of an illusion of objectivity and the tendency of political texts to contain within them their own interpretation via the presence of a final explanatory chapter, for example. Susan Suleiman’s work represents a development and an expansion of the sort of approach Flower advocated. Suleiman’s goal was to arrive at a workable generic definition, as the subtitle of her Authoritarian Fictions indicates: it is a study of ‘the ideological novel as a literary genre’. I have already suggested that for readers seeking a definition of political literature as a point of departure, Suleiman’s work is extremely valuable. More recent incursions into this field of scholarship have abandoned the sort of approach to political literature which seeks to define it according to a list of criteria. In two recent studies, Marc Angenot and Benoît Denis adopt a perspective grounded in the potential opposition between modernist literature and committed literature which also pays close attention to the reception of literary texts designated as ‘political’.15 In his study of inter-war communist literary criticism, Angenot states that: Une de mes conclusions au bout de cet ouvrage sera qu’il y a illisibilité réciproque entre la formation discursive communiste et l’écriture moderniste et surtout, qu’il est impossible de résoudre leur affrontement en optant en faveur de l’une, que, dans le discours social de ce siècle, elles continuent indéfiniment à se regarder en chiens de faïance en s’adressant des objections qu’elles ne peuvent ni éluder ni dépasser.16 ������������������� (Angenot’s italics)

14 There

are seven volumes in this series, covering writers and politics in Britain, Italy, Scandinavia, Spain, Russia and Germany as well as France. The series was published in London by Hodder and Stoughton. 15 ��������� Angenot, La Critique au service de la révolution and Denis, Littérature et engagement de Pascal à Sartre. 16 ��������� Angenot, La Critique au service de la revolution, p. 5.

46

Forgotten Engagements (One of my conclusions at the end of this work will be that communist discourse and modernist writing are mutually unintelligible, and above all that it is impossible to resolve the conflict by choosing one over the other. In the social discourse of this century, they continue to stare at each other for all eternity like ornamental dogs on a mantelpiece, making objections to each other which they can neither evade not overcome.)

For Angenot, the modernist understanding of the nature of literature, on the one hand, and the definition of literature which underpins sectarian notions of committed literature on the other are mutually unintelligible. It is by approaching the problem of committed literature in the context of the modernist aesthetic that Angenot reveals the criteria via which the defenders of ideologically utilitarian literature came to judge political fiction. Whilst a focus on this oppositional structure is useful for an analysis of literary criticism, it will not suffice as a means of understanding the texts themselves: the belief that it was sufficient was precisely the error made by inter-war communist critics. Angenot reveals the weakness of ‘���������������������������������������������������������������� la critique au service de la révolution’ ����������������������� (literary criticism in the service of the revolution) when he points out that no author actually managed to unite or to divide politics and literature completely, and that modernism did not eliminate the requirement that literature should in some way be socially useful: early twentiethcentury modernism did not herald a return to art-for-art’s-sake.17 Denis also reads the problem of political literature in terms of modernism, but takes a long view in historical terms. Denis argues that the problem of twentieth-century committed literature arises as a result of the appearance, around 1850, of a new conception of literature as completely autonomous, and therefore separate from the social and political sphere.18 Previously, the social character of all writing was taken for granted; henceforward, politics and literature could never coincide without the very nature of literature being called into question. Like Angenot, Denis recognises that an interpretation of twentieth-century committed literature in terms of a strict opposition between modernism and commitment is an oversimplification.19 More recently, Denis has approached the issue from the perspective of an opposition between Sartrean engagement and 17 Ibid.,

pp. 400–401. Littérature et engagement,������� p. 20. 19 Ibid., pp. 18–19. 18 ������� Denis,



Gender and Genre: The Political Novel

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the notion of ‘une �������������������������������������������������������� morale de la littérature’ (a ������������������������� specifically literary morality) evoked by Georges Bataille.20 Both Angenot and Denis stress that the problem of political literature cannot be separated from the problem of reception, that is, the tendency of partisan critics to judge the aesthetic object via ethical criteria.21 There is also a substantial body of French and francophone scholarship which draws explicitly on the work of Pierre Bourdieu in order to account for the politicisation of literature in 1930s France.22 These critics use the notion of the literary field and the power relations which, according to Bourdieu, structure it and combine to make the text what it is. There is a tendency in such analyses to privilege contextual analysis over textual analysis, although some scholars (Jérôme Meizoz, notably) are attempting to combine close reading with rigorous analysis of the literary field. My own attempt in this study to devote attention to texts and contexts and to reception as well as production is in sympathy with this sort of approach. It was in part Susan Suleiman’s work which inspired the choice of texts for consideration in this book. All the texts in question thematise politics, that is, ideological commitment and the action which results, and attempt to communicate a specific and identifiable message. The texts in my corpus are militant novels which manifest their faith in the possibility of a reconciliation between the literary and the social domains, that is, a faith in a mode of fiction which can participate in social and political debates without losing its specificity as literature, and which is subtended by the same notions of morality and ethics as those which obtain in the social realm.23 In retrospect, one might agree with Denis that the notion of such a reconciliation was utopian. But as Denis points out, ‘l’[e]ngagement ���������������� 20 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Benoît Denis, ‘Engagement littéraire et morale de la littérature’ in Emmanuel

Bouju (ed.), L’Engagement littéraire (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005), pp. 31–42. 21 ������� Denis, Littérature et engagement, pp. 44–45. 22 See for example ����������������������������������������������������������� Jean-Michel Péru, ‘Une crise du champ littéraire français. Le débat sur la “littérature prolétarienne” (1925–1925)’, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 89 (1991������������������������� ), 47–65; ��������������� Jérôme Meizoz, L’Age du roman parlant (1919– 1939) (Geneva: Droz, 2001); Meizoz, L’Oeil sociologique et la littérature (Geneva: Slatkine, 2004); Gisèle Sapiro,��������������������������������������������������������� ‘Forms of Politicisation in the French Literary Field’, Theory and Society 32 (2003), 633–52. See also Sapiro’s discussion of the writer and responsibility in La Guerre des écrivains, 1940–1953 (Paris: Fayard, 1999). 23 ���������������������������������������������������������������������� Denis, ‘Engagement littéraire et morale de la littérature’, pp. 34–35.

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Forgotten Engagements

est une notion historiquement située, qui apparaît dans le discours littéraire dans l’entre-deux-guerres pour assigner à la littérature un devoir d’intervention directe dans les affaires du monde et pour enjoindre donc l’écrivain à quitter la posture d’isolement superbe qui était, par excellence, celle du purisme esthétique’������������� (the notion of commitment is historically situated. It appeared in the literary discourse of the inter-war period to ascribe to literature the duty of intervening directly in the affairs of the world and thus to persuade the writer to abandon the position of total isolation which was the position which aesthetic purism encapsulated par excellence).24 Denis and Angenot are right to accord great importance to the reception of texts. The designation of a novel as ‘political’ and, specifically, as belonging to a particular ‘strand’ or ‘school’ of political literature, must be a key factor influencing the interpretation of those texts. As critics drawing on Bourdieu have shown, the existence of such ‘strands’ or ‘schools’ within the literary field also had an active effect on the production of texts – the context of production influences, but does not entirely determine, the aesthetic choices authors make. Thus my analysis does not seek to determine whether novels ‘are’ or ‘are not’ political or whether they ‘are’ or ‘are not’ literature, but rather attempts to understand how, why and under what circumstances the texts became what they are, and what they can now tell us about the relationships between gender, politics and fiction in inter-war France. My analysis seeks to rectify the one blind spot shared by all the (predominantly male) critics whose work I have surveyed, namely, their exclusive reliance on male-authored texts in the elucidation of their theories. Inter-war theories of political literature Looking back on the inter-war period with hindsight, modern critics aim primarily to understand how literary texts functioned in specific historico-political circumstances. This sort of analysis is, of course, only possible retrospectively. Inter-war theorists of political literature, on the other hand, had a creative and a militant purpose: they aimed both to prescribe new ways of creating art and to recommend particular ideologies. That is not to say that modern 24 Ibid.,

p. 31.



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critics do not seek to fulfil specific ideological objectives in their writing. It is simply to highlight a significant and defining feature of inter-war thinking on political literature, namely, the belief that it was possible and necessary to fashion a new literature and a new society, and that the two were inseparable. In order to situate and understand the genre choices made by Pelletier, Thomas, Téry, Valet and Weiss for their literarypolitical production, the reader requires a clear map of the interwar theoretical landscape. It is important to reiterate that inter-war debates over political literature were almost exclusively animated by male theorists discussing male-authored texts. The following account does not aim to give an exhaustive description of the twists and turns of the debate over left-wing political literature between the wars. This has been done elsewhere, notably by Jean-Pierre Morel in Le roman insupportable. L’Internationale littéraire et la France (1920– 1932),�������������������� ������������������� by Régine Robin in Le Réalisme socialiste. Une Esthétique impossible, by Pascal Ory in La Belle illusion. Culture et politique sous le signe du Front populaire and by Jean-Pierre Bernard in Le Parti communiste et la question littéraire 1921–1939.�������������� In addition, the introductory chapters of Rosemary Chapman’s Henry Poulaille and Proletarian Literature 1920–1939 provide an excellent summary and analysis of the issues in English, Denis gives a concise overview in his chapter on the inter-war period, and Angenot provides a useful chronology.25 I consider firstly the debates over ‘proletarian literature’ in the USSR and France, secondly, the development of socialist realism and the activities of the Association �������������������������� des écrivains et artistes révolutionnaires��������������������������������������� (Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, or AEAR), and thirdly the debate over the relationship between committed literature and an avant-gardist or modernist 25 ������������������� Jean-Pierre Morel,

Le Roman insupportable. L’Internationale littéraire et la France (1920–1932) (Paris: Gallimard, 1985); Régine Robin, Le Réalisme socialiste. Une Esthétique impossible (Paris : Payot, 1986) ; Pascal Ory, La Belle illusion. Culture et politique sous le signe du Front populaire 1935–1938 (Paris: Plon, 1994); Jean-Pierre Bernard, Le Parti communiste et la question littéraire 1921– 1939 (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1972);������������������� Rosemary Chapman,� Henry Poulaille and Proletarian Literature 1920–1939 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992), Chapter 1 ‘Intellectual and cultural context. Writings on literature and class 1900– 1935’ and Chapter 2 ‘Proletarian literature and the cultural politics of 1928–1935’, pp. 3–92; Denis, ������� Littérature et engagement, pp. 228–58; Angenot, La Critique au service de la révolution, pp. 411–18��.

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Forgotten Engagements

mode of expression, before locating the work of Pelletier, Thomas, Téry, Valet and Weiss in relation to various aspects of the debate. French thinking on the relationship between politics and literature emerged primarily as a result of engagements on the part of left-wing intellectuals with the polemics on culture and politics in the USSR. Morel has demonstrated that the Soviet debate began to be reported piecemeal in the French revolutionary press as early as 1923,26 and more systematically after 1926, thanks to Victor Serge’s ‘Chroniques de la vie intellectuelle russe’ (Chronicles ����������������������� of Russian 27 Intellectual Life) in L’Humanité. The review Clarté also played a significant role in the transmission and animation of the debate in France.28 The First Conference of Proletarian and Revolutionary Writers held in Moscow in November 1927, attended by the French communists Henri Barbusse, Pierre Naville and Paul VaillantCouturier, marked the beginnings of the organisation of proletarian literature on an international scale.29 1930 was something of a landmark in the debates. An opinion poll on proletarian literature had been carried out in the pages of the review Monde during 1928–1929.30 Poulaille published his Nouvel âge littéraire in ��������� 1930. And November 1930 saw the Kharkov Congress of Revolutionary Writers in the Soviet Union during which Barbusse, in his absence, was condemned for his ‘broad church’ approach to revolutionary literature, and the surrealist Louis Aragon controversially renounced his avant-gardism to toe the party line. Kharkov demonstrated the dominance of the dogmatic RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) in the Soviet debate on revolutionary literature, although its influence was to be short-lived; the congress also produced a new organisation, the Union ����������������������������������� internationale des écrivains révolutionnaires���������������������������������������������������� (The International Union of Revolutionary Writers, or UIER) and a new journal with parallel editions in French, Russian, German, and English, entitled Literature of World Revolution.31 26 Morel,

Le Roman insupportable, p. 76. p. 123. ������� 28 Ibid., pp. 76–77. 29 Ibid., p���������� p. 145–56. 30 See ���������������������������� Jean-Marie Goulemot, ‘Quand Monde enquêtait sur la littérature prolétarienne’, Revue des Sciences Humaines, ������������������������������������ Vol. 61, No. 190 (April–June 1983), 89–99. 31 On the Kharkov congress and its aftermath, see Morel, Le Roman insupportable, pp. 357–400. 27 Ibid.,



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It is possible to distinguish four clear strands within the French debate on political literature which had emerged by 1930: Poulaille’s proletarian literature; the line adopted by Barbusse and Monde; the populist school of Léon Lemonnier and André Thérive; and those who advocated a militant, party literature. According to Chapman, ‘[t]he fundamental characteristic of Poulaille’s views on proletarian literature is his assertion that proletarian writing is already emerging in France and in other capitalist countries such as Germany, the USA, Scandinavia and Czechoslovakia, as well as in the USSR’.32 Two points should be underlined here. Firstly, for Poulaille, proletarian literature arose out of national traditions rather than being imported from the new Soviet state – a point on which Barbusse agreed.33 Secondly, since proletarian literature was, for Poulaille, an expression of working class experience and not a product of specific political commitment, working class literature was possible in a pre-revolutionary state; those for whom ‘proletarian’ literature was synonymous with ‘revolutionary’ literature were less sure. Poulaille’s views were different from Barbusse’s in that, for Poulaille, proletarian literature was to be written only by members of the working class: Poulaille maintained that proletarian literature is an act of témoignage,��������������������������������������������� or bearing witness, reserved only for those with first-hand experience.34 Barbusse’s programme, elaborated in Monde, was for a politically engaged literature which would be more militant than Poulaille’s understanding of proletarian literature would permit, whilst avoiding the dogmatism of, for example, Clarté, which had called for a ‘���������������������������������������� littérature de propagande et de combat’� (literature of propaganda and struggle) in 1926.35 For Barbusse, proletarian, or revolutionary, literature was a question of political perspective and not necessarily of social origin: he was therefore prepared to classify bourgeois fellow-travellers as ‘proletarian’ writers, as well as writers whose penchant for a modernist mode of expression made them unacceptable to the RAPP. This approach brought him into conflict with the party, since Stalin’s dogmatic class war strategy after 1928 was reflected in literary polemics. 32 Chapman,

Henry Poulaille and Proletarian Literature, p. 13. Le Roman insupportable, p. 180. 34 ������������������������������������������ Barbusse is discussed in Henry Poulaille, Nouvel âge littéraire (Bassac: Plein Chant, 1986),����������������������� pp. 155–58 and 160–66. 35 Quoted in Morel, Le Roman insupportable, p. 115. 33 Morel,

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Forgotten Engagements

Although courted by the party, and despite his own commitment to communism, Barbusse consistently refused to allow Monde to become a party organ. It was only after the dissolution of the RAPP in 1932, which marked the beginning of a more open literary policy on the part of the Soviet Union as regards the fellow-travellers, that a rapprochement was achieved, and this because the party, not Barbusse, had altered its position. The appearance of populism on the French literary horizon in 1929 caused some confusions of terminology. The advocates of populism were interested not in achieving class solidarity, like Barbusse and Poulaille, but rather in using the proletariat as a new subject matter. Seeing themselves as the heirs of naturalism, Léon Lemonnier and André Thérive aimed at a middle-brow audience; the populist novel would observe, but not judge, the working class from a position of exteriority.36 I shall not dwell on populism here, since none of the writers with whom this book is concerned engaged specifically with their ideas;37 suffice it to say that the ideas of the populists on who should write, and indeed read, literature concerned with the working class represented one more element of the inter-war intellectual landscape which provoked discussion on the relationship between politics and literature. More important for our present purposes are the views of those who were in favour of a dogmatic, party literature. In 1928, in the Soviet Union, the RAPP had the full support of the party because it displayed������������������������������������������������� ‘une soumission inconditionnelle aux directives du parti, disponibilité complète pour être les corps conducteurs des idées du parti’������������������������������������������������������� (an unconditional submission to the directives of the party, and an absolute willingness to be the conduit for the party’s ideas).38 The literary climate in Soviet Russia was by this time one of the control, administration and organisation of literature, as the 36 On

populism, see Chapman, Henry Poulaille and Proletarian Literature, pp. 60–64. 37 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ René Trinzius����������������������������������������������������������������� accused Edith Thomas of populism in a review of her 1934 novel, L’Homme criminel, in L’Intransigeant,��������������������������������������� 11 May 1934. Trinzius was a bourgeois novelist of communist sympathies, whose 1932 novel Fin et commencement Nizan reviewed for L’Humanité (2 December 1932, p. 4: cited in Robert S. Thornberry, Les Ecrits de Paul Nizan (1905–1940). Portrait d’une époque (Paris: Honoré� Champion, 2001), p. 61). Trinzius uses his review of Thomas’s novel to declare his own opposition to populism. 38 Quoted in Morel, Le Roman insupportable, p. 167.



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writer Panaït Istrati declared in an article in Les Nouvelles littéraires published in 1929 on his return from the Soviet Union:������������ ‘Non, sous le régime soviétique actuel, un artiste ne peut pas créer à sa fantaisie, et le poncif prolétarien est aussi pesant que les autres poncifs’ (No, ����� under the present Soviet regime, an artist cannot create just as he likes, and the proletarian credo is just as inescapable as the others).39 During this period, proletarian literature became synonymous with militant party literature, and the criterion for judgement of a literary work was simply whether it was pro- or anti-Soviet.40 This hard-line approach was not theorised in France until 1930 when L’Humanité adopted it as its literary policy.41 Here is Jean Fréville, writing in L’Humanité in 1931: Des écrivains pensent qu’il suffit de critiquer la bourgeoisie, ou de décrire des clochards, des zoniers ou des ouvriers qui se tiennent en dehors des luttes des classes pour se proclamer révolutionnaires. A ceux-là nous dirons et nous répéterons qu’il n’est pas de voie révolutionnaire en dehors du parti 42 (Some writers think that all you have to do to declare yourself a revolutionary is criticise the bourgeoisie, or describe the tramps, the outcasts or the workers who don’t get involved in the class struggle. To these writers we say and we keep saying that there is no revolutionary path outside of the party.)

Which, as Morel points out, is tantamount to saying that ‘il �������������� n’est pas de littérature révolutionnaire en dehors d’une littérature du parti’ (there is no revolutionary literature outside of party literature). When the AEAR was founded at the beginning of 193243 as the French branch of the UIER, it initially mirrored Fréville’s uncompromising support for militant literature, condemning in its manifesto of March 1932 surrealism, populism, Poulaille’s Nouvel âge littéraire and ����������� Barbusse’s Monde.44 Thus for Nizan, writing in 1932, Monde was ‘���������������������������������������������� le groupe des traîtres’����������������������� (the traitor’s group).45 However, since 39 Quoted

in ibid., p. 198. pp. 257–58. 41 Ibid., p. 310. 42 Quoted in ibid., p. 402. 43 On the date of the founding of this organisation, see Chapman, Henry Poulaille and Proletarian Literature, pp. 71–72 and ������������ Meizoz, L’Age du roman parlant, pp. 216–17. 44 Morel, Le Roman insupportable, p. 425. 45 ����������������������������������������������� Nizan, ‘Littérature révoutionnaire en France’, La Revue des vivants,����������� September– October 1932. Reprinted in Nizan, ������� Pour une nouvelle culture, pp. 33–43 (p. 40). 40 Ibid.,

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the AEAR was associated with the UIER and not directly with the PCF, it did not require its members to be members of the party.46 The manifesto also proclaimed the AEAR’s commitment to the rabcors movement,47 the brainchild of the RAPP,48 which sought to encourage worker correspondents, or rabcors, to publish their testimonies in order to foster an ‘authentic’ mode of proletarian and revolutionary self expression. This movement was favoured by the UIER, which, as Chapman points out, explains the AEAR’s enthusiasm.49 The birth of socialist realism in the Soviet Union, and its appearance in France, was preceded by a softening of the line peddled by Fréville, the RAPP and the AEAR in 1931–1932. The first stage was the dissolution of the RAPP by the Soviet Communist Party in 1932, a move which inaugurated a new period of relative flexibility on the part of communism regarding its literary policy.50 Whilst the dogmatic, sectarian, class war strategies of the RAPP were now deemed to be a thing of the past, and a new openness towards fellow-travellers ensued, it is important to bear in mind that after 1932 the Soviet Communist Party took complete control of Russian literary policy, rather than tolerating a series of literary and cultural organisations associated with the party to differing degrees, as it had previously. Fréville and L’Humanité, finding themselves out of step with the new party line, revised their views, and Barbusse found that the position he had adopted via Monde was now closer to the party’s dictates than ever before. From the late summer and autumn of 1932, the AEAR began to move towards a more open approach to revolutionary literature which was to unite communists with other left-wing writers; in the words of Vaillant-Couturier there was to be ‘���������������������������������������������������� un vaste front unique littéraire’������������������� (one single broad literary front) which would come to include bourgeois writers such as André Gide.51 The RAPP was to be replaced not by a new organisation but by a new doctrine: socialist realism. The term first made an 46 Morel,

Le Roman insupportable, p. 411. Henry Poulaille and Proletarian Literature, p. 73. 48 Morel, Le Roman insupportable, pp. 367–70. 49 Chapman, Henry Poulaille and Proletarian Literature, p. 73. 50 Historians have advanced various explanations for the dissolution of the RAPP: see Morel, Le Roman insupportable, pp. 439–42. 51 Ibid., p. 446. 47 Chapman,



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appearance in 1932, and was consecrated as official communist literary policy at the 1934 Soviet Writers’ Congress for the Defence of Culture, held in Moscow.52 It will be clear from the preceding discussion that, as Régine Robin points out, socialist realism did not come from nowhere and was not simply imposed from above by the party, but rather was generated by debates and discussions which had been going on in Russia and Europe over a period of several years.53 I shall not attempt to give a full summary of the debates of the Congress: Robin’s book provides an excellent account of them.54 Modern critics are agreed that the all-too-quoteable slogan ‘realist in form, socialist in content’ was to prove difficult to define with precision and difficult to apply to the practice of literary creation. The Congress did not question the notion that the new aesthetic was to be realist, but neither did it make significant incursion into the complex territory of what exactly is meant by ‘realism’ as a literary technique. The Congress did not demur at Zhdanov’s argument that the new literature should be politically tendentious.55 Zhdanov recommended ‘revolutionary romanticism’ as the means to achieve a realistic account of the present from the optimistic perspective of a (socialist) future: 56 Soviet literature should be able to portray our heroes; it should be able to glimpse our tomorrow. This will be no utopian dream, for our tomorrow is already being prepared for today by dint of conscious planned work.57

For Robin, this notion is paradoxical: the combination of sociopolitical determinism with a belief that individuals can achieve

52 The

key speeches from the 1934 Congress have been collected and translated into English by H.G. Scott as Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934. The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism in the Soviet Union (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977). 53 Robin, Le Réalisme socialiste, pp. 40–42. 54 Ibid., pp. 31–103. See also Michael Scriven and Denis Tate, European Socialist Realism (Oxford: Berg, 1988). 55 On Zhdanov’s preference for this term over, for example, ‘party literature’, see Robin, Le Réalisme socialiste,����������� pp. 84–85. 56 See ibid., pp. 89–103 on Maxim Gorki’s discussion of revolutionary romanticism in the early 1930s. 57 Zhdanov, ‘Soviet Literature – The Richest in Ideas, The Most Advanced Literature’ in Scott (ed.), Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934. The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism in the Soviet Union, pp. 13–24 (p. 22).

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change for the future constitutes the defining philosophical problem of the socialist realist aesthetic: Ce mélange, tout à fait particulier, de lecture néo-darwinienne, méchaniste du social, et de volontarisme utopique, c’est bien cela la spécificité culturelle du stalinisme […]58 (It is this very specific mixture of a neo-Darwinian and mechanistic view of the social world with a utopian voluntarism which defines the cultural specificity of Stalinism […])

The Congress was unequivocal in its condemnation of modernism, of Freudianism, and of formalism as synonymous with bourgeois – counter-revolutionary – culture. Though certain about what it wanted to reject, the new aesthetic which emerged from the Congress was by no means clearly delineated. However, it was based on three quite specific beliefs about art: a belief that art should, and can, transmit a clear and specific ideological message; a belief that form is less important than content; and a belief that art transmits pre-existing content, as opposed to the view that it is in fact language which creates meaning.59 The key theorists of socialist realism in France were the communist writers Louis Aragon, who published his Pour un réalisme socialiste (�������������������������� For Socialist Realism) in 1935, and Paul Nizan. Although the latter never published a fulllength work of literary theory, his collected literary criticism is full of analyses pertinent to the debate.60 In France, 1934 was a turning point in the development of theories of committed literature. The riots of February 1934 suggested to the left a need for ‘�������������������������������������� un front uni anti-fasciste������������ ’ (a united anti-fascist front),61 which was to define the raison d’être of the

58 Robin,

Le Réalisme socialiste, p. 24. p. 92, p,102. 60 Many of Nizan’s relevant articles are collected in Pour une nouvelle culture, ed. and with an introduction by Susan Suleiman. This volume also contains a bibliography of additional articles not reprinted in the collection. For an exhaustive bibliography of Nizan’s work, including summaries of all texts, see Thornberry’s magisterial Les Ecrits de Paul Nizan (1905–1940). Portrait d’une époque. A complete edition of Nizan’s journalism is currently being prepared by Anne Mathieu. The first volume has appeared recently: Articles littéraires et politiques 1923–1935 (Mayenne: Joseph K., 2005). 61 Quoted in Ory, La Belle illusion, p. 65. 59 Ibid.,



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Popular Front.62 According ����������������������������������������������������� to Nizan, ‘personne n’est capable d’écrire en 1935 la suite des livres de 1933 […] on verra peut-être un jour que le 6 février 1934 établit un plan de clivage dans les lettres comme dans la politique’������������������������������������������������� (no-one in 1935 can write a continuation of the books of 1933 […] perhaps one day we shall see that 6th February 1934 represented a complete break in the domain of literature as it did in the domain of politics).63 The hard-line sectarianism of Kharkov had been abandoned, and was replaced by a desire for a common front uniting all those seeking to fight fascism, whatever their class or political credo. The change was accompanied by a new prioritisation on the left of the national over the international.64 In cultural terms, there was a turning-away from the idea, dominant in the late 1920s and early 1930s, that only literature produced by the working classes themselves was valid. Rather, in the Popular Front years, the idea that the working classes should have access to France’s (bourgeois) cultural heritage gained currency – in Pascal Ory’s words, ��������������������������������� ‘le mot d’ordre êtait désormais: �������������������� “Reprendre ce qu’on nous a volé”’�������������������������������������������������� (the new rallying cry was ‘To take back what has been stolen from us’).65 Nonetheless, as Ory implies, the cultural policy of the Popular Front should be seen as a development of the debate over proletarian literature rather than as a rejection of it.66 The evolution of the Popular Front and its policy on culture was reflected in the evolution of its mouthpiece, the AEAR.67 After a period of self-examination, the AEAR embraced Thorez’s ‘politique de la main tendue’����������������������������������� (proffered hand policy). The AEAR established the ����������������������������������������������������� Maisons de la culture�������������������������������� in 1935 as places where people from all backgrounds – and not just communists – could meet and debate. By 1936 Commune had changed its subtitle significantly: it now described itself as the ‘����������������������������������� revue littéraire française pour la défense de la culture’������������������������������������������������ (the French literary review for the defence of culture) rather than simply the ‘revue de l’AEAR’ (the review of the 62 Ory

gives a brief account of the birth and development of the Popular Front in France in Ibid., pp. 21–22. 63 Paul Nizan, review of Ramon ������������ Fernandez’s Les Violents, Monde, 1 August 1935. Reprinted in Nizan, Pour une nouvelle culture, pp. 172–74 (p. 172). 64 Ory, La Belle illusion, pp. 94–95. 65 Ibid., p. 71. 66 Ibid., p. 200. 67 Ory traces this evolution in ibid., pp. 118–127. See also the entry on the AEAR in Julliard and Winock (eds.), ��������������������������������������� Dictionnaire des intellectuels français, pp. 92–93.

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AEAR).68 Three points should be underlined here: the absence of the explicitly communist designation ‘�������������������������������� révolutionnaire’���������������� ; the insertion of a national designation; the adoption of the Popular Front’s broad rallying call to ‘the defence of culture’. Whilst in the post1934 period then, the accent was very much on the mobilisation of Western culture in general – bourgeois or otherwise – for the anti-fascist cause, this did not imply a lessening of the desire that literature be on the offensive: Ory argues that ‘la ������������������� relativisation des thèmes ouvriéristes et partisans ne signifiait nullement une diminution de l’ardeur combative’ ���������������������������������� (the contextualisation of the proworking class and militant line did not in any way signify a lessening of the fighting spirit).69 The question of literary modernism cuts across all interwar debates on proletarian and/or revolutionary literature. Recent critics such as Angenot and Denis have, as we have seen, contested the previously dominant view that ‘modernist’ and ‘committed’ literature are separate entities. The ‘separation’ thesis replicates the conclusions of the 1934 Congress that formal experimentation has no place in the committed text, and that texts which prioritise form cannot by definition be ‘revolutionary’. It is important to bear in mind that the stark opposition between modernism and commitment was very much a 1930s perspective: in the 1920s, the possibility of a productive coincidence between formal experimentation and tendentious literature was still open. The example of the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky is perhaps the most illustrative. In the mid 1920s, Mayakovsky had combined a passion for avant-garde cultural forms with communist commitment.70 However, by the later 1920s this was no longer possible: his suicide in April 1930 has been interpreted as a response to the politico-cultural impasse in which he found himself. His association with avant-garde groups made him suspect in the eyes of the party; he was deeply committed to communism, but could not accept its increasingly conservative aesthetic policy.71 Victor Erlich concludes that Mayakovsky’s 68 Ory,

La Belle illusion, p. 119. p. 187. 70 On Mayakovsky’s relationship with the avant-garde and the party, see Victor Erlich, Modernism and Revolution: Russian Literature in Transition (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 255–72. 71 On the reasons for Mayakovsy’s suicide see ibid., pp. 263–65. On the party’s response to his death, see Morel, Le Roman insupportable, pp. 294–302. 69 Ibid.,



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suicide ‘signalized the end of an era, a collapse of the increasingly precarious modus vivendi between the literary-artistic avant-garde and the regime ushered in by the October Revolution’.72 In France, communist suspicion of the avant-garde was played out in the problematic relationship between surrealism and communism.73 In the mid-1920s, the surrealists had enjoyed a politically and artistically productive relationship with the Marxist review Clarté, however the ‘crisis’ resulting from Pierre Naville’s 1926 article ‘������������������������������������ La révolution et les intellectuels: ������������������ Que peuvent faire les surréalistes����������������������������������������������������  ?’ (The Revolution and the Intellectuals: What Can the Surrealists Do?) inaugurated a series of polemics, the result of which would be the exclusion of the surrealists from mainstream communism. The surrealists were unwilling to accept the party’s insistence on total control over literature which professed to proselytise in its name; for its part, the party refused to delegate artistic matters to a group as potentially anarchic as the surrealists.74 The surrealists were seen to stand for all that the party increasingly wanted to vilify in artistic and political terms: elitism, absence of experience of or interest in the realities of working class life, Freudianism, individualism and a rather free definition of the term ‘revolution’. The Kharkov congress (a personal turning point for Aragon) condemned surrealism as not sufficiently revolutionary. If Kharvov dispensed with the surrealists, it was left to the 1934 Congress to dispense with modernism.75 The Congress dismissed modernism as bourgeois and decadent, and whilst some concessions were made to the talents of modernist writers such as Proust, Joyce or the early Gide, these concessions were, as Angenot points out, politically motivated:

72 Erlich,

Modernism and Revolution, p. 265. For a detailed account, see Helena Lewis, Dada Turns Red. The Politics of Surrealism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990). See also Raymond Spiteri and Donald LaCoss (eds.), Surrealism, Politics and Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). 74 Denis, Littérature et engagement, p. 235. 75 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� Radek addressed the question in an intervention on ‘James Joyce or Socialist Realism?’,�������������������������������������������������������������������� part of his speech on ‘Contemporary World Literature and the Tasks of Proletarian Art’, in Scott (ed.), Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934, pp. 72–182 (pp. 151–82). See also Robin, Le Réalisme socialiste, pp. 54–60. 73

60

Forgotten Engagements […] le ‘style’ moderne est adequat à une littérature désespérée et autodécomposée, elle-même ‘reflet’ d’un monde bourgeois qui sent sa fin prochaine�.76 ([…] the modern ‘style’ is adequate for a hopeless and decomposing literature which is itself the reflection of a bourgeois world which knows that its end is nigh.)

Angenot concludes that the definition – or rather, lack of definition – of socialist realism stems from its oppositional stance as regards modernism: his argument is convincing, since an understanding of socialist realism as ‘not-modernism’ goes a long way towards explaining socialist realism’s lack of engagement with the minutiae of a definition of realism: Tout part de ceci, de l’idée que le modernisme avec tout son talent, ses ‘techniques’ et ses fâcheuses innovations, est inacceptable, inintégrable au grand récit révolutionnaire – et non de l’élection première du postulat ‘réaliste’�.77 The starting point is always the idea that modernism, with all its talent, its ‘techniques’ and its unfortunate innovations is unacceptable and cannot be integrated into the great revolutionary story, and not an initial choice in favour of the premise ‘realism’.)

For Angenot, the politicisation of literature by those who required art to serve the revolution is synonymous with a desire for what he calls ‘monisme’: a naïve positivism which believes that the world is intelligible and explicable according to a simple, unitary principle (Marxism).78 Modernism is intolerable because its ‘enigmatic’ and ‘disorderly’ texts threaten precisely this monistic world view: Le modernisme est devenu peu à peu conflit constitutif entre le texte et l’apparence intelligible du monde. Or, dans une herméneutique militante, reconnaître l’énigmaticité et le désordre constitutifs du texte moderne reviendrait – homologiquement – à reconnaître l’opacité irrémédiable du monde […]79 (Angenot’s italics) (Modernism gradually became the site of conflict between the text and the apparently intelligible nature of the world. According to a militant 76 Angenot,

La Critique au service de la révolution, p. 134. p. 129. 78 Ibid., pp. 372–73. 79 Ibid., pp. 397–98. 77 Ibid.,



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hermeneutics, to recognise the enigmatic style and the disorder which define the modern text would be similarly to recognise the irreparable opacity of the world […])

Ultimately then, for Angenot, the source of the schism between ‘modernism’ and ‘commitment’ which the proponents of socialist realism saw fit to construct was ideological rather than aesthetic. Left-wing writers of the period whose own preference for a mode of literary expression which could be termed modernist, and who therefore contested the notion of a separation between modernism and commitment, did not of course do so on the grounds cited by Angenot. André Gide and André Malraux argued for a socially and politically effective literature without being prepared to abandon certain views on the nature and functioning of literature which contradicted socialist realism.80 Gide found himself faced with the problem of communism’s vilification of individualism; his entire œuvre to date had testified to a belief that the aesthetic object stems from, and expresses, the individual. Writing in 1935, Gleb Struve noted that: Gide is very popular with the Soviet official literary circles, especially since he has proclaimed his faith in the Soviet social experiment, but the bulk of his literary work, with its undercurrent of Protestant individualism, remains ideologically alien to the dominant tendencies in Soviet literature.81

Malraux had provoked the wrath of party zealots in the late 1920s: between 1928 and 1929, Les Conquérants had attracted adverse criticism from left-wing critics in L’Humanité and in the Russian literary press.82 Morel argues that ���������������������������� ‘[e]n attaquant Malraux, le Bureau83 combat donc toute tentative d’internationaliser la 80 See

André ������������ Gide, Littérature engagée, ed. and with an introduction by Yvonne Davet (Paris: Gallimard, 1950) and André Malraux, La Politique, la culture, ed. and with an introduction by Janine Mossuz-Lavau (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). 81 Gleb Struve, 25 Years of Soviet Literature (London: Routledge, 1944). This study was first published in 1935 as Soviet Russian Literature. 82 On the reception of Malraux’s ���������� Les Conquérants by ��������������������������������� left-wing critics, see Morel, Le Roman insupportable, pp. 245–50. 83 I.e. the ������������������������������������������������������������������� Bureau international de littérature révolutionnaire (International Bureau of Revolutionary Literature)���������������������������������������� , the group which attempted to organise proletarian literature on an international scale in the wake of the First Conference of Proletarian and Revolutionary Writers in Moscow in 1927. For details about this group, see Morel, Le Roman insupportable, pp. 145–63.

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modernité romanesque’�������������������������������������������� (by attacking Malraux, the Bureau was thus fighting off any attempt to internationalise literary modernism):84 the reception of Malraux’s novel reinforced the division between modernism and revolutionary literature of which Mayakovsky was to be a victim. Malraux agreed with Gide that art could not be subservient to any doctrine. He had expressed this view at the 1934 Congress in Moscow, declaring that ��������������������������������� ‘L’art n’est pas une soumission, c’est une conquête’ �������������������������������������������� (Art is not a submission, it is a conquest).85 At the Congrès pour la défense de la culture������������������� (Congress for the Defence of Culture) organised in Paris by the AEAR in 1935 to make public the resolutions of the Moscow congress, Malraux was more categorical: ‘Concevoir ����������������������������������������������� une littérature comme l’application d’une doctrine ne correspond jamais à une réalité’����������������� (Literature can never be the application of a doctrine).86 That Malraux achieved a series of aesthetically innovative, polyvocal and yet unarguably committed novels between the wars suggests that his thinking on the possibilities for the combination of literature and politics was more productive than Gide’s. Both writers would be welcomed as fellow-travellers in the ‘������������������������������������������� défense de la culture’��������������������� climate after 1934. Writing about politics in inter-war France required not only hard ideological choices, but also hard aesthetic ones. The range of possibilities in relation to which writers made genre choices was complex even within the seemingly specific designations of ‘proletarian’ or ‘revolutionary’ literature. The foregoing discussion has attempted to define the parameters of those possibilities. To summarise: in the context of increasingly dogmatic views in Soviet literary-political circles on what ‘proletarian’ or ‘revolutionary’ literature meant, divergences of opinion emerged in France between, for example, Poulaille, Barbusse and Fréville as to how, by whom and for what purpose such literature should be written. After 1934, French writers on the left had to contend with a newly paradoxical definition of literary-political activity from the Soviet Union: whilst the fact that the fellow-travellers were to be increasingly welcomed and encouraged suggested a new openness and flexibility, the imposition of socialist realism as the only acceptable aesthetic implied a degree of control exercised by the party which was anything 84 Ibid.,

p. 249. La Politique, la culture, p. 106. 86 Ibid., p. 109. 85 ��������� Malraux,



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but open or flexible. 1934 was a turning point in France, marking the beginning of the left’s policy of a united front against the fascist threat, which was to find its fullest political expression in the Popular Front. The debate over the avant-garde and modernism produced an ideologically-based rejection of literary innovation which placed many writers in a difficult relationship to the party, being at once in sympathy with its ideology but unable to accept its aesthetics. All these debates were largely a male preserve. To illustrate: Robin notes that the proportion of female participants at the 1934 Congress was only 3.7 per cent.87 This then was the literary-political context in which Valet, Téry, Thomas, Weiss and Pelletier were writing. In the case of the first three, it is relatively easy to situate their aesthetic output in the context of the debates I have outlined. Valet’s novels correspond closely to Poulaille’s definition of proletarian writing, whilst Téry produced dogmatic, party literature and Thomas’s Le Refus is typical of a post-1934 fellow-traveller, specifically in its interest in the role of the bourgeois intellectual in the revolution. Weiss and Pelletier are more difficult to categorise. Weiss’s position is perhaps closest to that exemplified by Malraux and Gide, not so much as regards any concern for aesthetic innovation, but rather in her foregrounding of the individual. Pelletier’s novels, though ideologically highly specific, are more critical in their political analysis than Téry’s and therefore cannot be classified as party literature; her tendency towards the roman d’anticipation, or science fiction/futuristic genre, and her interest in utopian writing suggest an engagement with revolutionary romanticism. Keeping in mind this schematic understanding of the ways in which these texts can be located within contemporary debates, I now turn to a more detailed analysis of the genre choices which govern them. Bearing witness to working class women’s experience: proletarian literature In a 1934 article entitled ‘Un début: Henriette Valet’ for Le Peuple, Poulaille����������������������������������������������������� reconstructed the story of Henriette Valet’s coming

87 Robin,

Le Réalisme socialiste, p. 38, note 6.

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to writing as an exemplary trajectory for the proletarian writer.88 He first described her authentic working-class origins, education and occupation. He then noted her rejection of the popular romances produced in France between the wars by, for example, Delly. Valet represents precisely this sort of reading matter in Madame 60BIS, suggesting that it affirms the status quo and is powerless to provoke revolt in working class readers (MSB, pp. 42–44). According to Poulaille, it was only when she discovered the works of Barbusse and in particular Romain Rolland, that Valet realised that books can be ������������������������������������������������������������� ‘porteurs d’autre chose que de distraction passagère’�������� (books can provide something other than momentary entertainment). She thus became a ‘good’ reader, according to Poulaille’s value system, able to reject the notion that literature is entertainment, a view Poulaille had vilified in Nouvel âge littéraire.89 Poulaille suggested that she progressed from good reader to good writer because of her contacts with the group of writers and intellectuals around the review Philosophies. For Poulaille, as we have seen, the key criterion of good proletarian writing was the transcription of authentic experience. His account of Valet’s emergence as a novelist locates authentic experience as being both prior to, and the necessary condition of, writing: Ils l’engageaient à parler. Elle avait connu quelques jours de l’enfer des femmes sous les combles de l’Hôtel-Dieu, où elle avait accouché. C’était des bribes de ce livre étonnant qu’est Mme 60bis [sic] qu’elle leur donnait en pâture. Guterman, qui venait me voir, me disait : – Ah ! mon vieux ! tu liras un livre vraiment épatant, j’espère. De la vraie littérature prolétarienne. C’est une jeune femme. Il faudrait que tu la connaisses. On essaie de la faire écrire. – Et ce livre ? lui demandai-je à chaque fois qu’il venait. – Il faudrait taper dessus pour la faire écrire, se désespérait-il�.90 (They persuaded her to talk. For several days she had lived through the hell that only women experience, in one of the attic wards of the ������������ Hôtel-Dieu,� where she had given birth. What she told them was the raw material of her writing, little snatches of what would become that astonishing book, Madame 60BIS. 88 Henry

Poulaille, ‘Un ����������������������������� début: Henriette Valet’, Le Peuple, 5 March 1934. Dossier Henriette Valet, Fonds Bouglé, BHVP. 89 ����������� Poulaille, Nouvel âge littéraire, pp. 104–106. 90 ��������������������������������������� Poulaille, ‘Un début: Henriette Valet’.



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Guterman, who often came to see me, said: ‘My friend! Just wait until you read this really amazing book! It’s real proletarian literature, by a young woman. You must meet her. We’re trying to make her write.’ ‘And what about that book?’ I asked him every time he came to see me. ‘I think we’re going to have to beat it out of her’, he said despairingly.)

The image of Valet as a reluctant writer whose authentic testimony must be beaten out of her by established male intellectuals is a striking one. In addition to the gendered nature of the image (it is the male intellectual who is responsible for the creation of the female writer according to Poulaille’s account), the image encapsulates Poulaille’s view that the production of proletarian literature is simply the process via which raw material is extracted from the worker and laid out on the page. In the case of Valet, Poulaille sanctions the exercise as worthwhile: once he has read the book, he declares that ‘Henriette ����������� Valet est appelée à prendre une des toutes premières places dans la littérature d’expression prolétarienne’��������������������������������� (Henriette Valet is going to be one of the leading exponents of proletarian literature).91 Valet on the other hand did not represent herself as a reluctant writer. She set out her motivations for writing in her response to Aragon’s survey in Commune in 1934, in which writers were asked ‘������������������������������������������������� Pour qui écrivez-vous?��������������������������� ’ (Who do you write for?): Je n’écris certes pas pour ‘m’exprimer’ ni pour trouver une délivrance. Ces formules appartiennent à une époque révolue. J’écris parce que je sens le besoin impériex de faire connaître certains faits et de déranger certains mensonges. Une conscience de classe m’a permis de ne pas tomber dans le désespoir et de dominer les faits dont j’ai directement souffert, en les voyant dans leur ensemble et en les comprenant – du moins il me semble�.92 (I certainly don’t write in order to express myself or to experience some sort of release. Such ideas belong to a past age. I write because I feel a very strong need to make certain facts known and to expose certain lies. Class consciousness has prevented me from succumbing to despair, and has allowed me to get to grips with the facts of which I have been a victim, by seeing and understanding the whole picture, or so it seems to me.)

Poulaille himself could have written these words. Literature is viewed not as self-expression, as in the bad old days of bourgeois literature, but as testimony; testimony reveals the reality of the 91 Ibid. 92

Commune, Nos. 7–8, March–April 1934, p. 769.

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world; testimony is optimistic because it is class conscious rather than politically partisan; testimony is based in first-hand experience. Valet elaborated on the relationships between experience, text and political change in an interview with Etienne Constant in Regards: Si c’était une fiction, se serait sale, me répond avec indignation Henriette Valet. Se servir de la misère et de la dégradation pour composer des scènes réalistes ou pittoresques! quelle malhonnéteté! Si j’ai décrit avec précision tous les détails de cet enfer, le refuge, c’est pour crier toute mon indignation. Je n’ai dit que la vérité�.93 (‘If it were fiction, it would be dirty’, Henriette Valet replied indignantly. ‘Using misery and degradation to invent realistic or picturesque scenes! What dishonesty! I have described precisely all the details of that hell, the refuge, in order to cry out my indignation. I have only told the truth.’)

Here Valet makes an important claim for proletarian literature: that the relationship between the author and the events described fundamentally alters the nature of the text produced. She argues that the very same words would have a different value if the writer had not actually experienced the events. In the absence of authenticity, the text would be dirty and dishonest; the presence of authenticity confers textual acceptability. Valet believed that the authentic proletarian text can produce real social change: ��������������������� ‘Pas un mot, pas une ligne qui n’aient pour but d’aider à changer tout cela, dit fermement Henriette Valet������������������������������������������������������ ’ (‘There is not one word, not one line that does not aim to change this situation’, Henriette Valet said firmly).94 The responses to Madame 60BIS in the pages of the proletarian journal Le Peuple and the communist daily L’Humanité demonstrate the differences of opinion on the left over the question of proletarian writing. Whilst Marcel Lapierre predictably endorsed Poulaille’s view when he greeted the book positively in Le Peuple as ‘��������� un livre de révolte’���������������������������������������������������� (an expression of revolt) based in real experience,95 Jean Fréville criticised Valet’s lack of militancy in L’Humanité: La révolte d’Henriette Valet est une révolte rentrée, celle d’une observatrice et non d’une combattante […] Il y a des travailleuses chez lesquelles 93 ������������������� Etienne Constant, ‘�Madame

60BIS n’a pas tout dit’, Regards, No������������� . 49, 11 May 1934. 94 Ibid. 95 ������������������������������������ Marcel Lapierre, ‘Un livre de femme: Madame 60BIS ’, Le Peuple, 14 March 1934. Dossier Henriette Valet, Fonds Bouglé, BHVP.



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l’oppression ne peut pas ne point créer la révolte. Cette révolte des femmes, nous ne la voyons pas. Voilà pourquoi nous disons que, malgré le grand talent de l’auteur, son livre est unilatéral […] Henriette Valet, qui a su  ‘éveiller le désespoir’, saura aller plus loin et nous rejoindre.96 (Henriette Valet’s revolt is a suppressed revolt. It is the revolt of someone who watches the fight, not of someone who participates in it […] For some working-class women, oppression cannot but lead to revolt. But we do not see this female revolt. That is why we believe that despite the considerable talent of the author, her book is one-sided […] Henriette Valet has certainly ‘provoked despair’; she will be able to go further and become one of us.)

Fréville shows exactly the combination of dogmatism and openness one would expect from L’Humanité around this date: whilst he is at pains to point out that more militancy is required from a novelist hoping to find favour with communist literary critics, his ‘could do better’ assessment implies that a welcome would willingly be extended to writers who showed themselves capable of making just a little bit more of an ideological effort. The extent to which critics read Valet’s novel as an example of women’s writing is debatable. Poulaille’s account of Valet’s coming to writing does not foreground gender; as an exemplary narrative, it could stand for the experience of any proletarian writer, male or female. The two reviews I have cited by Fréville and Lapierre, however, do point to gender in their titles. ���������������������� Fréville’s ‘Maternité et capitalisme’���������������������������������������������������� refers straightforwardly to content. Fréville does not elaborate on the link between Valet’s real-life experience and the situations she describes, no doubt in an attempt to distance himself from Poulaille’s proletarian school. In fact, his designation of Valet as an ‘observer’ situates her as external to the narrative. That Fréville uses the concluding paragraphs of his review to assert (optimistically, and without proof) that, in the USSR, ������ ‘[l]e monstrueux avilissement de la femme en régime capitaliste, dont Henriette Valet nous a retracé l’effroyable tableau, a disparu avec la victoire prolétarienne’������������������������������������������� (the appalling degradation of women under a capitalist regime, the portrait of which Henriette Valet has painted for us, has disappeared with the victory of the proletariat) leaves the reader with the impression that Valet has achieved a work of journalistic objectivity rather than a novel produced out of her own 96 ������������������������������������������� Jean Fréville, ‘Maternité et capitalisme’,

L’Humanité,��������������� 30 April 1934.

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physical experience of being a woman.97 Whilst Fréville obviously cannot deny the gender specificity of the novel’s subject matter, he ignores the possibility that the novel’s perspective on the problem might be a specifically female one. By contrast, Lapierre’s title, ‘���������������������������� Un livre de femme’���������� – a book by a woman, or, a woman’s book – immediately suggests that the perspective of the text is gendered. Of course, as I have already suggested, the difference is ideological: whilst Le Peuple’s interest was precisely in the author’s experience, L’Humanité wanted firstly to suggest that the message was more important than its source, and secondly to express the orthodox communist view that women’s oppression was a question of ideology rather than of gender, and would therefore disappear once the revolution was achieved. Hence Lapierre can go much further than Fréville in underlining the specificity of women’s oppression under capitalism, arguing notably that ����������������������������������������������������������������� ‘[Valet] a voulu, avant tout, définir ce point d’intersection où la maternité rejoint la misère’������������������������������������ (above all, Valet wanted to define the point of intersection between maternity and poverty). Here Lapierre isolates the defining characteristic of Valet’s novel. Whilst she adopts Poulaille’s views on how and why literature should be written, she implicitly refuses to accept ‘proletarian’ as a unitary category when she shows that women’s experience of proletarian misery is very different to that of men. She uses ‘proletarian writing’ – the expression of working class experience from a critical, but not politically dogmatic perspective – as a startingpoint, but problematises the very category on which Poulaille’s theory rests. This is not to say that Valet seeks to suggest that there is any meaningful solidarity between women over and above class distinctions: her text sets out to prove that women experience their bodies differently according to class. Madame 60BIS could no more have been written by a bourgeois woman than by a working class man.98 Valet shows that there are important differences between categories of proletarians just as she shows that there are great divisions between women according to class, nationality, religion and so on. In the context of second wave feminism of the 1970s 97 Ibid. 98 In

his review of Madame 60BIS, Edouard Peisson refers to ‘������������������� ce courage qui lui fait écrire certaines pages que nous n’aurions pas écrites, nous autres hommes’������� (that courage which led her to write certain pages which we men would not have written). Europe, No. 138, May 1934, 290–92 (p. 292).



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and its problematic insistence on ‘female experience’ as a coherent category, Valet’s analysis seems progressive: her novel is based on the premise that whilst all women share something (their bodies) and all proletarians share something (their poverty and oppression), different individuals are placed differently within and across these categories. A comparison of the reviews by Fréville and Lapierre suggests that Poulaille’s concept of proletarian writing offered more scope both for a gender-sensitive reading of literature by women, and for the production of texts expressing the specificity of a woman’s situation, than did mainstream communist criticism. Poulaille did not pursue such a line of analysis in Nouvel âge littéraire: although he does discuss two women writers, Marguerite Audoux and Neel Doff, his account consistently prioritises class over gender, almost to the exclusion of the latter. But since Poulaille sought to remove the socio-cultural barriers which had previously separated the proletariat from writing, his approach could be extended to women writers, excluded from cultural traditions on the basis of gender rather than, or as well as, class. In a literary climate which had not yet theorised in any sustained fashion the potential difference of women’s writing other than in the most stereotypical terms, Poulaille’s proletarian school provided a space to acknowledge the possibility of a textual production specific to women. For Poulaille, writing was based solely in the expression of an individual’s particular insertion into society and culture, and was divorced from any aesthetic expectations as regards the writer’s access to existing cultural norms and traditions. Poulaille’s theory of literature raised fewer problems of exclusion and inclusion for women writers, since it involved neither the creation of a new aesthetic tradition (such as socialist realism) nor membership of a particular party. As Nelly Wolf has pointed out: Les communists privilégient l’analyse du référent, la réalité sociale devant être soumise, au préalable, à une grille de lecture marxiste. Quant aux prolétariens, ils prêtent avant tout attention à la situation de communication, la parole ouvrière étant pour eux le premier critère de classement: c’est l’identité de l’écrivain qui garantit l’authenticité du témoignage, et seule cette authenticité compte�.99 99 ������������ Nelly Wolf,

Le Peuple dans le roman français de Zola à Céline (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), pp. 57–58.

70

Forgotten Engagements (For the communists, the analysis of the referent is the most important thing. The starting point is a reading of social reality through the prism of Marxism. As for the proletarian school, they are primarily interested in the communicative situation, since working-class self-expression is for them the most important and defining criterion: the identity of the author guarantees the authenticity of the testimony, and it is only this authenticity which is important.)

Poulaille’s theories provided Valet with a justification for writing; her particular contribution was to highlight gender as a significant context of textual production, and thus to show that the experiences of a working class woman could not straightforwardly be assimilated into the sexless universal ‘proletarian’. A ‘compagne de route’: politics and the Bildungsroman Edith Thomas’s memoirs and her contributions to Commune contain sufficient evidence on which to base a reconstruction of her literary-political trajectory in the inter-war period.100 In 1934, membership of the AEAR was a means for Thomas to ��������������� ‘faire le saut de la bourgeoisie au prolétariat ou du moins un premier acte de rupture’ (�TC, p. 46) (escape from the bourgeoisie into the proletariat, or at least, the first stage in that process). Her first novel having been championed by the right-wing press, she resolved, in defiance, to locate herself explicitly on the left (TC, pp. 44–46). This she did via her letter to Aragon, ‘������������������������������������������� La position sentimentale’������������������ (The Sentimental Approach), which was published in Commune in May along with Vaillant-Couturier’s reply, ‘Votre ����������������� place est à�� nos ����������������������� côtés’������������� (You Belong With Us).101 However, her initial association with the group proved short-lived: Thomas officially left the AEAR in November 1934 (TC, pp. 49–53).102 That she joined the AEAR shortly before the Moscow Congress (17 August–1 September 1934), and left shortly afterwards, suggests that socialist realism on the Soviet model, as 100 See

Kaufmann, Edith Thomas. A Passion for Resistance, Chapter 3, ‘ “To Rediscover a Reason to Live” ’, pp. 44–55 and Chapter 4, ‘Fellow Traveling and its Discontents’, pp. 56–66. 101 Edith Thomas, ‘��������������������������� La Position sentimentale’��, Commune, No. 9, March–April 1934, pp. 865–70. See also Thomas, Le Témoin compromis,����������� pp. 47–48. 102 Dorothy Kaufman quotes from Thomas’s resignation letter, dated 30 November 1934, in Le Témoin compromis, p. 55.�



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the French communists understood it in the mid 1930s, did not provide an answer to Thomas’s literary-political needs. Thomas had contributed to the debate around Aragon’s survey, ‘����������������� Pour qui écrivezvous?������������������������������������������������������������ ’ in the form of a speech at a meeting during the summer of 1934, and cites this meeting as the occasion of her rupture with the AEAR (TC, pp. 49–53).103 In her speech, Thomas rejected the sort of utilitarian, message-focused literature which communism was trying to create. In direct contrast to Valet’s politically orthodox answer to the survey, Thomas defined writing primarily in terms of the writer’s individual need for self-expression – as ‘graphomania’, as she called it. She rejected propagandistic literature and the roman à thèse on aesthetic grounds, conceding only that ‘un ������������������ romancier est amené à envisager les problèmes contemporains comme n’importe qui et l’attitude adoptée à leur égard réagira évidemment sur la façon de traiter un sujet’ (�TC, p. 51) (a novelist has to address contemporary issues just like anyone else and the attitude taken to these issues will of course have an effect on the way a subject is treated). She had a clear view of the best way to convert the bourgeoisie to the left: Leur suggérer, par la sincérité des tâtonnements d’un esprit analogue au leur, que toutes leurs valeurs, même du point de vue de l’individu, le seul qui leur importe, ne sont pas aussi certaines qu’ils le croient, leur montrer l’illusion d’une liberté qui a pour corollaire l’esclavage du plus grand nombre, est un moyen efficace de les amener peut-être à regarder de votre côté.��(TC, p. 52) (Suggest to them, via the sincerity of the attempts of someone like them, that none of their values are quite as indisputable as they think, even from the only point of view which really matters to them, that of the individual. Show them that a freedom which results in the enslavement of the many is an illusion. This is an effective way to try to bring them round to your way of thinking.)

This is exactly what Thomas attempted in Le Refus. In 1935, still finding the AEAR uncongenial, Thomas chose the newspaper Vendredi as a means of making manifest her support for the nascent Popular Front (TC, pp. 57–58). Vendredi, founded and directed by writers who supported the Popular Front without 103 Thomas reproduces the text of

article to Commune on this topic.

the speech here. She did not contribute a written

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being formally affiliated to any party, did not seek to peddle one particular line on the relationship between politics and literature.104 However, the AEAR was moving with the times. The period between Thomas’s first, brief period of association with the AEAR (1934) and the publication of Le Refus (1936) spans the change of direction embraced by the French left as it moved towards the Popular Front ethos of the defence of culture and a broad-based left-wing association against fascism. The more tolerant approach which the left in general and the AEAR in particular had adopted by 1936 was much closer to Thomas’s view of engaged writing. This was the context in which Thomas felt able to renew her contact with the AEAR and Commune. She made her first contribution to the journal’s literary reviews section in May 1936, and in July, Commune published an extract from Le Refus. Thereafter, Thomas became a regular contributor to the reviews section, publishing a total of nineteen book reviews between January 1937 and the journal’s final number in September 1939. By 1936, Thomas was prepared to define literature in terms which suggest something other than graphomania:������������������������������������������� ‘Je ne concevais la littérature que comme une forme d’engagement’ �(TC, p. 58) (I saw literature only as a form of commitment). This view of writing is confirmed in an autobiographical note in Thomas’s hand, dated 1945, held in the archives of the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, in which she writes: �‘Le Refus, publié aux Editions Sociales Internationales, est une profession de foi, un engagement: “Peut-être deviendrais-je capable de rendre témoignage à la vérité la plus humaine, c’est-à-dire d’aider à la faire”105 et la coucherais-je en livre’��(Le Refus, published with ���������������������������������������������������������� Editions Sociales Internationales������������������������� [a communist publishing house], is a profession of faith. ‘Perhaps I will become able to bear witness to the most human truth, that is, to help realise it’, and I would do this in the form of a book). However, Thomas was still suspicious of politically utilitarian writing. In Le Témoin compromis, she expresses doubts about her own ability to use literature as engagement, and suggests that her journalism fulfilled this function 104 On

Vendredi, see Geraldi Leroy and ������������ Anne Roche, Les Ecrivains et le front populaire (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des sciences politiques, 1986),� pp. 97–128. 105 Thomas here quotes the last lines of Le Refus, thus placing Brigitte’s words in her own mouth.



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more successfully than her fiction. She was clearly pleased with the new and more political approach to writing she had adopted in Le Refus, stating that ‘je ������������������������������������������������� prenais un nouveau départ et cette fois dans une direction qui semblait me mener quelque part’��(TC, p. 63) (I was making a new start, and this time in a direction which seemed to be leading me somewhere). Yet Thomas also laments here her inability to sustain this literary/political renaissance. She addressed the problem of political literature in the context of an article in Commune to commemorate the recently deceased Russian novelist Maxim Gorki: J’en suis arrivé à attacher une telle importance à l’éthique personnelle que la fidelité m’apparaît comme la condition nécessaire de toute œuvre valable. ‘L’homme’ et ‘l’œuvre’ ne peuvent être qu’artificiellement séparés : ils forment une unité vivante. C’est aussi bien à l’opposé de l’art pour l’art, que de l’art utilisé pour une fin immédiate.106 (I have come to attach so much importance to personal ethics that being faithful to oneself seems to me to be the necessary precondition of any worthwhile work of art. The separation of ‘the man’ and ‘the work’ is artificial – they form a living whole. This is as much an objection to art-forart’s-sake as it is an objection to the use of art for a specific purpose.)

Like most left-wing writers of the period, Thomas struggled to find a literary path between propaganda and pure aestheticism. Unsurprisingly, the problem of political literature was not one which Thomas resolved easily. This is perhaps proved by the fact that Le Refus is her only political roman à thèse. It should be pointed out that this is a designation Thomas would have rejected. She concludes a 1939 review of a novel by the German woman writer Irmgard Keun as follows: Le régime s’y trouve irrémédiablement condamné, non pas d’un point de vue politique ou idéologique nettement exprimé, mais en se plaçant sur le plan de la vie de tous les jours, le seul qui importe à la moitié des hommes. Cela va beaucoup plus loin et semble plus efficace que le roman  ‘à thèse’, quel qu’il soit�.107

106

Commune, No. 36, August 1936, p. 1463. This text was one of a range of contributions paying homage to Gorki. 107 Edith Thomas, review of Irmgard Keun’s Après minuit, Commune, No. 70, June 1939, p. 745.

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Forgotten Engagements (In the book the regime [i.e. the Third Reich] is condemned absolutely, not from a neatly expressed political or ideological point of view, but by the description of everyday life, which is what is important to a significant proportion of people. That takes one much further and is much more effective than any sort of ‘������ roman à�� thèse’.)  ���������

If I describe Thomas’s text as a roman à thèse, I use the term after Susan Suleiman in the non-pejorative sense which permits a rather greater degree of literary sophistication than Thomas would have understood by this designation. What Thomas is rejecting here is the dogmatic excesses and literary naivety of Soviet socialist realism, of which Le Refus is not guilty. Perhaps Le Refus� should then be described as a Popular Front novel rather than as a socialist realist text. What is clear is that the Popular Front context provided a new and more positive framework for Thomas’ literary activities; whilst she could not resolve the problems and contradictions inherent in the relationships between the Popular Front, socialist realism, the roman à thèse �������������������������������������������������� and committed literature, she did find a literary voice through which to express her ideological commitments, and the resultant novel is certainly comparable to the achievements of Nizan or Aragon. Thomas chose the Bildungsroman, or novel of apprenticeship, in order to write fiction about politics.108 In this choice, she is entirely consistent with her own definition of literature as being true to its author, for via Le Refus, she was expressing her own Bildung, her attempt to free herself from her class of origin in favour of the working class.109 In a recent study, Claire Marrone has identified coincidences between the genres of Bildungsroman and autobiography in nineteenth- and twentieth-century women’s 108 On

the relationship between the Bildungsroman and the roman à thèse, see Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions, Chapter 2, ‘The Structure of Apprenticeship’, pp. 63–100. 109 This is what Guilloux refers to as a ‘����������������������������������������������� littérature de rupture’������������������������ (literature of rupture – i.e. of rupture from the bourgeoisie, to join the working class) or, as Nizan calls it, referring to Guilloux’s article, a ‘����������������������������������������������� littérature de l’étape������������������������� ’ (literature of process – i.e. the process of breaking away from the bourgeoisie). Louis Guilloux, ‘Le Refus’, par Edith Thomas, Ce soir, 12 March 1937; Nizan,������������������������� ‘Littérature féminine’. Thomas states in Le Témoin compromis that Le Refus is not an autobiography, but notes that ‘les questions qui se posent pour [Brigitte] étaient celles qui se posaient pour moi’ (the questions which [Brigitte] faces are the ones which I myself faced) (p. 57).



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writing.110 Recent research, including that of Marrone, suggests however that the choice by a woman writer of the Bildungsroman might be problematic in gender terms. According to Gayle Greene, women tend to tell cyclical stories which repeat and revise the past, rather than creating chronologically linear narratives: In fact, if there is a ‘female form’ in Western literary representations, it is the circle – although I am by no means suggesting a biologistic analogy between physiology and textuality (women are round and so are their narratives). But the linear sequence of traditional quests and Bildungsroman plots have struck many feminist critics and writers as formally inappropriate to female experience.111

I do not want here to enter into the debate on the theoretical possibility, or desirability, of claiming the circle or the cycle as a model for female expression. I want instead to explore the contradiction between Greene’s suggestion that the Bildungsroman is not appropriate to women’s writing, and the fact that both Edith Thomas and Simone Téry used the notion of Bildung to explore and express female political commitment. It is certainly the case that the classic Bildungsroman has traditionally been exclusively the work of male authors, and has described male apprenticeships. There is however some distance between the assertion that the Bildungsroman is a male narrative tradition and the notion that it is ‘formally inappropriate to female experience’. It is precisely in the space between those two notions that Edith Thomas appropriates the Bildungsroman for her own ends. Thomas was reluctant to theorise literature in terms of gender. She had absolutely no patience with the sort of women’s literature which conformed to the stereotype to which Nizan refers in his 1937 review of Thomas’s and Valet’s novels. Reviewing Clarisse Francillon’s Coquillage,������������������� Thomas exclaimed: Mais Bon Dieu! quand donc les femmes penseront-elles à autre chose qu’à un homme? Quand auront-elles une existence autonome en dehors de

110 Claire

Marrone, Female Journeys. Autobiographical Expressions by French and Italian Women (Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood Press, 2000). 111 �������� Greene, Changing the Story, p. 15.

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Forgotten Engagements l’amour, ce qui, après tout, n’empêche pas l’amour? C’est tout le problème de la littérature féminine. Et pas seulement de la littérature�.112 (But for goodness sake! when will women ever start to think about something other than a man? When will they have an autonomous existence outside of love, which doesn’t, after all, preclude love? This is the main problem of women’s literature. And not just literature.)

Thomas was frustrated because women writers often failed to exercise their choice not to conform to the stereotype. In Le Témoin compromis, Thomas clearly states her opposition to a gendered approach to literature: Ainsi les critiques littéraires aiment à grouper les romans de femmes pour en rendre compte, comme s’il y avait une littérature féminine et une littérature masculine, alors qu’il y a seulement une bonne et une mauvaise, quel que soit le sexe de l’auteur. (�TC, p. 118) (Thus literary critics like to group women’s novels together in order to discuss them, as if there were a female literature and a male literature, when in fact there is only good literature and bad literature, whatever the sex of the author.)

If there is no inherently male/masculine literature, then women are not obliged to write like Francillon, and the Bildungsroman is straightforwardly available to all (good) writers. But Thomas’s protestation is optimistic. Thomas was caught between the desire, which she expresses here, to see gender as insignificant, and an appreciation that women, especially politically committed women, experience the world differently to men, and are treated differently by the world according to their sex. It is, in my view, this combination of idealism and realism which led Thomas to use a traditionally male literary genre in order to express a specifically female experience. Refusing to be excluded on the grounds of sex from a particular form of writing, she nonetheless wished to use that form to express a female political trajectory. The very existence of Le Refus proves Thomas wrong in her assertion that women’s writing is no different from men’s. How then is Thomas’s use of the Bildungsroman different from that of male Popular Front writers? There is a body of 112 Edith

Thomas, review of Clarisse ���������������������� Francillon’s Coquillage, Commune, No. 53, January 1938, p. 606.



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feminist scholarship, dating from the 1980s and 1990s, which asks precisely whether there is a female Bildungsroman, and, if so, how it differs from the male tradition.113 Such studies have tended to read novels by women previously excluded from the genre in order to revise or extend the boundaries of the category beyond its canonical definitions.114 This approach will not assist us in understanding Thomas’s novel, because her strategy (and it is a strategy which indicates a conscious awareness of the conventional rules of the genre) is to produce a typical Bildung structure, but to replace the male hero with a female one. Brigitte’s story corresponds closely to Jerome Buckley’s account of the classic Bildungsroman plot, as I shall demonstrate by intercalating Brigitte’s trajectory into Buckley’s outline:115 A child of some sensibility grows up in the country or in a provincial town, where he finds constraints, social and intellectual, placed upon the free imagination. [Brigitte has in fact grown up in Paris, but in the no less repressive atmosphere of the bourgeois family; although her childhood predates the opening of the text, it is re-inscribed symbolically via the representation of her younger sister Annie]. His family, especially his father, proves doggedly hostile to his creative instincts or flights of fancy, antagonistic to his ambitions, and quite impervious to the new ideas he has gained from unprescribed reading. [Brigitte’s father is a bourgeois capitalist who is hostile to her nascent left-wing ideas]. His first schooling, even if not totally inadequate, may be frustrating insofar as it may suggest options not available to him in his present setting. [Brigitte’s older sister, now a scientist, shows that a good bourgeois education does not free the bourgeois female from conventional femininity]. He therefore, sometimes at quite an early age, leaves the repressive atmosphere of home (and also relative innocence), to make his way independently in the city (in English novels, usually London). [Brigitte leaves home because of her illness]. There his real ‘education’ begins, not only his preparation for a 113

Laura Sue Fuderer’s The Female Bildungsroman in English. An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism (New York: Modern Languages Association of America, 1990) is a useful resource. Susan Fraiman’s Unbecoming Women. British Women Writers and the Novel of Development (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) also contains a useful bibliography; Fraiman’s first chapter, ‘Is there a female Bildungsroman?’ (pp. 3–31) provides an overview of some of the issues raised by feminist critics in the context of this debate. 114 See for example Fraiman’s Unbecoming Women, and Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland (eds.), The Voyage In. Fictions of Female Development, (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1983). 115 Jerome Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 17–18. Fuderer quotes this passage in The Female Bildungsroman, pp. 1–2.

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Forgotten Engagements career but also – and often more importantly – his direct experience of urban life. [Brigitte’s illness has provided the point of rupture; it is her reentry into the city which is the beginning of her ‘real “education”’]. The latter involves at least two love affairs or sexual encounters, one debasing [Pierre], one exalting [Anna, although the exultation is only a potentiality since Anna refuses the relationship],116 and demands that in this respect and others the hero reappraises his values. [It is (Brigitte’s rejection of) the (politically) debasing relationship which provokes Brigitte to reappraise her values].

However, despite the novel’s structural identity with the male template, which is a function of Thomas’s rejection of a gendered notion of writing, Thomas cannot escape the fact that the protagonist’s sex necessarily modifies the Bildungsroman. As Marrone argues, ‘when the protagonist of a Bildungsroman is a woman, her passage from youth to adulthood consists of different obstacles from those that men encounter, and society has different expectations of her’.117 Susan Fraiman shows in what respects the template Buckley describes is a male one. Apprenticeship, argues Fraiman, implies an ultimate passage to mastery, a relationship with a mentor, and the free choice of activity in the public/professional domain. But traditionally, culture has not granted women the authority mastery demands; a woman’s relationship to a male mentor, or master, is likely to be a sexualised one; and culture has circumscribed the professional choices open to women. Furthermore, Bildung is generally achieved via travel, and via sexual encounters. A single woman still could not travel alone with impunity in the early twentieth century, and the cultural encoding of extra-marital sexuality was different for men and for women.118 Le Refus modifies the Bildungsroman genre in various ways. Firstly, Brigitte’s female Bildung cannot coincide with the assumption of a conventional gender identity. In male Bildung stories, the hero progresses towards successful conventional masculinity; in the political Bildungsroman – such as �������� Nizan’s 116

Feminist critics have claimed the possibility of female-female relationships as a distinctive feature of the female-authored Bildungsroman. However, we shall see in Chapter 4 that Thomas does not grant any specific political potential to lesbianism in Le Refus but represents all sexual relationships in terms of the danger of inauthenticity. It is for this reason that I do not cite the Brigitte-Anna relationship as a defining feature of the text’s gender specificity. 117 Marrone, Female Journeys, p. 16. See also Abel et al., The Voyage In, p. 5. 118 Fraiman, Unbecoming Women, Chapter 1, ‘Is there a female Bildungsroman?’ , pp. 1–31.



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La Conspiration – successful adult masculinity is equated with successful commitment.119 But there is nothing in the conventional construction of a female gender identity which would permit the equation of ‘successful’ conventional femininity with successful political commitment: conventional femininity precludes activities such as politics in the public domain. Brigitte is obliged to reject conventional femininity, in the form of marriage and motherhood, in order to progress towards political commitment. Secondly, Brigitte’s Bildung results not in solidarity but in solitude. Brigitte’s sense of solitude escalates as the novel progresses, because she cannot find positive role models – mentors – in any of the men or women she meets; as a politicised woman in her bourgeois milieu, she is too different, an oddity. The goal of the conventional Bildungsroman protagonist is ‘a responsible role in a friendly social community’.120 In the political Bildungsroman, the protagonist tends to find fraternity in shared commitment. But although at the end of Le Refus, Brigitte is accepted by the communists as a camarade at a meeting, this is a false ending: the novel actually finishes with a solitary Brigitte setting sail for England to work as a governess. Brigitte’s positive assumption of solitude at the end of the novel is the means via which she will ultimately carve out a role for herself in society. Marrone notes that ‘the protagonist of the traditional novel of formation is meant to mature and assimilate his or her societal role’.121 Brigitte’s dilemma is founded on the absence of such a pre-existing role. Thirdly then, Brigitte’s Bildung is a process of creation rather than of assimilation. Finally, although Brigitte does achieve her Bildung via sexual encounters and via travel, these motifs function differently than in the male Bildungsroman. Brigitte’s Bildung results not in the positive assumption of a sexual identity, as in the case of a male apprentice, but rather in the rejection of her sexuality, as we shall see in detail in Chapter 4. Brigitte claims the right to travel alone at the very end of the novel. For a woman, such a breakthrough is the goal of the apprenticeship and represents a contravention of social conventions; for a man, travel is the means

119 See

Angela Kershaw, ‘Gender, Sexuality and Politics in Paul �������� Nizan’s La Conspiration ’, Modern Language Review 98.1 (January 2003), 27–43. 120 Abel et al., The Voyage In, p. 6. 121 Marrone, Female Journeys, p. 21.

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to achieve another goal, and is part of the range of activities from which society allows him freely to choose. Le Refus proves Gayle Greene both wrong and right. The Bildungsroman certainly can be an appropriate form for the expression of female experience. However, in the hands of a woman writer, the genre must be transformed. It may, as in the example of Le Refus, remain structurally faithful to the male model. However, because the female subject is placed differently in relation to the defining elements of that structure – such as mastery, mentors, choice, travel and sexuality – the female Bildungsroman will necessarily tell a different story abut the relationship between the individual and society. It seems that Thomas felt less excluded, as a woman, from the narrative tradition of the Bildungsroman than she did from political activism. It is perhaps because narrative tradition represented the lesser of two exclusions for Thomas, that she was able to refuse that exclusion and make the Bildungsroman work to express a female apprenticeship. Partisan literature: politics, the romance and reportage We noted earlier that the description of socialist realism as ‘realist in form, socialist in content’ was difficult both to define and to apply. Thomas’s use of the Bildungsroman exemplifies a strategy adopted by writers who wanted to produce ‘revolutionary’ and aesthetically successful literature: they would ‘bolt on’ another genre. Thus many texts which one might classify as socialist realist, in the sense that they are broadly realist novels with a left-wing message, draw their aesthetic inspiration from an existing genre, such as the Bildungsroman; the work of Nizan is another example. Simone Téry also adopted this strategy. In Le Cœur volé, Vera’s trajectory is a negative Bildung: she fails to adopt the ideology recommended by the text. In Où l’aube se lève on the other hand, Jeanette completes a positive apprenticeship by embracing communism and working actively for the republican cause in Spain. However, in structural terms, Téry’s novels rely primarily on the romance narrative rather than on the Bildungsroman. Feminist analyses of the nineteenthcentury romance plot have highlighted two features of the genre which are key to an understanding of Téry’s novels. Firstly, the nineteenth-century romance plot is defined by its ending. There



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are only two possible outcomes for the heroine – marriage, which represents successful integration into existing social structures, or death, which represents a punishment for the refusal of such structures, via adultery, for example. Secondly, Bildung and romance cannot coexist: although the heroine may set out on a quest for some form of autonomous self-fulfilment, that quest is ultimately repressed either by marriage, if the protagonist is prepared to renounce her quest, or death, if the protagonist refuses to renounce her quest.122 Rachel Blau DuPlessis defines the romance plot in the following terms: As a narrative pattern, the romance plot muffles the main female character, represses quest, valorizes heterosexual as opposed to homosexual ties, incorporates individuals within couples as a sign of their personal and narrative success. The romance plot separates love and quest, values sexual asymmetry, including the division of labor by gender, is based on extremes of sexual difference, and evokes an aura around the couple itself. In short, the romance plot, broadly speaking, is a trope for the sex-gender system as a whole. Writing beyond the ending means the transgressive invention of narrative strategies, strategies that express critical dissent from the dominant narrative.123

According to DuPlessis, twentieth-century women writers have attempted to respond to the challenge laid down by the nineteenthcentury romance plot by writing endings in which love and quest are not mutually exclusive options for female protagonists. Téry’s depiction of love has more in common with the nineteenth century romance plot as DuPlessis understands it than with the inter-war genre of popular romantic fiction.124 Written predominantly by female authors, published in collections and targeted at a working class female readership, the inter-war popular romance was, as Jennifer Milligan’s research has demonstrated, highly conservative in both its political messages and its representations of gender.125 Such texts aimed at linguistic and structural simplicity, 122 See

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending. Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), Chapter 1, ‘Endings and Contradictions’, pp. 1–19. See also Greene, Changing the Story, pp. 12–14. 123 Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending, p. 5. 124 On the genesis of the romance plot in the nineteenth century in France and in England, see Milligan, The Forgotten Generation, pp. 146–48. 125 Ibid., Chapter 5, ‘Re-reading the Romance’, pp. 141–73.

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sought emotional identification between writer and reader, limited the active involvement of the reader in the reading process, and often preached a moral or religious lesson (as in the work of Colette Yver).126 Women on the left were suspicious of this genre: we have noted that Valet is critical of it in Madame 60BIS. Milligan concludes that the popular romance was very resistant to any kind of progressive rewriting on the part of female authors.127 Téry’s work suggests that the opposition between romance and quest exemplified in the romance plots of the nineteenth century realist novel offered more possibilities for revision: it is via a critical engagement with this tradition that Téry succeeds, in DuPlessis’s words, in writing beyond the ending, that is to say, in producing a text which imagines the mutual coexistence of romance and quest. DuPlessis argues that death functions as closure in the romance plot ‘as the price for the character’s sometimes bemused destabilizing of the limited equilibrium of respectable female behaviour – in her acceptance of the wrong man, a non-hero, or in her non-acceptance of a right one’.128 Téry’s closure of Le Cœur volé with Vera’s death must be understood in terms of her rewriting of what constitutes ‘respectable female behaviour’. The heroine of the romance plot is punished by death for her decision to pursue a course of action (a quest) which does not correspond to norms of female behaviour. Vera makes just such a choice when she decides to experiment with political commitment, but it is not for this that she is punished by the narrative, since in Téry’s novel (unlike its nineteenth-century models) female quest is valorised. It is rather for her non-acceptance of the right man – or rather, her inability to make him accept her – that she is punished. Vera cannot achieve romance with Pierre because she cannot accept his ideology, because she is, after all, only an anarchic and disorderly bourgeoise (CV, p. 388). In that the quest plot coincides exactly with the romance plot in the novel, Téry can be said to disrupt the conventions of the romance genre. However, the negative apprenticeship structure means that the text does not fundamentally disrupt the narrative structures of the romance plot: Vera is punished by death for her failure to align herself with the correct man, and for her failure to correspond to 126 Ibid.,

pp. 148–55. p. 168. 128 Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending, p. 16. 127 Ibid.,



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Téry’s understanding of ‘respectable female behaviour’, namely, communist commitment as opposed to bourgeois individualism. It is only when Téry tries her hand at a positive apprenticeship narrative that she manages seriously to contest the romance plot, to write beyond the ending. In Où l’aube se lève,���������������������������� Téry contravenes the rules in the same manner as she had in Le Cœur volé by ��������������������� making Jeanette’s quest synonymous with romance. However, because in this novel the quest is successful, the text is open-ended. It ends not with the subservience of the female protagonist to the male via marriage, but with a new model for a successful romantic relationship between a heterosexual couple based on shared commitment, in which neither party contains the other in stereotypical gender roles. The novel ends with the female protagonist prepared to continue both her quest and her love affair; she faces the future unsure of where it will take her. Jeanette’s story is ‘terminal’ according to Margaret Attwood’s redefinition of the word as ‘not “the end of the line, where you get off ” but “where you can get on to go somewhere else”’.129 The ‘terminal’ is, appropriately enough, a journey, as in Le Refus. Both Le Refus and Où l’aube se lève achieve what Greene terms ‘a process of re-envisioning which allows an evolution and alteration of desire and consciousness’,130 but only Téry does this via a combination of quest and romance: Thomas reiterates the conventional mutual exclusivity of Bildung and love when she deprives Brigitte of successful affective relationships. In addition to the romance, Téry also engaged with the genre of reportage. As Myriam Boucharenc and Joëlle Deluche note in their introduction to a recent volume on Littérature et reportage, ‘[l]’interpénétration des milieux littéraires et journalistiques s’intensifie dans l’entre-deux-guerres avec l’apogée du grand reportage’������������������������������������������������������������ (the interpenetration of literary and journalistic circles became more pronounced between the wars with the heyday of the book-length work of reportage).131 Reportage was another way in which a text could be infused with ideology: the partisan reporting of events witnessed directly by the writer was a useful resource for 129 Quoted

in Greene, Changing the Story, p. 13. p. 14. 131 ��������������������������������������������� Myriam Boucharenc and Joëlle Deluche (eds.), Littérature et reportage. Colloque international de Limoges, 26–28 avril 2000, collection Médiatextes (Limoges: Presses Universitaires de Limoges, 2001), p. 8. 130 Ibid.,

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littérature engagée.132 In Téry’s case, the importing of the techniques of the committed journalist into the novel caused critics to condemn the novel as excessively dogmatic. Reviewing Le Cœur volé in Minerva in 1937, Régis-Leroi likened it to������������������������������������ ‘cette sorte de propagande éblouie qui n’admet aucune contradiction’�������������������������������� (that sort of propaganda which permits no contradiction) and condemned its ‘��������������������� mépris de la liberté de pensée’������������������������������� (scorn of freedom of thought).133 Writing in the 1980s, Jeannine Verdès-Leroux had this to say about Téry: […] l’échec du réalisme socialiste ne tient pas à ses thèmes (La porte du soleil de Simone Téry134 est un mauvais livre et, sur le même sujet, L’Espoir est un livre reconnu […] ) mais à la forme et au fait que l’auteur entend imposer au lecteur le sens unique de son écrit.135 ([…] the failure of socialist realism is not a feature of its thematic content (Simone Téry’s ������� La porte du soleil is a bad book, and L’Espoir is a wellrespected book about the same subject […]) but is a feature of its form and of the fact that the author wants to impose a single reading of the text onto the reader.)

Unlike Malraux’s work, Téry’s novels do indeed exemplify some of the worst ideological excesses of socialist realism. However, in their combination of romance and Bildung, Téry’s novels are formally more interesting than Verdès-Leroux implies. The relevance of gender to the roman-reportage has not been noted by critics of Téry’s work. In his contribution to Boucharenc and Deluche’s collection, Jacques Fontanille develops a semiotics of reportage which stresses the importance of ‘being there’, of being physically present as a witness. Fontanille argues that ‘le �������������������������������������� corps de l’énonciation motive les enchaînements argumentatifs, et authentifie la signature sensorielle du lieu traversé’������������������������������������������������ (the body from which the utterance proceeds is what defines the progression of the argument and authenticates the 132 As

Boucharenc �������������������������������������������� and Deluche note in ibid., p. 13.

133 ������������������������������� Régis-Leroi, ‘Deux romancières à�� l’assaut �������������������������������������� de l’émancipation féminine’, Minerva,

11 July 1937. Dossier Simone Téry, BMD and Dossier Simone Téry, Fonds Bouglé, BHVP. 134 Où l’aube se lève was published under the title La Porte du soleil by �������������� Editions hier et aujourd’hui������������������������������ in 1947. A second edition of La Porte du soleil was published by ���� Les Editeurs français réunis��������� in 1951. 135 ������������������������ Jeannine Verdès-Leroux, Au Service du parti: le parti communiste, les intellectuels et la culture (1944–1956) (Paris: Fayard et Les Editions de Minuit, 1983), pp. 284–85.



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sensory signing of the place travelled through).136 As I shall show in the next chapter, the fact of being housed in a female body prescribes a specific sort of access to action. Even when the female activist has ‘chosen’ journalism – which she might in any case view as a poor second to other forms of action closed to her but open to men – her access to events is determined by her physical sex: Quand nous avons été de retour à Arganda, en lieu sûr, Regler m’a dit : – Tu sais, pendant le déjeuner, nous avons été bombardés! – Pas possible! – Oui. Il y a même deux obus qui ont éclaté sur le talus, à quelques mètres de la maison. – Pourquoi ne m’as-tu rien dit? – Je suis sorti pour tenir conseil avec les camarades, et ils ont dit:  “A quoi ça servira de la prévenir? Il ne faut pas lui faire peur. Il vaut meiux la laisser déjeuner tranquille la petite copine …��� ” (FL, p. 67) (When we were back from Arganda, in safety, Regler said to me: ‘You know, we were bombed during lunch!’ ‘That’s impossible!’ ‘Oh yes. In fact, two grenades exploded on the hill a few metres from the house.’ ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ ‘I went out and asked the comrades what they thought, and they said, “What’s the point in telling her? We mustn’t frighten her. It would be better to let our little friend have her lunch in peace …”’)

Téry’s response, which is not one Thomas would have shared, is to interpret her comrades’ sexism positively as chivalry, and as yet more proof of the irreproachability of the communist combatants : Camarades du front de Madrid, je n’ai passé que quelques heures parmi vous, et grâce à vous je n’ai pas eu peur. Je ne savais pas. Mais vous, il y a des mois que vous êtes là, et vous savez. Et vous, vous n’avez pas peur.��(FL, p. 67) (Comrades on the Madrid front, I only spent a few hours with you, and thanks to you I was not afraid. I didn’t know. As for you, you have been there for months, and you do know. And you are not afraid.)

If we accept, with Fontanille, that being there and seeing are the basis of the true and full testimony which constitutes reportage, 136 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Jacques Fontanille, ‘Quand le corps témoigne: voir, entendre, sentir et être là’ in

Boucharenc and Deluche (eds.), Littérature et reportage, pp. 85–103 (p. 93).

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what we have here is the acceptance, and indeed the glorification, for ideological purposes, by Téry of the fact that her activities as a journalist are limited (‘������������������������������������������� je ne savais pas’�������������������������� ) by her sex. As Delphine Bouit and Marie-José Protais point out in their analysis of ‘��� Le reportage au féminin’�,137 issues of this sort lead us inexorably back to the equality/difference debate: should we value Téry’s témoignage less highly because she saw less of the action in Spain than male journalists? Should we lament the lack of parity of experience? Or should we celebrate the fact that Téry’s perspective on the war was different precisely because she was inserted into it differently, as a woman, and therefore gained a different, but equally valuable impression of the events? The answer to these questions will depend on the reader’s own theoretical position; the fact that it can be posed at all proves at the very least that the experiences on which Téry based her roman-reportage were gendered. This fact manifests itself in Téry’s choice of subject matter, since she cannot report what she has not seen. Thus, whilst L’Espoir gives an insight into issues such as the details of fighting and male-male relationships in a combat situation, Front de la liberté is about day to day life on the front, provides interviews with leaders, and attempts to present the personal angle, and Où l’aube se lève, which rewrites and fictionalises these experiences, shows what a woman can do placed as she is in relation to combat. Malraux’s particular contribution to inter-war French literature lay in a combination of a modernist mode of expression with techniques of reportage and the expression of his own ideological commitments.138 Téry’s first novel, Passagère (1930), �������������������� written and published before her conversion to communism, provides evidence that she was capable of producing aesthetically successful literature using similar techniques. The novel, an elliptical and lyrical evocation of a woman’s journey, was received by Suzanne Normand in the following terms: 137 �������������������������������������������������������������������������� Delphine Bouit and Marie-José Protais, ‘Le reportage au féminin: faits et

intenionnalité’ in ������������������������������� Boucharenc and Deluche (eds.), Littérature et reportage, pp. 69– 82 (pp. 77–78). 138 ������������������������������������������������������������������������ See Maria Teresa de Freitas, ‘Roman et reportage chez André Malraux’ in Boucharenc and Deluche (eds.), Littérature et reportage, pp. 153–65, and Christiane Moatti, ‘L’Histoire dans un roman d’André Malraux: reportage ou mythe?’ in René Garguilo and Aleksander Ablamowicz (eds.), Irruption de l’histoire dans le roman français de l’entre-deux-guerres (Katowice: Université de Silésie, 1986), pp. 117–31.



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[…] la douloureuse incursion au dedans d’elle-même d’une femme qui aime et qui souffre, devant laquelle les images du monde défilent et se défont comme des songes�.139 ([…] the painful interior journey of a woman who loves and who suffers. Images of the world pass before her and disintegrate like dreams.) Il y a là les meilleurs dons du journaliste-né, enrichis et ennoblis de tout ce qu’une admirable sensibilité de femme peut ajouter à la vision des êtres et des choses, de grâce, de tendresse humaine et de signification intime éternelle.140 (It shows the greatest talents of the born journalist, enriched and ennobled by all that an admirable female sensibility can bring to the description of people and things – grace, human tenderness and a very personal meaning which lingers for ever.)

Normand’s notion of a ‘sensibilité ����������������������������������������������� de femme’������������������������� is of the same order as Larnac’s stereotypical view of women’s literature; more perceptive is her appreciation that, in this text, the qualities of journalist and novelist had come together successfully. However, the outside world is, as Normand points out, only a vague and ghostly backdrop to the account of the narrator’s interior journey. Whilst an anti-colonial discourse emerges from certain passages, the text is certainly not a roman à thèse. The text was not received as a political novel: […] le roman de la séparation, roman intérieure où les événements du dehors n’ont pas de prise. C’est l’histoire d’un cœur placé en dehors du temps, en dehors de l’espace […]141 ([…] a novel about separation, a novel about the inner life in which external events have no significance. It is the story of a heart outside of time and outside of space […])

The development of Téry’s genre choices during the 1930s was then completely orthodox in communist terms, reproducing exactly the separation between modernism and commitment enshrined in the resolutions of the 1934 Moscow congress. In a study of Irish 139 Review

of Passagère by Suzanne Normand,� La Femme de France, 29 January 1933. Dossier Simone Téry, BMD. 140 Review of Passagère by Suzanne Normand,� Les Nouvelles littéraires, 22 November 1930. Dossier Simone Téry, Fonds Bouglé, BHVP. 141 ����������������������� Unattributed rev������� iew of Passagère, L’Œuvre, 6 January 1931. Dossier Simone Téry, Fonds Bouglé, BHVP.

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literature published in 1925, Téry had expressed her praise for James Joyce’s Ulysses, and had even noted the ability of this text to combine literary innovation with the representation of social and political realities. Téry did not however recommend Joyce as a model to be emulated, fearing that �������������������������������� ‘n’importe quel pâle jouvenceau croira faire du Joyce en recopiant les catalogues de la Samaritaine ou les notes de sa blanchisseuse’���������������������������������� (any pale youth will think he is doing a Joyce by copying out the Samaritaine’s catalogues or his laundry bills).142 Whilst a concern with style and symbol is evident from Téry’s first novel, her decision to use literature as a means of expressing communist commitment involved a rejection of the modernist literary style she had initially adopted. In the context of the debates over committed literature in France between the wars, it is clear that this decision was entirely ideological. A reading of Passagère, and comparison with a writer such as Malraux, suggests that, aesthetically speaking, her decision was a mistake. A woman’s place in history: autobiography Louise Weiss’s Délivrance also engages with the Bildungsroman and the romance plot. Via her representation of the politician Noémi, Weiss reiterates the conventional separation between quest and romance. At the start of the novel, Noémi’s positive apprenticeship has already taken place – she is a successful and influential political actor on the international stage. In DuPlessis’s terms, she is a hero. However, the price of Noémi’s success has been high: she has sacrificed both love and motherhood, the conventional modes of female experience, and the key elements of the definition of the heroine, which are valued highly by Weiss’s text. Noémi’s story therefore does not disrupt conventional narrative structures: romance and quest remain irreconcilable. Via her representation of Marie, Weiss historicises the romance plot, examining what happens to this archetypal narrative in the specific socio-historical context of inter-war France. Marie fails to achieve either quest or romance, but the reason for her failure is historical rather than personal: the carnage of the First World War has rendered romance 142 ������������� Simone Téry,

L’Ile des bardes. Notes sur la littérature irlandaise contemporaine (Paris: Flammarion, 1925), pp. 202–43, p. 230.



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impossible, because romance depends on the availability of a male subject via which the female subject can define her femininity. So although Weiss’s novel calls into question the feasibility of romance, it does not interrogate critically the basic premises on which it is constructed. Weiss’s genre choices thus reflect her view of gender: neither her political convictions nor the literary form she adopts to express them question fundamentally conventional constructions of femininity. There is then a tension between this aspect of her work and her call for political equality: she both celebrates different ‘femininity’ and uses an egalitarian feminist discourse to argue for the vote. We have seen that the particular modes of political commitment chosen by Valet, Thomas, and Téry inevitably brought them into contact with highly prescriptive theories about how and why political literature can and should be written: Valet wrote in the context of Poulaille’s proletarian school, Thomas in the context of the Popular Front and its welcoming of the bourgeois fellowtraveller, and Téry in the context of dogmatic communism. Weiss’s political commitments were to pacifism, European integration and bourgeois feminism. In the 1920s, she had investigated the ideological solutions proposed by the USSR, and found them wanting; refusing communism, she embraced a centre-left position of which L’Europe nouvelle was representative.143 Her commitments did not therefore imply a particular mode of writing, and her genre choices must be seen as a matter of individual preference rather than of ideological prescription. Délivrance is in a general sense typical of inter-war committed literature in that it is a realist novel which thematises individual identity in the context of collective issues and from a specific ideological viewpoint. However it cannot be assimilated into a specific ‘school’ of committed or ‘revolutionary’ writing. Viewed from one angle, Délivrance is a roman à thèse which recommends pacifism. Viewed from another, it is Weiss’s own story: she is both Noémi, the successful politician, and Marie, the failed romance heroine. The individual – in the person of Louise Weiss – is very 143

Weiss travelled to the USSR in 1921 and published an account of her experiences in L’Europe nouvelle, 17 December 1921 under the title ‘�������������� Cinq semaines ��à �������� Moscou. Récits de la Russie communiste’����� . In Combats pour L’Europe, Weiss explains how she opted for Geneva and the League of Nations rather than for Soviet communism. See in particular pp. 176–83.

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much at the centre of Délivrance: the novel is an example of what Thomas called graphomania, the author’s desire to express herself and her own situation. Such an individualist approach to writing was rejected in the sorts of political milieux ��������������������� frequented by Valet, Téry and Thomas. Louise Weiss, long-time supporter of French republicanism, had no reason to contest the individualist view of literary production which the far left vilified as ‘bourgeois’. In a 1979 radio interview, Weiss presented her impulse to write fiction in terms of graphomania: […] j’ai eu beacoup de plaisir à me libérer de ces carcans que m’avait imposés la profession pour vraiment pouvoir user de toute la palette qui est à la disposition de l’écrivain.144 ([…] I took great pleasure in freeing myself from the constraints imposed on me by the profession [i.e. journalism], so that I could really make use of the whole range of tones which are at the writer’s disposal.)

In Combats pour les femmes, first published in 1970, she describes what her attitude to writing had been in 1934: Etais-je un écrivain? Pas seulement une polémiste? Souvent je me l’étais demandée.Tout à coup, dans ce désastre dont je n’étais pas responsable et où je n’avais rien à faire, sinon que de m’en pénétrer,145 la question revenait me harceler. Oui ou non, un écrivain? Transportée de joie dans le flux et reflux des masses défigurées par leurs passions qui m’entraînaient nulle part, à leur suite, je sentais qu’au-délà de l’engagement, l’art me garderait toujours en appétit de vivre et je me disais qu’un jour je m’essayerais à une grande œuvre. Peut-être ces mémoires.146 (Was I a writer? Not just a polemicist? I had often wondered. Suddenly, in the midst of this disaster for which I was not responsible and in which I had no part, other than to steep myself in it, that question came back to haunt me. Was I a writer or not? I was overcome with joy in the movements of the crowds, disfigured by their emotions, which were leading me nowhere. I felt that beyond commitment, art would always give me the will to live and I said to myself that one day I would try my hand at a great work. These memoirs, perhaps.) 144 Interview

with Louise Weiss by Marie-Claude Leburgue and Vera Florence, Radio Suisse Romande, Lausanne, broadcast on 2 January 1979. The text of the interview is reproduced in Louise Weiss l’Européenne (Lausanne: Fondation Jean Monnet et le Centre de recherches européennes, 1994),���������������������� pp. 455–79 (p. 463). 145 Weiss is referring here to the riots of February 1934. 146 Weiss, Combats pour les femmes, p. 30.



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In both cases the desire for writing is a desire for individual selfexpression rather than a desire to change the world through writing. In both cases, Weiss seems in fact to assert a deliberate separation between the writing of fiction and political commitment: in the 1979 interview, fiction constitutes a liberation from ‘la profession’, that is, politics and journalism, and in the passage from Combats pour les femmes, art is beyond commitment. Interestingly, in neither of the texts quoted does Weiss refer to Délivrance:������������������������� in the interview, Weiss was referring to her later fiction,147 and gives the impression that she had not written any novels before 1951. Did the Louise Weiss of the 1970s want to forget that she had, between the wars, used literature as a vehicle to express her commitment? My hypothesis is that Weiss came to see her earlier fiction as part of her autobiographical project.148 Various pieces of evidence support this view. Passages from Délivrance� appear almost word for word in the early volumes of the memoirs. We know that most of Weiss’s papers and notes were destroyed during the Second World War, meaning that her published work would have constituted her only surviving record of these years.149 As we have noted, Weiss partly bases the character of Noémi on her own life story; conversely, Weiss’s later description of her own political trajectory owes more than a little to her earlier fictional construction of Noémi. The most significant genre choice Weiss made as an imaginative writer was her choice in favour of autobiography. Weiss’s explicitly autobiographical project in the Mémoires� can be read as a narrative response to the woman’s situation she had depicted in Délivrance:������������������������������������� deprived of conventional femininity by her intelligence, her commitment and her historical situation, Weiss’s answer was to write herself aggressively into history. There now exists a considerable body of research relating to women and

147 �������������� Louise Weiss,

Sabine Legrand (Paris: Julliard, 1951, reprinted Paris: Jacques Grancher, 1981) and Dernières voluptés (Paris: Albin Michel, 1979). 148 This argument also obtains in relation to Weiss’s three-volume novel La Marseillaise, published by Gallimard between 1945 and 1947, which deals with the Second World War. 149 �������������� Louise Weiss, La Résurrection du chevalier (Paris: Albin Michel, 1974), pp. 301– 302 and Tempête sur l’occident (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976) p. 19. Some of Weiss’s papers from this period were recovered in 1995 and are now held at the Musée Louise Weiss. See http://www.louise-weiss.org/le_musee_archives.html

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autobiography.150 This research has sought to understand whether, and if so, how, women’s autobiography is quantifiably different from men’s.151 I will not survey it here, since I do not aim to provide an analysis of Weiss’s memoirs as an example of women’s autobiography, but rather to understand her autobiographical impulse in the context of the range of possibilities offered by the inter-war period as regards political writing. Weiss’s Souvenirs d’une enfance républicaine (1937������������ ) certainly tells a story which is specifically female: it is, as Jennifer Milligan points out, ‘about’ women’s education in the France of the Third Republic.152 It has a feminist content in that it brings out the differences in opportunities open to intellectually precocious individuals on the basis of their sex. This negative experience of socially encoded sexual difference pervades Weiss’s entire autobiographical project. It produces a tension between success and failure, which emerges as the filter through which the reader interprets Weiss’s life as she represents it: whilst her life reads as a tremendous success, as a triumph of a woman’s abilities in the male domain of politics, Weiss is also at pains to show that professional success often implied personal failure. The image of Weiss which emerges is that of a woman frustrated both personally and professionally: she could not easily attain her professional goals because they were seen as ‘masculine’ goals, and she could not live out a successful personal life because of her professional identity which was seen to be in contradiction to ‘femininity’. Her autobiography thus represents a negotiation of the gendered public/private divide. The decision to write the book – all six volumes of it – can be read as an attempt to 150

For an overview of this research, see the introduction to Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (eds.), Women, Autobiography, Theory. A Reader (Wisconsin and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998). Two recent works on women and autobiography also offer useful overviews of the critical literature in this area: Linda Anderson, Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century. Remembered Futures (Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1997) and Alex Hughes, Heterographies. Sexual Difference in French Autobiography (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999). 151 This was the question posed by Jelinek in an early incursion into the field. See Estelle C. Jelinek (ed.), Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980). See also Jelinek, The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography (Boston: Twayne, 1986). Milligan seeks to answer the question in the context of inter-war women’s autobiographies in The Forgotten Generation. 152 Milligan, The Forgotten Generation, p. 90ff.



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resist failure. In her biography of Weiss, Célia Bertin notes that Weiss ‘a pris soin de se construire une image cohérente de réussite’ (took ������ 153 great pains to construct an image of success for herself). Weiss achieves this by representing herself as a significant political and, in retrospect, historical, actor: she constructs herself both as a witness to the century, and as someone who helped to shape it. She therefore uses the breadth of her experience to justify her autobiography: in the epitaph which she composes for herself at the end of her memoirs, she is ��������������������������������������� ‘Louise l’Européenne, Une Française du �� XXe siècle���������� ’ (Louise the European, a twentieth-century Frenchwoman), and her memoirs are ‘ce ����������������������������������������������� fresque du siècle que je me suis appliquée à�� peindre’ ��������������� (this ������ tableau of the century which I have tried to paint).154 To write thus is to write against the prevailing stereotype of women’s writing, and of women’s autobiography in particular, which certainly obtained in the inter-war period and which still had currency in the 1970s, as predominantly personal and subjective.155 Weiss writes her life in terms of great events, and in this respect produces the sort of autobiography readers have learned to expect from a high-profile male writer-politician. Her autobiography conforms to the tradition of male autobiography which is based on ‘the mirroring capacity of the autobiographer: his universality, his representativeness, his role as a spokesman for the community’.156 Weiss needed retrospectively to create herself as a successful public and political figure because there were no guarantees that a woman of her generation would be taken seriously as a political player on the national or international stage.157 Weiss’s choice of autobiography can be read from various perspectives as a political act. Firstly, her choice of this culturally encoded genre is a means of legitimising her identity as a politician, 153

Bertin, Louise Weiss, p. 11. Weiss, Tempête sur l’occident, pp. 517, 13. 155 On this point, see Ursula Tidd, Simone de Beauvoir: Gender and Testimony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 61–86 (pp. 63, 85). 156 Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenk, Life/Lines, quoted in Marrone, Female Journeys, p. 7. 157 On this point, see Angela Kershaw, ‘Women’s Writing and the Creation of Political Subjectivities in Inter-war France. Louise Weiss: Novelist, Autobiographer and Journalist’ in Angela Kershaw and Angela Kimyongür (eds.), Women in Europe Between the Wars: Politics, Culture, Society (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, forthcoming). 154

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or of achieving, in the words of Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, ‘cultural recognition’: On the one hand, the very taking-up-of-the-autobiographical transports the colonial subject into the territory of the ‘universal’ subject and thus promises a culturally empowered subjectivity. Participation in, through re/ presentation of, privileged narratives can secure cultural recognition for the subject.158

Smith and Watson frame their feminist arguments in terms of the coloniser/colonised binary, thus woman, the oppressed Other, is an example of a ‘colonised subject’. Weiss’s memoirs, because of their enormous scope in both personal and public-political terms, correspond closely to traditional autobiography understood as the attempt to produce a total and synthesised image of an individual’s life, of which women’s autobiography is often seen as a disruption.159 Secondly, by foregrounding herself as a political actor throughout her autobiography,160 Weiss commits herself to a particular mode of political writing which is content to use the individual as a fulcrum. Not being involved in the politics of the far left, this literary strategy would have caused Weiss considerably less soul-searching than is evident in writing on politics and literature by Malraux or, particularly, Gide. Thirdly then, one might go as far as to assert that Weiss’s genre choice was a specifically ideological one. The decision to embark upon an enormous autobiographical project foregrounding the individual to such an extent is revelatory as regards Weiss’s political leanings. Weiss’s commitment was to a centre-left parliamentary democracy which left plenty of scope for the individual to exist as a political player, in opposition to the notion of the collectivity proposed by the revolutionary left. As Smith and Watson note: Powering and defining centers, margins, boundaries, and grounds of action in the West, traditional ‘autobiography’ has been implicated in a specific 158 Sidonie

Smith and Julia Watson (eds.), De/Colonizing the Subject. The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), Introduction, pp. xiii–xxxi (p. xix). 159 Leah D. Hewitt, Autobiographical Tightropes (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), p. 4. 160 I find that I cannot agree with Milligan’s interpretation in The Forgotten Generation (pp. 90–91) of Weiss’s autobiography as an example of selfeffacement.



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notion of ‘selfhood’. This Enlightenment ‘self’, ontologically identical to other ‘I’s, sees its destiny in a teleological narrative narratively enshrining the ‘individual’ and his ‘uniqueness’.161

Whilst I would not want to suggest that autobiography is by definition a bourgeois genre, nonetheless, traditional autobiography relies on a view of the individual and of his place in society which had acquired a specific political resonance in the inter-war period. And one could pursue this line of argument, after Smith and Watson, to suggest the possibility of a binary divide separating the bourgeois autobiographical subject from the ‘amorphous’ mass of the proletariat: And yet not all are ‘I’s. Where Western eyes see Man as a unique individual rather than a member of a collectivity, of race or nation, of sex or sexual preference, Western eyes see the colonized as an amorphous, generalized collectivity.162

Binary oppositions can of course be transgressed: take for example Poulaille’s determination to establish the experience of the working class individual as a fit topic for literature. Valet’s interaction with the proletarian genre is in fact as much an example of the attempt to use genre as a means of ‘cultural recognition’ as Weiss’s use of autobiography; Valet however sought recognition within a different ideological context. Valet, Téry and Thomas all sought political recognition by engaging with a specific mode of political writing which the leading figures of their particular party or political grouping recommended. Weiss’s choice of autobiography can be read in similar terms. Cultural recognition via genre conformity was all the more necessary for a female inter-war political novelist, since inclusion within a specific genre tradition could go some way towards repairing the political exclusions to which she was subjected on the grounds of her sex. Discussing women’s autobiography, Claire Marrone writes: The modest tone of these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women can also be read as a frequent female strategy of the era and beyond. They write comme il faut ������������������������������������������������������������� so that their stories will be published but at the same time

161 Smith 162 Ibid.,

and Watson, De/Colonizing the Subject, p. xvii. p. xvii.

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Ideologically-based genre conformity was the means via which the female writer of political fiction could write comme il faut in the terms of those whose political blessing she sought. The stereotypical views expressed by critics such as Jean Larnac and Marcel Braunschvig about the relationships between women, politics and literature placed the inter-war female writer of political fiction in a difficult position. Since dominant discourses represented her as writing inappropriately for her sex, she was obliged to justify herself aesthetically. Genre conformity was one means via which she could confer legitimacy upon herself as a literary and political actor.164 As a result of this political and narrative strategy, these writers did succeed in creating a political role for themselves – their texts were published, and were read and reviewed by politically engaged critics in the leading reviews. Their writing gave them a public voice and thereby an opportunity to participate in the political debates which interested them, and to bear witness to their own commitment to particular causes. Utopia/dystopia Madeleine Pelletier was primarily a polemicist and political analyst; she turned to fiction late in life when she felt that other forms of action and writing had failed.165 Any analysis of her novels from the perspective of genre must begin by pointing out that Pelletier used fiction as if it were a transparent form through which ideological convictions could be expressed. Her writing is often platitudinous: Pelletier pays scant attention to questions of literary style. Her aesthetic naivety makes La Femme vierge� an artistic failure. La Femme vierge is an intellectual and ideologically based analysis of women’s oppression which privileges a political message 163 Marrone,

Female Journeys, p. 12. For a more detailed analysis of this point, see Angela Kershaw, ‘Simone Téry (1897–1967): Writing the History of the Present in Inter-war France’, forthcoming in Feminist Review (2007). 165 See Gordon, The Integral Feminist, Chapter 9, ‘From Activism to Fiction’, pp. 192–212. 164



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at the expense of ‘literary’ concerns such as characterisation (the protagonists are two-dimensional representatives of a particular world view) or symbol. It is an example of the potentially disastrous aesthetic results of the prioritisation of content over form: critics seeking to denigrate the political novel as aesthetically uninteresting and nothing more than barely fictionalised propaganda, need look no further than La Femme vierge. Pelletier is guilty of exerting an excessive amount of narrative control over her reader, a textual strategy about which Nizan was most scathing: �������������� ‘Il faut dire encore que ce genre d’écriture qui impose des commentaires au lecteur implique que l’auteur tient son lecteur pour un sot, qui ne comprendrait point des conséquences tacites du récit’���������������� (Also, it must be said that this sort of writing which imposes commentaries on the reader implies that the author thinks that his reader is an idiot who wouldn’t understand the tacit implications of the story).166 Nizan could have been describing Pelletier’s novels. An analysis of Pelletier’s genre choices from the perspective of gender must not neglect the centrality of the principle of virilisation to her feminist project. As I shall show in more detail in Chapter 3, Pelletier’s feminism was based on a quest for gender sameness, which meant an alignment of the female subject with the male norm in all areas of her activity. Pelletier rejected ‘femininity’ completely, believing that the eradication of all cultural and behavioural manifestations of ‘femininity’ would be beneficial to women. Whilst La Femme vierge is feminist in content, we should not expect to find a rewriting of literary forms in Pelletier’s work. Given that her response to women’s exclusion from the male domain of politics was to place herself in the male role, it seems logical to suppose that she might adopt the same strategy as regards women’s relationships to narrative. In the domain of writing as in all other domains, Pelletier believed that women’s interests would be best served if they minimised their difference and therefore wrote ‘like men’. In contrast to La Femme vierge, Pelletier seems to have given considerable thought to genre conventions in Une Vie nouvelle, although the text is certainly not free from the aesthetic flaws of La Femme vierge. In both novels, the style is pedestrian and clichéd, the narrative voice is intrusively directive and the characters are little 166 ��������������������������������� Nizan, ‘L’Œuvre d’Eugène Dabit’,

L’Humanité, 6 September 1936. Reprinted in Nizan, Pour une nouvelle culture, pp. 211–16 (p. 213).

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more than transparent representatives of abstract ideas. However, in its structure and its setting, Une Vie nouvelle incorporates elements of both the science fiction and utopian genres. The novel depicts space travel, aliens, and futuristic scientific and technological advances. It is set in Paris after a communist revolution. Gender and class equality are a reality. Pelletier’s description of an ideal social organisation functions as a commentary on contemporary reality, in accordance with the conventions of utopian writing. As such, Une Vie nouvelle is part of a tradition of literary-political utopias in France, as Claudie Lesselier has noted.167 None of the inter-war literary schools I surveyed at the beginning of this chapter advocated such a genre choice for the expression of political messages through fiction. However the narrative possibilities for depicting the communist society of the future was a question which concerned the theorists of socialist realism, as we have seen. Zhdanov proposed to describe the realities of the Russian present from the perspective of a communist future via revolutionary romanticism. According to Robin, the theory of revolutionary romanticism stems from the Marxist notion that ���������������������������������������� ‘[l]a fonction de l’imaginaire dans les révolutions à venir est de figurer les valeurs, l’idéal de la révolution, de lui donner une forme, un langage. Il a une fonction d’anticipation’� (the function of the imagination in the forthcoming revolutions is to express the values and the ideals of the revolution and to give them a form and a language. It has an anticipatory function).168 Thus, for the proponents of socialist realism, the ‘romantic’ element of realism was pedagogical, a means of controlling the reception of the text by interpreting the ‘realistic’ data presented within the framework of a specific, and forward-looking, ideology.169 But Robin argues that revolutionary romanticism as Zhdanov described it was one more element of the socialist realist aesthetic which is in fact a theoretical impossibility. How can a writer conflate the present with an ideal future whilst at the same time avoiding non-realist genres such as utopia, science fiction, the pastoral or the epic?170 The 1934 167 ������������������������������������������������ Claudie Lesselier, ‘L’Utopie des années trente.

Une vie nouvelle, un roman de Madeleine Pelletier’ in Christine Bard (ed.), Madeleine Pelletier (1874–1939). Logique et infortunes d’un combat pour l’égalité (Paris: côté femmes, 1992), pp. 167– 74 (pp. 170–72). 168 ������� Robin, Le Réalisme socialiste p. 98. 169 Ibid., pp. 90–91. 170 Ibid., p. 99.



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Congress did not provide an answer to such questions, and neither did Pelletier; or at least her solution – utopian science fiction – was not one which the Congress would have accepted. Neither would Pelletier’s political message have been tolerated in Moscow, for although Pelletier’s text addresses the same theoretical/aesthetic problem as the communist literary critics, her choice of genre is a function of a desire to present a very different picture of communism. In Pelletier’s text, the political realities of Soviet Russia are presented not in the perspective of a utopian future, but as the embryo of the dystopian nightmare to which she had come to fear communism was leading.171 In a letter to Arria Ly, Pelletier described Une Vie nouvelle as ‘une sorte de “Voyage en Icarie” ’������������ (a sort of Journey to Icaria) in which ‘���������������������� je décris une société communiste telle que je la comprends’������������������������� (I describe a communist society as I understand it).172 In a later letter, Pelletier makes the comparison for the second time, stating that Une Vie nouvelle is ‘[…] u���������������� ne anticipation à�� la �������������� manière du “Voyage ����������������������������� en Icarie” de Cabet’ (a futuristic work rather like Cabet’s �������� Journey to Icaria).173 The comparison with Cabet should arouse our suspicions as regards the possibility of interpreting Une Vie nouvelle as a straightforward communist utopia.174 For why should Pelletier choose to compare her novel to the work of Etienne Cabet, since Cabet’s own utopian

171 I argue the case in detail for a reading of

the text as part utopian, part dystopian in ‘Utopia and Dystopia in the Work of Madeleine Pelletier’ in Angela Kershaw, Pamela Moores and Hélène Stafford (eds.), The Impossible Space. Explorations of Utopia in French Writing. Strathclyde Modern Language Studies (New Series) No.6 (2004), pp. 145–79. 172 Letter to Arria Ly, 21 March 1932. Pelletier’s letters to Ly can be consulted in the BHVP, Dossier CP 4249 (�������������������������������������������������� série 83, féminisme������������������������������� ). See also Charles Sowerwine, ‘Militantisme et identité sexuelle: la carrière politique et l’œuvre théorique de Madeleine Pelletier (1874–1939), Le Mouvement Social 157 (October–December 1991), 9–32 (p. 10, Note 5), Sowerwine and Claude Maignien, Madeleine Pelletier: Une feministe dans l’arène politique (Paris: Editions ouvrières, 1992), p. 204 and Gordon, The Integral Feminist, p. 193. 173 Letter to Arria Ly, 24 May 1932, BHVP. Pelletier continues: ‘J’ai ���������������� tâché d’y mettre mes idées dans un cadre romanesque afin d’éviter l’ennui au lecteur’ (I have tried to put my ideas in a fictional framework so as not to bore the reader)� – unfortunately she did not succeed in this aim. 174 Lesselier does not raise the possibility of reading the text as anything other than utopian.

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experiment is a famous example of the spectacular failure of utopian socialism?175 A reading of Une Vie nouvelle within the broad context of Pelletier’s work indicates a strong utopian current in the text, in the sense that the post-revolutionary society described by Pelletier and explicitly designated as communist can be equated with the realisation of many of her ideals. Living conditions are excellent, poverty has been eliminated, education is freely and democratically available to all, and complete sexual equality has been achieved.176 However it is crucial to separate the representation of social progress in Une Vie nouvelle from its account of political change. Pelletier’s account of the power structure and mechanisms of organisation of the new regime is resolutely dystopian: the tragedy of the text is that Pelletier’s social ideals have been achieved via a regime she finds politically unacceptable. A dystopian interpretation of the novel is consistent with Pelletier’s own political trajectory. She had enthusiastically supported the French section of the Communist International in the wake of the Tours congress in 1920 in the hope that it would provide a forum for her commitment to bolshevism.177 However, she had broken with communism in 1926 after a stormy relationship with the party.178 According to Sowerwine and Maignien, ‘la ������������������������������������������������������� rupture avec le parti est consommée, définitive et irrémédiable’�������������������������������������������������������� (the break with the party was complete, definitive and irreparable).179 Like many of her contemporaries, Pelletier remained 175

For an account of Etienne Cabet’s life and work, see Christopher H. Johnson, Utopian Communism in France: Cabet and the Icarians, 1839–1851 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1974). 176 The most important sources as regards Pelletier’s non-fictional constructions of an ideal society are the two essays (both available in the Dossier Madeleine Pelletier, BMD) ‘������������������������������������������������������������� Capitalisme et communisme������������������������������������ ’ (Nice, 1926) and ‘La Morale et la loi’ (Paris, 1926), and an essay entitled ‘Que faire?’ which forms the final chapter of Pelletier’s Mon Voyage aventureux en Russie communiste (Paris: INDIGO and côté femmes, 1996), pp. 129–39. Useful indications are also to be found in Pelletier’s letters to Arria Ly. 177 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������� Claude Maignien, ‘L’expérience communiste ou la foi en l’avenir radieux’ in Bard (ed.), Madeleine Pelletier (1874–1939). Logique et infortunes d’un combat pour l’égalité, pp. 157–65 (p. 158). 178 �������������������������������������������������������������������������� Ibid., pp. 164–65; Claude Magnien, ‘Parcours biographique’ in Bard (ed.), Madeleine Pelletier (1874–1939). Logique et infortunes d’un combat pour l’égalité, pp. 13–26 (pp. 20–22); Sowerwine and Maignien, Madeleine Pelletier, pp. 174–80; Gordon, The Integral Feminist, p. 177. 179 Sowerwine and Maignien, Madeleine Pelletier, pp. 179–80.



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committed to revolutionary socialism in a broad sense, but she was by no means an orthodox communist in the early 1930s when she was writing Une Vie nouvelle. She was in fact a member of Paul Louis’s Parti ������������������������������������������������������������� d’unité prolétarienne���������������������������������� (The Party of Proletarian Unity, or PUP) between 1930 and 1936, a party which sought to promote democratic revolutionary socialism as an alternative to the Stalinist model.180 By combining utopian and dystopian discourses, Une Vie nouvelle dramatises a political dilemma which Pelletier was unable to resolve. Fiercely committed to the freedom of the individual, Pelletier could not tolerate the repressive, totalitarian state, and yet the oppression perpetuated by bourgeois capitalist democracies was just as abhorrent to her as communism’s restriction of individual liberty. Une Vie nouvelle is a critical engagement with the problem of liberty as it is posed by revolutionary politics. And it is her decision to combine the utopian, dystopian and science-fiction genres which facilitates Pelletier’s exploration of this problem. Given her deliberate attempt to align herself with the male norm in all spheres of life, a rewriting of narrative norms in the feminine would have been a theoretical impossibility for Pelletier. In terms of content, it is of course possible, and desirable, to read her novels as feminist novels, insofar as misogyny is clearly written into both novels from a woman’s perspective, and is actively contested. In La Femme vierge, Pelletier expresses a gendered view of politics when she describes her frustrations with the feminist movement and her exclusion from socialism on the grounds of her sex. However, the feminist message of the text does not impact upon its genre: the novel is no more than an essay hung on a story. In Une Vie nouvelle, female experience is, as Lesselier points out, transmitted via a male character;181 hence Pelletier’s personal experience of oppression is universalised and desexualised, presented not as a function of misogyny but as a function of capitalism. Une Vie nouvelle engages explicitly with a male-authored intertext, and there are no grounds to argue that Pelletier rewrites the utopian genre in the feminine. Certainly Pelletier plays with genre in Une Vie nouvelle, but she characteristically prioritises her identity as an ideological dissident over her identity as a woman.

180 See

ibid., pp. 193–94�.

181 ���������������������������������������������������� Lesselier, ‘L’Utopie des années trente’, pp. 168–69.

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Conclusions: gender and genre Central to Nancy Walker’s understanding of women as ‘disobedient’ writers is an emphasis on women’s position as outsiders to narrative traditions. She explains that: Because of the way in which Western literary traditions have been formulated […] most male writers who have appropriated and revised previous texts have worked within a tradition that included them and their experience, whereas women writers have more commonly addressed such texts from the position of an outsider, altering them either to point up the biases they encode or to make them into narratives women can more comfortably inhabit.182

Such an approach to women’s writing is problematic as regards female-authored political writing in inter-war France. On the one hand, such writers clearly were outsiders, both in relation to politics and in relation to literature. As women, they were debarred from the suffrage and from holding political office. They would seek in vain for positive representations of female political commitment in the texts of their more famous literary comrades (Nizan, Malraux, or Aragon) or those of their literary antecedents (Balzac, Stendhal, or Zola). And a writer such as Thomas had to manipulate the Bildungsroman genre so that she could comfortably inhabit it. But on the other hand, by the very fact of writing a political roman à thèse, these writers identified themselves as insiders, as very much part of the collectivity which sought to express the particular ideological message their texts aimed to promulgate. Indeed, to be recognised as part of such groups was what motivated their writing. Therefore, a reading of the novels of politically committed inter-war women writers purely in terms of exclusion from narrative traditions will not suffice. On the contrary, reading their texts for gender and genre shows that such writers were in fact positioned precariously on the dividing line between inclusion and exclusion. It is perhaps this precariousness which defines their writing, since it is not possible to resolve the tension by defining them according to just one term of the opposition. Also central to Walker’s concept of ‘disobedience’ is the idea that women writers are conscious of ‘working against instead of 182

Walker, The Disobedient Writer, p. 3.



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inside cultural heritage’.183 Again, this notion presents problems for a reading of the work of the writers with which this study is concerned. For they were writing within a culturally and historically specific context in which the leading theorists in the political and literary domains were attempting precisely to create a new cultural heritage, in opposition to the old, the point of which was to include those excluded from supposedly outmoded and oppressive political and artistic structures. Of course, the primary aim of theorists on the far left was to include the proletariat, not women, and, as we have seen, their strategies could be exclusive in gender terms. But it is important to bear in mind that women on the left were necessarily writing in opposition to the dominant culture,184 along with their male counterparts (and here we can include Louise Weiss, since her pacifism and her feminism arguably placed her in opposition to the dominant culture). The question which must be posed then is that of their relationship to a resisting culture; their writing illustrates the fact that resisting groups are quite as capable of creating exclusions as hegemonic ones. Communism as an ideology may have told women that it had solved their problems; but if they really had been granted democratic access to the new cultural traditions being forged between the wars, why has no-one heard of the novels I am discussing? Walker’s notion of ‘disobedience’ poses a third problem for an interpretation of the texts in our corpus. For how can a writer be ‘disobedient’ whilst writing in the service of an ideology? This brings us to the nub of the problem of gender and genre in inter-war political fiction. Recent feminist theory has sought to value women writers because of their ability to rewrite genre in the feminine, rather than aping male modes of writing. But in the specific context in which Valet, Thomas, Téry, Weiss and Pelletier were writing, there were unavoidable ideological constraints which prevented, or at least limited, such rewriting. Genre conformity was a requirement if their work was to be accepted within the political and ideological contexts from which it arose. I should like to illustrate this point with reference to Milligan’s work on the inter-war romance.185 Milligan 183 Ibid.,p. 6. 184 See

Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own (London: Virago, 1999), p. 14 on women’s relationship to the dominant culture. 185 Milligan, The Forgotten Generation, Chapter 6, ‘Revising the Romance’, pp. 174–207.

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suggests three ways in which inter-war female authors rewrote this genre: via the representation of Sapphic love; via the creation of virilised heroines and effeminate males (gender swapping); and via a questioning of the processes of reading and writing. Such strategies were not open to the female writer of a political roman à thèse. Specifically, all three would have aroused ideologically based objections from the left. Inter-war revolutionaries were anything but revolutionary as regards sexual identities; homosexuality was not embraced as a means of disrupting bourgeois culture. The culture of inter-war political activism maintained a strong belief in conventional gender identities; the emblematic communist militant could not be reconciled with effeminacy. And Pelletier’s concept of female virilisation made her no friends on the political left. Perhaps most importantly, self-reflexive modes of literature were resolutely condemned by communism as a symptom of the decadence of the bourgeoisie, and thus as inappropriate to the expression of socially and politically progressive ideas. Weiss is a different case, as she was not seeking acceptance within communist circles. Indeed, Délivrance touches on the question of Sapphic love in the NoémiMarie relationship; it creates, in some respects, a virilised heroine in Noémi and an effeminate male in Christian; the novel thematises writing by making links between childbirth and female creativity. However, since none of these elements are given a positive value in the text, it does not disrupt gender and narrative conventions very much. Weiss was also seeking political credibility through her writing, and in the political milieux in �������������������������������� which she moved, there would have been no benefit to be gained from marking herself out as a literary or sexual dissident. The work of all five writers suggests that the strategies for rewriting which were open to female authors of other types of literature were not open to women who sought to combine politics and literature. Much modern feminist criticism of women and narrative tradition focuses firstly on women’s (sense of their own) exclusion from narrative traditions and secondly on their impulse to create meta-literature in an attempt to produce a new tradition or a new genre, or, in Elaine Showalter’s words, a literature of their own. These approaches are not pertinent to an analysis of 1930s political literature, for three reasons. Firstly, inter-war discourses about the creation of a new literary tradition purported to be democratic and inclusive. Secondly, the ideological groupings with which



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such writers engaged were aesthetically prescriptive. And thirdly, the left proscribed formally ‘experimental’ literature. Showalter’s theory of the possibility of a female literary tradition must, in the present context, be treated with care, as the women writers this study examines wrote deliberately in relation to emergent political traditions of writing, rather than out of any desire to create or extend a gendered tradition (which is not to say that their work is not therefore part of a female tradition). If one reads these texts as examples of ‘women’s writing’ as Showalter understands the term, they are apt to disappoint, since they often appear simply to replicate male modes of writing. It must be understood however that the impetus for choosing a given genre was political; the genres in question were labelled according to ideological categories. How then can we begin adequately to explain the difference between male-authored and female-authored inter-war political literature? Nancy Walker suggests three key ways in which women writers revise or appropriate narratives. Firstly, they may call attention to another version of the story. Here Walker follows Molly Hite’s argument that: […] experimental fictions by women seem to share the decentering and disseminating strategies of postmodern narratives, but they also seem to arrive at these strategies by an entirely different route, which involves emphasizing conventionally marginal characters and themes, in this way re-centering the value structure of the narrative.186

Secondly, they may have recourse to metafiction, by calling attention to the process of revision and/or appropriation in which they are engaged. Thirdly, they may rewrite conventional male-authored narratives which tend to marginalise women by placing themselves at the centre of the narrative and/or of history. My analysis has demonstrated the various ways in which five inter-war political novelists adopted the first and the third of these strategies. It has shown that their reasons for rejecting the second were ideological: the absence in their texts of the sort of formal experimentation which feminist criticism has come to prize in women’s writing does not necessarily indicate a simplistic and unthinking adoption of a ‘male’ 186 Molly

Hite, The Other Side of the Story. Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narratives (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 2.

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writing style, but rather points to the complex network of inclusions and exclusions which these writers were forced to negotiate in their attempt to write fiction about politics.

3 Fictional Representations of Female Commitment What does it mean to speak of the thematisation of commitment? What is commitment and what happens when it manifests itself in a literary text? Considerable critical effort has been expended on the definition of commitment in relation to literature. David Schalk preliminarily defines commitment as ‘political involvement, usually by members of the intellectual class’. ‘Involvement’ implies action, and ‘intellectual’ implies critical awareness and an element of choice and freedom. Commitment is not blind adherence to a given doctrine, nor is it forced compliance. However, reasoned allegiance to a given political ‘ism’ is by no means excluded; indeed it is generally the vehicle through which commitment is expressed. Commitment requires the passing from political belief to political action through a conscious and willed decision by a reasoning subjectivity. The notions of action and critical reason characterise the commitment both of the authors of the novels in this study and of the committed characters they portray. In a recent essay, Alexandra Makowiak has underlined the key role language plays in effecting such a passage from belief to action, arguing that commitment must be articulated in order to exist, and defining commitment as ��������������������������������� ‘le passage d’une parole privée, énoncée par un sujet, à une parole intersubjective, qui s’addressant à autrui me lie aussi à lui’������������������������������������������ (the passage from private speech, spoken by a subject, to intersubjective speech which, addressed to an other, also links me to the other). A political novel is an example of such intersubjective speech.  David

Schalk, The Spectrum of Political Engagement: Mounier, Benda, Nizan, Brasillach, Sartre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. ix. See also the second chapter of Schalk’s War and the Ivory Tower: Algeria and Vietnam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 38–60. The source of the term engagement is, as Schalk points out, often cited as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (Paris: Gallimard, 1948).��������������������������������� Schalk establishes Paul Nizan’s Les Chiens de garde (Paris: Editions Rieder,1932) as an earlier and more important source in the history of the idea (pp. 9–17).  ������������������������������������������������������������������������ Alexandra Makowiak, ‘Paradoxes philosophiques de l’engagement’ in Bouju (ed.), L’Engagement littéraire, pp. 19–30 (p. 24).

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Since commitment is always specific, since it is necessary to speak of commitment to something, the presence of this theme makes the literary text historically specific. As Makowiak argues, commitment is opportunist, insofar as it is a function of a present circumstance or situation, and its future significance cannot, at the time of writing, be predicted: ������������������������������ ‘l’engagement est une manière de s’insérer dans le présent, d’être actuel, de parier sur l’avenir, précisement parce que l’avenir ne peut être prévu’ ��������������� (commitment is a way of inserting oneself into the present, of being contemporary, of betting on the future, precisely because the future cannot be foreseen). Furthermore, since commitment is a relationship between a particular subject and a particular circumstance, the author of the committed text is necessarily personally implicated in her or his writing project. Emmanuel Bouju defines commitment as ‘������������� le geste par lequel un sujet promet et se risque dans cette promesse, entreprend et met en gage quelque chose de lui-même dans l’entreprise’������ (the gesture through which a subject makes a promise and risks itself in that promise, embarks upon something and pledges something of itself in the undertaking). This is particularly obvious in the interwar period in France, because literature and political action were so closely intertwined. The thematisation of commitment in interwar French literature was an attempt by the author to construct or express a particular ideological affiliation, and was generally motivated by the author’s desire to locate himself or herself within a specific militant literary-political group. We saw in Chapter 2 how this desire for acceptance by a group motivates the author’s choice of genre. The creation of interpretive communities, such as the AEAR, the review Monde or the proletarian school, depended on the production and discussion of a range of texts (novels, plays and poetry, but also literary criticism, journalism, and manifestos); through such texts, authors made their own commitment manifest and also thereby attempted to persuade readers of the validity of their way of thinking. The theme of commitment thus functions as an exploration of the author’s own commitment as well as a means of drawing (ideological) assent from the reader. The novel as (political) témoignage, or bearing witness, looks both inwards  Ibid.,

p. 24.

 ����������������������������������������������� Emmanuel Bouju, ‘Avant-propos’ in Bouju (ed.),

pp. 11–15 (p. 11).

L’Engagement littéraire,



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and outwards; insofar as many inter-war novels which thematise commitment are partly autobiographical, the novel becomes a space in which the author can attempt to understand her or his experience as well as attempting to convey a specific ideological message to the reader. Although the writer-reader relationship therefore has a prescriptive element, crucially, the reader remains free to reject the author’s definition of it by reading ‘against the grain’ and rejecting the message. Commitment is composed of two elements: the chosen ideology or belief system and the committed individual (be it protagonist or author, or a combination of both). Therefore the novel of commitment can analyse both the ontology of commitment, that is to say, the effect of commitment on the constitution of subjectivity, and the ideological, moral or operational problems or advantages potentially associated with a particular political credo. The committed text questions the self-sufficiency of literature: the presence of commitment endows the novel with a use-value which exceeds the realm of the aesthetic, because it is called upon to operate in non-literary contexts. Gender is relevant to all these areas of inquiry. How can the female-authored text express authorial commitment if commitment is defined historically and culturally as a masculine or a male attribute? Is the implied reader interpellated by the text a sexed reader, and if so, what happens when the sex of the actual reader does not correspond to the sex of the implied reader? Whose time and whose place are reflected in the text? How does commitment change or construct male and female gender identity? And how do particular belief systems look from a woman’s perspective? These are the sorts of questions this chapter, and the two chapters which follow, seek to address. This chapter does not aim to provide an extensive account of the twists and turns of the political allegiances of the authors in this study. That is the task of the biographer; it would require an exhaustive analysis covering whole lives and complete œuvres.� This chapter seeks instead to determine what view of commitment emerges from the novels the authors produced between the wars. In doing so, it pays particular attention to the ways in which gender is approached. A thematic account of the representation of commitment in the novels of Weiss, Valet, Pelletier, Thomas and Téry will reveal the ways in which these authors combine an investigation of the ontology of politics with the recommendation of a specific

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political ideology. Their novels, which are all, to a greater or lesser extent, autobiographical, bear witness, in a militant fashion, to their author’s experience of politics and are firmly anchored in the political, social and historical realities of 1930s France. In this latter respect, they are precious testimonies which have much to tell us about the opportunities and constraints faced by female engaged intellectuals in this period. This chapter brings together the insights of theorists of political literature and the conclusions emerging from feminist analyses of the interface between gender and politics. Much useful work was undertaken in the latter area in the 1980s and 1990s, notably by political theorists such as Anne Phillips, Carole Pateman and Jean Bethke Elshtain. Elshtain and Pateman approached the question from the perspective of a critique of the gendering of the public/private divide. Their conclusions are however very different: Pateman would not endorse Elshtain’s view of citizenship as being based potentially on women’s identity as mothers. More recently, Ruth Lister’s work on feminism and citizenship has provided an excellent overview of and contribution to the debate. Anne Phillips’s 1998 collection, Feminism and Politics, brings together a stimulating body of work which illustrates the diversity of approaches which have been adopted by theorists investigating the interface between feminist theory and political theory. Acknowledging the importance of the Anglo-Saxon debate, a volume entitled Genre et politique, published in 2000, brought together a number of key essays in translation for a French-speaking readership. In France, the work of the philosopher Geneviève Fraisse has made a particularly fruitful contribution. Commentators on both sides of the parity debate have written on the topic, including Elisabeth Badinter, Mona Ozouf, Françoise Gaspard, Françoise Thébaud, Janine Mossuz-Lavau, and  Carole

Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989) and The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press,1988), Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1981), and Elshtain, Meditations on Modern Political Thought: Masculine/Feminine Themes from Luther to Arendt (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986).  Lister, Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives.  Anne Phillips (ed.), Feminism and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).  ��������������������������������������������������������������� Thanh-Huyen Ballmer-Cao, Véronique Mottier and Lea Sgie (eds.), Genre et politique: débats et perspectives (Paris: Folio, 2000).



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Sylviane Agacinski. Barbara Caine and Glenda Sluga have analysed the theme of gender and citizenship from a historical perspective, beginning with the French Revolution, a defining moment for our understanding of gender and politics, and progressing as far as the end of the First World War. Across these various approaches, the key question has been, and, on the evidence of the parity debates, remains, the question of whether, and if so how, to incorporate a notion of female difference into the political domain. This question stems from the paradox which Joan Scott articulates in the following terms: In the age of democratic revolutions, ‘women’ came into being as political outsiders through the discourse of sexual difference. Feminism was a protest against women’s political exclusion; its goal was to eliminate ‘sexual difference’ in politics, but it had to make its claims on behalf of ‘women’ (who were discursively produced through ‘sexual difference’). To the extent that it acted for ‘women’, feminism produced the ‘sexual difference’ it sought to eliminate. This paradox – the need both to accept and to refuse ‘sexual difference’ – was the constitutive condition of feminism as a political movement throughout its long history.10

Anne Phillips attempts to overcome this paradox by arguing that whilst abstract citizenship means in practice a discriminatory alignment of politics with the male, an emphasis on gender difference should be viewed as a strategy rather than an ultimate goal, because: No democracy cam claim to be equal while it pretends away what are major and continuing divides; yet democracy is lessened if it treats us only in our identities as women or men.11

As Carole Pateman points out, the way forward is far from straightforward, since, whilst universal, abstract notions of citizenship mask a masculinisation of the political domain, the acknowledgement of female difference is precisely the basis on which women have been excluded throughout history from the mechanisms of democracy.12 These are the issues with which the 

Barbara Caine and Glenda Sluga, Gendering European History (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 2000). 10 Joan Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer. French Feminism and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 3–4. 11 Phillips, Engendering Democracy, pp. 8–9. 12 Pateman, The Disorder of Women, p. 4.

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authors in the present study were grappling; they resolved them variously but none of them could escape the need to address the universalism/difference binary. This chapter begins with a consideration of the work of Louise Weiss and Henriette Valet, who base their accounts of female commitment on a positive notion of female difference. I go on to contrast their views with those expressed in the work of Madeleine Pelletier. Pelletier argues that all human beings are the same and therefore should enjoy the same rights; for Pelletier, ‘femininity’ as it was constructed in the cultural context of inter-war France can only be an obstacle to female commitment. Finally, I consider the work of Edith Thomas and Simone Téry, who attempt to acknowledge the difficulties of being a politically committed woman whilst avoiding the extremes of Weiss’s valorisation of femininity and Pelletier’s wholesale rejection of it. A politics of difference Corinne Rousseau’s analysis of Louise Weiss’s political trajectory in the inter-war period demonstrates that Weiss’s politics was very much defined by her experience and analysis of the First World War.13 Until 1936, when the rise of nazism and fascism made her position untenable, Weiss believed that European integration and the reconstruction of Germany were indispensable in order to compensate for the shortcomings of the Treaty of Versailles and avoid another war. Thus peace was her aim, and institutional politics at the highest international level her method. Her own role in the process was primarily as a journalist, via her directorship of the centre-left publication L’Europe nouvelle, which published political analysis from across Europe as well as official documents, particularly relating to the League of Nations, the institution in which Weiss placed her hopes for the future. Of L’Europe nouvelle, Rousseau writes: 13 Corinne

Rousseau, ‘������������������������������������������������������ Louise Weiss, l’Europe et la paix durant l’entre-deuxguerres’ in Louise Weiss l’Européenne, pp. 195–250. See������������������������������ also the chapter on Weiss in Michael Bess, Realism, Utopia and the Mushroom Cloud. Four Activist Intellectuals and their Strategies for Peace, 1945–1989 (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1993), pp. 2–40.



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[…] elle est essentiellement lue par l’élite dirigeante de tous les pays et jouit d’un prestige international […] Elle faisait autorité dans les milieux internationaux auprès de tous les grands esprits de l’époque�.14 ([…] it was read primarily by the ruling elite of all countries and enjoyed international prestige […] it was viewed as authoritative in international organisations by all the key players of the period.)

L’Europe nouvelle� was clearly of significance in political terms; Weiss was a woman who had an entrée into high-powered political circles and who interacted with some of the most important men of her generation. Similarly, when she turned to feminism, she focused her efforts on the central institutions of the French republic: La Femme nouvelle sought to change the nature of French republicanism – and also to make world peace into an achievable goal – by obtaining the vote for women. Thus politics and gender coincide for Weiss when women seek to play a role in international political organisations, and when politics itself is reconceived with peace as its goal. Weiss’s Délivrance is constructed around these separate but related issues: the identity of the female politician and the feminisation of politics. The novel traces Marie’s existential pilgrimage to Geneva where she meets the politician Noémi. This journey is an attempt on Marie’s part firstly to redefine her shattered identity following the death of her fiancé in the war and her abandonment by her lover, and secondly to decide whether or not to have an abortion. This is a novel about pacifist politics: the action takes place in the Autumn of 1931, during the run-up to the 1932 Geneva Disarmament Conference.15 Noémi has been educated in politics at the expense of her femininity by her father and his secretary, who becomes her governess. She is therefore well placed to pursue a political career, but feels resentment at the sacrifices this path obliges her to make as a woman. Weiss’s ideal of a coincidence between femininity and politics has eluded Noémi but is presented in the novel as a possibility for the future. Délivrance shows that the attempt to achieve and express female commitment through institutional politics presents the individual female subject with difficulties concerning her own access 14 Rousseau,

‘���������������������������������������������������������������� Louise Weiss, l’Europe et la paix durant l’entre-deux-guerres’, p. 212. 15 Jane Nemo commented on the novel’s historical setting in a review of Délivrance, La Française, 6 December 1937. Dossier Louise Weiss, Fonds Bouglé, BHVP.

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to conventional femininity. A normative and conservative view of femininity is operative in Weiss’s work. Weiss’s memoirs suggest that she regretted her own failure to accede to a conventional vision of womanhood. Weiss’s response to being proposed for the Légion d’Honneur is a clear example: ������ ‘Déjà L’Europe nouvelle m’empêche de me marier. Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur! Il ne se trouvera plus qu’un pédéraste pour m’épouser!’��(L’Europe nouvelle was already preventing me from marrying. The Legion of Honour! Noone but a homosexual would marry me!).16 Once she is forced to acknowledge the failure of the League of Nations, she remarks: ���� ‘je me demandais, amère, si le sacrifice des joies normales d’une femme – sacrifice auquel j’avais passionnément consenti – valait cette défaite’��������������������������������������������������������������� (I wondered bitterly whether the sacrifice of the normal joys of womanhood – a sacrifice which I had accepted passionately – was worth this defeat).17 Weiss reads her own political trajectory in terms of sacrifice as regards her gender identity. She regrets that in the inter-war period, conventional femininity and commitment were not compatible for a high-profile female politician. This is the focus of her fictional examination of the ontological aspects of political commitment in Délivrance. Female commitment is problematic for Weiss because, whilst desirable, it compromises femininity. On the one hand, Noémi is often aligned with virility: ����������������������������� ‘Elle parlait […] en homme’ �(D, p. 52) (she spoke […] as if she were a man), she shows ‘������������������� une extraordinaire virilité d’esprit’��(D, p. 68) (an extraordinarily virile mind). However, Marie also notices that her face is very����������� feminine��(D, p. 91) and is delighted when she thinks that ����������������������������������������� ‘elle allait enfin me parler de la femme qui frémissait dans ses discours’ (�D, p. 205) (at last she was going to reveal to me the woman concealed within the orator). Both Noémi and Marie, the narrator, are aware of the contradictory nature of the gender identifications of the politicised female subject: Quand vint le succès professionnel, le métier me parut plus âpre encore. On me critiquait comme un homme que je n’étais pas et comme une femme que je n’étais plus; on applaudissait en moi le monstre d’un genre inconnu qu’il serait bien intéressant de voir tomber dans l’arène ou, pourquoi pas?…réussir […] Réussir à quoi? L’indépendance féminine n’est pas encore acceptée. Les hommes la jalousent; les femmes se méfient; les couples la détestent. (�D, p. 216) 16 ������� Weiss, 17 Ibid.,

Combats pour l’Europe, p. 242. p. 304.



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(When success came in my career, the profession seemed even more bitter to me. I was criticised as a man, which I was not, and as a woman, which I was no longer. Applauding me, people were really applauding a monster of an unknown species who it would be very interesting to see come into the ring or, why not? To see succeed […] Succeed at what? Female independence is not yet accepted. Men are jealous of it. Women are suspicious. Couples hate it.) La solitude déforme les femmes en hermaphrodites qui croient au raisonnement et ne peuvent pas en user sans hurler de souffrance.��(D, p. 288) (Solitude changes women into hermaphrodites who believe in reasoning, but cannot exercise their reason without crying out in pain.)

Commitment leads to a hybrid female identity in which elements of masculinity and femininity are in constant conflict. Weiss concludes that when politics is conceived of as a male position, as in the inter-war period, it is accessible to the female subject only at the cost of great pain. As a transitional figure, one who is active in politics before it has been ‘feminised’, Noémi suffers as a result of the separation between politics and femininity. For example, when Noémi cares for the narrator in a moment of physical distress, she must effect a transformation from one identity to another: ������ ‘Elle s’était dévêtue de sa tenue politique et, simplement, se préparait à me donner des soins’��(D, p. 88) (She took off her political clothes and in a very simple way began to look after me). Removing the (male) trappings of politics, she reveals the compassionate woman underneath. Also, politics has deprived Noémi of love, which appears in the text as a significant defining element of femininity: ‘Les femmes qui m’ont été secourables, continua-t-elle, sont celles qui m’ont donné le sentiment que, malgré ma dure carrière, j’étais faite, comme elles, pour être aimée’��(D, p. 94) (‘The women who have been helpful to me’, she went on, ‘are the ones who have made me feel that, despite my hard career, I was made to be loved, just like them’). Noémi’s greatest sadness is her solitude. Weiss suggests that, in the inter-war cultural and political climate, solitude necessarily accompanied female commitment. For Weiss, solitude is negative; solitude represents the absence of the more conventional aspects of being a woman, which are valorised unquestioningly. Weiss blames the war losses in part for female solitude, historicising this element of female identity; Marie remarks that ‘[a]vec ������������������������� les femmes de ma

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génération j’ai parcouru une route jonchée de blessés, obstruée de morts. Notre solitude peu à peu s’est précisée’��(D, p. 6) (along with the women of my generation, I have followed a path strewn with the injured, encumbered by the dead. Our solitude has gradually become more clearly defined). The representation of Marie offers an important caveat to Weiss’s valorisation of women’s desire for conventional femininity. Marie has effected such a complete internalisation of the wife/lover role that the self is completely absorbed, and she progresses little from this position. She is incapable of ontological autonomy: ‘Privée �������� d’âme ou parfois tellement habitée par la tienne que je n’existais plus’ �(D, p. 16) (Deprived of a soul, or sometimes so much inhabited by yours that I no longer existed). The solution offered to her by the text, via the example of Noémi, is maternity: if she embraces ‘������������������������������������������������������������������� maternité libre’��������������������������������������������������� (being a single mother), then a successful female identity will be within her grasp. She fails to embrace it, opting instead for the abortion demanded of her by her ex-lover and thus proving that she has learnt nothing from Noémi. Individually, neither Marie nor Noémi ultimately achieves the combination of femininity and emancipation which is Weiss’s ideal. Marie’s abortion parallels Noémi’s abortive attempt to achieve world peace through the League of Nations. It seems appropriate to import from Combats pour les femmes a conclusion to this novel: ‘S’il fallait libérer les femmes d’un lourd passé de préjugés et réviser les lois, il fallait aussi et surtout les affranchir d’elles-mêmes��������� ’ (It is necessary to liberate women from the weight of the prejudices of the past and to revise the laws, but it is also and above all necessary to free them from themselves).18 There is in Weiss’s work – including her autobiography – a constant tension between alignment and separation of conventional femininity and politics, alignment being a political ideal but separation being the cruel reality for the female subject. Weiss’s political ideal manifests itself in Délivrance in the figure of L’Enchanteur, the president of the League of Nations, a character inspired by Weiss’s admiration for Aristide Briand.19 To propose 18

Weiss, Combats pour les femmes, p. 27. is clear from comparison with Combats pour L’Europe that L’Enchanteur is a fictional representation of Aristide Briand. On the relationship between Weiss and Briand, see Jacques Bariéty, ������������������������������������������������� ‘Le projet d’union européenne d’Aristide Briand’ in Georges-Henri Sourou and Jean Bérenger (eds.), L’ordre européenne du XVIe au 19 It



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the political ideal of feminised politics via a male character may seem perverse. However, the paradigmatic status of L’Enchanteur stems from his transitional function: a sympathetic male figure is necessary to bridge the gap between existing ‘masculine’ politics (war) and Weiss’s ‘feminine’ ideal (peace). Weiss saw women as having a natural affinity with peace; this is why she believed women could transform politics for the better. However, at this point in history, L’Enchanteur is the incarnation of pacifist politics, and he represents the only hope for women: ��������������������������������� ‘Notre destinée, la destinée des femmes dépendait de la réussite de l’Enchanteur’ (�D, p. 181) (Our destiny, women’s destiny, depended on L’Enchanteur’s success). He alone has understood femininity and he alone has the capacity to transform it into something politically effective: Je percevais qu’en dehors de la salle, flottait éparse une sensibilité féminine encore non affectée dont l’Enchanteur avait découvert certaines lois et qui pourrait, liée à une cause, se transformer en une mystique inspiratrice d’agissante solidarité.��(D, p. 61) (Outside the room I perceived a fluid, disparate feminine sensibility which had survived and whose laws l’Enchanteur had discovered and which could, if linked to a cause, transform itself into a mystical muse inspiring active solidarity.)

However L’Enchanteur is dying, and his successor, the text suggests, must be ‘L’Enchanteuse’ if the cause of world peace is to move successfully forward. ‘Papalin’ (D, p. 76) (Daddy), the symbolic father, must be replaced by an arch-mother. But Noémi shows that much will have to change in terms both of social constructions of gender and of women’s own relationship to their femininity before this is realisable. Her quest to be his successor is abortive because of both of these factors. Délivrance presents an optimistic view of politics in flux, moving towards the peace which the feminisation of politics will bring. Female commitment is part of a larger vision of politics moving ever forwards through the benign influence of femininity, a femininity which is presented as being different from, and superior to, masculinity. XXe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1998), pp. 137–49 (p. 140����������������������������������������������������������������� ). Corinne Rousseau gives a detailed account of the coincidences between Briand’s political agenda and that of Weiss and L’Europe nouvelle in ‘Louise Weiss, l’Europe et la paix durant l’entre-deux-guerres’.

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This positive and poetic evocation of femininity in Weiss’s textual universe had its counterpart in her real-life political world. But since poetry is of limited use in the street, Weiss needed a different vocabulary through which to valorise femininity in her campaigns with the suffragist group La Femme nouvelle: in this context, she therefore adopted the language of culturally-constructed gender stereotypes. A commentator writing in Le Figaro of 16 February 1936 remarked on the choice of the Salon ������������������������������� des Arts Ménagers�������� (Salon of the Domestic Arts) as the venue for the inaugural dinner of the electoral campaign of La Femme nouvelle: Le choix du lieu n’était pas vain. Il fallait, en effet, convaincre le public que l’on peut être à la fois bonne féministe et bonne ménagère […] On avait photographié et filmé Mlle Weiss en train de vider un poulet et de le préparer pour la cuisson�.20 (The choice of location was not without significance. In fact it was necessary to convince the public that it is possible to be both a good feminist and a good housewife […] Mademoiselle Weiss was filmed and photographed removing the giblets from a chicken and preparing it for the oven.)

One of Weiss’s suffrage slogans was:������������������������������ ‘Même si vous nous donnez le droit de vote, vos chaussettes seront raccommodées’�������������� (Even if you give us the right to vote, your socks will get mended).21 When she organised unofficial elections with female candidates during the municipal elections of 1935 and the general election of April 1936, she used hat boxes instead of voting urns. We saw in Chapter 1, via the examples of women’s participation in pacifism, social work and the ‘ministries of reproduction’, that potentially oppressive constructions of femininity might be manipulated in the cause of liberation. Weiss constantly took what Susan Bordo terms the ‘prevailing norms’ of femininity as a springboard for political commitment. The impact of the suffrage campaigns led by La Femme nouvelle depended precisely on the manipulation of conventional stereotypes of femininity.22 In this respect, Weiss adopted an approach already tried and tested by English suffragettes before the 20

Press report on La Femme nouvelle, Le Figaro, 16 February 1936. Dossier Louise Weiss, BMD. 21 Quoted in Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, p. 204 and p. 339. 22 Weiss gives a full account of her inter-war feminist activities in Combats pour les femmes. See also Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, pp. 334–42.



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First World War. Caroline Howlett argues that by appropriating conventional femininity for political ends, the suffragettes succeeded in destabilising it as a signifier. She concludes that: Rather than simply appropriating femininity in a way which left its meanings unshaken, suffragettes reinscribed femininity with new militant and lesbian meanings which severely disrupted its stability as an essential characteristic of women and thus as a signifier in the heterosexual economy.23

Weiss’s aim was similar (although as we shall see in Chapter 4, Weiss did not attempt to inscribe suffragist militancy with lesbian meanings): by using conventional femininity as a focus for her highprofile street demonstrations, Weiss sought to combine effective shock tactics with a reassuring vision of conventional femininity. Contemporary press reports suggest that this was an effective strategy. The press treated such campaigns as an amusing diversion whilst nonetheless acknowledging their impact: Enfin, et ce n’est pas le côté le moins pittoresque de la campagne, il y a les candidatures féminines […] Ces tentatives, dépourvues qu’elles soient de valeur légale ne peuvent manquer de présenter une grande force de propagande. Elles seront l’une des particularités dominantes de cette campagne électorale.24 (Also, and this is quite the most entertaining part of the campaign, there are the female candidates […] These candidacies lack any legal value but they will certainly have tremendous propaganda value. They will be one of the defining features of this election campaign).

Weiss had created an image of feminism which was simultaneously comforting and threatening. But it was not just a question of image. Weiss believed that that which was proper to women would be beneficial to politics: Je voyais ce droit sous un double aspect. En modifiant les coutumes, il donnerait aux femmes toutes leurs chances dans leurs activités civiles et, en modifiant la politique, toutes ses chances de survivre à une humanité trop encline aux conflits�.25 23 Caroline

Howlett, ‘Femininity Slashed: Suffragette Militancy, Modernism and Gender’ in Hugh Stevens and Caroline Howlett (eds.), Modernist Sexualities (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 72–91 (p. 87). 24 Press report on Louise Weiss, Paris-Midi, 24 April 1936. Dossier Louise Weiss, BMD. 25 Weiss, Combats pour les femmes, p. 18.

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Weiss argues not only that the vote is important for women themselves, since it would allow them to live as full citizens, but also that the vote is important for politics; the feminisation of politics will have the beneficial effect of orienting humanity towards peace rather than war and thus ensuring a better future for humanity in general. For Weiss, female political commitment, which is to be facilitated by suffragist feminism, is more than a simple redressing of the balance based on arguments of fairness in political representation: it is to have wider repercussions for politics. As Anne Phillips points out, this is a conventional argument for the inclusion of women (or indeed any excluded group) in the polity – they will change politics, and thus the world, for the better.26 Ellen Kennedy and Susan Mendus, in their introduction to Women in Western Political Philosophy, suggest three possible stances regarding women’s attempt to gain access to the political realm.27 Firstly, they describe the possible transformation of politics by an attempt to ‘feminise’ it, which involves undermining the traditional public/private distinction. Secondly, politics might be rejected completely, which amounts to a valorisation of the private over the public. Thirdly, women might demand access to the existing political system, thus accepting the established view that the public realm is superior to the private. The Louise Weiss of Délivrance exemplifies the first of these. Weiss’s attempt to find a ‘feminine’ mode of action in the peace movement and in the suffrage movement through which to express her political belief is in turn to have a transformative effect on politics itself. Maternity: feminising politics and politicising femininity The dominant motif used by Weiss in her imaginative writing to express the feminisation of politics was maternity. In her attempt 26

Phillips, Engendering Democracy, pp. 49, 63.

27 Ellen Kennedy and Susan Mendus (eds.), Women in Western Political Philosophy

(Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1987), pp. 16–18.



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to ally femininity, politics and maternity, Weiss again engaged positively with prevailing contemporary views about female identity. According to Françoise Thébaud’s analysis of maternity in France between the wars, ‘[l]’idéologie ���������������������������������������������� dominante pendant l’entre-deuxguerres exige de la femme d’être une mère avant tout’��������������� (the dominant ideology between the wars required women to be mothers above all).28 This ideology had both positive and negative consequences: on the one hand, it allowed feminists to argue for an extension of women’s rights based on their reproductive function, given that, in the context of the falling birth rate, the state had an interest in listening to such arguments.29 On the other hand, it suggested a return of women to the home, especially given the unemployment which resulted from the economic crisis of the early 1930s. Clearly then, the attempt to use the motif of maternity positively in relation to politics was fraught with difficulties, difficulties which Weiss did not entirely overcome. Maternity recurs frequently as a metaphor in Weiss’s writing. In Combats pour L’Europe,����������������������������������������� Weiss describes the crisis in Russia by making a conventional association between the health of the nation and the fertility of its women: Elles n’avaient plus de seins, ces femmes, plus de ventre, plus de cheveux, plus de genoux. Elles n’étaient que chairs meurtries, poils clairsemés, os tordus, aisselles grattées, escarres. Marx pouvait vaticiner. Lénine finasser. Trotsky maudire. Telle se révélait la réalité fondamentale: la Russie était atteinte dans sa maternité.30 (These women no longer had breasts, no bellies, no hair, no knees. They were just bruised flesh, thinning hair, twisted bones, itching armpits, 28 ������������������� Françoise Thébaud,

Quand nos grand-mères donnaient la vie. La maternité en France dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1986), p. 23. 29 For an analysis of French feminists’ approach to the maternity question, see Anne Cova, ‘French Feminism and Maternity: theories and policies 1890–1918’ and Karen Offen, ‘Body Politics: women, work and the politics of motherhood in France, 1920–1950’, both in Gisela Bock and Pat Thane (eds.), Maternity and Gender Policies. Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s–1950s (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 118–37 and pp. 138–59, respectively. 30 Weiss, Combats pour l’Europe, p. 119. Weiss had incorporated the same incident nearly word for word in Délivrance (p. 228), where it forms part of Noémi’s political testimony. Some of these sentences recur verbatim in ���������������� Fred Kupferman, Au Pays des Soviets. Le Voyage en Union Soviétique 1917–1939 (Paris: Editions Gallimard/ Julliard, 1979����������������������������������������������������������������������� ), p. 55, where they are ascribed to an interview with Weiss conducted by Kupferman in 1977.

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In Délivrance, Weiss attempts to use the Marie-Noémi couple to construct a symbolic equivalence between politics and maternity: En me comparant à elle [i.e. Noémi], je me disais que toutes deux, femmes génératrices de vie, nous avions été mises à la torture pendant ces interminables années d’après-guerre. Nous avions œuvré: l’enfant de son esprit avait avorté; l’enfant de ma chair pourrait vivre peut-être.��(D, p. 109) (When I compared myself to her [i.e. Noémi], I said to myself that both of us, women who had generated life, had been tortured during the interminable post-war years. We had created: the child of her intellect had miscarried; perhaps the child of my flesh could live.)

Childbearing is also used as a metaphor for the creation of the novel: Je combattis l’agonie. Dans l’acharnement de ma résistance, les transports qui labouraient mes entrailles remontèrent à mon cerveau. Alors, secouée d’un furieux besoin de créer, de sortir malgré tout quelque chose de mon être fécondé et d’œuvrer en poussant des cris, instinctive jusqu’au seuil de l’éternité, je me levai pour m’emparer d’une plume, pour te parler, ah! encore une fois avant de mourir. (�D, p. 315) (I fought against the throes of death. In the frenzy of my resistance, the transports of emotion which lacerated my womb rose to my brain. And so, convulsed by a furious need to create, to produce something, in spite of everything, from my fertile being, and to labour with cries of pain, an instinct which survives right up to the threshold of eternity, I got up to seize a pen, to speak to you, oh! once more before I die.)

However, these words, which close the text and explain its fictional genesis, suggest a displacement of the maternal body in favour of mental travail. Purely cerebral activity has been substituted for ‘���� les transports qui labouraient mes entrailles’. Marie������������������ has undergone an abortion, and thereafter, the creation of a child is exchanged for the creation of a political discourse. This relationship between the firstperson narrator and the text is mirrored in the relationship between Noémi and pacifist politics within the League of Nations, since politics functions as a substitute child for Noémi after the death of her flesh-and-blood son. Later, Noémi’s retreat from politics



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is encoded as a return to motherhood since her new task, to care for her partner, Christian, is also a maternal one, and one which excludes politics for the moment: ‘plus ����������������������������������� encore que mon amant, il est mon enfant […] Ma tâche la plus certaine est auprès de Christian. Pour l’action politique, il sera toujours temps’��(D, pp. 311–12) (even more than my lover, he is my child. What I must do now is be with Christian. As for political action, the time will always be ripe for that). Politics and maternity then are symbolically equivalent in Délivrance, but they must observe a strict sequence. The relationship between politics and maternity is one of substitution which produces a separation between successful maternity and successful politics. Susan Stanford Friedman has argued that culture has effected a separation between production and reproduction, which results in the fiction of the mutual exclusivity of creation and procreation.31 Délivrance maintains this opposition in its assertion that a woman writes, in the case of the narrator, or becomes engaged in politics, in the case of Noémi, only when procreation has failed. Friedman’s close analysis of various examples of female-authored childbirthcreation metaphors suggests a typology of such images, organised as various points along a continuum beginning with ‘a fundamental acceptance of a masculinist aesthetic that separates creativity and procreativity’ and ending with ‘a defiant celebration of (pro)creation, a gynocentric aesthetic based on the body’.32 Délivrance exemplifies the first two points on Friedman’s scale. In that the text’s metaphorical patterns offer no model for the fusion of creation and procreation, it exemplifies ‘the use of the metaphor to confirm the patriarchal separation of creativities’.33 In Délivrance, female creation, which appears in the guise of writing a political narrative (Marie) and political activism (Noémi), can only follow the death of the child. The next point along Friedman’s continuum is termed the ‘desire for and fear of possible fusion of literary and literal motherhood’.34 This formulation precisely describes Noémi’s situation as, on the one hand, the arch-mother of League of Nations politics, but as such, on the other hand, a hybrid and inadequate creature, ‘���������������� le monstre d’un 31 Susan

Stanford Friedman, ‘Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse’, Feminist Studies 13.1 (Spring 1987), 49–82 (p. 52). 32 Ibid., p. 66. 33 Ibid., p. 67. 34 Ibid., p. 68.

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genre inconnu’������������������������������������������������������ . Weiss stops short of presenting the most radical of politicised women: the one who is a mother as well. Weiss’s attempt to feminise politics via maternity does not result in what Friedman calls ‘a gynocentric aesthetic’. Turning now to an analysis of characterisation, we shall see that Weiss’s attempt to politicise femininity via maternity is also problematic, although for different reasons. Weiss constructs Noémi’s character and personal history such that she can use her to convince the reader that certain attributes of femininity – specifically, those associated with childbearing – are politically useful. Firstly, maternity is presented by Weiss as a motivating factor in female politicisation. We learn that it was the death of Noémi’s child, André, which precipitated her entry into politics: ‘��������������� En souvenir du bébé que j’avais totalement chéri, j’entrepris de plaider à travers le monde sa cause, celle des innocents, la paix’ (�D, p. 215) (In memory of the baby which I had so cherished, I undertook to plead his cause throughout the world, the cause of the innocent children, peace). Here the linking of women with the peace movement because of their role as life-givers is made explicit. Women are to be politically motivated by their identification with ����������������������������� ‘la génération des mères des soldats tombés au front’ (�D, p. 223) (the generation of mothers of soldiers who fell at the front), with ����������������������������� ‘l’enfance martyrisée par la vindicte des hommes’ (�D, p. 229) (childhood martyred by men’s fault). Secondly, women’s capacity for maternal affection is the basis for their positive contribution to politics. Noémi, much of whose political work is oriented around mothers and children, is precisely the sort of arch-mother who could succeed L’Enchanteur, because ‘[m]on amie incarnait toute la maternité, toute l’enfance du monde’ (D, p. 229) (my friend incarnated all the world’s motherhood, all its childhood), because she is a ‘mère ������������������� exemplaire’��(D, p. 248) (an exemplary mother), ‘�������������������������������� la grande et maternelle Noémi’��(D, p. 312) (the great, maternal Noémi), characterised in terms of ‘���������������� sa souveraineté maternelle’��(D, p. 258) (her maternal sovereignty). These are precisely the sorts of arguments advanced by feminist theorists in the 1980s such as Jean Bethke Elshtain and Sara Ruddick, who proposed to recuperate the positive value of motherhood for feminist consciousness as a response to the criticism of the family and the maternal role which had been a feature of



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1970s feminism.35 According to Mary Dietz, in an article which is very critical of ‘maternal thinking’ but which does, I think, give a fair account of its main foci, this strand of feminism makes two key promises: to valorise women’s identity as mothers (a point about female subjectivity), and to create an ‘ethical’ and ‘compassionate’ polity based on the nurturing and preservation of human life (a point about politics).36 Dietz argues that there is no reason why citizens – mothers included – should not be politicised by concerns specific to their own situation. It is at the place where this argument shades into an equation of maternity with citizenship that Dietz parts company with the ‘maternal thinkers’. Her criticisms of their work reveal the problems with Weiss’s argument. Two of Dietz’s key objections to ‘maternal thinking’ are that the supposed causal link between being a good mother and being a good citizen remains to be proved, and that ‘maternal thinking’ does not tell us how exactly it intends to protect life.37 A convincing argument for ‘maternal thinking’ would have to show, according to Dietz, ‘that maternal virtues are conceptually connected to, or that the social practice of mothering causally brings about, democratic values – particularly active citizenship, self-government, egalitarianism, and the exercise of freedom’.38 Weiss’s representation of Noémi is an attempt to show precisely this. Because the text in question is a novel, Weiss has a less difficult job on her hands than the theoretical ‘maternal thinkers’: the text almost persuades, because to succeed aesthetically it only has to show that one women – Noémi – uses her maternal instincts positively for political ends. However, taking this argument from the aesthetic realm into the political domain, one would have to ask whether all women are supposed to have this capacity, or just mothers, or perhaps just good mothers, and whether we are dealing 35 See

for example Sara Ruddick, ‘Maternal Thinking’, Feminist Studies 6.2 (Summer 1980), 342–67, and the debate over Elshtain’s essay ‘Feminism, Family and Community’, Dissent 29.4 (Fall 1982), 442–49. Barbara Ehrenreich and Marshall Berman responded in Dissent 30.1 (Winter 1983), 103–109 and 30.2 (Winter 1983), 247–55 respectively. 36 Mary G. Dietz, ‘The Problem with Maternal Thinking’, Political Theory 13.1 (February 1985), 19–37. See also the juxtaposed essays by Elshtain and Dietz reprinted in Phillips (ed.), Feminism and Politics: Elshtain, ‘Antigone’s Daughters’, first published in 1982, pp. 363–77 and Dietz, ‘Context is All: Feminism and Theories of Citizenship’, first published in 1987, pp. 378–400. 37 Dietz, ‘The Problem with Maternal Thinking’, pp. 30–35. 38 Ibid., p. 30.

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with a somatically based femininity, or one which is culturally constructed, and so on. Weiss’s argument falls into the same trap as more recent ‘maternal thinkers’, not least because the role accorded to the female body is unclear. For example, Sara Ruddick’s article on ‘Maternal Thinking’ confusingly asserts both that the ‘maternal’ is a social, not biological category, and is therefore open to all, and that women have a privileged relationship to the ‘maternal’, an argument which must, at some level, be biologically based. Weiss’s novel attempts to assert a form of female subjectivity which is based on the maternal, but which is certainly not an explicit politics of the body, and which is not derived exclusively from the social function of mothering either. As regards the question of how the ideal feminine (compassionate, ethical and peaceful) polity is to be achieved, Weiss is more specific than modern ‘maternal thinkers’. Her answer is the League of Nations. But her answer is not of course the actual League of Nations, for the novel seeks to demonstrates the latter’s inadequacy, but rather an imagined, idealised institution infused with the mystical femininity incarnated by L’Enchanteur. Weiss’s politics as it emerges from Délivrance ������������������������������ depends on female difference, but that difference tends to be evoked in terms of women’s emotions and experiences, rather than being rigorously defined. Weiss depicts femininity as a mixture of stereotypical cultural roles and ahistorical biological impulses, both of which she presents positively and which add up to that primal ‘����������������������������������������� sensibilité féminine’�������������������� which l’Enchanteur has understood. Weiss thus proposes the sort of ‘sentimentalised vision’ which Phillips cites as one possible consequence of a view of feminism and politics which is based on an assertion of female difference.39 Henriette Valet’s politicisation of maternity in Madame 60BIS is of a quite different order. Valet’s novel privileges the appellative rather than the ontological mode, seeking to present an ideological and sociological analysis of the way in which poor women are expected to bear children under capitalism. Here the reader is faced with actual, not metaphorical, maternity, in all its grim reality. As Fred Bud Burkhard argues in his analysis of the novel, Valet’s choice of the Hôtel-Dieu is politically significant:

39

Phillips, Feminism and Politics, p. 11.



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Valet’s choice inserts the misery and the tragedy of the maternity ward squarely into the historic center of Paris, right in its political, intellectual and financial heart […] The drama of the maternity ward is not peripheral to the lives of the French but located at the center of everyday national existence.40

Indeed, Valet plays on the geographical and linguistic proximity of the Hôtel-Dieu with the Hôtel de Ville in order to demonstrate women’s relationship to the state. In a humorous episode, the women look out from inside the hospital, over the Seine and onto the Hôtel de Ville: – Dites donc, propose la boniche. On va grimper sur les montants des lits et regarder par les lucarnes ce qui se passe dehors. Heureuses de cette diversion, les voilà qui se hissent, le corps plaqué au mur, les mains collées au plafond; elles tendent le cou, les têtes sortent par la lucarne. La toiture doit se trouver fleurie d’un rang de têtes curieuses et hilares. (MSB, p. 191) (‘I know’, suggests the skivvy, ‘We’ll climb up on the bed heads and look out of the skylights at what’s going on outside’. Pleased at this distraction, there they are, hauling themselves up, their bodies flattened against the wall, their hands pressed to the ceiling. They crane their necks, and their heads pop out of the skylight. The roof must have looked as if it was sprouting a row of curious and laughing heads.)

The hilarious image of a row of heads poking out of the roof of the ��������������������������������������������������������� Hôtel-Dieu����������������������������������������������� and looking out onto the ��������������������� Hôtel de Ville������� , from which they are physically separated, is a striking metaphor for the inaccessibility for the female subject of the dominant political institutions which the Hôtel ��������������������������������������������� de Ville������������������������������� exemplifies. The women do not comprehend the gendered opposition between political participation and spectatorship which the text makes clear for the reader: – C’est vraiment beau La République. Ça doit être le président que je viens de voir passer; tout le monde a enlevé son chapeau et en avant la musique. Il est fait comme tout le monde. Vous voyez bien, c’est l’égalité. Et c’est la liberté aussi puisqu’on a le droit de les regarder! (MSB, pp. 194–95) (The Republic is really wonderful. That must be the president who I’ve just seen going past – they have all taken their hats off, and there goes the music!

40

Burkhard, ‘Henriette Valet’s Madame 60BIS: French Social Realities and Literary Politics in the 1930s’, p. 506.

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These women are taken in by the myth of the Republic and its discourses of freedom and equality which the text exposes as duplicitous and deceiving. Valet’s novel will show that those who wish to create better living conditions for working-class women must attack not only patriarchy, but female collusion with it. The text’s geographical setting indicates that Madame 60BIS is an illustration of the social and political contexts in which workingclass women were obliged to experience their bodies. Valet uses childbearing to dramatise a threefold political oppression which is specific in its effects but general in its source: Elles sont opprimées et écrasées parce qu’elles sont pauvres, parce qu’elles sont femmes, parce qu’elles vont être mères. Les causes de leur malheur sont les mêmes pour toutes et ne viennent pas d’elles-mêmes mais de tout un monde. (MSB, p. 91) (They are oppressed and downtrodden because they are poor, because they are women and because they are going to be mothers. The reasons for their misery are the same for all women and do not come from within themselves but from the wider world.)

The pregnant body is the site of Valet’s analysis of wider class, economic and gender inequalities. The text asks how the suffering which is inscribed on the female body, and the political roots of that suffering, can fruitfully be brought into discourse as a weapon against oppression. The narrator, who is endowed with a degree of political lucidity which the other women lack, initially aims to reveal the political truth of their condition to her fellow patients: the text’s central problematic is formulated by the narrator as ‘Que ������������������ leur dire?’, ‘Qui a jamais exprimé leur souffrance?’��(MSB, p. 41) (What could I say to them? Who has ever expressed their suffering?). However, she discovers that the working-class women in the ������������������ Hôtel-Dieu�������� cannot understand that their individual physical suffering has a collective, and therefore political, dimension: �������������������������������� ‘Et pourtant chacune d’elles se croit un petit point particulier dans l’ensemble; chacune pense que sa misère est unique’ (�MSB, p. 91) (And yet each one of them thinks she is one little individual within the whole. Each one of them thinks her misery is unique). The production of a liberating discourse is hampered on the one hand by working-class women’s lack of



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revolutionary fervour, and on the other by their pragmatic blindness to their own misery which, whilst actually cementing that misery, renders it tolerable on a day-to-day basis. They are utterly resigned: ‘C’est comme ça parce que c’est comme ça��� ’ (MSB, p. 24) (That’s the way it is because that’s the way it is). They subscribe to a right-wing individualist view which blames the private self for the poverty the class system imposes on its underdogs: ‘����������������������������� Si les gens crèvent de faim, c’est qu’ils ne sont pas débrouillards’��(MSB, pp. 38–39) (If people are starving, it’s because they can’t look after themselves). Via her analysis of the maternal body, Valet’s text reveals a double bind – the class system produces proletarian misery, a misery which the miserable themselves must not admit if despair is to be avoided, yet the consequent disguising of class-based misery as individual fault supports the ideology responsible for the creation of misery in the first place. For to focus on ‘���������������������������������������� l’ensemble’����������������������������� , to speak their oppression, would be unbearable: Alors la douleur est en elles, et elles le savent à peine, parce qu’elle n’a pas été dite. La souffrance est ensevelie dans la torpeur. On la supporte mieux ainsi. La misère serait intolérable s’il fallait la voir en face. (MSB, pp. 41–42) (So pain is within them, and they hardly know it, because it has never been spoken. Suffering is buried in torpor. That way it is easier to bear it. Misery would be intolerable if you had to look at it head on.)

The narrator is faced with the paradox that the creation of a discourse which is politically liberating in general terms will consign individual women to a despair which is less tolerable than their ignorance: ����������������������������������������������������������������� ‘Pour éveiller en elles la révolte, il faudrait d’abord éveiller le désespoir. Mais ai-je le droit de le faire?’ �(MSB, p. 93) (In order to awaken revolt within them, it would first be necessary to awaken despair. But do I have the right to do so?). The narrator cannot find the answer to this dilemma. She concludes: ������������������������� ‘Je n’ai pas su répondre à cette question: que faire? J’ai seulement appris que mes colères intérieures et mes révoltes étaient inutiles’ �(MSB, p. 242) (I have not been able to answer this question – what is to be done? I have only learned that the anger within me and my rebellions were useless). The text’s optimism is located in the fact that the narrator’s experiences inside the ���������������������������������������������� Hôtel-Dieu������������������������������������ are motivating politically for her as an individual:

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In this clear statement of commitment, which incorporates both critical awareness (‘���������������������������������������������� lucide’��������������������������������������� ) and a commitment to action (‘�������� agir’��� ), it is being a mother which motivates female politicisation. Whilst the socio-political environment of inter-war France has thwarted collective female commitment, just as it thwarts Noémi’s political career in Délivrance,�������������������������������������������� individual commitment has been achieved by the narrator, and is presented in the text’s closing words as the first, crucial step along the road to female emancipation: L’hôpital disparaît derrière moi. D’autres femmes arrivent aujourd’hui, arriveront demain, chaque jour, pitoyables, marquées par toute la vie des femmes – et sortiront humiliées, brisées, aujourd’hui, demain, toujours peut-être … �������������������� Non, pas toujours! (MSB, p. 243) (The hospital disappears behind me. Other women are arriving today, and will arrive tomorrow, and every day, pathetic, scarred by the life women lead – and they will leave, humiliated, broken, today, tomorrow, forever perhaps … No, not forever!)

At the level of its explicit argument, Valet’s text does not anticipate the ‘maternal thinkers’. It could not do so and remain acceptable to the revolutionary left which was very far from promoting a gendered or embodied understanding of politicisation. As we saw in Chapter 2, the criteria of acceptability to specific ideological or genre conventions, and therefore to specific literary-political commitments, was necessarily operative in the narrative choices made by the women writers in this study. Nonetheless, Valet’s vision is of a commitment to the left and of an inclusion of women in politics dually motivated by the physical experience and political understanding of what it means to give birth in poverty. Valet dares to risk the potentially negative consequences of arguing for women’s rights on the basis



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of their experience as mothers, and she dares to make a distinction based on sex between members of the oppressed proletariat under capitalism. Her argument is then radical in terms of its acceptability within the left-wing literary and ideological contexts in which she attempted to insert her work. It is my contention that Valet achieves this sort of acceptability by evoking a form of politicisation based on the maternal body via the text’s imagery, rather than via its explicit political-economic argument. Thus it is an example of what Friedman terms ‘a gynocentric aesthetic’. An analysis of the text’s imagery seems not to have been undertaken by contemporary critics (and has not been undertaken since to my knowledge); this will be my aim in Chapter 5. Ruth Lister provides a useful theoretical framework via which we can approach the difference between Weiss’s and Valet’s representations of maternity and politics. In considering various forms of maternalist political theory, Lister asks ‘whether the primary concern is with women’s material contribution through their maternal responsibilities or with their supposed distinctive qualities and values’ (Lister’s emphasis).41 For Lister, the former is a ‘weak’ form of maternalism, and the latter a ‘strong’ form. Weiss’s Délivrance would seem on the face of it to conform to ‘strong’ maternalism, since she takes some form of female difference – read superiority – as a starting point. But ultimately Weiss does not conflate the female citizen with her different body – as a good republican, she understands citizenship in terms of disembodiment and equality. Weiss defines maternity primarily in its relational aspect – it is the contribution woman-as-mother makes to society which is valorised. Thus Weiss’s maternalism is on the ‘weak’ side of Lister’s schema, because the role she accords to the body is unclear. Valet on the other hand very clearly prioritises the female body in its physical specificity in her investigation into female commitment. Valet seeks to show that the experience of capitalism differs according to the physical sex of the subject. As a woman, she suggests that solidarity can be derived from a shared physical experience. For these reasons, her maternalism is on the ‘strong’ side of Lister’s schema. However, for Valet, maternity is a strategic, temporary moment: progress is achieved by the female subject who finds strength and creativity in her physical difference (understood as physical sameness with other 41

Lister, Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives, p. 97.

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women) in order to achieve equality in the wider world. For Valet – unlike Beauvoir – the female body is very definitely a project in the existentialist sense. But the claims she makes for procreationas-project are more limited than those of theorists such as Ruddick or Elshtain. Valet does not suggest that maternity can or should characterise all women’s politicisation. Her novel seeks only to show that there is a way forward for those who find themselves at the intersection of three specific markers of identity: woman, mother and proletarian. She does not make claims on behalf of the whole of womankind – those who are child free will, we assume, pursue other projects on their journey towards commitment, projects which will be equally valid within the context of the revolutionary left’s fight for freedom from oppression. A utopian erasure of difference Views such as those of Weiss and Valet about femininity and politics could hardly be more antipathetic to the work of Madeleine Pelletier. Pelletier’s texts advocate a complete rejection of femininity as the sine qua non of female commitment, a rejection which appears not to be problematic in the least for the female subject. In Pelletier’s texts, the complete eradication of gender difference constitutes a utopia in which the female subject is unequivocally empowered by cutting herself off from femininity. For Pelletier, the separation of the female subject from femininity is possible because she sees gender as being socially produced and therefore not immutable; as Claudine Mitchell notes, ‘Pelletier argued that sexual difference was the product of culture, and that all forms of social relations were determined by it’.42 The evidence provided by Pelletier’s novels suggests that she believed, like many mainstream communists, that in a successful post-revolutionary society, social relations would be completely different, and therefore women would no longer be condemned to femininity. Her views differed from the orthodox communist stance in that she did not believe that this fact rendered working for gender equality before the revolution unnecessary.

42 Claudine

Mitchell, ‘Madeleine Pelletier (1874–1939): The Politics of Sexual Oppression’, Feminist Review 33 (Autumn 1989), 72–92 (p. 76).



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In the imaginary communist France presented in Une Vie nouvelle, as we have seen, Pelletier’s gender ideal has been achieved. For Pelletier, the erasure of sexual difference is a utopian dream; her great hope is that the fundamental sameness which she believes characterises all human beings can triumph over physical differences. By contrast, her second novel, La Femme vierge, set in the real world of inter-war Paris, charts a woman’s attempt to achieve the ideal of gender sameness in less favourable conditions. As Marie grows up and leaves her naïvety behind, she is forced to take account of a world in which being female constitutes a limitation on a whole range of activities, and in particular, political commitment. This is articulated through the attitude of her fellow teachers: Marie avait encouru la désapprobation parce que, son repas expédié, elle lisait L’Aurore. Aucune institutrice ne lisait les journaux. La plupart, dans leurs moments de repos, faisait au crochet d’interminables dentelles, les plus affranchies lisaient un roman-feuilleton. N’osant interpeller directement Marie, on échangeait à son propos et sans la nommer des généralités. – Une femme n’a pas à lire les journaux; la politique doit être réservée aux hommes. La femme, d’ailleurs, a assez à faire dans son ménage sans aller s’occuper de politique. Une dame d’âge mûr qui était mariée disait que, le soir, elle prenait bien le journal de son mari, mais c’était uniquement pour lire le feuilleton et les faits divers, le reste ne l’intéressait pas. (FV, p. 82) (Marie had incurred disapproval because, once she had finished her lunch, she would read L’Aurore. No other teacher read the newspapers. In their breaks, most of them would crochet endless pieces of lace; the more liberated ones would read a serialised novel. Since they did not dare to address Marie directly, people would make general remarks about her but without mentioning her name. ‘A woman has no business reading the newspapers. Politics should be reserved for men. In any case a woman has enough to do in her home without going and worrying about politics.’ A mature married lady said that in the evenings, she might well pick up her husband’s newspaper, but only to read the serialised story and the news in brief; she wasn’t interested in the rest.)

Marie, like Pelletier, is constantly faced with the fact that the social structures of her environment are opposed to the gender sameness she desires. Culture states that a woman should keep out of the male domain of politics; women’s own internalisation of such an injunction often renders them disinterested in the sources of information through which they might be led to oppose it.

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La Femme vierge shows that the gender sameness Pelletier advocates is in fact the alignment of the female subject with masculinity. Pelletier was unequivocally in favour of the active adoption of a masculine role by the politicised female subject. She herself wore masculine clothing and vehemently rejected all the trappings of conventional femininity. This did not win her the support of other women. Most were scandalised by her audacity. The reaction of her close friend Arria Ly was more theoretical; she objected that Pelletier’s views and behaviour perpetuated oppressive gender oppositions: Il est indispensable comme le dit fort justement Madeleine Pelletier que la femme s’applique – je ne dirai pas à se viriliser, l’expression étant impropre et masculiniste – mais à tremper son caractère. Et au sujet des expressions masculinistes, je me permets d’adresser une critique à Madeleine Pelletier: pourquoi continue-t-elle les anciens errements? Pourquoi fait-elle de viril un synonyme de fermeté et de féminité un synonyme de faiblesse? Cela détonne sous une plume féministe et c’est d’ailleurs confondre l’effet avec la cause.43 (It is vital, as Madeleine Pelletier quite rightly says, that a woman should take great care to strengthen her character – and I don’t mean to ‘virilise’ herself, since that expression is inappropriate and masculinist. And on the subject of masculinist expressions, I should like to take issue with Madeleine Pelletier on one point: why does she perpetuate the bad old ways? Why does she make ‘virile’ synonymous with firmness, and ‘femininity’ synonymous with weakness? It is out of place coming from the pen of a feminist and in any case it a confusion of the effect with the cause.)

Ly here argues that femininity should be valued in itself, and that the alternative is an undesirable impersonation of the male which ascribes superiority to the latter. The debate is the inevitable one between equality conceived of as sameness, and equality which stresses difference. Pelletier believed that the embracing of ‘femininity’ could only limit and oppress women further; for her, the only route to emancipation was for women to seize for themselves the privileges hitherto reserved for men, to overcome femininity via virilisation. Marie Pierrot is the epitome �� of virilisation: ‘Décidément elle aurait dû être un homme’ (F� V, p. 171) (She really should have been a man). Marie cuts her hair and always wears a suit (FV, p. 135) and is 43 ����������������� Arria Ly, ‘Pages ��à ���������� méditer’, La Suffragiste, February ��������������� 1908. Quoted ���������������� in Bard, Les

Filles de Marianne,������������ pp. 195–96.



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too virile (FV, p. 130) according to the very feminine Catherine. Her transgression of conventional dress codes, like Pelletier’s own, can be read as a deliberate and political attack on female oppression: Je ne tiens pas à être charmante, je pense qu’il est honteux pour les femmes de montrer nu ce que les hommes tiennent couvert. Les soirées mondaines me font l’effet de marchés à la chair esclave (FV, p. 135) (I have no desire to be attractive, I think it is shameful for women to reveal that which men keep covered up. Society soirées seem to me to be like slave markets.)

As Christine Bard notes, cross-dressing can be a useful political tool. According to Bard, cross-dressing has a symbolic power which she defines as: […] la transgression, vécue en pleine conscience politique, d’un code, le code vestimentaire, qui met en scène la différence des sexes, leurs rôles respectifs et hiérarchisés.44 ([…] the politically conscious transgression of a code, the dress code, which dramatises the difference between the sexes and their respective hierarchised roles.)

Marie’s masculinity is also played out at the level of her psyche. As a child, a dream which can very obviously be interpreted within a Freudian framework situates Marie on the masculine side of the Oedipal triangle: ‘Cependant ����������������������������������������������� l’enfant s’endort, mais son sommeil est hanté de cauchemars, elle rêve d’un homme qui court après lui pour lui couper le pouce’��(FV, p. 12) (However the child falls asleep, but her sleep is haunted by nightmares. She dreams about a man who is running after her to chop off her thumb). Marie appears to experience a male castration complex, believing herself to be in possession of the phallic thumb and fearing castration by the Father rather than recognising the absence of the penis and desiring to obtain it.45 Thus in psychoanalytic terms, from early childhood, 44 Christine

Bard, ‘������������������������������������������������������������������ La virilisation des femmes et l’égalité des sexes’ in Bard (ed.), Madeleine Pelletier (1974–1939). Logique et infortunes d’un combat pour l’égalité, pp. 91–108 (p. 98�� ). 45 Pelletier was familiar with Freudian psychoanalysis, which began to appear in French from around 1922. Her 1935 essay ‘���������������������������������������� La Rationalisation sexuelle’������������ represents a close engagement with Freudian theory. See Gordon, The Integral Feminist, pp. 182–87.

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Marie is shown to adopt the male position. When as an adult she becomes involved with the mainstream feminist movement, Marie scorns the attitude of other feminists to femininity which manifests itself when they attempt to organise a demonstration: L’une voulait que, pour donner à la manifestation un caractère bien féminin, on couvrît de fleurs les voitures. Une autre voulait absolument y faire figurer une jeune mère qui porterait dans ses bras un bébé. De cette façon on verrait que les féministes ne renoncent pas à la maternité. Marie avait honte d’être femme! C’étaient cela des affranchies? Toutes ces féministes étaient tellement ancrées dans leur esclavage qu’elles le voulaient afficher dans les rues. (�FV, pp. 108–109) (In order to give the demonstration a really feminine flavour, one of them wanted to cover the vehicles with flowers. Another was determined to include a young mother holding a baby in her arms. This would mean that people would see that feminists do not turn their backs on motherhood. Marie was ashamed to be a woman! Was that what liberated women were like? All those feminists were so chained to their slavery that they wanted to display it in the streets.)

This passage constitutes a direct attack on the sort of feminism in which Weiss was engaged.46 Even if one agrees with Pelletier that a politicisation focused on conventional femininity and/or biology threatens a descent into essentialism, her own inversion of the equation which valorises the ‘masculine’ as the unique site of strength and commitment is problematic in feminist terms. Virilisation was Pelletier’s response to a society in which the prevailing belief, expressed by Marie’s colleagues at school, was that politics was a male domain. Her solution is neither a transformation of politics itself, nor a transformation of woman qua woman, but her closest possible alignment with the male norm: Chez Madeleine Pelletier le masculin devient en principe la norme commune puisque les oppresseurs se sont octroyé la plupart des bonnes choses de ce monde: la liberté, les meilleurs salaires, les vêtements les plus pratiques …47 46

Pelletier might even read such feminism as an example of female masochism, which she saw as a source of women’s desire for what were, for Pelletier, oppressive modes of femininity. See Gordon, The Integral Feminist, p. 183. 47 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Bard, ‘La virilisation des femmes et l’égalité des sexes’, p. 92. On the question of virilisation see also Michelle Perrot, ‘Madeleine Pelletier ou le refus du “devenir femme” ’ in Bard (ed.), Madeleine Pelletier (1974–1939). Logique et infortunes d’un combat pour l’égalité, pp. 185–92.



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(In Madeleine Pelletier’s work, the masculine becomes the norm in principle, since the oppressors have obtained all the best things for themselves: freedom, the best salaries, the most practical clothes …)

Pelletier does not consider that to ignore femininity completely might, firstly, be impossible, if one considers the social construction of gender to be integral to the psychic construction of subjectivity, secondly, painful for the individual female subject and thirdly, undesirable for women and feminism alike. She does not engage in any debate concerning the ‘maleness’ of the concept of citizenship, and she envisages no contradictions arising from the occupation of this role by a woman. Pelletier’s views on female commitment contrast directly with those of Weiss. Their different approaches to the question exemplify the two horns of what Carole Pateman has termed the ‘Wollstonecraft dilemma’: The two horns of Wollstonecraft’s dilemma […] are, first, that within the contemporary patriarchal order, and within the confines of the ostensibly universal categories of democratic theory, it is taken for granted that for women to be active, full citizens, they must become (like) men. Second, although women have demanded for two centuries that their distinctive qualities and tasks should become part of citizenship – that is, that they should be citizens as women – their demand cannot be met when it is precisely these marks of womanhood that place women in opposition to, or, at best, in a paradoxical relation to, citizenship.48

Weiss attempts to incorporate female specificity into citizenship, whilst Pelletier is happy for women to become men. However Pelletier could not deny the fact that inter-war France systematically refused to accept women’s acquisition of male privileges such as citizenship. In order to enjoy full political participation, Marie Pierrot eventually renounces France in favour of Germany. German women had been granted an equal right to vote and stand for election under the Weimar constitution of 1919.49 Whilst Pelletier’s choice to locate Marie Pierrot’s political 48

Pateman, The Disorder of Women, p. 14. See also Chantale Mouffe’s engagement with Pateman in her ‘Feminism, Citizenship and Radical Democratic Politics’ in Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (eds.), Feminists Theorize the Political (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 374–77. 49 See Ute Frevert, Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation, trans. by Stuart McKinnon-Evans in association with Terry Bond and Barbara Norden (Oxford: Berg, 1989), pp. 151–204.

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success abroad is a clear criticism of France’s refusal to grant women political rights, her choice of Germany – in a novel published in 1933 – to depict an environment in which women have political opportunities seems perverse. Marie is persuaded by her friend and political mentor, Saladier, that it is pragmatically necessary, even if not ideologically desirable, to work initially within conventional structures of femininity if female commitment is to achieve tangible results: Appliquez-vous aux questions d’assistance: filles-mères, enfants abandonnés, etc. Ainsi vous ne choquerez personne et si vous réussissez à faire voter des lois de protection, tout le monde vous bénira. – J’aurais préféré la grande politique, je me sens de l’ambition. – Patience … Vous avez l’avenir devant vous, ce n’est pas comme moi, hélas! La grande politique viendra à son heure; pour le moment, elle ne vous ferait que du tort. (FV, p. 239) (‘Turn your attention to social issues – single mothers, abandoned children and so on. That way you won’t shock anyone and if you succeed in getting welfare laws voted, everyone will be eternally grateful to you.’ ‘I would have preferred really serious politics: I am ambitious.’ ‘Be patient … you have the future ahead of you, not like me, alas! Really serious politics will come when the time is right. At the moment it would not do you any good.’)

The issue raised is the same as that which confronts modern female politicians placed in ‘soft’ ministries dealing with social problems. In the novel, Saladier’s tactics are successful. Furthermore, Marie ‘finit d’ailleurs par prendre goût à ces questions féminines qu’elle considérait comme secondaires’ (�FV, p. 243) (in the end she got a taste for the feminine issues which she used to consider to be of secondary importance): she completely reforms the German education system, which makes her really happy��(FV, p. 246). The text ultimately suggests that it is necessary to work within society’s expectations of a woman, at least in the early stages of female commitment. This is something Pelletier herself refused to do, the reward for which, it seems, was rejection. According to Charles Sowerwine, Pelletier’s uncompromising extremism was not ultimately politically productive: Malgré ses réussites, M. Pelletier restait en marge de la vie active qu’elle convoitait. Le même refus de l’identité sexuelle courante, la même dynamique de personnalité qui lui avait permis de dépasser ses origines de



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classe et de sexe lui interdisait l’accès à la vie active et surtout les rapports affectifs dont elle avait besoin�.50 (Despite her success, M. Pelletier remained on the margins of the professional life she so desired. The same refusal of accepted gender identities, the same dynamics of personality which had allowed her to go beyond her class and her sex barred her access to a professional life and particularly to emotional relationships which she needed.)

In accepting, pragmatically, the strategy of working with rather than against conventional constructions of femininity, the text resolves something Pelletier herself could not resolve in her own life concerning the translation of belief into action. In the text, Pelletier suggests that the reality of gender inequality necessitates behaviour which appears to uphold values to which she does not subscribe. Marie, then, goes further than Pelletier herself in terms of a resolution of the question of female commitment. Femininity, class and gender The work of the authors I have discussed so far constantly foregrounds the question of the female condition, be it to embrace femininity in various forms (Weiss and Valet) or to reject it completely (Pelletier). By contrast, in her preface to Edith Thomas’s memoirs, Dorothy Kaufmann points out that Thomas says very little about being a woman (TC, p. 23). This is not to say that gender is irrelevant to Thomas’s work; indeed her fiction, memoirs and journals constitute a nuanced study of the relationship between femininity and politics, of the gender identifications of the committed female subject. What Kaufmann perhaps means is that Thomas does not take gender as a starting point in her approach to commitment. Thomas certainly is more interested in commitment, and specifically, in the problem of the ‘bourgeois(e) déclassé(e)’ (a member of the bourgeoisie who has rejected his or her class of origin) than she is in gender per 50 Sowerwine,

‘�������������������������������������������������������������������� Militantisme et identité sexuelle’���������������������������������� , p. 27. Marilyn J. Boxer makes a similar point in her essay ‘When Radical and Socialist Feminism Were Joined: The Extraordinary Failure of Madeleine Pelletier’ in Jane Slaughter and Robert Kern (eds.), European Women on the Left: Socialism, Feminism and the Problems Faced by Political Women, 1880 to the Present (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), pp. 51–73.

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se. But she is nonetheless forced to contend with the relationship between femininity and commitment because she recognises that, on an experiential level, it is not the same to be a woman active in politics as it is to be a man active in politics. Although Thomas did not join the PCF until 1942,51 her approach is consonant with the view held consistently by the party between the wars, that political change must take precedence over any concern with gender (or any other) inequality. In this respect Thomas was a very obedient fellow-traveller. In her fiction she does, however, go further than many communist commentators in her analysis of the barriers to politicisation which confronted a woman in the inter-war period. In her prioritisation of politics over gender, Thomas offers a direct contrast with Weiss, who chose rather to prioritise gender when she turned her attention from L’Europe nouvelle to La Femme nouvelle in 1936, and also with Pelletier, in that Thomas’s willingness to choose one over the other would have been anathema to Pelletier, who insisted on an ‘integral’ approach combining socialism and feminism, an approach which some historians judge to have been a failure.52 The case of Valet is slightly different – her association with the proletarian school would lead one to expect to find a prioritising of class over gender issues and indeed, her second novel, Le Mauvais temps (��������������������������������������������������������������� 1937) offers a more conventional class-based analysis; Valet’s interest in gender appears to be more experiential (as in Thomas’s case) than theoretical (Pelletier), given that Madame 60BIS is based on Valet’s own direct experience of giving birth in the ������������ Hôtel-Dieu.� And as we have seen, Valet’s explicit discourse on maternity is ultimately used in the service of a class-based analysis. Thomas’s refusal to prioritise gender issues over political issues manifests itself as a suspicion of gender separatism as a useful way forward for female commitment. This is probably the reason why Thomas states that she did not completely believe in the activities which she was required by the PCF to undertake in connection with her directorship of the journal Femmes françaises (TC, p. 171). She also specifically rejected separatism within the Resistance: 51 Thomas

resigned from the PCF in 1949 in the wake of the Tito affair. Her resignation was documented in predictably unfavourable terms in L’Humanité of 17 December 1949 in an article entitled ‘���������������������������������������������� C’est l’avis des travailleurs qui compte’����� (It Is the Opinion of the Workers Which Counts). 52 See for example Boxer, ‘When Radical and Socialist Feminism were Joined: The Extraordinary Failure of Madeleine Pelletier’, especially pp. 67–68.



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Un groupement de femmes, dans la Résistance, me paraissait inutile et périmé. C’était pour moi une étape dépassée et je ne voyais pas comment je pourrais être utile à une organisation dont les préoccupations, en tant que femme, précisément, m’étaient étrangères. (TC, p. 118) (A women’s section in the Resistance seemed to me to be useless and outdated. For me, things had gone beyond that stage and I could not see how I could be useful to an organisation whose concerns were alien to me precisely as a woman.)

Thomas’s views on gender and activism are consistent with her views on gender and literature which we examined in Chapter 2. Thomas rejects as old fashioned the separatist approach which characterised Weiss’s feminism. Perhaps more interestingly, the reason for this rejection is that Thomas can perceive no similarity between the concerns of such organisations and her own experience of being a woman: the preoccupations of these groups are foreign to her precisely ‘en tant que femme’. Here Thomas rejects the sort of ‘identity politics’53 on which Weiss’ suffrage campaigns were based. The question of the relevance of ‘female identity’ to both politics and feminism (and indeed the question of its existence) is one which modern theorists have not resolved;54 this is clear from the theoretical divisions which have emerged both within the pro-parity camp and between those against parity and those in favour of it. In the context of Weiss’s suffrage campaigns, it was easy to assert the existence of a 53 I

am using the term ‘identity politics’ here to mean a strategy based on a belief in a ‘collective identity of “woman”, defined in terms of sexual difference, as a group with bonds which cross other social differences’; this definition is proposed by Jane Jensen in ‘Representations of Difference: the Varieties of French Feminism’ in Monica Threlfall and Sheila Rowbotham (eds.), Mapping the Women’s Movement (London: Verso, 1996), pp. 73–114 (p. 77). The term has also been used to denote an attack on such a feminist strategy based on a common female identity; thus ‘identity politics’ can also refer to a politics which seeks to recognise different identities (class, race, disability and so on) which divide and unite individuals within and across the category ‘woman’. See for example Gill Allwood’s use of the term in French Feminisms: Gender and Violence in Contemporary Theory (London: UCL Press, 1998), p. 64. 54 See Joan W. Scott, ‘“Experience”’ in Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (eds.), Feminists Theorize the Political (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 22–40, Chantal Mouffe, ‘Feminism, Citizenship and Radical Democratic Politics’ in the same volume, pp. 369–84, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990), Phillips, Engendering Democracy, pp. 70–73 and Linda Alcoff, ‘Cultural Feminism Versus Post-structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory’, Signs 13.3 (1988), 405–36.

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community of interest between women based on sex, and overriding all other differences between women, because it was precisely on the grounds of their sex that women were excluded from voting. Once the vote had been won, this strategy became less easily justifiable; when second wave feminism attempted to construct a politics based on ‘female identity’, it soon found itself in theoretical hot water. For Thomas, whose interest, as a communist fellow-traveller, was not primarily in the vote question (in her published memoirs, Le Témoin compromis, which cover the period from the 1930s up to 1953, she does not mention the granting of the vote), the question was similarly complex. Thomas is clearly of the view that there is no reason why women should share a common approach to Resistance activities just because they are women. Thomas sees the embracing of a ‘female identity’ as a dead end for any woman: ���������� ‘pour une femme, consentir à sa singularité est déjà un tombeau’ (a ��������� woman 55 who assents to her specificity is as good as dead). Where Thomas differs radically from Pelletier is that this belief does not lead her to a wholesale and ultimately unrealistic rejection of femininity, but rather to a sensitive and balanced investigation of the situation of the female subject whose experience of being a woman does not match up to the stereotypical norm. These are the issues Thomas explores in Le Refus. Brigitte’s rejection of bourgeois capitalism and bourgeois culture leads her to reject the lifestyle of the bourgeois female as it is experienced by all the women she knows. Religion, family social occasions designed to further the social status of the hosts, fashion, which is a reflection of social status and a manifestation of wealth, marriage and motherhood, which reinforce female dependency, all come under Brigitte’s critical scrutiny because of her growing left-wing political sympathies. The reader is in no doubt that it is Brigitte’s political commitment which leads to her critique of gender roles. She abhors the bourgeois concept of a woman’s role which is the only mode of femininity with which she, and her entourage, are familiar. Religion, marriage, socialising, fashion, motherhood – the traditional building blocks of femininity for a woman of Brigitte’s class – are all rejected, leaving Brigitte with the difficult task of rebuilding her identity out of new materials with which she is as yet unfamiliar. As Thomas remarked in a 1937 review of Montherlant’s �������������� Le Démon du bien: 55 Thomas,

Pages de journal, p. 189.



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Plus encore que l’homme, la femme nouvelle est à créer. Elle naît déjà: c’est un être qui travaille, qui est mêlé à la vie sans médiateur, qui se construit de ses propres mains, qui a conquis son autonomie.56 (Even more than the new man, the new woman remains to be created. She is already being born: she is a being who works, whose involvement in life is not mediated by anyone else, who constructs herself with her own hands, who has won her own autonomy.)

But the destruction of Brigitte’s old identity proves to be a solitary experience. Le Refus presents a female subject who is impoverished in her relationships, both sexual and social, to other subjects, both male and female, because her particular experience of being a woman does not tally with the sort of femininity which is expected of her. Le Refus shows clearly that the difference between Brigitte’s attitude to the bourgeoisie and that of the other women of her entourage constitutes an insurmountable barrier between them which far outweighs any solidarity or community of interest they might be said to share qua women. Identity politics seems meaningless. The only solution for Brigitte is to embrace solitude positively: ‘Avoir ���������� le courage de faire sa vie seule. Avoir le courage de vouloir sa vie, toute sa vie et rien qu’elle’ �(R, p. 205) (To have the courage to make a life for oneself alone. To have the courage to desire one’s life, the whole of one’s life and nothing but that).57 The concluding chapters of Le Refus� begin to investigate the difficulties faced by the bourgeoise déclassée in rebuilding her identity. Brigitte cannot of course slip quietly and easily into the workingclass culture of leftist political meetings. The translation of Brigitte’s new political awareness into active commitment is complicated by the fact that the outsider looking in sees only the roles she wants to refuse. Severed from her class roots by her left-wing sympathies, Brigitte fears that her attempt to translate her beliefs into action will result in rejection precisely because of those roots. On the threshold of her first communist meeting, ‘������������������������������������ [e]lle n’avait plus qu’une crainte, c’est qu’on ne la laissât pas entrer, qu’on la rejetât de l’autre côté��� ’ (R, pp. 239–40) (she was afraid of just one thing, that they would not 56 Edith

Thomas, review of �������������� Montherlant’s Le Démon du bien, Commune, No. 48, August 1937, pp. 1515–16 (p. 1515). 57 Kaufmann underlines the prevalence of the theme of female solitude in Thomas’s fiction in ‘Uncovering a Woman’s Life: Edith Thomas (novelist, historian, résistante)’.

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let her in, that she would be rejected by the other side). Her fear is unfounded – she does gain access to the meeting, where she discovers the sense of solidarity which has been denied her for so long: ‘��� Et voici qu’elle était au milieu d’eux et voici que, pour la première fois, elle ne savait plus ce que voulait dire la solitude’��(R, p. 241) (And suddenly she was in the middle of them and suddenly, for the first time, she no longer new the meaning of solitude). However, when the International is sung, she is thrown back on her solitude because ‘[����������������������������������������������������������������������� e]lle seule ne savait pas la chanter: elle n’avait pas le droit d’être parmi eux. Elle venait de l’autre monde et elle y retournerait��� ’ (R, p. 241) (she was the only one who did not know the song: she did not have the right to be amongst them. She was from the other world and she would go back there). It is significant that this new experience of alienation is specifically class-based rather than gender-based. Here Brigitte faces the dilemma of any bourgeois subject who has chosen to reject his or her class of origin; she feels alienated because she is bourgeois, not because she is a woman. The criticism implied by the text is of Brigitte and not of communism. That her sense of alienation comes from within herself and not from the communists at the meeting is proved when she is addressed as ‘������������� camarade����� ’ by one of the militants. Therefore her alienation is short-lived: ‘���������� [e]lle le remerciait de l’avoir appelée de ce nom-là qui semblait un moment l’admettre et l’accueillir’ �(R, pp. 241–42) (she thanked him for having called her by that name which seemed for a moment to open the door and welcome her). For Thomas, the bourgeoise déclassée is constantly threatened by solitude because she faces rejection from those she rejects and fears it from those she hopes to join. Brigitte refuses to re-enact the gender role prescribed by her class, and cannot as yet enact the political role prescribed by her new class allegiance. The text’s implied message corresponds to the orthodox communist view: once Brigitte has committed herself to the cause, she will be a ‘������������������������������������������������������� camarade����������������������������������������������� ’ – a role she will be happy to perform – that is to say that political commitment will resolve the gender issue. The text’s message is that a positive embracing of solitude can be the ultimate route to the achievement of female commitment. At the end of the text, Brigitte embraces solitude when she abandons her fiancé and cuts herself off definitively from her family by departing for England alone, leaving the reader convinced that real communist commitment is within her grasp.



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In contrast to Thomas, Simone Téry does not confine the female politicised subject to solitude: we saw in Chapter 2 that in Où l’aube se lève, quest is combined with romance such that the main protagonist can enjoy both commitment and love. We also saw that, whilst Où l’aube se lève shares a very similar plot structure with Téry’s earlier novel, Le Cœur volé, the latter depicts a negative female apprenticeship and thus does not disrupt the conventions of the romance plot, since the female protagonist is punished by death for her failure to make the right choice. Contemporary critics of Le Cœur volé – or at least, those who were broadly in favour of female emancipation – expressed their hostility to the text because of the implications of the negative apprenticeship of its heroine as regards female commitment. A brief account of the main protagonist’s trajectory will illustrate why. Vera is brought into contact with communism via her friendship with the real-life surrealist René Crevel. She participates in the 1935 Congrès �������� pour la défense de la culture��������������������������������������� (Congress for the Defence of Culture) in Paris,58 where she meets Pierre Dumont, a communist militant who introduces her to communist activism during the Popular Front election campaign of 1936 and who is a fictional representation of Paul Nizan. Pierre rejects her possessive affection in favour of his (communist) wife.59 Vera eventually succumbs to the despair which tempts her whenever a relationship fails: rather than joining the party and working actively for communism (the course of action the text clearly recommends), Vera commits suicide. In an article in Minerva entitled ‘����������������� Deux romancières à�� l’assaut ��������������������������� de l’émancipation féminine’��������������������������������������������������� (Two Women Novelists Attack Female Emancipation), Régis-Leroi wrote of the novel:

58 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������� The Congress took place between 21–25 June 1935, bringing together all the

major figures of the intellectual left from France and abroad, many of whom feature in Téry’s novel, alongside Crevel. The aim of the Congress was to defend a leftist concept of culture which would actively contribute to the transformation of social structures for the freedom and prosperity of all. The Congress was to transmit to its French audience the conclusions of the Moscow Congress of 1934 which had consecrated socialist realism as Soviet cultural policy (see Chapter 2 above). Julliard and Winock (eds.), Dictionnaire des intellectuels français, pp. 307–309 gives ������ a concise account of the Congress and its importance. 59 Henriette Nizan recounts the relationship between Nizan and Téry (which bears some resemblance to that of Pierre and Vera) in Libres mémoires (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1989), pp. 205–209.

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Forgotten Engagements Je ne sais pas si l’auteur a voulu stigmatiser l’impuissance des femmes à se détacher de leur univers personnel pour s’intégrer dans les mouvements collectifs, du moins c’est la conclusion qu’on peut tirer de l’aventure de Vera Boissard. En face de l’amour, cette anarchiste se conduit comme une midinette et l’on s’étonne de ne trouver en elle aucune idée personnelle, aucune ressource intérieure pour lutter contre l’influence d’un homme. Simone Téry ne semble guère croire à une véritable et profonde émancipation féminine …60 (I do not know whether the author intended to condemn women’s incapacity to separate themselves from their personal world in order to take part in collective movements. At least that is the conclusion one could draw from Vera Boissard’s story. When faced with love, this anarchist behaves like a silly little shop girl, and it is surprising to find that she has not a single idea of her own, not an ounce of individual resourcefulness to fight against the influence of a man. Simone Téry seems hardly to believe in a real and profound emancipation of women…)

Marie-Jeanne Viel defined the underlying theme of the novel in the following terms in a review in La Française: Il ne s’agit de rien de moins que de savoir si la femme vient à la politique, ou même prend intérêt à la chose sociale à travers l’homme qu’elle admire, ou qu’elle aime – les deux conditions pouvant se trouver réunis… – ou si elle est capable de conduire seule sa pensée et de s’orienter elle-même vers un parti ou simplement vers un but social en vue duquel elle travaillera.61 (The novel is really about whether a woman comes to politics, or even takes an interest in the social environment, through the man she admires, or loves – and these two sometimes go together… – or whether she is capable of directing her own thought and of opting independently for a party or simply for a social goal for which she will work.)

Viel resists the urge to which Régis-Leroi succumbs to discuss authorial intention, but her view of the effect of the text on the reader is the same: Nous retiendrons surtout que Véra, apparemment sans contrôle, est venue au communisme par et pour Dumont, et que sans son aide, elle n’a pas trouvé dans la mystique de la révolution, la force de vivre …

60 Régis-Leroi,

‘����������������� Deux romancières à�� l’assaut ������������������������������������� de l’émancipation féminine’. Viel, review of Le Cœur volé, La Française. Dossier Simone Téry��, BMD. The article in the dossier is undated. 61 Marie-Jeanne



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(What stays with us is that Vera, apparently lacking any self control, came to communism by and for Dumont, and that without his help, she could not find the strength to live in the mystique of the revolution …)

Suzanne Normand made the same criticism in Marianne: Qui donc, en les temps que nous vivons, pourrait imaginer une femme digne de ce nom adoptant des opinions uniquement parce qu’elles sont celles de l’homme aimé?62 (Whoever could imagine, these days, a woman worthy of that name adopting an opinion just because it is the opinion of the man she loves?)

Normand concludes that the book is anti-feminist and demonstrates that ‘la �������������������������������������������������������������� femme amoureuse est incapable de penser par elle-même’ (a ��� woman in love is incapable of thinking for herself). In a response to Normand published shortly afterwards, Téry defended her novel, arguing that it is not anti-feminist, because Vera is an anti-heroine, and it is not ideologically unsound, because its message is that Vera loves Pierre because he is a communist, and not that she attempts to become a communist because she loves him.63 Of course, in the final analysis, both readings are possible. But the question this debate poses relates to the validity of a representation of female political quest in terms of romance. Téry’s attempt in Où l’aube se lève to ‘write beyond the ending’, in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s words, certainly disrupts narrative norms, but can it really produce a representation of female commitment which is something other than dependence on the male? We have already noted the structural similarities between the two novels. In Où l’aube se lève, Jeanette departs for Spain during the Civil War with the aim of getting herself killed, because she has been deserted by her lover. However, she is gradually won over to the republican cause and to the need to act to save Europe from fascism. Her initial despair is gradually replaced by hope as she actively assumes the role of journalist which is foisted upon her by accident. Like Vera, Jeanette discovers commitment via her lovers: Guirec, Paco and Ramon are all communists fighting on the front line against Franco’s troops. Unlike Vera, Jeanette proves able to 62 Suzanne

Normand, ‘����������������� Eve émancipée���� ?’, Marianne, 31 March 1937, p. 20. response to Normand was published in Marianne,14 April 1937, p. 18, also under the title ‘���������������������������������������������� Eve émancipée’�������������������������������� , but without the question mark.

63 Téry’s

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resist the despair which threatens to engulf her identity each time a relationship dissolves into crisis. The narrative tests Jeanette’s commitment on three occasions when the lovers who have encouraged her in her politicisation fall victim to the war, to ascertain whether that commitment is truly political or purely sentimental. Each time, Jeanette overcomes the despair which tempts her. In this respect, the text can be seen as a direct response to the criticisms made of the earlier novel. The death of Jean Guirec provokes Jeanette to commit herself to the Spanish cause and to reject a meaningless death: Cette Espagne qui, voilà huit jours à peine avait été, avec le reste du monde, si loin de ses pensées, cette Espagne pour laquelle Jean Guirec avait donné sa vie, voilà que Jeanette la trouvait tout à coup entrée dans son cœur. L’Espagne était là avec Jean Guirec lui-même, son visage, son sourire et sa voix, faisant corps avec lui. ‘Et moi aussi, pensa Jeanette, je veux donner ma vie pour l’Espagne. Qu’au moins ma mort serve à quelque chose.’ La mort qui jusque là n’avait été pour elle qu’une aveugle porte de sortie, un moyen d’échapper à la souffrance, prit soudain un sens, une dignité.��(OA, p. 108) (This Spain, which barely eight days ago had been for her, as for the rest of the world, so far from her mind, this Spain suddenly filled Jeanette’s heart. Spain was there in her heart with Jean Guirec himself, his face, his smile and his voice, one and the same thing. ‘Me too’, thought Jeanette, ‘I want to give my life for Spain. Let my death be useful, at least’. Death, which so far had been just an emergency exit for her, a means of escaping suffering, suddenly became meaningful, dignified.)

The death of Paco plunges Jeanette into a state of panic in which she is temporarily unable to subordinate the personal to the collective: �������������������������������������������������������������� ‘Il ne s’agit pas des peuples, il s’agit de moi ! Je me moque des peuples, c’était mon Paco à moi !’��(OA, p. 320) (It’s not about the people. It’s about me! I don’t care about the people, he was my Paco, mine!). In her distress, she abandons her work in Spain and returns to Paris, but is so disgusted by the politics and attitudes of the Parisian bourgeoisie of which she was once a member that she returns to Spain almost immediately and resumes her activities as a journalist. Jeanette’s relationship with Ramon is a direct parallel with Vera’s relationship with Pierre. Both fulfil the role of directeur de conscience, and both reject the love of the female protagonist, because commitment is higher on their list of priorities than emotional attachments. Jeanette, unlike Vera, succeeds in prioritising commitment over emotion when she recognises that ‘��������� Ramon ne pouvait appartenir à personne parce qu’il appartenait à tous. Jeanette



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ne pouvait pas cesser de l’aimer, mais elle pouvait cesser de vouloir vainement s’emparer de lui’ (OA, p. 390) (Ramon could not belong to anyone because he belonged to everyone. Jeanette could not stop loving him, but she could stop wanting in vain to take possession of him). Whilst she is devastated by the news of his death, her response is not to succumb to passivity and inaction, like Vera, but to throw herself back into her political work. Her choice in favour of politics is rewarded narratively, twice over, by emotional fulfilment when Ramon returns to her: Ramon turns out not to be dead after all; he then undertakes another dangerous mission and is captured by the fascists, but escapes. Vera hoped in vain that ‘������������������ [e]lle sera payée de tout’�(CV, p. 279) (all her efforts would be rewarded); Jeanette, by contrast, is paid back for her political commitment in emotional currency. However the reader is left with the awkward feeling that Jeanette has chosen the right path for the wrong reasons: Elle était vaincue par cette volonté de fer. Elle se sentit prête à tout, non pas pour obéir à ce mystérieux, ce tout-puissant, ce redoutable Parti, mais seulement pour revoir le sourire chéri sur ce visage irrité […] Elle n’existait plus, elle ne s’appelait plus Jeanette, elle n’était plus qu’une mission impersonnelle, elle ne se mouvait plus que pour accomplir cette mission – et après cela, le néant. (OA, pp. 432–33) (She was overcome by this iron will. She felt ready for anything, not to obey this mysterious, all-powerful formidable Party, but just to see once more the cherished smile on that irritated face […] She did not exist any longer, she was no longer called Jeanette, she was nothing more than an impersonal mission. Now she moved only to fulfil this mission. And after that, nothingness.)

Are we to conclude that Jeanette, despite her positive political achievements, is also condemned to a mode of femininity which is ultimately relational and dependent? The answer to this question lies in Téry’s representation of military leaders, which is strikingly consistent across all three texts: Le Cœur volé, Où l’aube se lève, and Front de la liberté. The ��������� male republican military leader is for Téry the apotheosis of commitment, because he represents the ideal combination of ideological allegiance and effective action. Without exception, all the military leaders portrayed by Téry – and there are a substantial number, both factual and fictional – owe their status to their ability to integrate a serious interest in the personal, emotional lives of their soldiers with

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appropriate ideological and military concerns. Each military leader is a paternal figure who is an authoritative disciplinarian whilst compassionate in his attention to the emotional lives of his men. Ramon’s view is typical: Quand un de mes soldats a des ennuis avec sa famille ou avec sa novia, si je ne suis pas capable de lui donner un bon conseil, il a l’esprit ailleurs, il ne se met pas tout entier dans la guerre, et j’ai un mauvais soldat dans ma division. Les problèmes personnels, c’est très important … (�OA, p. 382) (When one of my soldiers has a problem with his family or with his girl, if I cannot give him good advice, his mind is elsewhere, he is not completely involved in the war, and I have a bad soldier in my division. Personal problems are very important …)

That which appears from the political trajectories of the female protagonists to be a feminine weakness is actually endorsed as a necessary element of successful action. Téry’s representation of Pierre as a political machine devoid of any human emotion is no more positive than her representation of Vera as unable to function on any other plane than the emotional. His attempt to �������������� ‘écarter tout le pathétique de ma vie��� ’ (CV, p. 354) (to remove all traces of emotion from my life) is not condoned; it is only when he succumbs to tears in the novel’s closing lines that he achieves that which emerges from Téry’s novels as ideal commitment – the combination of the correct ideological allegiance, effective action and an active emotional life. The committed subject can only be a complete human being when individual and collective concerns are allowed to coexist. As Jeanette realises, this does not mean that an individual is justified in treating politics as a backdrop for her love affair, as Vera attempts to do. It means that ‘masculine’ commitment and ‘feminine’ emotion can and must coexist in one individual, whether that individual is a woman seeking refuge from her bourgeois roots and her failed love affair, or a military hero such as Lister or Miaja. Où l’aube se lève suggests that all human identities, male and female, are relational and depend on others. By insisting on the presence of ‘feminine’ characteristics pertaining to emotion and affective relationships with others within even the most macho of military leaders, Téry argues that successful subjectivity – and therefore effective commitment – requires a combination of qualities conventionally viewed as ‘feminine’ and qualities conventionally viewed as ‘masculine’. Commitment is



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something which women learn from men, whilst men learn from women to be more receptive to the other. Commitment and action bring the female subject both the solidarity of her comrades and the approbation of the man she loves; commitment brings enhanced affective relationships for women and destroys female solitude. Whilst Téry’s insistence on the role of the emotional realm in politics clearly does, in a limited sense, represent the introduction of the personal into the political domain, it would not be accurate simplistically to conflate her representation of the collective/ individual dichotomy with the public/private dichotomy which became the focus of attention for second wave feminists. There is a point of contact here, in that Téry’s texts advocate a revalorisation of the ‘feminine’ within the political (public, collective) sphere from whence it is conventionally expelled as at best an irrelevant, or at worst a dangerous, distraction. However, the assertion that ‘the personal is political’ meant much more than this to feminists in the 1970s; there is no sense in which Téry is arguing that politics should turn its attention toward women’s issues and the specificity of the female condition rather than, or even as well as, strictly ‘political’ ones. The end point of Téry’s concept of politicisation is ideological effectiveness, not female emancipation; her interest in the emotional realm is motivated by the desire to interest women in communism, and not to interest communism in women. The problem of female action Edith Thomas frequently formulates the problem of female commitment in terms of the relationship between thought and action, focusing in particular on the difficulty of finding a form for female action. Le Témoin compromis testifies to Thomas’s own difficulties in this respect:��������������������������������������������������� ‘je me sentais mauvaise conscience, incapable que j’étais de faire l’accord entre mes convictions et ma vie’ �(TC, p. 56) (my conscience pricked me, because I was incapable of aligning my beliefs and my life). She demonstrates that expectations about what should constitute female experience represent a real hurdle. The relationship between war and commitment is one obviously sexspecific constraint. Jean Bethke Elshtain argues that:

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Forgotten Engagements Meditating upon modern Western political thought, the contemporary analyst, particularly if she is sensitive to feminist questions and femaleshaped concerns, is struck by the pervasive nexus forged between war and politics, on the level of action and of thought.64

Thomas, it seems, was also thus struck. ‘������������������� Ce que je pensais, à�� vrai ����� dire, n’avait aucune importance. J’étais une femme. Je n’étais pas mobilisable’��(TC, p. 81) (What I thought was completely unimportant. I was a woman. I could not be called up). Military incapacity is supposed to imply incapacity in terms of political belief. The question then remains as to the precise form of female action, of her passing from belief to commitment. ‘Si �������������������������� j’avais été un homme, je me serais engagée dans les rangs des républicains espagnols. Mais j’étais une femme, et boiteuse, comment être utile?’��(TC, p. 59) (If I had been a man, I would have joined up alongside the Spanish republicans. But I was a woman, and I had a limp, what use could I be?). It is significant that the moment of closest accord between belief and action occurs in Le Témoin compromis ��������������� when Thomas is working in her capacity as a journalist with refugees crossing the Pyrenees into France to flee Franco’s troops. Here, because Thomas found herself in the thick of the action, ��������������������������� ‘[j]e retrouvais un accord entre le monde et moi. Il n’y avait plus de faille entre ce que je faisais et ce que je pensais, ni de réserve’ �(TC, p. 67) (I rediscovered an affinity between the world and myself. There was no longer a rift between what I was doing and what I believed, and I didn’t have to hold back). Commitment is achieved when thought and action are allowed to coincide, but for a woman, such coincidence is frequently inhibited. Elshtain notes: ‘War is the means to attain recognition, to pass, in a sense, the definitive test of political manhood’.65 Unfortunately there is no established ‘political womanhood’ and there are no established female rites of passage. Téry’s experiences in Spain raise the same questions. In Front de la liberté,����������������������������������������������������������� Téry is at pains to stress that the ‘domestic’ resistance of the people of Madrid, especially its women, is just as important as military assaults on Franco’s troops. But whilst their patience and their good humour in the face of endless queues and shortages of the basic necessities of life do acquire a real political significance, women are nonetheless ultimately as irrelevant to combat as children, 64 Elshtain, 65 Ibid.,

Meditations on Modern Political Thought, p. 103. p. 75.



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and so, once the real fighting begins, they are evacuated. Removed from the location of action, they are prohibited from expressing their commitment via the same channels as men. Military action, commitment and masculinity on the other hand form a coherent whole. On the Aragon front, Téry meets fascist prisoners taken during the Belchite campaign in September 1937, and is informed by Colonel Gordon that ����������������������������������������� ‘[a]vec nous ils deviendront des hommes’ (FL, p. 87) (with us they will become men): in the roman à thèse, masculinity necessarily depends not only on fighting, but on fighting on the correct side. In the context of battle, femininity is equated both with a civilian identity and with a lack of commitment,66 as Lister’s metaphor proves: – A Cerro Rojo, m’a raconté le jeune commandant Vidal, il y avait des hommes qui se sauvaient. Alors Lister, au lieu de les fusiller les a regardés comme ça et leur a dit : ‘laissez vos fusils, je n’aime pas avoir de femmes avec moi. Allez à Madrid’. (FL, p. 176) (‘At Cerro Rojo’, Vidal, the young commander, told me, ‘some men ran away. So instead of shooting them, Lister looked at them like that and said, “Leave your guns here, I don’t like having women with me. Go to Madrid.”’)

Although Téry does mention the creation of the first female Spanish battalion in Front de la liberté,���������������������������������������� she does not seem to have witnessed it in action and makes no comment on its role in the war or on the effect of this opportunity for active service on women themselves. Téry did however have contact with elected female politicians in Spain, namely Dolores Ibaruri (La Pasionaria) and Margarita Nelken. Ibaruri, notes Téry, was far too busy saving Spain to bother with journalists (FL, p. 99), however Nelken was more accommodating. Téry’s account of their visit to the front line at Arganda tallies with her representation of female commitment in her novels, although here, female dependence is physical rather than ideological:

66 The

association of masculinity with ‘correct’ commitment (‘correct’ in terms of the novels’ political thesis) and the association of cowardice with femininity and a civilian identity is a common theme in male-authored political fiction of the period; Malraux’s L’Espoir is one obvious example. See Angela Kershaw, ‘The Body of the Hero in French Political Fiction of the 1930s’, Nottingham French Studies 41.2 (Autumn 2002), 47–60.

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Forgotten Engagements Margarita a des petits souliers parisiens assez inattendus pour aller dans des tranchées. Je le lui fais remarquer. – Bien sûr, dit-elle, seulement je ne peux pas porter des souliers sans talons, ça me fait mal aux pieds. Mais elle doit avoir mal également avec ses petits souliers. A chaque pas elle trébuche dans les ornières, elle se tord les chevilles. Elle avance lentement, appuyée au bras d’un officier.��(FL, p. 49) (Margarita was wearing dainty Parisian shoes, not what you would expect for walking in the trenches. I pointed this out to her. ‘You’re right’, she said, ‘it’s just that I can’t wear shoes with no heels, they make my feet ache.’ But she must have had aching feet anyway with her dainty shoes. She stumbled in the ruts, and with each step she went over on her ankles. She walked slowly, leaning on the arm of an officer.)

Whilst Nelken is clearly a serious and respected politician, she has not abandoned the cultural trappings of femininity. Téry’s account is deliberately humorous, but her interest in the combination of feminine dependence and political commitment echoes the very much more developed account of femininity and commitment offered by the novels. The case of the elected female politician represents the possibility of a combination of femininity and political action not available to a woman via active combat. However, Téry and Thomas were not of course able to take this path in inter-war France. Both chose journalism, and this choice provoked reflection on female political action on the part of both writers. Excluded from military participation in Spain because of her sex and her physical disability, Thomas saw journalism as offering the only remaining possibility for an active contribution to the republican cause. However, for Thomas, journalism was an inferior form of commitment: ���������� ‘C’était, me semblait-t-il, la seule manière dont je pouvais servir une cause pour laquelle j’aurais donné facilement ma vie’ (�TC, p. 61) (It seemed to me to be the only way I could serve a cause for which I would have willingly given my life). Women’s exclusion from active service means that the giving of one’s life for a cherished cause is a male privilege. Female political martyrdom is unacceptable: Schalk, discussing the épuration, notes that de Gaulle granted clemency to all women condemned for collaboration, along with minors and those acting upon formal orders.67 As Carole Pateman points out, 67 Schalk,

The Spectrum of Political Engagement, p. 86.



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‘The ultimate test of men’s political obligation, political theorists agree, is that they will, if necessary, be prepared to give up their lives in defence of the state’,68 or, by extension, in defence of their preferred ideology. The female subject is prohibited from taking the ultimate responsibility for her commitment – she may not take her commitment as far as death. Yet dying for the cause is the ultimate test of commitment, as Pierre points out in Le Cœur volé: – Il n’y a qu’une façon, pour un homme, de mesurer sa sincérité, une seule qui puisse le justifier à ses propres yeux de la responsabilité qu’il prend. – Laquelle ? – C’est de savoir qu’il est prêt, pour soutenir ce qu’il dit, à donner luimême sa vie. (CV, pp. 105–106) (‘There is only one way for a man to gauge his sincerity, there is only one way for him to prove to himself the responsibility he has taken.’ ‘What is that?’ ‘He must know that he is prepared to give his own life in support of what he says.’)

Thomas notes, concerning her Resistance activities: ‘Chacun �������������� a son revolver (sauf moi: je ne saurais d’ailleurs m’en servir et ne ferai jamais que mon métier de témoin)��� ’ (TC, p. 133) (Everyone has their revolver, except for me. In any case I would not know how to use one; my job will always be only that of a witness). The ‘que’ indicates that for Thomas, the prohibition on killing, as well as dying, forces the female subject into inferior commitment. The writing project is inferior in other ways too. Concerning her journalism, Thomas is ashamed of her inability to support herself financially by writing (TC, p. 74). Concerning the writing of her memoirs, she is troubled by the subjectivity of the writing project (TC, pp. 34–35): perhaps here she again fears a descent into conventional femininity. Téry reveals a similar ambivalence about journalism as a form of action. Again, the relationship of the journalist to weapons is used as an index of her relationship to action: Tonneau m’emmena dans un réduit de granit, me présenta fièrement sa mitrailleuse, m’expliqua des choses que je ne compris pas, pointa, tira. Mes tympans se déchirèrent, le réduit s’emplit de fumée et d’odeur de poudre. Je me bouchai les oreilles. Tonneau était très content de son effet. (FL, p. 228) 68

Pateman, The Disorder of Women, p. 11.

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Forgotten Engagements (Tonneau took me into a little stone den, proudly showed me his machine gun, explained some things to me which I did not understand, aimed, and fired. I was deafened. The little den filled with smoke and the smell of gunpowder. I put my fingers in my ears. Tonneau was very pleased with the effect.)

Téry is uncomfortable with the notion that as a journalist, her form of action represents far less of a sacrifice than that of any ordinary soldier: ‘On �������������������������������������������������������������� a un peu honte d’être journaliste, d’être toujours écarté du danger lorsque tant d’hommes meurent’ (�FL, p. 304) (One feels rather ashamed of being a journalist, of always being moved out of harm’s way when so many men are dying). Front de la liberté nonetheless represents Téry’s belief in the overriding necessity of témoignage.����������������������������������������������������� Its final chapter is a harrowing description of the hundreds and hundreds of twisted, mutilated corpses which were the sickening result of the bombing of Barcelona. Téry concludes that, if some are called upon to sacrifice their lives for the cause, then others must make their own sacrifice, that of their innocence, their naivety, and their physical repulsion when faced with the realities of war. This is a lesser sacrifice, but a necessary one: Si, il fallait y aller. Pour tous les crimes, il faut des témoins. Nous sommes là pour porter témoignage. Nous crierons tant qu’il faudra bien qu’on nous entende. Nous crierons jusqu’à ce qu’on arrête le bras des assassins. Jusqu’à ce que les innocents soient vengés, jusqu’à ce que les bourreaux soient châtiés. (FL, p. 329) (Oh yes, it was necessary for me to go there. For every crime there must be witnesses. We are there to bear witness. We will cry out for as long as people need to hear us. We will cry out until the arm of the assassin is stopped. Until the innocents are avenged, and until the executioners are punished.)

This is precisely the sacrifice Jeanette makes in Où l’aube se lève: Jamais elle n’avait pu supporter le spectacle du sang, de la souffrance. Mais maintenant elle ne pouvait pas fuir. Le travail ne pouvait pas se poursuivre sans la lumière de la lampe qui tremblait dans sa main. Et il lui fallait regarder, pour écrire ce qu’elle avait vu. (OA, p. 170) (She had never been able to bear the sight of blood and physical suffering. But now she could not run away. The work could not continue without the light from the torch which trembled in her hand. And she had to look, in order to write what she had seen.)



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Téry and Thomas both choose testimony – and yet even testimony is not free from an association with the masculine: […] the notion of testimony which is central to Western jurisprudence and legal practice first arose in Roman law – but we tend to forget the functional and etymological link between testimony and testicles (in Ancient Rome, no one could give evidence unless he was properly hung, i.e., unless his testicles were there – and in the right place!69

It seems that any political action for a woman is, initially, an appropriation of the male norm. The choice of testimony is an attempt to negotiate what exactly might constitute women’s political and ideological duty. Discussing women’s exclusion, or exemption, from ‘men’s ultimate obligation’, Carole Pateman remarks that ‘[t]he question of what the corresponding duty might be for women has not been asked by contemporary political theorists’, even though – or perhaps because – the answer is obvious: ‘men’s duty to die for the state is matched by women’s duty to give birth for the state’.70 Téry and Thomas (neither of whom had children) investigate what other options were open to women who did not wish to pay the female version of the ‘impot du sang’ (blood tax). The examples of Téry and Thomas suggest that the capacity to use writing as a form of commitment does not eradicate the desire for direct action. The male subject may choose the form of his action for himself, whereas the female subject is confined and limited in that choice. The example of writing then illustrates the ways in which gender plays a central role in the relationship of the female subject to her own commitment. As a woman, some forms of political action are barred; those which remain may be insufficient but must nonetheless be pursued if the politicised female subject is to align belief with action. She is caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of a failure to attempt to align belief with action, and a commitment which is in some way inadequate.

69

Judith Still and Michael Worton, Textuality and Sexuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 43. 70 Pateman, The Disorder of Women, p. 11.

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Conclusions: female commitment The foregoing analysis of the thematisation of commitment in female-authored political novels illustrates the different ways in which commitment functions as a literary motif. It shows how the texts relate to contemporary social and political realities, and it demonstrates the combination of an investigation of the ontology of commitment with the recommendation of a particular ideology or belief. Each author situates her text in relation to a different facet of her socio-political environment: Weiss examines the effect of the First World War on both politics and female identity; Valet deals with proletarian poverty in the 1930s, specifically in its effect on women as mothers; Pelletier reveals the sex discrimination which operated against women in all areas of public and professional life between the wars in France; Thomas’s Le Refus and Téry’s ������� Le Cœur volé are generated by an engagement with the politics of the Popular Front; ������� Téry’s Où l’aube se lève arises out of the active participation of French and European intellectuals in the Spanish Civil War. Each author offers a twofold investigation of politics made up of a militant defence of a political stance and a semi-autobiographical investigation into the relationship between political commitment and human subjectivity. Weiss advocates pacifism and (bourgeois) feminism. Délivrance shows ������������������������������������������� that political commitment results in a woman’s painful separation from conventional femininity and motherhood. Valet contests capitalism and advocates revolutionary socialism. Her ontology of commitment is based on women’s experience of their bodies rather than on their engagement with cultural stereotypes of femininity. Pelletier’s ontology of commitment is so naïve as to be almost absent; her texts advocate an integral approach to socialism and feminism. Thomas advocates communist fellow-travelling. Le Refus� examines how a committed woman negotiates her female identity against prevailing class-based constructions of femininity and demonstrates that this implies solitude. Téry’s novels reveal her dogmatic and uncritical adherence to the PCF. She is interested in the ways in which a committed woman might combine love and politics. All five authors show the gender-based obstacles which faced a woman seeking political commitment in inter-war France, and they demonstrate that these obstacles were as problematic in terms of ontology as they were in terms of ideology and action.



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Whilst Weiss, Valet, Pelletier, Thomas and Téry all shared one common experience – that of a conflict between their gender identity and their political identity – no consensus emerges from their work as to the way in which that conflict might be resolved. The texts show a tremendous diversity of opinion regarding the experience of the relationship between gender and politics, and the possibilities for that relationship in the future. This diversity obviously stems both from their particular political engagements and from their individual views on the question of the existence and nature of a female gender identity. For Weiss, the cultural attributes of conventional, stereotypical femininity can be manipulated in a positive way to change both women and politics. Weiss’s view of gender combines a cultural and a biological approach: whilst her belief in the superiority of femininity stems from women’s capacity to reproduce, she also sees the female condition as being produced by social relations which are historically specific. For Weiss, maternity functions as a motivation for politicisation, a model for political relations and a metaphor for political activity. Weiss produces the sort of poeticised, idealised evocation of maternity which Valet’s class-based perspective reveals as partial and unrealistic in the context of the experiences of women forced to give birth in abject poverty in the ������������������������������������������������������� Hôtel-Dieu��������������������������������������������� . Valet sees nothing superior in femininity, but constitutes women as a group only because they share a specific subset of class oppression which is the result of historically produced social relations. Pelletier and Thomas both contest the notion that ‘femininity’ should define a woman’s relationship to politics. Pelletier sees biology as irrelevant, believing that one’s humanity rather than one’s sex should be the basis for solidarity. For Pelletier, ‘femininity’ as it is stereotypically constructed by culture is antipathetic to female politicisation, and so her feminism involves a direct assault on stereotypical femininity. Pelletier refuses the orthodox communist view that, before the revolution, gender inequality is of secondary importance; she opted for an ‘integral’ approach which ultimately alienated her from both feminism and socialism. Thomas also rejects the notion of female difference in theory, but is more realistic than Pelletier in her assessment of the practical effect of cultural constructions of femininity on women’s lives. Thomas is more in line with the orthodox communist view in that she clearly prioritises class oppression over gender oppression. Téry’s view of gender could be said to straddle that of Weiss on the one hand and

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Thomas on the other: whilst she evidently sees some value in the ontological attributes and the modes of behaviour which culture calls ‘feminine’, she does not advocate a politics based on ‘female identity’. Téry and Thomas share an interest in the intersections between class identifications and gender identifications which, in both cases, is motivated by their communist sympathies. Téry poses the problem of female commitment in terms of the relationship between the individual and the collective, which brings her to reflect, like Thomas, on the possibilities for female action, and ultimately to propose a model of commitment based on a balanced combination of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ attributes. Only three out of the five authors discussed here deal directly with the question of women’s legislative debarment from politics: Weiss and Pelletier explicitly address the question of a woman’s right to elect and to be elected, whilst Valet alludes to woman’s position vis-à-vis the formal institutions of politics when she shows the women in the ������������������������������������������������ Hôtel-Dieu�������������������������������������� looking out onto the Hôtel ���������������� de Ville.� Thomas’s and Téry’s communist novels campaign more for left-wing commitment than for female emancipation, but they nonetheless foreground gender as a barrier to politicisation when they address the question of the potential forms of female political action. All these texts represent a negotiation of the problem of women’s exclusion from politics. Whilst they approach political commitment from very different angles, and offer very different suggestions and solutions, their texts all prove that it was impossible for a woman in inter-war France to relate to politics in the same ways as her male counterparts.

4 Politics and Female Sexuality The previous chapter demonstrated that ‘commitment’ should be understood as a gendered term. The present and following chapters investigate some of the repercussions of this for inter-war politicised women and for their writing, by considering two motifs via which the gendered nature of commitment is brought into particularly sharp focus in political fiction: sexuality and the body. In his contribution on sexuality in the New Critical Idiom series, Joseph Bristow begins, appropriately enough, by asking, ‘What is sexuality?’. The very fact of the inclusion of this subject as an appropriate area of inquiry for the series suggests the rich potential it is currently considered to have as an analytical tool, as well as its complexity as a human experience. Bristow’s concisely illuminating survey shows that the meaning of the term cannot be taken for granted; ‘sexuality’ is at once physical, psychological, emotional, historical, cultural, aesthetic, political, and discursive, and cannot be contained within any one of these domains. The present chapter focuses on the expression of sexual desire in a particular time and place, and on the effects on the construction of subjectivity that this expression, or its absence, might have, as well as on kinship structures, that is, on sexuality as a means of creating allegiances which may have economic, social and political significance. Theorists from different disciplines have, at different points in our intellectual history, followed very different routes into sexual territory. An important contribution of recent theory is an understanding of sexuality as a historical concept, generally taken to have emerged as we know it in the late nineteenth century, and operating differently according to the variables of time and place. In response to this, and in common with the methodology adopted throughout this book, it is appropriate to indicate some of the specific contexts of female sexuality as it was discussed and experienced in inter-war France. Female sexuality was of interest from a political – that is, institutional – perspective, as the waves of pro-natalism which swept over France in the post-First World War and pre-Second World War periods demonstrate. From a cultural 

Joseph Bristow, Sexuality, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).

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perspective, female sexuality formed a significant part of debates over female gender identity, for example around the figure of the garçonne. Paul Smith identifies two periods of active pro-natalist campaigning in inter-war France: 1919–1923 and 1934–1940. Only a handful of extremists (feminists and others) opposed the pro-natalist drive in order to call for sexual liberation. Françoise Thébaud and Christine Bard go as far as to claim that pro-natalism went almost completely uncontested in the period, citing the creation of a family medal (1920), mother’s day (1926), and maternity and family allowances (1930 and 1932 respectively) as evidence of the privileging of women’s identity as mothers. France’s perceived demographic crisis, a site of collective neurosis since the FrancoPrussian War, rendered female sexuality relevant to the political debates of the years following the First World War. The argument was between those who supported the laws of 1920 and 1923 which outlawed contraception and abortion in a fairly unsuccessful attempt to increase France’s birth rate, and those who supported a neo-Malthusian approach which promoted contraception and tended to dissociate sexuality from its reproductive aspect. The nation’s sensitivity to these issues was highlighted in 1927 when the ‘Alquier affair’ hit the headlines: schoolteacher Henriette Alquier was brought to trial over a report she had written which was said to promote an anti-natalist point of view. In 1933, proposed amendments to the laws to grant amnesty to those who had either had abortions or recommended them were rejected. In the same year, Madeleine Pelletier, one of the few feminists who openly opposed pro-natalism and advocated neo-Malthusianism, was accused of the crime of performing abortions. In 1939, at the age of 64, Pelletier  Smith,

Feminism and the Third Republic, p. 213.

 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� Françoise Thébaud and Christine Bard, ‘Les effets antiféminists de la Grande

Guerre’ in Christine Bard (ed.), Un siècle d’antiféminisme (Paris: Fayard, 1999), pp. 148–66 (p. 155).  Reynolds, France Between the Wars, pp. 18–37 offers an insightful analysis of debates around the issue of demography in inter-war France, as well as of the representation of those issues by historians.  See Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, pp. 209–17 for an outline of neo-Malthusianism in France between the wars.  On Pelletier’s views on abortion, see Gordon, The Integral Feminist, pp. 134–40 and Mitchell, ‘Madeleine Pelletier (1874–1929): The Politics of Sexual Oppression’, pp. 74–76.



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was incarcerated in the asylum of Perray-Vaucluse as a result of suspicions about her medical practice, where she died. The storm which greeted the publication of Victor Margueritte’s novel La Garçonne in 1922 suggests that the question of women’s sexual identity in inter-war France went far beyond procreation. Christine Bard is surely right to argue that this novel should not be read as an illustration of early twentieth-century female emancipation, but rather in terms of ����������������������� ‘une problématique qui nous instruit davantage sur la persistance du monde ancien que sur la timide émergence d’un monde nouveau’�������������������������� (an argument which tells us more about the persistence of the old world than it does about the timid emergence of a new world). The figure of the garçonne ���� –a male creation, and an anti-feminist motif for Françoise Thébaud and Christine Bard – conveyed certain fears about female sexuality. With her androgynous physicality and dress code she embodied a fear of a blurring of gender boundaries. And her sexual freedom was not only an affront to received notions about femininity, chastity and marriage, but an appropriation of the privileges formerly enjoyed exclusively by young men. Mary Louise Roberts, in her study of France in the decade immediately following the First World War, argues persuasively that perceptions of changing gender roles provided a framework through which the traumatic changes and upheavals wrought by the war could be understood by French society.10 She reads debates concerning female identity during the post-war period as a means of articulating anxieties about the transformation of the whole of civilisation as it had hitherto been known and comprehended. Roberts suggests that the opposing images of the modern woman and the mother structured the debate, the former representing the disruption and discontinuity of the new world, and the latter representing stability and the continuation of the old. Both these images are founded in concepts of what female 

For an account of Pelletier’s demise, see Gordon, The Integral Feminist, pp. 213–35.  Christine Bard, ‘������������ Lectures de La Garçonne’, Les Temps Modernes, No. 593 (April–May 1997), 78–95, p. 78. On the reception of Margueritte’s novel, see also Nicholas Hewitt, ‘Victor Margueritte and the Reception of La Garçonne: Naturalism, the Family and the “ordre moral” ’, Nottingham French Studies 23 (May 1984), 37–50.  ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Thébaud and Bard, ‘Les effets antiféministes de la Grande Guerre’, pp. 161–63. 10 Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes, pp. 1–16.

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sexuality is, or should be: the sexually liberated modern woman is opposed to the respectable procreating wife. In inter-war France, female sexuality was experienced as a problem – a problem in terms of the way real women lived their lives, and a symbolic focus for the traumatic transformation of the après-guerre into the entre-deux-guerres. Female sexuality was on the political agenda as a focus for legislation, and on the cultural agenda as an index of social change. It is within these contexts that the representations of female sexuality which are found in female-authored political fiction of the inter-war period should be understood. As we bring more recent theories of sexuality to bear on inter-war texts, we should keep in mind that sexuality meant something very different to a woman writer of that period than it might to the authors of those theories and their current readers. In a historical context in which marriage and motherhood defined female identity, and in which contraception and abortion were punishable by prison, sexuality was necessarily closely entwined with kinship and reproduction. In his study of sexuality in the French Third Republic, Robert A. Nye concludes that ‘the power of both the “official” legal order and the less visible but equally influential power of cultural discourse seemed aligned in a common direction. They both sought, the former by repression, the latter by the production of natural “norms”, to validate a certain kind of sexuality, one that celebrated heterosexual love and connected it squarely with reproduction’.11 The exercise of female sexuality outside of these norms was linked to notions of social upheaval which might variously be deemed traumatic, immoral or invigorating, but were never neutral. The institutional politics of female sexuality was not a politics of individual rights, but of public duties: the women of the Third Republic were exhorted to be good republican mothers who would provide strong and healthy sons in order to create a strong and healthy state. In common with all novelists who have written about this defining human experience, the writers in this study pay attention to the ontological aspect of sexuality. However, if we bear this historical context in mind, we should not be surprised

11 Robert

A. Nye, ‘Sexuality, Sex Difference and the Cult of Modern Love in the French Third Republic’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 20.1 (1994), 57–76 (p. 72).



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to find the politically aware inter-war woman writer privileging the question of the uses to which her sexuality is put. One of the contributions of the work of Michel Foucault has been to open up the question of how and why individuals and societies use sexuality. His work is pertinent to the texts we are considering in that his analyses focus on the relationships between history, discourse, power and sexuality, rather than on the notion of sexuality as a drive and on the psychic mechanisms via which the subject deals with that drive. The women writers in this study understood what Foucault was to articulate in The History of Sexuality (if, inevitably, with greater theoretical complexity): that sexuality is ‘an especially dense transfer point for relations of power’.12 That is to say that, through their novels, they discuss the ways in which women are subject to the power of contemporary discourses about female sexuality, and they investigate how women might use their sexuality as a site of resistance to such discourses. The prohibitions to which the female protagonists find themselves subjected are social in origin: the ways in which society constructs their gender – and, as a part of this, their sexuality – are not in accord with the ways in which they want to live. In this respect, the work of feminist theorists interested in the cultural construction of sexuality is pertinent. In the introduction to a volume of anthropological essays entitled The Cultural Construction of Sexuality, Pat Caplan justifies such an approach to gender and sexuality: Yet while we in the west may have a concept of sexuality as something separate from reproduction, from marriage and so forth, it is really not possible to analyse sexuality without reference to the economic, political, and cultural matrix within which it is embedded. It would indeed be more accurate to say, perhaps, that in modern society we have an idea of sexuality as a specific concept, but we cannot in actual fact understand it without contextualising it […] Sexuality […] cannot escape its cultural connection.13

Caplan’s work draws on feminist theory of the 1970s and 1980s, such as that of Stevi Jackson, who wrote in 1978: 12 Michel

Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction, trans. by Robert Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 1978), p. 103. 13 Pat Caplan, Introduction to Pat Caplan (ed.), The Cultural Construction of Sexuality (London and New York: Tavistock, 1987), pp. 1–30 (pp. 24–25).

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Forgotten Engagements Sexual behaviour is in this way ‘socially scripted’ in that it is a ‘part’ that is learned and acted out within a social context, and different social contexts have different social scripts. In using the term ‘sexuality’ then, I am referring not just to genital sexual activity, but to all the attitudes, values, beliefs and behaviours which might be seen to have some sexual significance in our society.14

Such work is predicated upon a separation of ‘sex’ from ‘gender’, ‘sex’ being a natural fact of biology and ‘gender’ a constructed fact of culture. This has been an attractive line of inquiry for feminism because, provided that social construction does not really mean social determinism, the separation of gender from sex facilitates a better understanding of oppression and suggests how change might be achieved. According to this way of thinking, an individual becomes free to express their gender identity however they like: the fact of having a female body does not and should not necessarily entail behaviour which society would term ‘feminine’. Sexuality is of course one vital aspect of that behaviour, since ‘femininity’ has long been defined in large measure by a woman’s willingness to conform to the dominant mode of heterosexuality operative in her socio-historical environment. Hence the suspicion encountered by the inter-war garçonne or, at the other end of the scale, the bluestocking. Such work has been influential: a vocabulary in which ‘sex’ designates biology and ‘gender’ designates culture is now allpervasive in writing about masculinity and femininity. However, theories about the cultural construction of sexuality have come under fire, notably from feminists influenced by poststructuralist theories of subjectivity; Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble is one enormously influential example. Butler’s theory of performativity, which is influenced by Foucault, suggests that ‘acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality’.15 Butler replaces the notion of the physical and cultural markers of gender as expressive of a ‘gender core’ with a notion of gender as ‘performative’, 14 Stevi

Jackson, The Social Construction of Female Sexuality (Women’s Research and Resources Centre, 1978), reprinted (extracts) in Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott (eds.), Feminism and Sexuality: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), pp. 62–73 (p. 62). 15 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 173.



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according to which there is no true or originary gendered self, and nor is there any originary sexed self since the body is culturally constructed too. For Butler, the illusion of drag is illustrative of the falsity of any notion of ‘true’ gender based on a distinction between inside/outside: the drag artist is said to be both a biological man (inside) aping cultural femininity (outside), and a feminine gender identity (inside) posing as a masculinised woman (outside).16 Butler argues that these contradictory assertions about the drag artist (who is both ‘really’ and man and ‘really’ a woman) indicate that gender operates according to an infinitely playful combination of discourses rather than according to a logic of reality and imitation, of a pre-existing gender ‘fact’ and its subsequent expression. For the women writers in this study, the separation of cultural gender from biological sex was, in the context of a dominant biologically-based understanding of gender between the wars, a vital emancipatory strategy. Their views on gender and sexuality display various points of contact with the work of Butler and with social constructivist views of gender. They questioned the idea that the category ‘woman’ could make sense, given the vastly divergent experiences and subjectivities of individuals classed as biologically female. They questioned the relationship of the category ‘woman’ to sexuality, seeking to disrupt the received notion that having a female body should prescribe a particular way of experiencing or using one’s sexuality. They recognised that discourses about sexuality served a regulatory function within a heterosexual framework. And they recognised that the end point of gender as a project or strategy is, as Butler suggests, cultural survival, and that this quest for survival is carried out under the duress of prescriptive notions about gender.17 However, they were not of course poststructuralists, and they did not question the notion of a ‘gender core’. Edith Thomas, for example, held exactly this view of a ‘gender core’ which is expressed in cultural terms: C’est un devoir de lucidité tranquille, de tenter de distinguer ce qui est en soi-même spécifiquement ‘féminin’, c’est-à-dire biologique et éternel, de ce qui est acquis par l’éducation, les préjugés du milieu, les convenances, ou les inconvenances déterminées par les premières.18 16 Ibid.,

pp. 174–80. pp. 177–78. 18 Thomas, review of ����������������� Montherlant’s Le Démon du bien, p. 5151. 17 Ibid.,

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Forgotten Engagements (The calm and lucid mind must try to distinguish which part of the self is specifically ‘feminine’, that is to say, the part which is biological and cannot be changed, from the part which is the result of education and the preconceptions of one’s milieu, and of knowing what is defined as appropriate and inappropriate by one’s education and one’s milieu.)

The writers in this study sought to envisage different ways in which they might express their femininity, which did not accord with existing views of what constituted femininity. But their aim was ultimately constructive: their purpose in investigating the constituting powers of discourse was not to deconstruct notions of identity, the subject, or gender, but rather to redefine them in opposition to the status quo in order to achieve a more stable and coherent sense of self. Perhaps we should see here an example of the centripetal force of modernism, which James MacFarlane calls a logic of falling together rather than falling apart, in contradistinction to the discourses of fragmentation which postmodernism offers.19 The novelists in this study certainly do offer images of fragmentation as they investigate the different elements which constitute gendered subjectivity. They differ from their postmodern granddaughters in that they attempt to reconfigure that which postmodernism wants to leave scattered: having deconstructed the self, they go on to propose new forms of unitary subjectivity, as opposed to the fragmented subjectivities which postmodernism proposes. The analysis which follows rests on an appreciation of the role of discourse as a transmitter of power, and of sexuality as a rich locus of both discourse and power. It is influenced by constructivist notions of gender, because the writers in question do indeed posit a subject which can separate itself from its (socially determined) gender; however, it remains aware of the fact that some recent theorists have found such a view of gendered subjectivity inadequate. It does not engage with psychoanalysis, because the writers themselves do not adopt a psychoanalytic approach to the representation of sexuality. This is not to say that in all cases they are uninterested in the relationship between sexuality and subjectivity, as we shall see. However, for four of our five writers, there were good ideological reasons to reject a psychoanalytic approach. According 19

James MacFarlane, ‘The Mind of Modernism’ in Malcolm Bradbury and James MacFarlane (eds.), Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930, 2nd edn (London: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 71–93 (p. 92).



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to Marc Angenot, one of the central tenets of the condemnation of bourgeois literature by la critique au service de la révolution was the supposed individualism of such writing, which manifested itself in an excessive psychologism and an obsession with sexuality.20 Those writing within a far left framework would have had to contend with this view: we have already seen that the criterion of ideological acceptability was operative in narrative choices made by inter-war women writers of political fiction. We should recall at this point also that both Larnac and Nizan characterised women’s writing in terms of emotion: thus to achieve ideological acceptability and to avoid writing in what was denigrated as a ‘feminine’ mode, the left-wing inter-war woman writer was well advised to avoid too much psychological introspection. The text from my corpus which would most readily respond to a psychoanalytic reading is Weiss’s Délivrance,����������������������������������������������������������� because Weiss had the least ideological investment in the far left, and was least likely to object to being labelled ‘feminine’. Sexuality and narrative Literature affords writers the opportunity to reflect on the experience and use of sexuality in their particular time and place. But the fact that we are dealing precisely with literature and not with theoretical or purely polemical texts requires some consideration of the ways in which this theme is integrated into narrative. I return at this point to the question of genre, because, in the texts in this corpus, choice of genre has a significant effect on the narrative treatment of sexuality. In Chapter 2, we established that, whilst all belonging to the broad category of the political roman à these, the texts operate in relation to particular genre conventions. Edith Thomas writes in the mode of the Bildungsroman, Simone Téry engages with the romance and with reportage, Madeleine Pelletier, in Une Vie nouvelle, adopts and subverts the conventions of the utopian narrative, Louise Weiss chooses autobiography and Henriette Valet’s novels are examples of proletarian témoignage.���������������������������������������� To what extent does an engagement with each of these genres imply a particular function for sexuality within the text’s narrative structure?

20 Angenot,

La Critique au service de la révolution, pp. 113–20.

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Weiss and Valet write within the least prescriptive genres as regards the narrative function of sexuality. The founding criterion for their texts is authenticity: the representation of sexuality thus arises out of, and functions as a marker of, the experience of the author. This does not necessarily imply an overly psychologised account. In Madame 60BIS, authenticity is achieved via the choice of the telling detail: the authentic ‘truth’ of the text lies in a woman’s experience of the relationship between female sexuality and poverty, the appalling nature of which could only be conveyed, the text gradually leads us to believe, by someone who has been there. Délivrance relies ������������ more on psychology, as I have already indicated: here the authentic ‘truth’ emerges at the intersection between a woman’s sexual identity and history, and again, it is the author’s experience of this convergence, which emerges particularly strongly from a reading of the text within the context of the Mémoires d’une Européenne,������������� which draws assent from the reader. In the case of Pelletier, the utopian genre encourages a didactic treatment of female sexuality. Utopias are allegorical and ideological in nature: female sexuality thus operates narratively in Une Vie nouvelle according to the model whereby the presentation of an idealised solution in the utopian textual space provides a commentary on a problem which exists in the real contemporary social space. Téry’s and Thomas’s texts operate in relation to genres which prescribe very specific functions for sexuality. In the case of the conventional romance, the full expression of female sexuality within the framework of a socially acceptable heterosexual relationship is the narrative prize held out to the heroine, attainable if she resists the temptation to transgress acceptable codes of behaviour, or if she repents of any transgressions. Anti-heroines who persist in aping the role of the hero by stubbornly pursuing a quest for authenticity are punished with death or required to live out their days as old maids, separated for ever from the exercise of sexuality and thus from ‘normal’ femininity. As we saw in Chapter 2, Téry rewrites the romance such that romance and quest can coexist, but nonetheless, sex remains the prize. In the case of the Bildungsroman, sexuality fulfils a key role in the main protagonist’s development. We also saw that, according to Jerome Buckley’s account of the conventional Bildungsroman plot, the protagonist experiences at least two sexual encounters, one of which is ‘debasing’ and one ‘exalting’, resulting



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in a reappraisal of values on the part of the protagonist.21 In Le Refus, Le Cœur volé and Où l’aube se lève,��������������������������� the position and function of female sexuality within the text’s narrative structure are dictated very precisely by genre considerations. In Thomas’s and Téry’s novels, sexual encounters result in the reappraisal of political values. That is to say that the text constructs a symbolic relationship between sexuality and politics. In Le Refus, Le Cœur volé and Où l’aube se lève, this relationship operates through a common narrative device: the rejection of the bourgeois lover by the central female protagonist. This sexual rejection functions as a symbol for the female protagonist’s rejection of bourgeois ideology and her progression towards the left. In Téry’s novels, the symbolic nature of the relationships is underlined by the brevity with which they are described. This sort of schematic use of relationships or characters is of course characteristic of the roman à thèse, because of the didactic nature of the genre. In Le Cœur volé, Vera’s proposed marriage to the bourgeois Marcel Fournier is a transparent symbol for Vera’s initial desire to adopt the identity of the grande bourgeoise. However, later, when Marcel opposes Vera’s interest in the Congrès �������� pour la défense de la culture�������������������������������������� , she leaves him, and this new sexual choice represents Vera’s political move towards the left. Whilst the ‘facts’ are slightly different, Téry uses the same narrative strategy in Où l’aube se lève. The bourgeois André leaves Jeanette for political reasons – she is not of a sufficient social pedigree. When Jeanette meets André again in Spain, they find themselves on different sides of the war: fighting for Franco, he has been taken prisoner by Jeanette’s communist-republican comrades. In his cell, Jeanette must choose either to succumb to his sexual charms, or to resist him and hand him over for execution (OA, p. 363). Again, a sexual choice is encoded as political choice: her decision to reject André represents her decision to reject her bourgeois past life once and for all (and in this case her decision will result in his death). Within the sexual and ideological economy of Téry’s texts, the rejection of these men is a requirement if the heroine is to win the sexual/textual prize, namely, the ideologically acceptable exercise of her sexuality. As we have seen, Vera falls at later hurdles, whilst Jeanette ultimately triumphs. Thomas also uses this narrative device in Le Refus. As we have 21

Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, pp. 17–18.

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seen, the Brigitte-Pierre relationship occupies the position of the debasing sexual encounter according to Buckley’s schematisation of the Bildungsroman. When the pair quarrel, the dispute is politically motivated and it ruptures a romantic idyll. Brigitte and Pierre are walking romantically by the Seine, but Pierre provokes Brigitte’s searing irony about bourgeois charity when he carelessly throws money to a beggar (R, p. 163). In another episode, Pierre declines to introduce to Brigitte an old school colleague turned communist. His scorn of �������������������������������������������������� ‘ces pêcheurs en eau trouble qui ont tout intérêt ��à ��� la révolution, parce qu’ils jugent que cette société ne leur offre pas les avantages auxquels ils s’imaginent avoir droit’�(R, p. 176) (people who go looking for trouble, who want a revolution because they think that this society doesn’t offer them the advantages they think they are entitled to) clashes with her disgust at his caricatural description of left-wing commitment (R, p. 177). So Pierre and Brigitte separate, physically and symbolically, and the cigarettes they were smoking together go out just as romance is extinguished by political incompatibility. The quarrel is a microcosm of Brigitte’s ultimate and definitive rejection of Pierre. Such mapping of sexual choice onto political choice relies on a representation of sexuality in terms of political contagion: sleeping with the enemy is equated with being tainted by his ideology. It is a recurrent device in the inter-war political roman à thèse.����������� In Téry’s and Thomas’s texts, the female protagonist’s choice is necessitated simultaneously by genre and by ideology: the rejection of the ‘wrong’ man is a narrative requirement of the romance; the rejection of the debasing love affair is a narrative requirement of the Bildungsroman; an active and consequential rejection of bourgeois ideology is a requirement of the left-wing political novel. The realities of female sexuality: culture, history and ideology I turn now to the thematisation of female sexuality to consider how the writers viewed the exercise and use of sexuality. For this purpose, I look firstly at texts in which the author addresses the reality of the experience of female sexuality for the politicised female subject, and secondly at texts in which the author creates a utopian vision of female sexuality. In Le Refus and La Femme vierge, the focus is on the ways in which inter-war French culture constructed



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female sexuality. In Délivrance,���������������������������������� female sexuality is presented in relation to history, and in Madame 60BIS, in relation to ideology and its discourses. In the subsequent section, I examine the utopian resolution of the problem of female sexuality which characterises Une Vie nouvelle and also, arguably, Où l’aube se lève. 1. Culture Pat Caplan begins her introduction to The Cultural Construction of Sexuality with a discussion of the relationships between the terms ‘sex’, ‘sexuality’ and ‘gender’, asking ‘under what circumstances and to what extent can sexuality and gender be independent variables?’ and, ‘when we talk about sexuality, are we considering behaviour or a set of ideas and, if both, what is the relationship between them?’.22 She concludes, on the evidence contained within the essays in the volume, that sex, gender and sexuality can be combined in many different ways, according to social, historical, cultural and personal variables, in order to produce different ‘identities’. The question of who or what controls or prescribes the ways in which these elements are combined for particular groups of women at a given point in time and within a given culture has defined much post-war feminist theory. As we have seen, theorists such as Butler have warned against an uncritical reliance on the sex-nature/gender-culture equation. The writers in this study present female characters whose desire for politicisation requires them to negotiate and redefine certain combinations of sex, sexuality and gender in order to achieve a mode of female identity which is acceptable to them in relation to their desire to function as effective political agents. Their implicit starting-point then tends to be a belief that gender and female sexuality are defined by culture and are therefore not immutable; therein lies the possibility for change. Brigitte’s task in Le Refus is to exchange her identity as a daughter of the bourgeoisie for that of a communist fellow-traveller. Pierre’s proposal of marriage provides the catalyst for Brigitte’s political development. It is not a question of love: ������������������� ‘– Vous ne m’aimez pas, dit-il. – S’agit-il vraiment de cela?��� ’ (R, p. 213) (‘You don’t love me’, he said. ‘Is that really what it’s about ?’). Because female sexuality is inextricably bound to a well-established network of family 22 Caplan,

The Cultural Construction of Sexuality, p. 2.

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alliances in Brigitte’s bourgeois milieu, love hardly counts: to marry Pierre is to become enmeshed in social structures she now despises. Brigitte comes to her decision via three visits: to Chantal, a school friend, to her sister Catherine, and to her father’s factory. Through these three visits, Brigitte investigates the three female identities which, according to Mary Louise Roberts, structured culture’s definition of femininity in inter-war France. Chantal embodies the mother: she is a bourgeois wife who lacks any autonomous identity. Catherine represents the modern woman: she is also married, but has a successful career as a research scientist. But Catherine represents the enemy ideology: she believes that the class system is justifiable and that hard work is unproblematically rewarded by economic progress (R, pp. 130–34). The combination of her rightwing political views with her economic and professional autonomy suggests that the modern woman is not necessarily a progressive role when seen from the perspective of a female communist fellowtraveller. Brigitte ultimately aligns herself with the single woman, this being the only mode of femininity compatible with her politics. It is her visit to her father’s factory, where she sees the oppression of the working class at first hand, which ultimately convinces her that her political ideals are superior to the identities exemplified by Catherine and Chantal; as a result, she rejects the marriage which would preclude any revolutionary commitment by confining her to one or other of the modes of female existence she has seen. Brigitte realises that sexuality cannot be experienced separately from its cultural construction. She realises that ‘sexuality’ cannot exist per se in some magical space outside of discourse. She acknowledges the impossibility of detaching Pierre from his milieu: Est-ce qu’elle ne pouvait pas le détacher de sa fortune et du salon de tante Renée, où elle l’avait rencontré? Est-ce qu’elle ne pouvait pas le rejoindre: ses yeux verts et gris, ses mains, son corps, et, à travers eux, lui-même? Lui-même? Le fils d’un président de Cour d’appel, le futur président de Cour d’appel, le catholique sans croire en Dieu, le patriote pour croire en quelque chose? Lui-même? (R, p. 219) (Could she not separate him from his fortune and from aunt Renée’s drawing room, where she had met him? Could she not get close to him: his green-grey eyes, his hands, his body, and through them, the man himself ?



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The man himself ? The son of a President of the Court of Appeal, the future president of the Court of Appeal, a Catholic who doesn’t believe in God, a patriot, so as to believe in something? The man himself ?)

Nothing, not even Pierre’s body, can give Brigitte access to the ‘real’ Pierre underneath, because no such thing exists. However attracted to Pierre Brigitte might feel sexually, and however much she might be prepared, personally, to forgive Pierre his reactionary politics, she cannot escape the fact that to adopt the identity of Mme de Métrange junior is to collude with the very system which oppresses the class with whom she herself is aligned by conviction, though not by birth. In their discussion of the cultural construction of sexuality, Judith Still and Michael Worton note that: Emphasis on the construction of gender can result in the bolstering of another myth, that of feminine passivity, of women composed or written by social forces which men control.23

Brigitte, however, actively embraces the knowledge that gender is culturally constructed in order to deconstruct and change her own identity as a woman; she thus refuses to submit passively to constructions of her identity for which others are responsible. But she is not capable of creating a new feminine identity which is actively sexual outside of these norms. Although there clearly was a context for the expression of female sexuality outside of the bourgeois heterosexual norm (Natalie Barney’s Paris-Lesbos for example), inter-war communism certainly did not embrace ‘transgressive’ sexual identities. Thus, in order to refuse the political and cultural meanings attached to the expression of her sexuality, Brigitte rejects her sexuality completely. Le Refus� does consider the possibility of using transgressive female sexuality politically. Brigitte is tempted to explore adultery, which is presented as a deliberate opposition to bourgeois conventions regarding female sexual expression. The text depicts Anna’s father’s desire for Brigitte as an opportunity for Brigitte to achieve political transgression:

23 Still

p. 11.

and Worton, Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices,

176

Forgotten Engagements Dans ce mélange de désir et de répugnance, n’était-ce pas plutôt le ‘tu-necommettras-pas-l’adultère’ qui réapparaissait, et n’y avait-il pas là un moyen de se libérer une fois pour toutes de la morale qu’ils s’étalaient. (R, p. 100) (In this mixture of desire and repulsion, wasn’t it just the ‘Thou-shalt-notcommit-adultery’ which was coming to the surface, and wasn’t this a way of breaking free of their morality once and for all?)

Here, Brigitte has the opportunity to disrupt bourgeois morality via the exercise of her sexuality. However she rejects this approach because she views it as a flawed political methodology in the longer term: Elle hésita un moment: peut-être est-il préférable d’agir provisoirement selon les principes mêmes que l’on met en question. Si on les rejette par la suite, on ne peut du moins s’accuser d’y avoir été amené par la faiblesse, parce qu’on n’a pas été capable de les observer personnellement et qu’on se cherche une justification. (R, pp. 100–101) (She hesitated for a moment: perhaps it is better to act provisionally according to the very principles which one is calling into question. If one rejects them later, then at least one won’t be able to accuse oneself of having done so out of weakness, because one couldn’t live up to them, and therefore needed to justify oneself.)

Anna’s father is unceremoniously shown to the door. Le Refus offers two theses about female sexuality. Firstly, Thomas demonstrates that, for a daughter of the bourgeoisie with revolutionary aspirations, female sexual identity is imbued with the ideology which her developing political consciousness is attempting to reject. Secondly, to adopt a transgressive sexual identity is politically dangerous as it threatens to compromise the individual’s revolutionary commitment by leaving her open to the charge of not being capable of living up to the ‘ideals’ of bourgeois social codes. If Brigitte wants to embrace an active sexual identity, she has two choices: she must either accept bourgeois marriage, or transgress bourgeois codes and risk the charge that her adoption of a leftwing ideology is nothing more than retrospective self-justification. Thomas proposes a third way in the form of a complete rejection of sexuality, which represents a radical choice in political terms. Because her choice for solitude at the end of the novel is represented as a rejection of the lover, it can be read as a choice for chastity. Chastity symbolises the rejection of bourgeois ideology in its



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entirety: it is a refusal of its family structures, its social pretensions, its oppression of the working class as well as of its definitions of the role of woman and her circulation in the marriage economy. The question of whether the bourgeoise déclassée� will be able to resume her sexual identity once her political transformation is complete is not addressed in Le Refus.����������������������������� The novel does not consider female working-class sexuality: this is beyond the scope of the novel’s plot and also of course beyond the author’s own experience. As a bourgeoise déclassée, like her protagonist, Thomas must avoid falling into the trap of a false and patronising identification with workingclass women. Brigitte’s awareness of this problem is illustrated at the only point in the text where female solidarity seems to start to overcome class division. On holiday in rural France, Brigitte meets a group of women washing their clothes in the village square and interacts with a child in their company: Lui acheter des bonbons à l’épicerie, en bonne dame charitable, avec la simplicité de la bourgeoise qui ‘va au peuple?’ Il ne manquerait plus que de prendre un rateau, et d’aller faner avec elles, dans le genre de madame de Sévigné. Et de composer un hymne aux travaux des champs: la sueur et la peine, c’est thème poétique. (R, pp. 137–38) (Go and buy him some sweets from the grocer’s like Lady Bountiful, with all the simplicity of a bourgeois lady who ‘goes to the people’? Then all she would have to do would be to get a rake and go and work in the fields with them, like Madame de Sévigné. And compose a hymn to rural labour. Sweat and hard work are such a poetic theme.)

Thomas’s activity as a novelist parallels Brigitte’s contact with the working classes: both must resist poeticising that which they cannot experience first hand. Therein lies the dilemma common to all interwar revolutionary writers of bourgeois origin. Thomas’s proposal of chastity as a positive political strategy is also linked to her views about literature. She was hostile to investigations of female subjectivity by women writers based on love and sexuality. In Le Témoin compromis, she states that ������������������������������ ‘Le scandale qu’on laisse aux femmes est celui de leurs expériences amoureuses. Cela m’importe peu et pour moi le scandale est ailleurs’ �(TC, p. 34) (The only sort of scandal women are supposed to experience is in their love lives. That is hardly important for me; for me, the scandal lies elsewhere). We saw in Chapter 2 that Thomas deplored writers such as Clarisse Francillon who wrote about women in terms of love and sex. It is in part for this

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reason that ���������������������������� ‘expériences amoureuses’���� in Le Refus ������������������� do not represent a positive political force: Thomas does not want to produce yet another example of stereotypically ‘feminine’ writing focused on sex and love, with politics added in for good measure! However, Thomas’s horror of sexual sentimentality and her apparent defence of chastity in Le Refus should not be taken as an assertion on her part that autonomy and commitment are necessarily always incompatible with sexuality. In her 1937 review of �������������� Montherlant’s Le Démon du bien,����������� where she discusses the creation of the new woman, she argues that love and female autonomy are not incompatible,��������������������������� ‘[s]eulement l’amour même est devenu lucide: on reste capable de juger celui qu’on aime’ ������� (it is just that love itself has become lucid; you remain capable of judging the person you love).24 The novel does not follow Brigitte far enough along her political and sexual journey for the reader to witness her enjoying this new form of intellectualised, critical sexuality. The message of the novel is that chastity is a political strategy imposed on a particular group of women in a specific politico-historical moment, and not an ultimate goal. Chastity is a central concept in Madeleine Pelletier’s political universe. Whilst she too views its necessity for the female subject as a result of a particular politico-historical moment, she is much more prepared than Thomas to extol its virtues in a more general and abstract sense. Chastity is announced in the title of La Femme vierge. �������������������������������������������������������� Throughout the novel, chastity is directly equated with effective female political action, and female sexuality runs counter to it. Marie’s lack of interest in her own sexuality leaves her free to channel her energies elsewhere: Cette activité que les jeunes filles dépensent pour l’amour, Marie l’avait en réserve. Comprimée depuis toujours, par sa mère d’abord, par la nécessité de gagner sa vie ensuite, Marie avait un violent besoin d’agir. L’existence lui paraissait insipide si on n’a pas un idéal pour lequel on travaille. (FV, p. 96) (Marie saved up the energy that young women tend to expend on love. She had always been constrained, first by her mother and then by the need to earn her living, and now Marie had a violent need to act. Existence seemed dull to her if one didn’t have an ideal to strive for.)

Here chastity is presented as an abstract political virtue, regardless of the female subject’s politico-historical situation. Elsewhere in the 24 Thomas,

review of Montherlant’s �������������� Le Démon du bien, p. 5151



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text, the rejection of female sexuality is presented in terms of the situation of the female protagonist: Certes elle n’était pas sans sexe; elle aussi éprouvait des désirs, mais elle avait dû les refouler pour être libre, elle ne le regrettait pas. (FV, p. 241) (She certainly wasn’t sexless; she too felt desires, but she had had to repress them to be free and she didn’t regret it.)

Here, the ‘������������������������������������������������������ avait dû’��������������������������������������������� suggests that Marie is making a virtue of a historically and politically defined necessity. Marie’s chastity is always positively connoted in political terms as an active and productive choice, since the expression of female sexuality is consistently represented as being incompatible with liberty. Marie’s rejection of sexuality in favour of politics is contrasted with the women with whom she comes into contact, whose meagre motivation for political action generally has a sexual element. The inspiration for Mademoiselle Lautaret’s involvement with socialism is her sexual attraction towards Jean Jaurès (FV, p. 91). This is as far as her politics goes – although highly educated, she is incapable of discussing political or intellectual topics, unlike Marie who craves such stimulation. Marie goes on to discover that most of the members of the feminist group Solidarité ����������������������������������� des femmes�������������� have come to feminism because of some failure in their sexual relationships: […] beaucoup de membres avaient eu autrefois une situation brillante qu’elles avaient perdue avec l’homme qui la leur donnait. Plongées dans la médiocrité elles étaient en colère contre le sexe masculin, leur féminisme n’avait pas d’autre cause. (FV, p. 104) ([…] many of the women had previously enjoyed tremendous social status which they had lost with the man who gave it to them. Plunged into mediocrity, they were furious with the male sex in general and this was the only reason for their feminism.)

Pelletier is severe in her criticism of established feminism between the wars in France.25 Its participants appear to have no general political 25

Pelletier took over the leadership of Solidarité ������������������������������������ des femmes��������������� from Caroline Kauffmann in 1909. According to Sowerwine, Pelletier detested mainstream contemporary feminist groups which were populated, in her opinion, by ‘���� des demi-émancipées’���������������������������������������������������������������� (half-emancipated women). Sowerwine, ‘������������������������� Militantisme et identité sexuelle’�������� , p. 22.

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awareness beyond their own individual plight, and they refuse to sacrifice the conventional trappings of femininity which, according to Pelletier, reduce women to sexual objects. Marie complains that Caroline Kauffmann, president of ���������������������������������� Solidarité des femmes������������� , insists on parading her own sexual identity by wearing low-cut evening dresses, which for Pelletier was incompatible with feminism: ���������������� ‘Le décolletage est le symbole du servage, cela saute aux yeux. Si les féministes ne le comprennent pas, c’est qu’elles sont des dindes’��(FV, p. 136) (Lowcut dresses are the symbol of servitude, it’s perfectly obvious. If feminists don’t understand this, they must be completely stupid). Pelletier’s text constantly asserts that oppression is the only possible outcome whenever a woman expresses her sexual identity, and most particularly when she expresses her sexuality via marriage. For Pelletier, marriage necessarily meant servitude for women and men alike.26 Pelletier’s negative views on marriage emerge clearly from the cautionary tale of the marriage of Mademoiselle Lautaret to Monsieur Lecornu. A syndicalist, Lecornu is a textual vehicle for the discrediting of the syndicalist movement as insidiously reactionary. He is the epitome of the aggressive patriarch who allows his wife to continue working only for the financial benefits he receives and still forces her to take sole responsibility for the domestic tasks. Ultimately he compels her to continue with a pregnancy at an advanced age, against the advice of doctors, in order to provide him with an heir. The pregnancy results in his wife’s death. Female sexuality can be fatal. How then is it possible to reconcile such an unambiguous hostility to the expression of female sexuality with the representation historians offer us of Pelletier as a loud if lonely voice in the clamour for sexual freedom?27 Her pro-abortion and pro-contraception activities would seem to indicate rather a desire to see female 26

Pelletier expresses her views on marriage in the essay ����������������������������� ‘Le Célibat, état supérieur’ (Celibacy, a Superior State) (Caen: Imprimerie Caennaise�������������������� , undated). Dossier Madeleine Pelletier, BMD. Claudine Mitchell attributes this essay to 1933. 27 Bard, Les Filles de Marianne,����������������������������������������������� p. 217. Historians point out that Pelletier’s views on sexuality isolated her from the feminist movement, some suggesting that her radical approach alienated potential supporters of feminism and provided justification for its existing enemies, others suggesting that her extremism had the effect of making moderate feminism seem acceptable. See Boxer, ‘When Radical and Socialist Feminism Were Joined’, pp. 57–59 and pp. 60–63, Stephen C. Hause with Anne R. Kenney, Women’s Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 49–50 and James F.



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sexuality expressed unobstructed. Felicia Gordon suggests that although sexually restrained herself, Pelletier was not in favour of the suppression of desire, although she did believe the female libido to be less developed than the male.28 Pelletier, like Thomas, was interested in the social manipulation of sexuality and the extent to which the subject’s experience of sexuality could be said to be an internalisation of culture’s presentation of it.29 As Claudine Mitchell points out: Alongside her work on the notion of ‘psychological gender’, Pelletier’s other major contribution to feminist thinking was her analysis of the agencies which regimented sexuality and made it the locus of woman’s oppression. […] Pelletier considered that all forms of sexuality were a product of culture; indeed she believed that the very idea of sexuality as the centre of human life was a cultural construct.30

La Femme vierge asserts that, in the cultural and political climate of inter-war France, female sexuality is so ideologically coded as to make the combination of political activity and freedom with an active sexual identity impossible: Plus tard la femme pourra s’affranchir sans renoncer à l’amour. Il ne sera plus pour elle une chose vile, que seuls le mariage et la maternité peuvent relever. La femme pourra, sans être diminuée, vivre sa vie sexuelle. (FV, p. 242) (Later, women will be able to liberate themselves without giving up love. Love will no longer be something abject which only marriage and McMillan, Housewife or Harlot: The Place of Women in French Society, 1870–1940 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1981), pp. 89–96. 28 Gordon, The Integral Feminist, pp. 182–87 and Felicia Gordon and Maire Cross, Early French Feminisms, 1830–1940. A Passion for Liberty (Cheltenham, UK and Brookfield, US: Edward Elgar, 1996) pp. 164–88. In De la prostitution (published as the November 1928 edition of the monthly pamphlet L’Anarchie) Pelletier states that ‘�������������������������������������������������������� la femme a moins de besoins sexuels que l’homme’�������� (women have fewer sexual needs than men). Dossier Madeleine Pelletier, BMD. 29 Pelletier’s main theoretical writing on sexuality is represented by the following works: L’Amour et la maternité (Paris, undated), Le Célibat, état supérieur, L’Emancipation sexuelle de la femme (Paris: Girard et Brière, 1911), La Rationalisation sexuelle (Paris, 1935) and Pour l’abrogation de l’article 317. Le droit à l’avortement (��������������������������������������������� Paris, 1913), reprinted in Gordon and Cross, Early French Feminisms, 1830–1940, pp. 177–83 as ‘The Right to Abortion’. 30 Mitchell, ‘Madeleine Pelletier (1874–1939): The Politics of Sexual Oppression’, p. 78.

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In the contemporary social climate, sexuality can only be ‘���� une chose vile’�������������������������������������������������������� for a woman, in direct opposition to the freedom which only active politicisation mediated by socialism and feminism can achieve. In ‘The Feminist Education of Girls’, Pelletier argues: The inalienable right to sexual pleasure which women ought to possess is not accorded by society, and since we live in society one must take account, as little as possible, but still, take account to some extent, of social prejudices. For example, a girl’s belief that she has the right to sexual pleasure must not make her the dupe of men and expose her to being rejected by society as part of a class of shady women, because today distinctions are scarcely made between a girl living in a free union and a kept woman.31

And, in ‘The Right to Abortion’: In practice, free love brings women all kinds of miseries, thanks to the generally unfavourable nature of public opinion. Men treat women disrespectfully; families close their doors to them.32

Again, as in Le Refus, it is the political connotations with which society invests female sexuality which render it undesirable for the liberated, politically committed female. Therefore Pelletier recommends chastity, arguing in ‘The Feminist Education of Girls’: If a girl wishes to blot out the chapter of sexuality from her life, she should be encouraged in this path. Laws and customs enslave women and they can only really find a bit of liberty by depriving themselves of sexual love.33

Like Thomas, Pelletier rejects female sexuality because of the cultural meanings associated with it, which it cannot escape. For Pelletier, it is only when society has been revolutionised that the expression of female sexuality will be compatible with female emancipation and politicisation. 31 Madeleine

Pelletier, ‘The Feminist Education of Girls’, reprinted in Gordon and Cross, Early French Feminisms, 1830–1940. A Passion for Liberty, pp. 167–77 (p. 176). 32 Madeleine Pelletier, ‘The Right to Abortion’, reprinted in Gordon and Cross, Early French Feminisms, 1830–1940. A Passion for Liberty, pp. 177–83 (p. 178). 33 Pelletier, ‘The Feminist Education of Girls’, p. 176.



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Thomas and Pelletier are Foucauldian in their questioning of the centrality of sexuality to subjectivity and in their recognition that sexuality is a rich locus for the transfer of power relations. Unlike Foucault, they show in detail how women are placed very differently from men within that web of discourses via which power is transmitted and in relation to which all subjects must negotiate and define their identities. To propose the refusal of sexuality as a strategy or a solution to the problem of the limitation of female subjectivity by the social inscription of sexuality is a recognition of a problem rather than a definitive answer: to refuse to exercise one’s sexuality is equally to refuse the full exploration of human subjectivity, and in this sense it is no solution. Furthermore, the cultural meanings ascribed to female chastity might be quite as problematic as those ascribed to female sexuality. Pat Caplan notes that asexuality can be, and has been, thrust upon women as a means of controlling them: prescriptive definitions of women as the respectable repository of Christian morality in the early nineteenth century depended on the rejection of an identification with the dangerously sexual Eve in favour of the virgin Mary.34 To embrace chastity is to risk straightforward collusion with a male-defined view of female sexuality as inherently dangerous and disruptive, according to which it should be expelled from the realm of the political where order and reason must triumph. On the other hand, Margaret Jackson argues in her contribution to The Cultural Construction of Sexuality that the separation of women from sexuality can function as a mode of resistance.35 Discussing inter-war sexology, Jackson notes that female ‘frigidity’ could be represented (by men) in various ways: as women’s natural state, out of which they must be coaxed; as a form of perverse resistance to nature; as a socially motivated form of resistance to male power. In all three cases, sexology sought to ‘cure’ women whose behaviour was, in Jackson’s words, ‘deeply threatening to male supremacy’36 because it resisted men’s desire to define and control female sexuality. Female chastity is a shifting signifier which can connote both oppression and resistance. Pelletier’s and Thomas’s novels are examples of discourses which attempt to 34 Caplan,

The Cultural Construction of Sexuality, p. 3. Jackson, ‘ “Facts of life” or the eroticisation of women’s oppression? Sexology and the social construction of sexuality’ in Caplan (ed.), The Cultural Construction of Sexuality, pp. 52–81. 36 Ibid., p. 70. 35 Margaret

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use female chastity to signify resistance to the (sexual) politics of the heterosexual marriage economy. In the cultural and political context in which they were writing, this was a dangerous strategy. They were not only writing against cultural norms and their definitions of femininity, but also against ideological discourses which allied sexual potency and procreation with national identity. Nye argues that ‘by becoming conflated with the problem of national health and survival, individual impotence became the master sexual metaphor for national decline during most of the life of the Third Republic’.37 These texts attempt to extricate the female subject from a discursive trap: the moment she attempts to reject conventional constructions of femininity, she is condemned as subversive and unpatriotic, yet she rejects them precisely in order to transform herself into an autonomous agent with the capacity to act politically and thus to help to achieve national and international regeneration. 2. History Unlike Pelletier and Thomas, Louise Weiss was not prepared to embrace or accept the reality of the separation between the female subject and sexuality which she nonetheless recognised as a feature of the contemporary socio-cultural environment. Whilst the heroines of Thomas’s and Pelletier’s texts embrace solitude and chastity as politically enabling, the stories of Weiss’s female protagonists in Délivrance constitute ������������������������������������������������������ a lament for the loss of a feasible sexual identity for the female subject. Love is the ultimate value in the text: in an interview in 1936, Weiss referred to Délivrance as ���������� a love story.38 In the novel, Marie’s experience of sexuality is portrayed in terms of oppression. Marie longs for the kind of relational identity which Thomas’s Brigitte finds so abhorrent. Délivrance suggests that culture offers such an identity to women but that historical events have destroyed the conditions of possibility for them to achieve it. The novel explores the impossibility of living femininity in terms of 37 Nye,

‘Sexuality, Sex Difference and the Cult of Modern Love in the French Third Republic’, p. 68. 38 ‘������������������������������������������������������������������������� Un roman d’amour, avant tout un roman d’amour, m’a dit Mme Louise Weiss’� (‘A love story, first and foremost a love story’, Mme Louise Weiss said to me) states Noël Sabord in a review of the text entitled ‘Délivrance ou le drame d’un double avortement’ (Délivrance or the Drama of a Double Abortion), Paris-Midi, 29 November 1936. Dossier Louise Weiss, BMD.



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dependence on a sexual partner in the historical context of interwar France. Marie cannot adopt the relational sexual identity she desires, and which society offers her, because of the annihilation of a whole generation of young men. The embracing of any kind of active heterosexual identity is shown to be problematic for the postFirst World War woman because of the deployment of marriage fodder as cannon fodder. This problem is elucidated at the beginning of the text: Tant que je ne saurais pas à qui me donner, me dévouer jusqu’à la négation de moi-même, je ne vaudrais rien et toute ma génération me ressemblait. Nous étions des millions de femmes sans maître qui avions erré, hallucinées, à la poursuite d’êtres à chérir, de fantômes qui s’étaient dissous dans la brume. Lasses, nous nous étions enlisées, les unes dans le travail, les autres dans la religion ou la débauche, trois formes de la même solitude. Quelle pitié! (D, p. 38) (As long as I don’t know who to give myself to, who to devote myself to so that my own self is nothing, I shall be worth nothing, and all my generation is in the same position as me. We were so many women without a master and we wandered, having visions, looking for someone to cherish, looking for ghosts who disappeared into the mist. Exhausted, some of us sank ourselves into work, some into religion, or debauchery, three versions of the same solitude. What a pitiful situation!)

By the end of the text, Marie has not progressed: Elevée comme toutes les femmes de ma génération par une mère qui n’avait pas vécu seule, pour un foyer où je ne devais pas vivre seule, je me découvrais serve et ne pouvais m’affranchir […] Je ne m’adapterais pas à la société surgie de la guerre, cette pléthorie de femmes et de gérontes. Je revendiquais un homme pour moi, alors qu’il n’en restait pas un pour chacune de nous et l’exigeais plus fort que moi, alors que tous les vrais mâles gisaient dans les tranchées. (D, p. 285) (Like all the women of my generation, I was brought up by a mother who had not lived alone, and I was destined for a home where I would not live alone. But I found I was a slave and I could not free myself […] I would not adapt to the society the war had created, with all those women and old ladies. I demanded a man of my own, but there were not enough left for us to have one each, and I wanted a man stronger than myself, and all the real men were lying dead in the trenches.)

Raised at a time when female self-definition was to be achieved only through dependence on a male sexual partner, Marie cannot adapt

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to her new historico-cultural environment. She exemplifies the problem of the gender role of the single woman elucidated by Mary Louise Roberts. Her Bildung is the search for a new means of defining her self; Noémi’s example of self-definition through politics shows one way of achieving autonomy. However, Marie refuses Noémi’s refusal of sexuality which is presented as an inevitable condition of politicisation. Ultimately Marie’s Bildung is negative: ‘Je ����������������� n’avais rien appris’��(D, p. 266) (I had learned nothing). During a chance meeting with Anselme, her former lover, she reverts to a regressive discourse of self-destruction: Je t’appartenais si totalement que tu étais devenu moi.��(D, p. 284) (I belonged to you so completely that you had become me.) Je concevais que tu me dominais et que cette domination, loi de nos rapports, correspondait au code intérieur de mon existence […] Mon corps ne valait que magnifié par tes caresses. (D, p. 286) (I understood that you dominated me and that this domination, which governed our relationship, corresponded to the inner workings of my existence […] My body was worthless unless it was magnified by your caresses.)

Finally choosing abortion as Anselme recommends, Marie also rejects the text’s maternal solution. She represents the negation of Weiss’s political agenda, refusing both maternity and female emancipation. She fails to change and therefore, locked within a discourse of sexual dependence in the absence of sexual expression, fails to reconstruct her identity. Noémi on the other hand has avoided the disintegration of the self by embracing an active political identity. However, marriage is therefore denied her because it is socially encoded as female dependence on the male. The dependence which Marie desires is precisely what separates the emancipated female subject from sexuality: Un homme peut, avec de la chance, rencontrer une compagne dont l’amour, à travers lui, s’unit à la cause qu’il défend, en une sorte de communion idéale et privée; une femme ne peut trouver un tel compagnon, l’abdication n’étant pas le fait d’un amant. (D, p. 215)



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(If he is lucky, a man can meet a female partner whose love becomes part of the cause he is fighting for, creating a sort of ideal and private communion. But a woman cannot find a male partner like that, because a male lover cannot abdicate himself.) Je comprenais que les hommes puissants ne rencontraient jamais leurs égales et, insatisfaits, se torturaient à les chercher, que les femmes puissantes ne rencontraient jamais leurs supérieurs et demeuraient solitaires, malgré les ferveurs qu’elles suscitaient. (D, p. 287) (I understood that powerful men never met women equal to them and, unsatisfied, they tormented themselves to find them. I understood that powerful women never met men superior to them and they stayed single, even though they aroused passion in men.)

Weiss concurs with Thomas here in her critique of the social manipulation of female sexuality through marriage: for Brigitte, marriage is imbued with bourgeois ideology which is in conflict with her communist beliefs, whilst for Noémi, marriage imposes a relational identity which is in conflict with her political career. Like Brigitte, Noémi explores the possibility of a transgressive sexual identity, but finds it wanting: Mon second acte de courage […] fut de renouer librement avec le plaisir. Ma tradition le mêlait à l’amour si intimement que, malgré mon mariage qui l’en avait dissocié, je fus longue à me résoudre à cette décision. (D, pp. 218–19) (My second act of courage […] was to freely embrace pleasure again. The tradition I came from connected pleasure so closely to love that even though my marriage had disconnected the two, it took me a long time to reach this decision.)

Noémi’s attempt to de-sanctify pleasure by detaching it from love comes up against the implacable force of culture. Promiscuity cannot provide a long-term solution since ����������������������������� ‘[o]n se lasse de la volupté indispensable à la santé de l’esprit plus jeune’��(D, p. 219) (one becomes tired of the sexuality that is necessary for the health and spirit of a younger person). Noémi is denied access to a viable sexual identity. She is ‘désintégrée ��������������������������� de sa chair’ (D, p. 288) (separated from her flesh). Even her relationship with Christian, her companion, offers a maternal rather than a sexual identification, as we have seen: ‘plus encore que mon amant, il est mon enfant’ (D, pp. 311–12) (even more than my lover, he is my child). Through Noémi, Weiss suggests

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that the notion of a politicised female subject is better expressed through a maternal metaphor than through a sexual one. An article which appeared in Minerva soon after the publication of ��� Délivrance offers the following summary of the text: […] ce livre où s’harmonisent si heureusement les élans d’un cœur de femme et d’une sensibilité blessée et la clarté d’une intelligence lucide, familiarisée avec les plus grands problèmes de l’heure. Cri de révolte et cri de désespoir, avertissement, le livre de Louise Weiss nous apporte tout cela en mêlant le drame individuel au vaste drame collectif qui enfièvre le monde.39 ([…] this is a book in which a felicitous harmony is achieved between the passion of a women’s heart and a wounded sensibility, and the clarity of a lucid intelligence which is familiar with the greatest contemporary problems. It is a cry of revolt and a cry of despair, and a warning. Louise Weiss’s book gives us all this by combining an individual drama with the enormous collective drama which is stirring up the world.)

Noémi’s story constitutes a cry of revolt against the ways in which culture defines women’s experience of their sexuality. Marie’s is a cry of despair. The warning offered by the text concerns the dangers which face the female subject who is obliged by post-First World War culture to find a path between a relational sexual identity which precludes female autonomy, and an independent, politically active role which renders the assumption of a female sexual identity highly problematic. Weiss differs from Pelletier and Thomas in that the ‘solution’ her text offers to the incompatibility of female sexuality and politics is not chastity but single motherhood. Although acknowledging that, in the contemporary historical and cultural climate, the politicised female subject must forgo the physical expression of her sexuality, the text will not accept the stifling of the emotional aspect of sexuality, but instead transfers it onto a maternal identification, which is in turn associated with politics, as we saw in Chapter 3. Exclusion from sexuality is seen to be a tragedy; erotic love is not to be rejected, as in Le Refus and La Femme vierge, but rather re-channelled.

39 Review

of Délivrance,� Minerva, 3 January 1937. Dossier Louise Weiss, BMD.



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3. Ideology In the representations we have examined so far, the focus has been on bourgeois intellectual writers and bourgeois intellectual protagonists, women whose political sympathies put them at odds with their class of origin and its sexual codes of behaviour. Madeleine Pelletier is to some extent an exception given her working class origins, however, by the time she wrote her novels, she too had gained access to middle class education and culture. All these texts examine central female protagonists who enjoy a level of economic and intellectual freedom which allows them, at least to some extent, the luxury of choice in relation to the exercise of their sexuality. As Francesca Canadé Sautman argues in a study of lesbianism in France in this period, ‘social background and education made it possible to take a chance and live in ways not consonant with mainstream norms’.40 Middle class intellectual women could choose to have sex or not to; Henriette Valet’s Madame 60BIS shows that working class women were often denied even this choice. In this text, we meet a group of women for whom sexuality and pregnancy are an inevitable fact of material existence rather than a subject for reflection. The narrator differs from the other women in the ������������������������������ Hôtel-Dieu,������������������� since she is both participant and observer, able to adopt a position of exteriority in relation both to her own condition and that of the other women, commenting on and analysing what she sees and experiences. We are not told the precise circumstances of the narrator’s falling pregnant, but it is made clear that her assumption of the role of single mother is an active, deliberate and political choice. The stories told to her by the women she meets in the maternity hospital show that her (albeit limited) freedom to choose how to live this experience sets her apart from them. In Madame 60BIS, the shared fact of pregnancy inevitably leads the women in the maternity hospital to discuss female sexuality, as they are living its most obvious result. They bemoan the fact that men are free to enjoy sex, whilst women’s pleasure is negated by the constant fear of pregnancy: 40

Francesca Canadé Sautman, ‘Invisible Women: Lesbian Working-class Culture in France, 1880–1930’ in Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan, Jr. (eds.), Homosexuality in Modern France (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 177–201 (p. 196).

190

Forgotten Engagements Chaque mois tu marques la date sur le calendrier et tu attends comme le Bon Dieu que ça vienne, tu n’as de bons jours que quand tu es dégueulasse. A moins que tu te passes d’homme ou que tu soyes gousse, c’est le seul moment que t’es sûre d’être pas prise; aussitôt après, tu as peur, tu as peur, tu tâtes ton ventre pendant le jour, pendant la nuit; tu trimes, tu souffres, tu as peur. (MSB, p. 51) (Every month you write the date on the calendar and you hope to God it comes, you only have good days when you’ve got the curse. Unless you do without a man or you’re a dyke, that’s the only time you know you haven’t caught. Then straight after you’re scared, you’re really scared, you feel your stomach during the day and at night, you slog away, you suffer, you’re scared.)

The notion that the man might restrain his pleasure or the frequency of its expression in order to spare his partner another pregnancy does not feature; contraception is a dangerous secret proscribed by the laws of both church and state (MSB, pp. 188–89). These working class women live their sexuality just as they live their pregnancy, as a blight on their lives rather than as a source of joy: sexuality is a conjugal duty over which they have little control, and procreation represents another mouth to feed on resources already stretched to their limit. Butler suggests that the construction of gender through the exercise of sexuality is a matter of cultural survival: for these women, it is a matter of material survival. We saw in Chapter 3 that their resignation immures them in their oppression to such an extent that even the narrator cannot find a way to articulate and thus remedy it. Similarly, the notion that a woman might make a choice about her sexuality from a political or ontological perspective is completely outside of their frame of reference. The women in the maternity hospital are categorised by Madame 61 according to the social framework within which they exercise their sexuality. She tells the narrator that there are three groups of women here: married women, single mothers and prostitutes (MSB, pp. 23–24). The first group of ‘���������������� honnêtes femmes avec leur livret de famille’����������������������������������������� (honest women with their administrative records) have their own corner of the ward. When Madame 61 remarks ironically, ‘[f]aut ����������������������������������������������� croire qu’on les a mises ensemble pour qu’on les déshonorent pas, nous les filles’������������������������ (you’d think that they put them together so that we girls don’t ruin their reputations), she indicates that a discourse of morality is operative in the way in which the different women are viewed. ‘�������������������� La petite paysanne’�



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(the little country girl) is an example of a young woman who has internalised this sort of discourse. She reproduces the attitude of her father, who threw her out of his house at the point of his shotgun on discovering her pregnancy: ‘j’ai ����������������������������� fauté et j’ai fait moimême mon malheur’��(MSB, pp. 31–32) (I have done wrong and I am the cause of my own misery). However, moral condemnation is not the most prevalent response to the unmarried mother illustrated in this text; ‘��������������������������������������������������� la petite paysanne’ is ������������������������������� exceptional among the women in viewing her situation in moral terms. The institutional context of the ����������������������������������������������������������� Hôtel-Dieu������������������������������������������������� suggests the ambivalence of social attitudes to the unmarried mother. As Françoise Thébaud points out, moral condemnation of the unmarried mother was in conflict with pronatalist ideology. The sign of real moral degeneracy was abortion, and many therefore viewed the healthy unmarried mother with tolerance.41 The church colluded with this view, if the priest who visits the Hôtel-Dieu��������������������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������������������� is typical: he dishes out religious medals rather than moral condemnation, more concerned with winning souls born and unborn than with reinforcing the church’s view on extra-marital sex (MSB, pp. 150–53). There is then a strong element of realist pragmatism in this text; it is echoed in Madame 61’s description of the prostitutes ‘�������������������������������������������� qui se sont fait prendre comme les autres’ (�MSB, p. 24) (who got caught out like everyone else), who are first and foremost victims of their biology, just like all the other women. The most lucid of the prostitutes offers an analysis of her profession in economic terms, presenting it simply as����������������������������������������������� ‘un métier, pas des meilleurs, pas des pires’� (MSB, p. 209) (a job, not one of the best and not one of the worst), in which selling sex is just like selling anything else – when business is good, you can eat and be warm, but when business is slow, you have to tolerate physical hardship. Thus she rejects any moral analysis of prostitution: Après tout une honnête femme, c’est une putain qui s’ignore. Et une putain, c’est une honnête femme qui a eu de mauvais débuts! On n’y est pour rien. Les circonstances font tout, et le souci de croûter. Si le monde est mal fait, c’est pas nous qui en sommes la cause. (MSB, pp. 212–13). (After all, an honest woman is a prostitute who doesn’t know she is one. And a prostitute is an honest woman who had a bad start! It’s not our fault. 41 ��������� Thébaud,

Quand nos grand-mères donnaient la vie, pp. 219–22�.

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Forgotten Engagements It’s just circumstances, and trying to feed yourself. The world is in a mess but that’s not our fault.)

Whilst Valet’s detailed account of the life of a prostitute pushes at the limits of textual acceptability in terms of inter-war norms, her overtly Marxist analysis renders the account acceptable to a leftwing readership: the logical conclusion is that there is no need to bring (bourgeois) moral value judgments to bear on prostitution, since the revolution will abolish the economic conditions which have created it. Valet constructs the prostitute’s life narrative such that the interjections from her female audience, which generate the telling, represent a range of attitudes to prostitution. ‘La moucharde’ (the snitch) expresses outright moral condemnation: ��������������������� ‘Moi, j’aurais mieux aimé mourir de faim que de gagner ma vie avec mes cuisses’ �(MSB, p. 209) (I’d rather have died of hunger than earned my living lying on my back). ‘La petite juive’ (the little Jewess) is naïvely curious: ‘Faut être forte pour faire ce travail?’ (�MSB, p. 209) (Do you have to be really strong to do that sort of work?); ‘���������������������� Pourquoi as-tu choisi cette profession? […] On t’a donc rien appris d’autre?’ �(MSB, p. 212) (Why did you choose that profession ? Did no-one teach you anything else?). ‘La rouquine’ (the redhead) starts to reappraise her values: ����������������������������������������������������������� ‘Dire que je croyais que les grues c’était pour le plaisir […] Du moment que c’est pour gagner sa vie c’est moins laid. Faut bien qu’on vive …’ (MSB, p. 211) (And I thought that whores did it for pleasure […] If it’s to make a living it doesn’t seem quite so sordid. You have to live, after all … ) but does not seem to be able to cope with the end of the narrative: ‘Tiens, ������������������������������������� la rouquine elle est partie, pauvre mignonne, elle a pas pu supporter ça’ (MSB, p. 216) (Look, ������� the redhead has gone, poor little thing, she couldn’t deal with it). The text does not conclude the episode with any narratorial interpretation and there is no evidence to suggest that the prostitute’s story is successful in changing the women’s views on prostitution. As the narrator remarks, ‘[l]e ���������������������������������������� monde réel vient se reveler ici’ (MSB, p. 217) (the real world is on show here): as a typical example of proletarian literature, the text views its narrative mission primarily in terms of authentic presentation and not in terms of analysis. However, proletarian literature is political precisely because presentation is analysis. The message is that the resolution of the material difficulties associated with poverty, female sexuality and pregnancy should be



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prior to any moral consideration of how particular women found themselves in this situation. The text does not therefore engage in a detailed consideration of the problem of prostitution per se, since this is peripheral to its main concern. Valet is only interested in the question of the moralisation of female sexuality to the extent that it affects the material conditions of women’s lives; she does not express (feminist) righteous anger against these discourses. Valet is nonetheless interested in the production of discourses about sex. The prostitute’s life story serves as a textual vehicle for a consideration of the ways in which sex is talked about. In the convent where she was brought up, ‘on �������������������������� ne parlait que de ça’ (MSB, p. 213������������������������������������������������������ ) (that’s all everyone talked about): the nuns taught their charges to view their female bodies as dirty and evil and to be ashamed of menstruation (MSB, pp. 213–14). Sent to work on a farm, the prostitute encounters an equal prolixity about sex, but the message is quite different. Here, animals copulate constantly, and sex is merely a physical function; the farming community watches fearlessly and talks and jokes about sex all the time. In this respect, Valet’s novel concurs with Foucault’s analysis of sexuality in terms of a proliferation rather than a repression of discourses.42 A Foucauldian analysis might go further to point out that, in the case of this prostitute, discourses have created a certain form of sexual behaviour. The result of the prostitute’s discursive saturation with sex is that she becomes physically saturated with sex: J’ai suivi les garçons dans les champs: je me suis laissée faire; tripotée, pelotée, tout était bon; et quand j’ai été à la ville, j’ai fait encore une grande découverte: qu’on pouvait gagner sa vie avec ça. (MSB, pp. 215–16) (I followed the boys in the fields, I let them get on with it. I was groped and mauled, I didn’t care, and once I got to the city I made another great discovery – you can earn your living doing that.)

Viewed in this light, the account of the nuns’ treatment of sexuality is an illustration of the way in which an excessive discourse on sex produces an excessively sexualised subject; there is no condemnation of their attempt to make women experience their bodies in terms of shame, for in this case that is not the effect ultimately produced. On 42

Foucault refutes the ‘repressive hypothesis’ in the introduction to the first volume of The History of Sexuality.

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Forgotten Engagements

the contrary, the prostitute’s story suggests that the fact that she has been constantly bombarded with discourses about sex from the age of six is what makes her a prostitute: it is the fact of talking about sex and not what is actually said which is significant here. As a typical example of proletarian literature, Valet’s novel integrates a class-based analysis into her account of the production of discourses about sex. The middle classes cannot hide sex; their attempts to do so reveal sex, just as the nuns’ attempts to suppress sex actually produce it:������������������������������������������������� ‘Une petite bourgeoise sait depuis l’âge de six ans comment se font les enfants. Elle a épié les grandes personnes et deviné ce qu’on lui cache si bêtement’��(MSB, p. 74) (A little middleclass girl knows from the age of six where babies come from. She has been spying on the grown-ups and she has guessed what they have tried so pathetically to hide from her). On the other hand, a working-class girl like ‘������������������������������������������������� la petite juive’,�������������������������������� although fully acquainted with sexual vice and perversion, is dangerously ignorant about her own body. She does not know how her baby is going to come out, and is horrified when she discovers the truth from the other women (MSB, pp. 74–77). Later, when she tells her story, it becomes clear that her loss of virginity and subsequent pregnancy are a result of what we now call date rape, caused by a combination of male brutality and her own ignorance of the physical reality of sex (MSB, pp. 158–62). As in the case of the prostitute, it is the discourses about sexuality to which ‘������������������������������������������������������������ la petite juive’�������������������������������������������� has been exposed which define the exercise of her own sexuality. Her sexuality is the result of a combination of knowledge and ignorance. We learn that ‘��������������������� [u]n bordel avec ses lanternes est pour elle une maison de commerce comme Félix Potin. Elle n’ignore rien des pratiques les plus sales; ses gestes évocateurs font quelquefois se pâmer les autres femmes’ (MSB, p. 74) (a brothel with its red lights was just like any old grocery shop to her. She knew all about the most disgusting practices – when she showed them what went on, the other women were horrified). Because this sort of sexuality is all she knows, she does not have a bank of other representations on which to draw. Therefore she cannot help but reproduce it in her behaviour, and her own sexuality is legible only as ‘vice’. Even though she is in fact a sexually inexperienced virgin, both the man who seduces her and the proprietress of the hotel where the seduction takes place believe her to be a prostitute: when she holds out her hand to take her lover’s hand in hers, he misreads her gesture as a request for payment (MSB, pp. 160–61). Her ignorance



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of the gestures which connote affection and her ignorance of her own biology thus exclude her from love and make her the victim of her own body. The representations of sexuality I have analysed in this section vary considerably in their focus. Yet all the texts offer a highly developed awareness of the intimate relationships between power and sexuality. All the texts show how discourses about sexuality control and produce the exercise of women’s sexuality. The corollary of this is that the link between power and sexuality can be turned to women’s advantage. If sexuality is seen as being subjected to power, it is also presented as a site where women can seize power: by exercising their sexuality differently, they can change the world and themselves. This is why Foucault’s concept of a ‘transfer point’ of power relations is so crucial: sexuality is a locus where power circulates between individuals and institutions; it is not only a place where women are subjected to power. Valet’s text is the least optimistic in this respect because of its focus on the material barriers to emancipation, both in terms of class and in terms of gender. Poverty severely reduces the margin within which women might attempt to redefine their (sexual) lives. Nonetheless, it is not a pessimistic text, as will be shown in more detail in Chapter 5. Weiss, Pelletier, Téry and Thomas present women protagonists who enjoy more room for manoeuvre, but whose ability to define their gender and their sexuality is nonetheless still circumscribed by the ways in which female subjectivity is inevitably conditioned by history and culture. Although that conditioning operates differently for women of different classes, the definition of femininity in terms of heterosexual marriage and motherhood remains a constant; all the texts bring us inexorably back to these roles which must be redefined or rejected if autonomy and agency are to be achieved. Utopian visions In counterpoint to the foregoing analysis of the problem of female sexuality, I now turn to texts which provide a resolution by situating their female protagonists in a utopian textual environment. By this I mean texts in which the (fictional) sociohistorical environment in which the characters find themselves corresponds, to some degree at least, to the author’s political ideal.

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Here we should expect to find that women can combine the exercise of their sexuality with full autonomy and agency. We should also expect that, in common with the conventions of the utopian genre, the idealised resolution of the problem of female sexuality should offer a commentary on the real social, historical and political environment of the author. As Louis Marin argues, this relationship between utopian space and social space is the core of the definition of the utopian genre: It is clear that utopic dialogue has a critical function. The representation of the ideal city, of its mores, institutions and laws – precisely because it is picture and representation – conjures up, as a negative referent, real society; it thus encourages a critical consciousness of this society.43

Madeleine Pelletier and Simone Téry provide very different examples of novels which engage with the utopian genre. These texts provide a counterweight to the potential objection that to propose chastity as a solution to the problem of female sexuality is to collude with the myth of a danger inherent in female sexuality. On the contrary, these texts suggest that in the right social and political conditions, the exercise of female sexuality could be combined freely and successfully with politics. We saw in Chapter 2 that Pelletier’s engagement with the utopian genre in Une Vie nouvelle is a complex one; whilst many of her social ideals have been achieved in the post-revolutionary society she depicts, the regime is, from a political point of view, dystopian. In this text, sexuality is approached as a social problem and accordingly finds an idealised resolution. Proof that the depiction of female sexuality in Une Vie nouvelle does indeed correspond to Pelletier’s ideal of progress is to be found in Pelletier’s essay ‘����������������� Le Célibat, état supérieur’������������������������������������������������������������� (Celibacy, a Superior State). Here she argues that the free exercise of female sexuality is desirable, and will be possible in the reorganised, ‘rational’ society which she envisages for the future: Mais le célibat ne comporte pas nécessairement la chasteté. La vieille fille à perroquet n’est plus de notre temps; c’était une victime du préjugé social. La sexualité n’est pas plus une honte pour la femme qu’elle n’en est une pour l’homme; ce n’est qu’une fonction physiologique ni honorable, ni déshonorante, ni belle, ni laide; la femme a droit d’y satisfaire, comme 43

Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play, trans. by Robert A. Vollrath (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1984), p. 79.



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elle a le droit de manger et de respirer. Une société rationnelle ne saurait considérer comme une faute, dans l’un comme dans l’autre sexe, l’acte de génération pratiqué entre adultes.44 (Being unmarried does not necessarily mean being chaste. The old maid with her canary is out of date – she was a victim of social prejudice. Sexuality is no more shameful for a woman than it is for a man. It is just a physiological function, neither honourable nor dishonouring, neither beautiful nor ugly. Women have the right to satisfy this need just as they have the right to eat and to breathe. A rational society would not think of viewing the generative act practised between adults as wrongdoing.)

Thus in the society depicted in Une Vie nouvelle, there is no marriage; both women and men are free from sexual objectification and the relations of enslavement which, according to Pelletier, marriage necessarily produces. In the ‘rational’ society, everyone lives in individual flats in apartment blocks which provide for collective leisure to replace the human contact formerly provided by marriage. Since children are not only educated by the state but are raised communally from birth, the nuclear family unit no longer exists. In fact, things are exactly as Pelletier advocates in ‘Le ������������������ Célibat, état supérieur’����������������������������������������������������������� . Sexual mores have been completely transformed, since, in the absence of a meaningful family unit, fidelity, which has no value for Pelletier, is no longer required between partners. Abortions are legal but are rarely necessary due to the state’s responsibility for its offspring and the lack of interest in issues around paternity resulting from the abolition of the nuclear family. Childbirth is painless and hygienic thanks to the enormous advances in medical science. The fact of being a single mother has no cultural significance, since all the children of the state are reared by the collectivity. The abolition of marriage has produced the abolition of sexual hypocrisy; there is complete equality between men and women in the realm of sexuality as in all other areas of life. The text’s central female protagonist, Claire Mélin, exemplifies the new attitude to sexuality: Autrefois sa vie amoureuse lui aurait fait encourir le mépris public, elle aurait été ravalée au niveau des prostituées. Maintenant, avec tous ses amants, elle reste une femme honnête. Personne ne se permet de lui parler avec mépris, même de s’adresser à elle sur le ton familier que les hommes prenaient autrefois avec les femmes faciles. (VN, p. 21)

44

Pelletier, ‘������������������������������������� Le Célibat, état supérieur’, pp. 6–7.

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Forgotten Engagements (Before, she would have been the object of public contempt because of her love life: she would have been treated like a prostitute. Now, with all her lovers, she is still an honest woman. No-one would think of speaking to her contemptuously, or of taking that familiar tone with her which men used to use with easy women.)

There is no stigma attached to female promiscuity, and men and women interact without fear of sexual ambiguity. Thus, in a society in which social organisation has been radically transformed, the exercise of sexuality no longer presents a problem for the female subject. In fact, it is a matter of relative insignificance, just like any other bodily function. As Pelletier says, ‘������������������������� la sexualité est devenue une chose très simple’ �(VN, p. 20) (sexuality has become a very straightforward matter). Reading the text according to Marin’s model of utopian discourse, the elements of the real social space which Pelletier seeks to criticise emerge very clearly: the condition of possibility for the free exercise of female sexuality is the complete abolition of the bourgeois nuclear family based on marriage and motherhood. But like all utopias, the solution proposed is not realisable in actual social space, and is not intended to be: the function of the utopian discourse is to provide social critique and not a blueprint for a new society. The problems are obvious: the solutions proposed are simplistic; the creation of such a society would rely on forcing compliance through authoritarian means (a point which Pelletier herself makes in the novel when she presents the new regime as a political dystopia); no account is taken of the human, emotional attachments individual subjects would have to renounce, for example, in relation to sexual fidelity and parenthood. The dilemma explored, and not resolved, in Une Vie nouvelle is the question of whether the masses can be forced to be free; Pelletier believed in freedom above all, but had little faith in the ability of the people to assume that freedom responsibly. As Felicia Gordon suggests in her biography of Pelletier, ‘[h]er commitment to individual liberty was at war with her social pessimism’;45 Pelletier diagnoses the practical problems of female sexuality in both Une Vie nouvelle and in La Femme vierge, but in the context of her decreasing faith in both feminism and socialism, she is less clear about the remedy. 45 Gordon,

The Integral Feminist, p. 171.



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In suggesting that Simone Téry’s representation of the Spanish Civil War constitutes a depiction of utopia, I am echoing an argument which has been advanced in relation to George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia: that the revolutionary socialism both writers witnessed in the republican battalions in Spain is represented as an ideal manifestation of fraternity, communist commitment and action. From a textual perspective, this mode of utopian writing is different from the classical allegorical model with which Pelletier engages, and as a political narrative it is problematic, because the relationship between utopia and reality is fraught with difficulties. U-topia means No-place, that which is not reality, or is other than reality. To describe a textual account of a real social-geographicalpolitical space as utopian implies either that the author is deluded about the nature of that reality, or that the author deliberately deceives the reader by omitting any negative aspects. In the context of French inter-war communism generally, it would be easy to apply this sort of analysis to the conspicuous absence of a critical response to Stalinist repression in the USSR. Alternatively, such a utopian narrative might be an account of the attempt to build a utopian community, such as the nineteenth-century utopian socialist phalanstères or Cabet’s experimental community in Utah. But such communities tend to self destruct, because, since utopia is by definition separate from the world, it must employ exclusionary strategies to prevent infection from outside, but in so doing, becomes ever more caught in a web of authoritarianism which produces the sort of oppression utopia was designed to overcome. As Marin points out, ‘utopia is not realizable, or is realizable only by denying itself’.46 In the context of the Spanish Civil War, it would be easy to apply this sort of analysis to the famously bloody repression of the anarchist POUM by the communists in Barcelona in May 1937. Marin’s schema is operative in the case of Où l’aube se lève, in that Téry’s account of the republican battalions is a representational construct with no real referent; her idealised account no more corresponds to reality than did Thomas More’s imaginary state of Utopia. But the figure is complicated in political terms because Téry posits the Spanish troops as both real and ideal. The text’s ideological message depends in part on the reader’s collusion with Téry’s assertion, be it deceptive or deluded, that the textual dialogue is not 46 Marin,

Utopics, p. 275.

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only between a signifing representation and an idealised signified, but also between a signifying representation and a real referent, since to question the veracity of Téry’s positive construction of the republican troops is to question the sincerity of communism itself. The political context provided by the communist-republican groupings with which Jeanette becomes involved corresponds exactly to Téry’s ideal of political commitment and action. Téry begins the introduction to Front de la liberté with the assertion that ���������� ‘Ceci est un livre de partisan’ (FL, p. i) (this book is partisan): this is no less the case as regards ����������������� Où l’aube se lève. As we have seen, both texts are uncritically partisan and present an idealised view of communism. Within the communist battalions, order, discipline, unity and solidarity reign supreme. The problem of anarchism and the POUM is elided: the anarchists Jeanette meets have all, implausibly, adopted the communist view of military organisation. Within the communist battalions, there is complete ideological cohesion; individuals from many nations are united under the guidance of the Soviet Union, the source of both military hardware and communist doctrine. The communist influence is also presented as the source of the republican government’s education programme for soldier and civilians, and of its always ethical behaviour in combat and in its treatment of prisoners. From this perspective, Spain does indeed appear to be a kind of utopia: Ici la vie était bonne, et tout était bon dans cette vie, chaque heure et chaque précieuse minute, parce que peut-être il n’en restait plus beaucoup, et peutêtre c’était la dernière, et l’ami rencontré une heure vous racontait la vérité de sa vie comme on ne la raconte qu’à l’être qu’on aime d’amour, ou au moment de mourir, et il s’en allait, et le lendemain il était tué. (OA, p. 206) (Here life was good, and everything was good in this life, every hour and every precious minute, because there might not be much time left, and because each minute might be the last. The friend you met an hour ago told you things about his life which you would only tell someone you really love, or when you are about to die, and then he left, and the next day he was killed.)

Death cannot rupture this ideal of commitment and action because it is its ultimate expression. France on the other hand is Spain’s dystopian opposite: Il y avait pour Jeannette plus d’intensité de vie dans une seule de ces minutes espagnoles que dans des mois d’existence française. (OA, p. 274)



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(Jeanette lived more intensely in one minute in Spain than she did in months of living in France.)

Paris is associated with everything Téry condemns politically: the policy of non-intervention, the absence of commitment, and the dominance of bourgeois ideology, luxury, and individualism. Paris is the place to which Jeanette runs when her commitment fails; Spain is the place to which she returns when she realises that the fight against fascism is the only valid justification for her life. The positive (utopian) and negative (dystopian) representation of the relationship between female sexuality and politics is mapped exactly onto this geographical duality. Paris is associated with negative female sexuality: in Paris, Jeanette is rejected by André because he is a grand bourgeois and she is of an inferior social status. Had Jeanette been obliged to pursue her political apprenticeship in Paris, she would have experienced exactly the same conflict between her political inclinations and the cultural encoding of female sexuality as Brigitte does in Thomas’s Le Refus. In fact, she escapes bourgeois constructions of female sexuality when she flees to Spain. Amongst her communist comrades, it is as if the revolution has already taken place. In the extraordinary context provided by war, Jeanette is free to enjoy her sexuality without bourgeois proscriptions. She mocks her own reluctance to accompany Guirec to his bedroom in precisely these terms: Elle eut honte d’avoir eu un réflexe si bourgeois, d’avoir paru lui prêter des intentions équivoques, d’avoir oublié qu’ils n’étaient pas faubourg SaintGermain, mais dans un pays en guerre. (OA, p. 87) (She was ashamed of her bourgeois reaction, of having seemed to think that his intentions were not honourable, of having forgotten that this wasn’t Parisian high society, but a country at war.)

She soon discovers that his intentions are indeed ‘equivocal’, which does not prevent her from enjoying his passionate embrace. Téry’s point is not simply that normal social codes do not apply in wartime, but that ideological resolution also brings sexual resolution. It is clear from her frequent depictions of the fascists as misogynist, violent and disrespectful towards women that she does not envisage similarly free, frank and equal sexual relationships taking place on the other side of the political divide. Indeed André is presented later

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in the text as emblematic of the right’s attitude to female sexuality when, as a prisoner of the communists, he attempts to manipulate Jeanette sexually: ������� ‘Voilà �������������������������������������������� qu’il m’offre son corps, maintenant ! pensa Jeanette. Le marché est bien clair : ‘Sauve-moi de ces rouges, et je consens de coucher avec toi’ (OA, p. 357) ��������������������������� (‘And now he’s offering me his body!’ thought Jeanette. ‘The deal is quite clear – “Save me from these reds and I’ll agree to sleep with you”’). It is specifically within Téry’s republican-communist utopia that sexual relationships based on manipulation and self-interest are replaced by relationships of mutual respect. That utopian resolution at the level of ideology requires similar resolution in the domain of sexuality is a function of Téry’s engagement with the romance genre: because sex is the prize in the romance, and commitment is the prize in the roman à thèse,������������������������������������������������������ the coincidence of romance and quest in Téry’s novel requires a coincidence of female sexuality and politics. As we have seen, Jeanette accomplishes her political apprenticeship via sexual relationships: Guirec, Paco and Ramon in turn each bring her a little closer to the authentic commitment she finally achieves at the end of the novel. Thus female sexuality and commitment are united, forming a productive unity which benefits the female subject politically, ontologically and physically. Jeanette’s choice of Ramon both symbolises her choice for communism and is a means through which she can actualise her commitment via a new sort of relationship based on equality and freedom. What then constitutes a sexual utopia for the politicised female subject? For Pelletier, the answer is discursive neutrality: in Une Vie nouvelle, the expression of women’s sexuality is completely free because all socio-cultural meaning has been erased from her sexual identity. For Téry, the answer is the creation of a new discourse, in the context of communism, according to which sexual relationships between men and women function as a microcosm of all social interaction between human beings based, after the revolution, on equality and mutual respect. In both texts, the sexual utopia rests on an appropriate use of sexuality, both by the female subject and by society, governed primarily by female agency. Sexuality remains a transfer point for power relations, but power circulates around and through sexuality without detrimental effect to any of the individuals concerned, and to the benefit of society at large. Thus in Une Vie nouvelle, maternity triumphs over abortion



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such that the state is strengthened without physical pain or social disadvantage to women; in Où l’aube se lève, a relationship between a man and a woman furthers the cause of communism as the pair channel their love towards freeing their comrades from political tyranny. The examples of Où l’aube se lève and Une Vie nouvelle suggest that when the socio-historical and political environment is revolutionised, the emancipated, politicised female subject will be able to relate unproblematically to her sexuality, thus proving that, for these writers, it is not with female sexuality per se that the problem lies, but with the uses to which female sexuality is put in a social, political and historical context which constructs it in a fashion which is very much less than ideal. Female homosexuality The thematic investigation of sexuality provided by the texts in question is not focused exclusively on heterosexual relationships. If heterosexuality is so encoded by culture as to make it unacceptable to the female subject, might homosexuality offer both a way of expressing female desire without its being subject to such cultural inscriptions, and a means of attacking those cultural meanings themselves? The interpretation offered by some second wave feminists of homosexuality as offering politically transgressive possibilities, in that it constitutes an attack on the bourgeois construction of women as a commodity for exchange in the marriage market, is now familiar. Monique Wittig proposed lesbianism as the solution to such a mode of oppression: Lesbianism is the culture through which we can politically question heterosexual society on its sexual categories, on the meaning of its institutions of domination in general, and in particular on the meaning of that institution of personal dependence, marriage, imposed on women.47

It would certainly not be anachronistic to seek such a representation of lesbianism in inter-war novels. Shari Benstock’s work has shown the extent to which American expatriate women living in Paris during 47 Monique

Wittig, ‘Paradigm’ in George Stambolian and Elaine Marks (eds.), Homosexualities and French Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 114–21 (p. 118).

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the first half of the twentieth century provided a context for lesbian self expression during this period both in life and in literature.48 The novels of Colette, a member of this group for a time, dealt positively with lesbianism. However there seems to be little common ground between these positive experiences and representations, and the representations of lesbianism in the novels of Thomas, Pelletier and Weiss. The reasons for this are historical and political. Claudie Lesselier’s research has suggested that the conditions of possibility of the Paris-Lesbos community were eroded during the 1930s: ‘In fact the economical [sic] and political crisis of the thirties, followed by the war, is the death knell of an aesthetic and a social space which has been a ground for a particular lesbian culture’.49 However, there were other reasons, some of which were specific to the ideological and personal contexts within which the authors in this study were writing. As a communist fellow-traveller, it would have been difficult for Thomas to ally lesbianism positively with left-wing commitment. The inter-war French left was generally homophobic, specifically viewing homosexuality in terms of bourgeois luxury and vice.50 Thus Brigitte’s encounter with lesbianism is presented as part of the bourgeois milieu she will come to reject. Brigitte’s experience of homosexual desire is first suggested by her reading of certain authors: Proust, Rimbaud and Baudelaire. The reference to these authors has a dual significance. Intertextually, they connote a homosexual identity; they are also examples of authors whose texts were vilified by communist literary critics as manifestations of bourgeois decadence.51 The lesbian theme is developed through Brigitte’s ambiguous relationship with Anna. Their relationship is 48 See

Benstock, Women of the Left Bank. Paris 1900–1940, Andrea Weiss, Paris Was a Woman (San Francisco: Harper, 1995), and Noel Riley Fitch, Syliva Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties (W.W. Norton and Company, 1985). For a detailed account of the history of homosexuality in the inter-war period, see Florence ������������������ Tamagne, Histoire de l’homosexualité en Europe. Berlin, Londres, Paris 1919–1939 (Paris: Seuil, 2000). 49 Claudie Lesselier, ‘Silenced Resistances and Confidential Identities: Lesbians in France, 1930–1968’, Journal of Homosexuality 25 (1993), 105–25 (p. 112). 50 Sautman, ‘Invisible Women’, p. 183. 51 On intertextuality and homosexuality, see Christopher Robinson, Scandal in the Ink. Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century French Literature (London: Cassel, 1995), pp. 167–72 and ��������� Tamagne, Histoire de l’homosexualité, pp. 290–93.



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presented in covertly sexual terms and as exclusive and extremely close both physically and mentally. One contemporary reviewer picked up on this relationship: �������������������������������� ‘Elle veut remplacer l’amitié – l’amour? – perdu d’Anna par un autre amour’ (She ���������������������� wants to replace Anna’s lost friendship – or love? – with another love).52 Although the relationship is never openly labelled as lesbian, textual indications are clear: Anna, mon amie. A qui donc rendre grâce de ce don qu’est l’amitié d’Anna, sinon à Anna elle-même. Elle va dire ‘mon amour’, car elle n’en a pas d’autre. Elle dit ‘mon amie’, et c’est beaucoup plus que tout ce que l’on peut dire. Ah! le coin de la rue! Nous nous étions avancées si lentement l’une vers l’autre, les mains hésitantes et tendues, car nous avions peur de ne rien saisir et d’avoir ensuite à nous retirer, le cœur ardent de désir, mais toujours vide. Ce jour-là … Mais quel jour? Il n’y a pas eu de jours saillants dans la suite des jours, car si on déclare son amour, il n’est pas de déclaration d’amitié. (R, pp. 40–41) (Anna, my friend. To whom should I give thanks for this gift of Anna’s friendship, if not to Anna herself ? She was going to say ‘my love’, because she did not have another love. She said ‘my friend’, and that was a great deal more than could be said. Ah, the corner of the street! We had moved towards each other so slowly, with hands hesitating, outstretched, because we were afraid of seizing nothing and then having to pull back, hearts burning with desire, but still empty. That day … but which day? There were no remarkable days in the days which followed, because if you declare your love, that is not a declaration of friendship.)

In this context, an episode which takes place between Brigitte and her sister, Annie, takes on a dual connotation: – Comme tes bras sont froids, Brigitte, laisse-moi me coucher dans ton lit et te rechauffer. Une légère hésitation, un court moment où le cœur de Brigitte semble s’arrêter de battre: le danger rôde encore. – Non, dit-elle, tu vois, je vais me lever. Et elle rejeta ses couvertures et s’assit au bord du lit. (R, pp. 26–27). (‘Your arms are so cold, Brigitte, let me get in bed with you and warm you up’. A slight hesitation, a brief moment in which Brigitte’s heart seemed to skip a beat: the danger was still present. ‘No’, she said, ‘You see, I’m going to get up’. And she threw back the covers and sat on the edge of the bed.) 52

Pierre Pieuchot, review of ��� Le Refus, Vendredi, 12 February 1937.

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Is the danger simply that Brigitte will transmit her tuberculosis by close physical contact, or does she fear that she might betray her transgressive desire as a result of such contact? Brigitte’s relationship with Anna represents a temptation for Brigitte to take refuge in inauthenticity: ���������������������������� ‘Mais moi, je m’accomplirai bien moi-même. Et seule, s’il le faut. Anna d’ailleurs m’a déjà aidée et m’aidera’��(R, pp. 32–33) (But I shall make something of my life myself. And alone, if necessary. But Anna has helped me, and she will help me). There is a degree of bad faith in the contradiction – resisting conventional bourgeois self-definition via a husband, Brigitte proposes to substitute a female to fulfil the same function and call this autonomous self-definition. Furthermore, Anna is also tainted by bourgeois values. She silently distances herself from the ambiguous entente with Brigitte because it threatens the stability of the bourgeois socio-cultural milieu with which Anna allies herself and which she is not prepared to disrupt: ������������������ ‘je tiens surtout ��à �������� pouvoir vivre tranquille’ (�R, p. 91) (above all I want to live a quiet life). It is tempting to read Brigitte’s lesbian inclination as another manifestation of her revolt against bourgeois ideology. However, the text does not grant any political potential to lesbian desire. Rather it is suggested that the development of the Brigitte-Anna relationship would amount to inauthentic self-definition via the lover, which is condemned as the inevitable position of the female subject in heterosexual relationships in a bourgeois cultural environment, such as that of Brigitte and Pierre. Homosexual desire is not free from the dangers presented by heterosexual desire, and the transgressive potential of a same-sex relationship is far outweighed by the dangers it presents by offering yet another relational sexual identity. For Thomas, it is precisely the refusal of the inauthenticity which seems to characterise all sexuality in Le Refus which allows the female subject to come to politics. Thomas’s refusal to accord revolutionary significance to lesbianism finds an echo in her (posthumously published) 1971 biography of the anarchist Louise Michel. Whilst Michel’s contemporaries and subsequent biographers and historians had debated her possible lesbian identity, Thomas grants no credence to this thesis.53 53 Marie

Marmo Mullaney discusses Thomas’s biographical portrait of Louise Michel in ‘Sexual Politics in the Career and Legend of Louise Michel’, Signs 15.2 (1990), 300–22.



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There is also a biographical context for Thomas’s representation of lesbianism. During 1946–1947, Thomas had a love affair with the writer Dominique Aury, author of the controversial novel L’Histoire d’O.54 The love affair, probably Thomas’s first and only lesbian experience according to Dorothy Kaufmann, ended when Aury became involved with Jean Paulhan, although the two women remained close friends until Thomas’s death in 1970. The evidence presented by Kaufmann from Thomas’s diaries suggests that Thomas was passionately committed to the affair, and fiercely jealous of Paulhan. The diary extracts Kaufmann quotes are revelatory as regards Thomas’s views about lesbianism: If she were a man, I would be infinitely happy about her love for me. If I were a man, I would love her. But she is a woman and I am a woman. What to do? I never thought that homosexuals and lesbians could be in love outside their closed network. And here I discover the love of one of them for a physically normal being. And it happens that this woman is beautiful, intelligent, delicate and that I love her (as much as I can love a woman).55

These quotations are interesting in the present context from two perspectives. Firstly, they betray a marked ambivalence about lesbianism on Thomas’s part. She clearly does not feel that she can love a woman in any straightforward way; she distinguishes herself from the ‘authentically’ lesbian Aury on the grounds of physical normality/abnormality; she also sees lesbians and homosexuals as a social group separate from everyone else, herself included; none of which suggests that Thomas viewed lesbianism in a positive light. Secondly, the writing of Le Refus preceded Thomas’s friendship with and love for Aury by almost ten years, and seems in some ways to anticipate it. Like Thomas, Brigitte feels passionately attracted to a woman, but is not altogether comfortable with her own feelings, and her love is ultimately reciprocated only as friendship. It is perhaps worth noting at this point that Thomas used both ‘Brigitte’ and ‘Anne’ as pseudonyms during the Second World War. These 54

Kaufmann, ‘The Story of Two Women: Dominique Aury and Edith Thomas’; Kaufmann, Edith Thomas. A Passion for Resistance, Chapter 9, ‘Story of Two Women. Edith Thomas and Dominque Aury’, pp. 123–37. 55 Kaufmann’s translation, quoted in Kaufmann, ‘The Story of Two Women: Dominique Aury and Edith Thomas’, p. 892.

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biographical details reinforce the text’s message that for Thomas, lesbianism was not a viable route towards an emancipated and politicised female identity. The resolution of the ‘problem’ of homosexuality in Une Vie nouvelle makes Madeleine Pelletier’s views on the topic clear. Here lesbianism is perceived to be a result of the necessary repression of heterosexual female desire in a cultural climate which does not permit the existence of a female sexual identity in the absence of a husband, and of the often brutal nature of female sexual experience within a patriarchal marriage: La société nouvelle avait donné droit de cité aux homosexuels, hommes et femmes. Elle reconnaissait que l’homosexualité n’était pas normale, néanmoins elle trouvait archaïque et arbitraire de réglementer les caresses, de désigner ce qui est permis et ce qui est défendu […] Chose inattendue, l’inversion sexuelle, au lieu d’augmenter, diminua. Une bonne part de sa force tenait à l’importance donnée à la sexualité en général […] Chez la femme, l’homosexualité avait toujours été moins répandue et sa grande pourvoyeuse avait été la continence forcée des femmes qui, n’ayant pu se marier, n’avaient pu prendre un amant. Des femmes mariées recherchaient dans le lesbianisme un amour moins brutal enjolivé de tendresse. La liberté sexuelle de la femme fit disparaître le saphisme à peu près complètement. (VN, pp. 205–206) (The new society granted full rights to both male and female homosexuals. The new society recognised that homosexuality was not normal, but nonetheless thought it was old fashioned and arbitrary to regulate caresses and to prescribe what is permitted and what is forbidden […] Unexpectedly, sexual inversion decreased rather than increasing. A significant part of its impetus was a result of the importance accorded to sexuality in general […] Homosexuality has always been less prevalent in women and its major source was the enforced continence of women who had not been able to get married and could not take a male lover. Married women saw in lesbianism the possibility of a love which was less brutal and full of beautiful tenderness. Women’s sexual freedom made sapphism disappear almost completely.)

Homosexuality does not appear as a tool for political change in Pelletier’s work: rather, it is presented as a direct result of the ideology to which Pelletier is opposed, and thus is shown to have no constructive possibilities. La Femme vierge presents an exclusively female ‘family’ formed when Marie and Catherine set up home together and adopt Mme Lecornu’s daughter after her mother’s death, but there is nothing in the text to suggest any physical



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desire between Catherine and Marie. Their relationship follows the pattern of a conventional patriarchal marriage, Catherine being the weaker partner, emotional and clinging, completely absorbed by ‘motherhood’ and domesticity, whilst Marie is a dominant, liberated, active partner who fulfils herself outside of the domestic setting. Catherine is presented as a victim of her own refusal to embrace politics and therefore freedom: the paths which Marie has chosen, and which are valorised by the text, are open to Catherine, but she refuses them. She is not presented by the text as a victim of Marie’s ambition. Pelletier comes to the same conclusion as Thomas as regards homosexuality, although via a different route: same-sex relationships threaten the female subject with the same oppression as heterosexual ones. Pelletier additionally interprets lesbianism as a direct result of the enemy ideology. Thus, despite brief considerations of lesbianism, both texts propose chastity as the only viable female sexual identity in the given socio-cultural environment: chastity constitutes a necessary stage of female evolution between capitalism and revolution. Pelletier’s own appearance and masculine dress code might appear to suggest a ‘butch’ lesbian identity, however research has strongly indicated that Pelletier did not engage in either same-sex or heterosexual physical relationships. Florence Tamagne suggests that Pelletier’s appearance indicates her general antipathy to sexuality rather than a lesbian identity.56 Felicia Gordon argues that there is no reason to suppose that, had Pelletier wanted to do so, she would have shrunk from defending an ‘unorthodox sexual choice’ on her own part; her theoretical writings provide a context for a defence of homosexuality. But instead, she affirmed her choice of virginity. Gordon quotes Pelletier writing to Arria Ly on the topic: ‘The voyage to Lesbos tempts me no more than the voyage to Cythère’.57 On the other hand, Sautman suggests an inability on Pelletier’s part to acknowledge or articulate her own lesbian inclination.58 What is clear is that, in her own life, Pelletier rejected homosexuality on the same terms as she rejected heterosexuality: as a threat to personal autonomy. 56 ��������� Tamagne,

Histoire de l’homosexualité, p. 340. The Integral Feminist, p. 211. 58 Sautman, ‘Invisible Women’, pp. 196–97. 57 Gordon,

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We have seen that for Louise Weiss, the power to achieve political transformation is to be found in an exclusively female mode of relating to the world and to other people. The goal of this transformation is the inclusion of women in the polity and a concomitant rejection of war. At the beginning of Délivrance, the question is posed as to the effectiveness of lesbianism as a model for such a relationship. The narrator’s response to Noémi has erotic overtones from her first sight of this well-known politician in a newspaper photograph: ‘Je ���������������������������������������������� portai l’image sous la lampe, la lissant, la caressant’ �(D, p. 28) (I held the picture in the light of the lamp, stroking and caressing it). Noémi’s body becomes the focus of Marie’s erotic fantasies: L’étoffe moulait ses formes. Moi, je devinais en elle l’amante aux seins fermes, aux hanches drues, sans autre ornement en sa nudité que ses nattes. Mon désir fit un bond et je compris la jouissance d’aimer un être au pouvoir. (D, p. 92) (The fabric followed the curves of her body. I imagined the lover within, with firm breasts and solid hips, naked, wearing only her plaits. I felt a leap of desire and I understood the ecstasy of loving a powerful individual.)

However, this text is also categorical in its rejection of any possible political potential of female homosexuality. Noémi gently but firmly rejects Marie’s sexual advances because ‘[l]es ����������������������� lesbiennes sont des impuissantes: nous n’en sommes pas’ (�D, p. 94) (lesbians are powerless, we are not). Not lesbians or not powerless? The phrase remains ambiguous but either way homosexuality and power are deemed to be mutually exclusive. It is clear that the structures of domination and submission which Marie actively desires in her heterosexual relationships also characterise her response to Noémi: Mon sentiment pour Noémi m’étonnait par sa ressemblance avec mes amours masculines. Androgyne, il oscillait entre les deux stratégies de la domination: la soumission ou l’emprise: c’est que de son inspiratrice émanait une extraordinaire virilité d’esprit; je me délectais en mon goût pour elle. (D, p. 68) (I was surprised by the similarity between my feelings for Noémi and my love for men. These feelings were androgynous, and wavered between two strategies of domination – submission or control. An extraordinary virility of mind flowed from the woman who inspired these feelings; I delighted in my attraction towards her.)



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Marie desires Noémi in the same way as she would desire a man: homosexuality is not significantly different from heterosexuality. Délivrance again represents homosexual desire in terms of a conventional oppressor/oppressed dichotomy: homosexuality cannot then, for Weiss, symbolise personal female liberation or political liberation, since the pacifism the text recommends depends precisely on the erasure of the oppressor/oppressed structure on the macro level. The reasons for the rejection of any positive link between lesbianism and politics in these texts are varied and complex. Certainly it was in general difficult to write positively about homosexuality in inter-war France. As Nye points out, ‘[the] valorisation of heterosexual, reproductive sex had the effect of calling into question all other forms of sexual contact and intimate practices; for this was the era of the scientific invention of the “perversions” which enveloped non-heterosexual sex in an aura of pathology and exoticism’.59 It is important to stress that Thomas, Pelletier and Weiss do not present an unfavourable view of lesbianism per se. Their novels do not replicate the maleauthored models of female homosexuals cited by Jennifer WaeltiWalters in her study of lesbianism in the French novel; lesbianism produces neither monstrous, perverse, castrating women à la Balzac, nor genteel and refined bisexuals à la Gauthier; lesbianism is not equated with moral degeneracy or criminality, nor with mental instability and neurosis.60 But lesbianism is not embraced as a politically productive choice for the female subject seeking politicisation. For all three writers, lesbianism is rejected because it replicates the oppressive structures of heterosexuality; additionally, for Pelletier, lesbianism is no more than a temporary outlet for (necessarily) repressed female desire, and for Weiss, lesbianism is synonymous with powerlessness. It is vital to understand the contexts, or rather, absence of contexts, in which these authors were writing about lesbianism. No obvious social context into which a politically positive presentation of lesbianism could be integrated 59 Nye,

‘Sexuality, Sex Difference and the Cult of Modern Love in the French Third Republic’, p. 60. 60 Jennifer Waelti-Walters, Damned Women. Lesbians in French Novels, 1796–1996 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000). See also Marie������ Jo Bonnet, Les Relations amoureuses entre les femmes du XVIe au XXe siècle (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1995).�

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suggests itself. According to Shari Benstock, Parisian lesbianism of the 1920s fell into two main categories: the mononcled, besuited mannish lesbian exemplified by Gertrude Stein and Radclyffe Hall tended deliberately to replicate heterosexual relations, whilst the lesbian element of Nathalie Barnay’s literary salon exemplified the sort of upper-class experimentation which was often tolerated within heterosexual marriage by the grande bourgeoisie, and which celebrated all the culturally defined trappings of femininity.61 Neither of these models would have been useful to the political novelists. The first is problematic because, in Thomas’s, Pelletier’s and Weiss’s texts, the political message depends precisely on a rejection of oppressive power structures characteristic of heterosexual relationships. The second is problematic in the case of Pelletier and Thomas, because of its valorisation of both class and gender identifications which were antithetical to their own convictions. Louise Weiss would have found this less alienating – indeed she visited Barnay’s salon on occasions.62 However, Barnay’s Paris-Lesbos proposed only a ‘shortlived freedom from patriarchal constraint’ which took place only in the private sphere,63 whilst Thomas, Pelletier and Weiss were seeking a permanent transformation in the public sphere. Furthermore, no political context suggests itself. Contemporary feminism certainly did not advocate a political mobilisation of lesbianism, displaying a marked lack of interest in sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular.64 Although Pelletier was probably not a lesbian herself, her cross-dressing attracted much criticism from feminists and socialists alike. Henri Barbusse exemplified the prevailing communist view of homosexuality when he declared, ‘I consider this perversion of a natural instinct to be an index of the profound social and moral decadence of contemporary society’.65 Lesselier argues that ‘the heterosexism of the left, for whom homosexuality is an expression of “bourgeois degeneracy” could only exclude lesbians from political participation and force them to negate a

61

Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, pp. 173–77; p. 306–307. Bertin, Louise Weiss, pp. 103–104. 63 Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, pp. 306, 451. 64 ������ Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, p. 196; Antony Copley, Sexual Moralities in France, 1780–1980. New Ideas on the Family, Divorce and Homosexuality (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 154. 65 Quoted in Robinson, Scandal in the Ink, pp. 21–22. 62



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part of themselves’.66 Any celebration of lesbianism would have been in direct contradiction with the ideological affiliations of both Thomas, an obedient communist fellow-traveller, and Weiss, a pillar of the bourgeois feminist movement. Whilst Paris has often been represented in terms of tolerance as regards homosexuality (the Napoleonic Code did not prohibit homosexuality per se), inter-war France did not readily accept homosexuality.67 In a society in which women in general were often represented as pariahs, lesbians were even more likely to be designated as misfits;68 the political text which advocated women’s integration into society against such models would have had no interest in aligning the politicised female subject with the pariah par excellence. As Sautman has shown, lesbianism was generally deemed to exist only in the mansion or the brothel, and was frequently associated with illness and pathology, and even with criminality: thus lesbians ‘had every reason to ensure survival by making themselves invisible’69 and the female political novelist had no interest in defending their cause. Sautman and Marie Marmo Mullaney both suggest that a long tradition existed in France of ascribing ‘deviant’ sexual identities to politicised women, and particularly of ‘accusing’ them of lesbianism: a woman who flouted established gender norms by her political activism, her failure to marry, her refusal to be subservient to men, and her flagrant rejection of accepted conventions of femininity proved herself not to be a woman at all, but an inversion of what it meant to be a woman, or a third sex.70

These novels could then also be read as a deliberate attempt to refute the notion that a politicised woman must necessarily be a lesbian. There seems to be no significant literary context for a positive, femaleauthored representation of lesbianism, other than that offered by Colette and others of Barnay’s group. Waelti-Walters’ research produced only four female-authored ‘lesbian’ novels between 1929 and 1934 (three of which are by the same author, Jeanne Galzy)

66

Lesselier, ‘Silenced Resistances and Conflictual Identites’, p. 117. Scandal in the Ink, p. 2; Copley, Sexual Moralities in France, pp. 152–54. 68 Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, p. 50. 69 Sautman, ‘Invisible Women’, p. 177. 70 Mullaney, ‘Sexual Politics in the Career and Legend of Louise Michel’, p. 309. 67 Robinson,

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and none at all between 1934 and 1946.71 Christopher Robinson and Claudie Lesselier both suggest that the reluctance of early twentieth-century publishers to take on lesbian novels by women had a negative effect on the development of lesbian writing, and Benstock points to a climate of social and legal censure around expressions of lesbianism by women who were not protected by wealth and social status.72 Since the whole raison d’être of the roman à thèse is the communication of a message, it is very understandable that Thomas, Pelletier and Weiss chose not to risk the silencing of their voices which such an attempt to inaugurate a new current in female-authored French literature would have entailed. In the final analysis it seems that many of the themes which writers such as Colette chose to explore via lesbianism are instead explored via politics by Thomas, Pelletier and Weiss. Robinson suggests that the motif of lesbianism allowed Colette to oppose patriarchy, to investigate ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ elements of her personality, and to achieve ‘a fuller awareness of her own female identity and its potential’:73 politicisation fulfils all these functions in the novels of the three writers I have discussed. As political novels, these texts do not find lesbianism a useful motif; as investigations of the female condition, they find it superfluous. Conclusions: politics and pleasure The attempt to integrate an awareness of the cultural construction of sexuality with both a critique of the ways in which female sexuality is conventionally presented in relation to politics and with the production, via the novel itself, of a new discourse on female sexuality and politics is both complex and problematic, because female sexuality is an unstable signifier in relation to politics. Dominant cultural representations of the politicised woman in France incorporate contradictory notions. She has been defined as asexual, beyond sexuality, and therefore able to function as the pure guardian of moral and national 71

Waelti-Walters, Damned Women, p. 98. Scandal in the Ink, p. 174; Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, pp. 48–49, Lesselier, ‘Silenced Resistances and Conflictual Identites’, pp. 113ff. 73 Robinson, Scandal in the Ink, pp. 212–13. 72 Robinson,



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respectability.74 Conversely, she has been defined as too sexual – the conflation of the female revolutionary and the whore dates back at least to 1848.75 Alternatively, she is defined as sexually deviant and, specifically, in terms of lesbianism.76 Consequently, however the authors in this study had chosen to represent their protagonists – as sexually inactive, as sexually active or as sexually different – they would be open to the charge of replicating existing, maledefined stereotypes. The one constant in the varied representation of female sexuality in the novels in my corpus is an acute awareness of culture’s attempts to define, and thus direct and contain, female sexuality. The authors suggest that once the female subject assumes a political identity, the possibility is opened up that the cultural meanings invested in female sexuality at a given historical and socio-cultural moment will be in contradiction with that political identity. Two points should be underlined. Firstly, the alienation of the female subject from her sexuality is seen to be historically and culturally specific, and therefore temporary: for Thomas and Téry, it is a problem specific to the bourgeoisie, for Pelletier and Valet, it is a problem of the pre-revolutionary epoch and for Weiss, a problem of the post-First World War and pre-feminist period. Their texts look forward to a reconciliation between female sexuality and politics once the political problems with which they are concerned have been resolved. It is this sort of resolution which is dramatised in Où l’aube se lève,���������������������������������������������������� although as we have seen, the text’s utopianism is problematic in political terms. Secondly, the texts suggest the genesis of some constructive possibility, in terms of female politicisation, out of that alienation. For both Thomas and Pelletier, chastity is clearly politically enabling. Weiss’s solution is maternity rather than chastity, but her proposition of a new, specifically female mode of relationship as the way forward for politics similarly arises out of the politicised female subject’s alienation from sexuality. For Téry, quest and romance are compatible in the right political context, and for Valet, pregnancy offers at least the beginnings of a sharing of experiences which is the precondition of critical awareness of female 74

For an analysis of the relationship between female national symbols, nationalism and sexuality see George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985), especially Chapter 5. 75 Sautman, ‘Invisible Women’, p. 178. 76 See Mullaney, ‘Sexual Politics in the Career and Legend of Louise Michel’.

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oppression and therefore also of change. Thomas, Weiss and Pelletier propose a willed separation of the female subject from her sexuality in order to achieve a positive political goal. This separation of female sexuality from politics can be understood in both a theoretical and cultural context as a response to a heterosexual norm deemed to be inherently oppressive. This theme has often been addressed in recent feminist theory: For despite the fact that most women probably experience heterosexuality as natural, or possibly as a positive choice, I would argue that it is the key institution in and through which male power is produced and maintained. Numerous studies by feminists have shown how women are exploited and controlled in marriage, in the family, in the labour market, by the state, and by means of male violence; underpinning all these institutions, and the sanctions which enforce male dominance within them, is the institution of heterosexuality, a system of social relations – hetero-relations – in which male domination and female subordination are institutionalized and sexualized.77

Many of the arguments which emerge from the novels this chapter has analysed anticipate this sort of approach to female sexuality. Their reading of female sexuality in terms of culture is however very much of its time. It was after all in the inter-war period that the influential work of Margaret Mead on the social construction of gender was first published.78 The rejection of sexuality as a political strategy is comprehensible within the cultural context of inter-war France. At this time, women were questioning their disadvantaged role within the institution of marriage, for example via feminist campaigns for the reform of the Napoleonic Code; Theodore Zeldin remarks that ‘[a]fter the war of 1914 emancipated girls were complaining that men never mentioned marriage without talking about the size of the dowry’!79 Although, as Mary Louise Roberts has shown, the role of the single woman was a viable mode of femininity, this did not necessarily open the door to the free expression of female sexuality, given the constraints imposed by prevailing views on the unacceptability of the exercise of female sexuality outside of marriage and the resultant investment of 77

Jackson, ‘ “Facts of Life” or the Eroticisation of Women’s Oppression?’, pp. 76–77. 78 See Caplan, The Cultural Construction of Sexuality, pp. 12–13. 79 ����������������� Theodore Zeldin, France 1848–1945, Vol I, ‘Ambition, Love and Politics’ (Oxford: Clarenden, 1973), p. 288.



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cultural meaning in ‘transgressive’ female sexuality, and the nonavailability of contraception. However, the writers who reject female sexuality achieve much more than what Cora Kaplan has termed a ‘temporary expedient’, namely ‘the rejection of woman’s pleasure as inextricably bound to her dependent and deferential status’.80 Kaplan begins her investigation of feminism’s response to the problem of female sexuality by suggesting: How difficult it is to uncouple the terms pleasure and sexuality. How much more difficult, once uncoupled, to re-imagine woman as the subject, pleasure as her object, if that object was not sexual.81

Thomas, Weiss and Pelletier may temporarily reject female sexuality but they do not reject female pleasure. In political terms, they do see female sexuality as being inextricably bound to female dependence, but they assert a very real possibility of its uncoupling from pleasure and conceive of politics as the pleasurable object of their subjectivity. Thus female pleasure is displaced from sexuality to politics. Brigitte experiences physical exhilaration once the letter which contains her final rejection of Pierre and all he stands for has been sent: ������ ‘Elle se mit à courir jusqu’à ce qu’elle sentît une brûlure dans sa gorge et dans sa trachée’ (R, p. 246) ������������������������������������ (She started to run until she had a feeling of burning in her throat and in her chest). And the waves crashing onto the deck of the boat which carries her to England and her new political identity offer similar exhilaration: Mais le vent violent lui battait le visage et ses lèvres brûlaient et l’eau en séchant, laissait des plaques de sel sur ses vêtements et les mèches de ses cheveux venaient dans sa bouche, toutes salées. (R, p. 250) (But the violent wind battered her face and her lips were burning and as the water dried it left patches of salt on her clothes and wisps of her hair caught in her mouth, all salty.)

Marie-Victoire Louis has suggested that Pelletier’s singular situation as a politicised and emancipated female was a source of pleasure which compensated for the absence of sexual desire:������������������ ‘Si elle refoula 80 Cora Kaplan, ‘Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism’ in Nancy Armstrong

and Leonard Tennenhouse (eds.), The Ideology of Conduct: Essays in Literature and the History of Sexuality (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 160–84 (p. 161). 81 Ibid., pp. 160–61.

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ses désirs, la conscience d’être exceptionnelle, ne fut-elle pas, pour elle, aussi, une forme de plaisir?’�������������������������������������� (She may have repressed her desires, but was the knowledge that she was exceptional not also a form of pleasure for her?).82 Unlike all the other female characters in La Femme vierge, who privilege sexuality over politics and autonomy, Marie is happy (FV, p. 114). Marie’s independence is ultimately a pleasurable experience: ‘elle ���������������������������������������� se dit avec joie qu’elle a réussi à�� s’organiser une existence très acceptable. Elle remarque qu’elle ne pleure jamais, elle qui a tant pleuré dans son enfance’ �(FV, p. 115) (She said to herself with joy that she had succeeded in organising a very acceptable existence for herself. She noticed that she never cried, and she had cried so often in her childhood). Weiss represents politics as ecstasy when she describes Marie’s coming to politics via Noémi: �������������������������������������������������������� ‘Emportée par sa foi maternelle, elle m’entraînait vers d’autres extases’ (�D, p. 221) (Swept along by her maternal faith, she carried me towards other ecstasies); Noémi experiences a paradoxical joy when she burns the reminders of the child whose death has inspired her politics: ����������������������������������� ‘Le celluloïde des joujoux crépita avec une sorte de joie’��(D, p. 221) (the celluloid toys crackled with a sort of joy). This re-appropriation of female pleasure might be read as a response to the predominantly negative inscription of female sexuality which emerges from the male-authored political roman à thèse of the period. In the novels of Nizan, Aragon and Malraux for example, female sexuality is irrelevant to, or a simple distraction from politics; female sexuality tends to be associated with the antithesis of the political ideology recommended by the text; the politics of the female subject who attempts simultaneously to live sexually and politically is presented as inferior in relation to male politicisation, and her sexuality is presented as inferior in relation to ‘normal’ female sexuality. This is because texts such as those of Nizan, Malraux and Aragon interpellate male readers: the association of male sexuality and masculinity with politics is reassuring for the male reader, in that the textual message reads: commit yourself actively to politics and you will be a real man! In the female-authored roman à thèse, which interpellates a female reader, such gender associations are 82 ����������������������������������������������������������������� Marie-Victoire Louis, ‘Sexualité et prostitution’ in Bard (ed.),

Madeleine Pelletier (1874–1939). Logique et infortunes d’un combat pour l’égalité, pp. 109–25 (p. 125).



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inappropriate. The female reader must be persuaded that female politicisation is a good thing (this is the thesis proposed by the text). If politicisation is to be presented as requiring the sacrifice of female sexuality, then the re-appropriation of female pleasure and its inscription onto politics is a requirement of the genre, since that which the text is recommending cannot ultimately be presented as unpleasurable if the text’s thesis is to be accepted by the reader.83 As we saw in Chapter 2, feminist literary criticism has often focused on women’s engagement with, and attempts to rewrite, the traditions of narrative which have been formed out of a predominantly male canon.84 In their attempts to rewrite narrative traditions of political fiction, Thomas, Pelletier and Weiss all privilege the role of the single woman as the only one compatible with female politicisation in the contemporary socio-historical climate. Téry envisages a close and productive relationship between female sexuality and politics, however the context of this representation is politically idealistic. Neither Thomas, Pelletier, Weiss nor Valet appropriate for women the close identifications between sexuality and politics which often characterise male politicisation in the maleauthored political roman à thèse. ���������������������������������� Rather, they suggest constructive alternatives to that tradition which represent more than a simple re-gendering of its terms.

83 See 84 See

Kershaw, ‘The Body of the Hero in French Political Fiction of the 1930s’. Walker, The Disobedient Writer.

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5 Politics ������������������������������ and the Maternal Body In his study of Rabelais and carnival, Mikhail Bakhtin argues that carnival images ‘grant the author the right to treat an unofficial subject’. The work of feminist theorists who have investigated the relationship between the body and politics suggests that in political discourses the body is ‘an unofficial subject’ par excellence. The body is conventionally absent from the public and official world of politics, present only in the realms of the private and the unofficial: The relation of the social and political structures of the ‘body politic’ to the fleshy specificity of embodied identities has generally been masked behind the constitutional language of abstracted and implicitly bodiless ‘persons’.

This point, made here by Karen Sánchez-Eppeler in the context of American abolitionist and feminist discourses, underpins any feminist analysis of the relationship between the body and politics. As Sánchez-Eppeler goes on to suggest, it is the banishment of the specific, physical body from politics which creates a fictional ‘bodiless subject’ which is easily conflated in practice with the white male body. However, any attempt to rescue the female body from such banishment brings the theorist face to face with the paradox Scott articulates as ‘the need both to accept and to refuse “sexual difference”’. In her discussion of the relationships between politics, narrative and birth, Carol A. Mossman is right to suggest that the relevance of the body to politics has posed a considerable challenge to feminism; she defines that challenge as ‘whether and in what way to acknowledge the feminine body when patriarchal culture’s dominance is based on a gendered hierarchy which heavily promotes women as corporeal (defining her in her capacity to give birth) opposite a disembodied male’. The question of female embodiment and its potential relationship to feminist theory inevitably poses the  Mikhail

Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. by Helene Iswsolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).  Karen Sánchez-Eppeler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 1.  Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer, p. 3; see Chapter 3 above.  Carol A. Mossman, Politics and Narratives of Birth. Gynocolonization from Rousseau to Zola (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 6–7.

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universalism/difference problem: will feminism simply reinforce patriarchy by taking female physical difference as a starting point? Political representation and the female body The French debate over parity reintroduced the female body into politics and feminism. Geneviève Fraisse has argued that only the recognition of physical, that is, sexed, citizenship can explode the false conflation of ‘universal’ with ‘masculine’, a conflation which is clear when the adjective ‘universal’ qualifies a noun such as ‘suffrage’:������������������������������������������������������ ‘La constatation est banale, qui rappelle que depuis la naissance de notre démocratie, universel et masculin sont des termes qui se superposent’ (The ��������������������������������������� observation that, since the birth of our democracy, the terms ‘universal’ and ‘masculine’ have been overlapping terms, is a very obvious point). The defenders of parity countered claims about the dangers of destroying the concept of the abstract, universal citizen by affirming that the inscription of sexual difference in the constitution would simply represent a new and much-needed (in feminist terms) honesty about the embodied nature of the ‘universal’ citizen: Prendre en compte, théoriquement et pratiquement, la différence des sexes ne représente ainsi aucun abandon de l’universel mais, au contraire, permet de reconnaître le contenu concret et différencié de l’universel. (To take account, both theoretically and practically, of sex difference does not represent an abandoning of the universal but on the contrary, permits a recognition of the concrete and differentiated nature of the universal.)

This renewed emphasis on the female body also entailed a renewal of interest in the maternal body, because, as Fraisse argues, ������ ‘[l]e méchanisme de la reproduction humaine est le point fondamental de la différence des sexes, dans les faits empiriques autant que dans la dynamique du pouvoir’ (the �������������������������������������������� mechanics of human reproduction is the basis of sex difference both empirically and as regards the dynamics of power). Contemporary theorists often view women’s right to  ��������� Fraisse,

La Controverse des sexes, p. 75. Politique des sexes (Paris: Seuil, 1996), p. 81.  ��������� Fraisse, La Controverse des sexes, p. 272.  �������������������� Sylviane Agacinski,



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control their fertility as prior to equality in other domains. There is much criticism of Beauvoir’s analysis of maternity in Le Deuxième sexe, where she presents motherhood in terms of submission to biological destiny; in the age of contraception and abortion, it is argued, maternity can indeed be a choice and a ‘project’ in the existentialist sense. Whilst arguing against Beauvoir’s view that the female body constitutes a handicap, Sylviane Agacinski recognises the importance of historicising such a critique, since in the years before scientific, legislative and social progress in the domain of reproduction, la fécondité était déjà une force et beacoup de femmes la ressentaient ainsi, mais cette force mal maîtrisée entrait en contradiction avec d’autres formes de liberté. En ce sens, la revendication d’une rupture avec la nature avait, dans une certaine mesure, sa justification.10 (the capacity to give birth was already a source of power and many women experienced it in this way, but since they could not control it, this power was in contradiction with other forms of freedom. From this point of view, the demand for a break with nature found its justification, to a certain extent.)

Fertility which can be controlled autonomously is a natural power; in the absence of autonomy, the relationship between fertility and power is ambivalent.11 The significance of the availability of contraception to modern women cannot be overstated; this factor constitutes a crucial difference between the ways in which inter-war culture, and inter-war women, understood women’s bodies and the ways in which they are understood in our own time. We saw in Chapter 1 that there are significant links between contemporary debates over parity and the inter-war debates over female suffrage. A focus on the relevance, or otherwise, of the female body to the domain of politics is common to both. In the interwar period, the female body was often used against women who were seeking to argue for their right to emancipation and equality. Anti-suffrage campaigners based their arguments on the idea that  See

for example ibid., p. 269. for example ibid., pp. 208–24, and ����������� Agacinski, Politique des sexes, pp. 59–80. Various articles in Le Monde’s���������������������������������������� dossier of April 22 1999, ‘������������ Elles enfin au pluriel’������������������������������������������������������������������� , engage with Beauvoir and motherhood in the context of the parity debate. 10 ����������� Agacinski, Politique des sexes, p. 64. 11 Ibid., p. 64.  See

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women were too much embodied for politics, thereby asserting an impassable gulf between the body and politics. In their summary of anti-suffrage arguments, Albert and Nicole du Roy identify a range of medical arguments, such as women’s physical weakness, and the subordination of her reason and intellect to her specific physicality.12 Comments such as those of the Radical Party senator Alexandre Bérard concerning women’s hands are a case in point: Sont-elles bien faites pour le pugilat de l’arène publique? Plus que pour manier le bulletin de vote, les mains des femmes sont faites pour être baisées dévotement quand ce sont celles des mères, amoureusement quand ce sont celles des femmes ou des fiancées.13 (Are they really made for the fisticuffs of public life? Women’s hands are not made to handle voting papers. The hands of mothers are made to be kissed with devotion and the hands of wives and fiancées are made to be kissed with love.)

Bérard perhaps believed that that which had no basis in physical fact could be ‘proved’ via the creation of fantastical myths about women’s role in society and the family. The fear that the politicised woman would be masculinised was justified through the assertion that increased political activity in women would lead to physical sterility.14 Such a negative manipulation of discourses about the female body in the domain of politics is a key reason for some modern feminists’ preference for abstract universalism. For Elisabeth Badinter, Evelyne Pisier and Danielle Sellenave, ������������������� ‘[l]’universel est une arme contre la différence’������������������������������������ (the universal is a weapon against difference),15 necessary because historically, difference has always been a basis for exclusion rather than inclusion: Pour une victoire symbolique, la mise en place de la parité hommes/femmes dans les assemblées rompt avec ce premier principe de toute émancipation: le refus d’enfermer les êtres humains dans des distinctions naturelles. Ce 12

du Roy and du Roy, Citoyennes!,������������ pp. 131–33. in ibid., p. 133. 14 Ibid., p. 132. 15 Elisabeth Badinter and other anti-parity campaigners published these views in a dossier in L’Express of ����������������������������������������������������� 11–17 February 1999, in the wake of an article in favour of parity by Agacinski in Le Monde of 6 February. L’Express had ������������ already published a key manifesto in favour of parity in June 1996. 13 Quoted



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faisant, on reconstruit les vieilles barrières entre le monde des femmes et celui des hommes.16 (In order to achieve a symbolic victory, the establishment of parity between men and women in elected assemblies has departed from the first principle of all emancipation – the refusal to contain human beings within biological categories. In doing this, the old barriers between the world of women and the world of men are reconstructed.)

The example of inter-war anti-suffrage arguments proves that a corporeal notion of sexual difference has indeed been used to maintain and reinforce the doctrine of separate (i.e. gendered and hierarchised) spheres. For those against parity, the notion of sexed citizenship cannot be dissociated from such negative uses of discourses about the female body. They are equally opposed to the positive valorisation of female difference which characterised much 1970s feminist theory and which arguably resulted in politically ineffective and ultimately damaging separatism. In contrast, those who argue for parity believe that it is possible to use the concept of sexed citizenship strategically in order to resolve contradictions between abstract legislative equality and the actual situations in which women find themselves in practice.17 Overcoming the female body Discourses on the female body and politics dating from the inter-war period suggest that, for the inter-war male establishment at least, the right and proper character of politics was abstract disembodiment, the dominant characteristic of women was their embodiment, and that the transgression of such boundaries was unacceptable. This chapter shows that, through its integration of grotesque images of the female body into a political narrative, Valet’s Madame 60BIS represents just such a transgression. Valet’s representation of the maternal body and politics sets her text apart from the other novels in this study. Neither Edith Thomas nor Simone Téry addresses the question of maternity. In Le Refus,� Thomas presents a female subject who must overcome her body 16

L’Express,���������������������������� 11–17 February 1999, p. 52. Fraisse argues throughout La Controverse des sexes that parity is a political strategy rather than a philosophically or theoretically tenable position. 17 Geneviève

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in order to achieve politicisation. Brigitte’s tuberculosis is a rite of passage and ultimately a new beginning: her illness is a time of solitude and confinement which allows for profound reflection and therefore for intellectual and political development. The reader is given to understand that Brigitte’s period of exile in a sanatorium has permitted the development of a critical perspective on the bourgeois values of her family, which is the root of her subsequent politicisation and eventual conversion to communism. However, it is the possibility of recovery, described as resurrection, which is allied with positive politicisation: ‘Peut-être ����������������������������������������� sa mort était-elle nécessaire pour qu’elle s’éveillât��� ’ (R, p. 10) (Perhaps her death was necessary for her reawakening). Brigitte must vanquish her sick body in order to achieve communist commitment. Illness functions in Le Refus as a form of political apprenticeship only insofar as the body must be overcome, rather than positively asserted, to allow for the political affiliation recommended by the text to be fully achieved. The sick body is privileged as a site of politicisation, but only temporarily. Similarly, the separation of the female subject from sexuality in Le Refus suggests disembodiment – Brigitte can only achieve commitment once she has put aside her desire for Anna and for Pierre. Brigitte reads her recovery from tuberculosis in terms of the possibility of finding Anna again; it is Anna who has provided her with a reason to resist death. But it is Anna’s refusal to resurrect a sexual relationship with Brigitte which forces the latter to go further down the road of self-discovery, beyond the somatic domain of sexuality and into the political domain. Simone Téry does not appear to view the female body as having any special relevance to politics. For Téry, communist commitment is an abstract ideal; whilst the female body might offer one route towards that ideal, as in the case of Jeanette’s sexual encounters with the Spanish revolutionaries in Où l’aube se lève, the body does not determine the nature or quality of commitment. Men and women might, for cultural and biological reasons, travel different roads to reach the ultimate goal of authentic communist commitment but the goal remains universal, disembodied. Téry’s novels express the predictable conclusion that once the revolution has been achieved, women (and men) will be free to enjoy their physicality outside of the constraints imposed by bourgeois ideology. Thomas’s and Téry’s refusal to accord any special significance to the female body is unsurprising given their commitment to communism. The party



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consistently privileged class struggle over gender struggle between the wars, on the basis that women’s emancipation would necessarily result from the resolution of the class war.18 Whilst the French communist press did address issues relating specifically to women and did thereby recognise female specificity,19 it stressed �������������������� ‘l’égalité foncière de leurs capacités’���������������������������������������������� (the underlying equality of their potential);20 this approach did not produce equality in practice, but indicates that a universalist notion of equality was on the communist agenda. JeanLouis Robert has argued that������������������������������������������� ‘[o]n trouve rarement l’idée d’une nature féminine “autre” que celle de l’homme; l’une comme l’autre étant d’abord “être social”’������������������������������������������������� (one rarely finds the idea of a feminine nature ‘other’ than man’s nature, since both are seen first and foremost as ‘social beings’).21 Inter-war communism was interested in the female body since one of its aims was to achieve the material conditions for its health and survival: it is in this context that communism’s neomalthusianism should be understood.22 However, any support for contraception and abortion on the part of the PCF was motivated by a desire to limit the economic misery suffered by large working class families under capitalism and not by any feminist ethos. There was no sense in which the PCF offered a context for the promotion of the notion of sexed citizenship between the wars. Louise Weiss and Madeleine Pelletier both consider maternity in their novels in some detail. We saw in Chapter 3 that maternity is central to Louise Weiss’s concept of feminised politics. In Délivrance,� women are seen as having a natural affinity with pacifism because they are givers of life. Their capacity for empathy which is to be so beneficial to politics is based on the maternal bond. The novel’s title indicates the somatic: délivrance means both ‘deliverance’, in the sense of liberation, and ‘delivery’, the act of giving birth. However, we also saw that Weiss ultimately separates the female body from politics: the metaphorical relationship between politics and maternity in Délivrance is one of substitution. Insofar as Weiss bases her rethinking of politics 18 See

for example Robert’s analysis in ‘Le PCF et ������������������������������ la question féminine������� , 1920– 1939’. 19 François Delpha demonstrates this in his analysis of the journal Regards in ‘Les communistes français et la sexualité’, Mouvement social 91 (1975), 121–52 (pp. 139–45). 20 �������������� Ibid., p. 131. 21 ������������������������������������������������ Robert, ‘Le PCF et la question féminine’, p. 75. 22 On this point see Delpha, ��������������������������������������������������������������� ‘Les communistes français et la sexualité’,������������ pp. 141–47.

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on a positive notion of female difference, she can be said to introduce the female body into her concept of political commitment and activity. This must be true of any politics based on sexual difference, since, as Geneviève Fraisse argues in the passage cited at the beginning of this chapter, sexual difference is firstly corporeal. However, whilst Weiss’s politics is a politics of difference, of femininity, it is not a politics of embodiment. In the vision of politics which emerges from Délivrance,������������������������������������������������������� the cultural and ontological aspects of being a woman are valorised in relation to political commitment and activity: politics is to be based on the maternal relation, and not on the physical fact of birth. ‘Deliverance’ takes precedence over ‘delivery’: both Noémi and the narrator find at least some deliverance from their ontological crises, but neither experiences a successful delivery since the narrator opts for an abortion and the fruit of Noémi’s delivery is moribund. Here then lies the fundamental difference between Délivrance and Madame 60BIS. The maternal relation – that is to say, the motherchild bond – is not central to Henriette Valet’s novel. Her focus is instead on the bond which is created between women by the fact of their specific embodiment as procreators: in Madame 60BIS, Valet bases her concept of politicisation on the shared somatic experience of being a child-bearing female. We have seen that, in contrast to Weiss’s ‘feminised’ feminism, Madeleine Pelletier was horrified at the prospect of the female subject becoming enmeshed in femininity. For Pelletier, the female body threatened precisely such entrapment. Pelletier’s Une Vie nouvelle presents the overcoming of the physical body – both male and female – as a social ideal. Pelletier’s ���������������� Une Vie nouvelle is diametrically opposed to Valet’s Madame 60BIS in that it presents a utopian resolution of the problems of childbirth and poverty, whilst Valet seeks to illustrate these problems as realistically – and as shockingly – as is necessary to achieve change. The similarities and contrasts between the opening passages of the two texts are so striking that it is worth citing both at some length. The difference in political perspective emerges all the more forcefully because the two passages describe the same event and location. At the start of both novels, a pregnant woman makes her way through central Paris towards the hospital where she will give birth: Claire Mélin, dactylographe au ‘Commissariat du Ravitaillement’, monte doucement à pied le boulevard Michel-Bakounine […] Claire aurait pu



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facilement prendre l’autobus; mais elle a préféré marcher quoique, à vrai dire, elle soit bien lasse. Enceinte de neuf mois, elle va accoucher à la Maternité du boulevard Port-Royal et comme elle sait devoir rester peutêtre un mois enfermée, elle profite de ses derniers instants de liberté pour flâner par les rues. Elle n’est déjà plus très jeune, trente-deux ans, et elle se rappelle le temps où le boulevard avait un aspect tout différent de celui qu’il a aujourd’hui. C’était alors le boulevard Saint-Michel, il était bordé de boutiques et de cafés, maintenant l’aspect est tout différent. Tout est plus vaste. Le trottoir est très large et tout le long des maisons règne une plate-bande garnie de gazon et de fleurs. Ces maisons qu’elle a connues étriquées sont maintenant de colossaux palais ornés de colonnes et hauts de vingt étages et, comme ils sont très grands, il n’y en a guère qu’une dizaine de chaque côté du boulevard23 […] C’était sans appréhension, nous l’avons dit, que la jeune femme se rendait à l’hôpital d’accouchement. Elle en était à sa quatrième grossesse. Deux ans auparavant, elle avait donné à l’Etat une belle petite fille qui lui avait valu un an de congé payé; elle en avait profité pour visiter la Suisse qui était aussi en régime communiste […] L’hôpital d’accouchement n’avait plus rien de triste. Le nouveau régime avait compris que dans toute maison où des humains devaient vivre pour n’importe quel motif, il fallait leur rendre la vie agréable. (�VN, pp. 1–25) (Claire Mélin, a typist at the ‘Commissariat for Supplies’, walked slowly up the boulevard Michel Bakounine […] Claire could easily have taken the bus, but she preferred to walk even though she was in fact very weary. She was nine months pregnant and she was on her way to give birth at the maternity hospital on the boulevard Port-Royal, and since she knew she might have to stay there for a month, she made the most of her last moments of freedom to wander through the streets. She wasn’t young any more, thirty-two years old, and she remembered the time when the boulevard looked quite different than it does today. Then it was the boulevard Saint Michel and there were shops and cafés all along it, but now it looks quite different. Everything is more open. The pavement is very wide and there is a border of grass and flowers which runs in front of the buildings. These buildings, which she remembered as so narrow, are now huge palaces decorated with columns, twenty stories high, and since they are very large, there are only about a dozen on each side of the boulevard. […] As I have said, the young woman made her way to the maternity hospital without fear. This was her fourth pregnancy. Two years earlier, she had provided the State with 23 The

differences between the old and the new boulevards suggest a contrast between pre- and post Haussmann Parisian topography. If this is indeed intended, then Pelletier’s chronology is playful, since the changes she describes in the novel are attributed to a revolution that she locates explicitly in the 1930s. Une Vie nouvelle draws freely on France’s revolutionary history for its inspiration: there are various references to the French Revolution and the Terror, whilst the name of the boulevard Michel Bakounine evokes 1848.

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Forgotten Engagements a lovely little girl, which had entitled her to a year’s paid leave. She had used this to visit Switzerland, which was also under a communist regime. […] The maternity hospital no longer looked depressing. The new regime had understood that in all buildings where human beings had to live for whatever reason, their lives should be made pleasant.) J’ai marché longtemps le long du quai. Pour retarder mon arrivée devant l’hôpital, pour prolonger je ne sais quel espoir absurde, j’ai fait un long détour. Pitoyables ruses avec la misère et l’inévitable. Un vent glacial rabat le brume en larges cercles au ras du sol, chaque tourbillon prend les jambes dans un lasso. J’ai froid. Dans le brouillard je ne vois pas les passants qui me croisent – à peine les lumières des ponts en banderoles et les reflets mouvants sous les arches. Malgré la brume et le froid le fleuve n’est pas triste. Ses ponts illuminés le pavoisent, l’eau puissante roule en lourds paquets. Je voudrais le suivre sans fin, je m’attarde, mes mains traînent sur la pierre rugueuse des parapets. ���������������������������������������������������������������������������� Un taxi. Il freine et grince le long du trottoir. J’ai l’air d’attendre, le chauffeur me fait signe. – Mais non je n’attends rien. Je vais, le plus lentement possible, chercher refuge à L’Hôtel-Dieu. Déjà dans l’ombre j’aperçois l’angle du bâtiment, la pierre grise est tassée dans la brume grise, la pierre grise avec ses grands trous aveugles: les portes, les fenêtres […] C’est donc là que les femmes enceintes pauvres viennent chercher un abri? Je m’attendais à trouver la porte ouverte. Devant cette forteresse je reste immobile. La maison me repousse comme un être sans visage. (MSB, pp. 1–3) (I have walked for some time along by the river. I have made a long detour so as to put off my arrival at the hospital and so as to prolong some sort of absurd hope. Playing a pathetic game with misery and the inevitable. An icy wind blows the mist in wide circles along the ground, each little whirlwind is like a lasso round my legs. I am cold. In the fog I cannot see the passers-by who approach me. I can hardly see the string of lights on the bridge, and their moving reflections under the arches. Despite the mist and the cold the river is not depressing. It is decorated with the lights of its bridges, and the forceful water flows, eddying, heavy. I should like to follow it forever, I stay here, my hands lingering on the rough stone of the bridge. A taxi. It brakes and screeches along the kerb. I look like I am waiting and the driver waves to me. ‘No, I am not waiting for anything’. As slowly as possible, I am going to seek refuge in the Hôtel-Dieu. In the shadows I can already see the corner of the building. The grey stone compacted in the grey mist, the grey stone with its blind holes – the doors, the windows. […] So that is where women who are poor and pregnant come to find shelter? I expected to find the door open. I stand before this fortress, immobile. The building repels me like a faceless being.)

In each text, the evocation of the institution where the pregnant female body is to be confined functions as an index of the approach



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the text will take to the question of the relationship between the female body and politics. In Valet’s capitalist dystopia, the building is miserable and unwelcoming and provokes fear. Here, the experience of pregnancy dramatises the dreadfully flawed nature of the institutions provided by the state for the care of the bodies of its citizens. Valet describes the building in the same terms she will adopt to describe the female body. The representation of the hospital in terms of holes prefigures the representation of women’s pregnant bodies in terms of its orifices, which pervades the imagery of the text. Similarly, the flowing of the Seine past the Hôtel-Dieu presages Valet’s representation of female bodies in terms of fluidity and flux, in terms of an absence, or a transgression, of conventional physical boundaries. This is only the beginning of Valet’s politicisation of the female pregnant body. The social critique which is here inscribed on the building of the ��������������������������������������������� Hôtel-Dieu����������������������������������� will increasingly be re-inscribed on the woman’s body. In Pelletier’s social utopia, the hospital building reflects the zenith of progress. Pelletier describes equality achieved – all women have the right to give birth in the clean, modern, hygienic maternity hospital provided by the state. Valet describes a world in which the nature of a woman’s experience of pregnancy is contingent on her economic circumstances: the ��������������������������������� Hôtel-Dieu����������������������� is a miserable refuge rather than a right. This misery is manifested in the grey, faceless, closed building which is a far cry from the lawns and flower beds which brighten up Claire Mélin’s experience. It is noteworthy that the actual hospital building is absent from Pelletier’s description: it is evoked in purely abstract terms as being no longer depressing. Through descriptions of the city, Pelletier and Valet introduce the socio-political critique which will be central to their novels; these descriptions are from the outset integrated into an analysis of the experience of female physicality. In Pelletier’s utopia of social and scientific progress, it is possible to ignore the body even in labour: L’accouchement se passait simplement; les progrès de la technique en avaient banni presque toute la crainte. On transportait la patiente dans la salle d’opération et là une infirmière commençait par lui faire une piqûre eutocique qui avait pour effet de supprimer la douleur sans diminuer le travail des organes, beaucoup de parturientes accouchaient en lisant un roman ou en écoutant la T.S.F. (VN, pp. 25–26)

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Forgotten Engagements (Birth took place very simply – technical progress had removed almost all the fear. The patient was moved to an operating theatre and there a nurse began by giving her a eutocitic injection, the effect of which was to remove the pain without affecting the activity of the organs. Many parturients gave birth reading a novel or listening to the radio.)

Pelletier presents birth in the abstract, as simple and painless, just as she depicts the hospital building in the abstract. Medical progress in Pelletier’s novel is not limited to procreation. The ageing of the physical body has also been overcome by the pioneering work of the text’s biologist hero, Charles Ratier. Thanks to his new technique of organ grafting, the novel leaves him at the ripe old age of one hundred, ����������������������������������������������� having been ‘���������������������������������� regenerated’ for the second time (VN, p. 254), and the narrator notes that illnesses are rare and mortality has been reduced (VN, p. 245). In Une Vie nouvelle, the inconveniences of the body are identified with the execrable old order which the revolution has destroyed. Here, social progress coincides with disembodiment: in Pelletier’s utopia, the significance of embodiment is a thing of the past. Legislation on maternity between the wars Madeleine Pelletier was very interested in the question of the regulation of the female body via legislation. It was her outspoken campaigning in favour of the right to abortion and contraception, and, ultimately, the suspicion that her own medical practice included carrying out abortions, which led to her prosecution and incarceration. Pelletier believed that contraception and abortion were the basic conditions of possibility for women’s freedom to enjoy their sexuality, and for the improvement of the living conditions of the proletariat. She argued that ‘[t]he simplest arithmetic demonstrates that less money is required to nourish three people than six, and any observation of working-class homes shows everywhere the relative prosperity of those whose fecundity is limited and everywhere poverty where people have many children’.24 Certainly, for Pelletier, the body was a political issue. But Pelletier’s motivation in seeking legislation in favour of women’s autonomous control over their fertility was to permit all human beings to share equally in their common humanity; 24 Madeleine

Pelletier, ‘The Right to Abortion’, p. 181.



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it was a means of overcoming, not asserting, the specificity of the female body. This should not surprise us in the context of Pelletier’s doctrine of virilisation and her quest for gender sameness. Research on the history of inter-war feminism in France has revealed the importance, and difficulties, of contemporary attempts to address the question of maternity from a political perspective and with a specific political purpose. As Anne Cova demonstrates, ‘[l]a question de la maternité n’est pas simple à régir, elle se situe au cœur des problématiques égalité/difference, privé/public, maternité/ citoyenneté’ (the ������������������������������������������������������ question of maternity is not straightforward. It is right at the heart of questions about equality/difference, public/ private and maternity/citizenship).25 Françoise Thébaud justifies her book-length study of maternity in France between the wars in similar terms: ‘Qu’elle ������������������������������������������������������������ soit désirée, refusée ou acceptée sans plaisir, la maternité est au centre de la condition féminine et le sort des mères traduit la place réelle des femmes dans la société’ ������������������ (Desired, refused or reluctantly accepted, maternity is at the centre of the female condition, and the fate of mothers illustrates the true place of women in society).26 There is a clear legislative and political context for an analysis of the female body in inter-war France. The low birth rate – and the nation’s obsession with it in the context of war – made women’s bodies into a focus of discourses on national regeneration and military and economic strength. Childbearing was represented as a social function – by both feminists and the political establishment – and as the female equivalent of soldiering, with all the paradoxes and problems such an association entails.27 There was a recognition of the need to improve the social and economic conditions in which babies were brought into the world, and this obviously entailed the passing of legislation specific to women. The first French maternity protection law was passed in 1909, and state and medical provision 25 �������������������������������������������������������������������������� Anne Cova, ‘Féminismes et maternité entre les deux guerres en France. Les

ambiguïtés et les divergeances des féminismes du passé’, Les Temps modernes, No. 59������������������������������������������������������������������������� 3 (April–May 1997), 49–77 (p. 50). See also Laura Levine Frader, ‘Social Citizens Without Citizenship: Working-Class Women and Social Policy in InterWar France’, Social Politics 3 (Summer–Fall 1996), 111–35, Offen, ‘Body Politics: women, work and the politics of motherhood in France, 1930–1950’, and Cova, ‘French Feminism and Maternity: theories and policies 1890–1918’. 26 ��������� Thébaud, Quand nos grand-mères donnaient la vie, p. 7. The earlier period is dealt with by Rachel Fuchs in Poor and Pregnant in Paris. Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992). 27 See Pateman, The Disorder of Women, p. 11.

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developed throughout the inter-war period. These factors led to what has been termed, by historians such as Laura Levine Frader, a ‘politicisation of women’s bodies’.28 But, as the remarks by Cova and Thébaud cited above indicate (not to mention the debate over parity), the female body can be ‘politicised’ by feminists or anti-feminists, and such politicisation might either achieve emancipation, or further confine and constrain women in terms of their biological ‘destiny’ as mothers. As Foucault demonstrates in Birth of the Clinic, once medicine began to be organised according to its social functions, the doctor’s task became primarily political.29 In the inter-war period, the medicalisation of maternity functioned as a means of surveillance in the Foucauldian sense; indeed it was intended to do so. As Robert Nye suggests, state assistance provided for pregnant women, nursing mothers and their offspring was designed ‘to improve the birth rate and survival of infants, not the lot of women in general’.30 Thébaud has argued convincingly that, whilst the medicalisation of maternity in the period undeniably had positive consequences in terms of actually saving lives, its ideological implications were rather more ambivalent.31 The medicalisation of maternity was synonymous with male control of the female body, for example via the ��������������� ‘certificat de grossesse’ �������������������������� (certificate of pregnancy) and the medical checks which were a condition of the payments of maternity benefits.32 For Thébaud: Cette emprise médicale a des effets positifs mais, très normative, elle tend à cantonner les femmes, premières concernées, dans le rôle de mineures soumises.33 28

Frader, ‘Social Citizens without Citizenship: Working-class Women and Social Policy in Inter-War France’. 29 Michel Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1979), pp. 33–34. 30 Nye, ‘Sexuality, Sex Difference and the Cult of Romantic Love in the French Third Republic’, p. 70. 31 Madame 60BIS shows that the institutional regulation of maternity in the period was however often woefully inadequate from a medical perspective – the narrator nearly dies of puerperal fever. 32 ��������� Thébaud, Quand nos grand-mères donnaient la vie, pp. 40–41. 33 Ibid., p. 207. Fuchs makes a similar point in relation to single mothers in her study of maternity in nineteenth-century France: ‘With an end to discrimination against poor married and single mothers, and with rhetoric proclaiming their equality and their entitlement to assistance, women suffered a loss of freedom in determining how to raise their children and all the hardships a lack of liberty entailed’. Poor and Pregnant in Paris, p. 76.



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(The medical establishment’s hold over women had some positive effects but it was very normative and tended to confine women to the role of subjugated minors, even though they were central to the process.)

Furthermore, discourses resulting from the medicalisation of maternity could be used to reinforce women’s political exclusion: if women were portrayed as needing male social and medical intervention in order successfully to achieve their most natural function, how much more then would they be seen as needing male ‘protection’ in the political domain? Therefore, as Frader points out, the politicisation of the female body in inter-war France was a double-edged sword: ‘a means by which women could claim new rights but also a means by which the assumed link between the maternal body and the nation would be used to maintain gender difference as an underlying principle of social provisions’.34 And, one might add, the provision or withholding of political rights. Karen Offen’s review of the attitudes of inter-war feminists of various persuasions concludes that they did argue for women’s rights as embodied subjects: Without arguing that all women thought alike, it is nevertheless possible to demonstrate a significant convergence between a broad range of politically outspoken women on several fundamental points: their insistence on bodily sexual difference and needs as a basis for women’s civil, economic and political equality, and their overall agreement on the socio-political importance of motherhood and of women’s economic independence.35

Such an argument suggests that feminists such as Pelletier politicised the female body. For the purpose of the present analysis, it is important to establish clearly what is to be understood by the notion of a politicisation of the female body. The recognition of the need to legislate to protect women’s bodies is not the same as an argument in favour of a somatically based and therefore sex-specific female politicisation. Pelletier clearly did insist on bodily sexual difference as a basis for women’s rights, and, in this sense, did politicise the female body. But, as we have seen, her politics is nonetheless a politics of disembodiment. Similarly, those who object to sexed citizenship 34

Frader, ‘Social Citizens without Citizenship: Working-class Woman and Social Policy in Inter-war France’, p. 125. 35 Offen, ‘Body Politics: Women, Work and the Politics of Motherhood in France, 1930–1950’, p. 141.

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in the form of parity also defend, perfectly consistently, the idea of legislation specific to women. Turning now to Henriette Valet, my analysis will focus on the notion of a politics of embodiment, that is, a somatically based mode of politicisation. Valet’s text is the only novel in this corpus – an appropriate term – to investigate ways in which the female body might serve as a basis for a new concept of politicisation. Carnival and the grotesque body: Bakhtin and Rabelais Reading Valet’s novel through the prism of Bakhtin’s reading of Rabelais reveals the relationship between Valet’s representations of the female body and her left-wing politics. Rabelais seems to have been an important influence on Valet’s writing.36 The coincidence of imagery between Rabelais’s and Valet’s texts is striking and suggests a deliberate intertextual link; also, Valet names of one of her characters after Gargantua’s mother, Gargamelle, and thereby makes the link explicit. Valet uses Rabelais as a source of the grotesque carnival images through which she conveys her political message. Rabelais was in the intellectual air in the inter-war period. Surveying the history of ‘Rabelaisiana’ in the twentieth century, Bakhtin notes the founding of La ������������������������������������� Société des études rabelaisiennes� (Society of Rabelaisian studies) in 1903, and the publication of a scholarly edition of Rabelais and of various critical studies in the 1920s and 1930s.37 Poulaille evokes Rabelais in Nouvel âge littéraire in the context of Bernard Lazare’s analysis of the precursors of ‘social art’.38 In 1934, Maxim Gorki cited Rabelais as a model for the inclusion of oral folk tales into the new Soviet literature.39 It is plausible to suggest that Valet would have been aware of the 36 This

is the reason I draw largely on Rabelais and his World, rather than on the account of carnival in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Bakhtin added the section on carnival in the Dostoevsky study for the second edition published in 1963; it thus postdates the Rabelais book. See Craig Brandist, The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture and Politics (London: Pluto Press, 2002), pp. 12–15. 37 Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, pp. 129–136. 38 ����������� Poulaille, Nouvel âge littéraire, pp. 16–17. Paul Nizan cites Rabelais in a review of a novel by Erskine Caldwell from 1936. See Nizan, ������� Pour une nouvelle culture, pp. 217–21. 39 See Michael Holquist and Katerina Clark, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 313.



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left’s interest in Rabelais thanks to her contacts with communist intellectuals, including her future husband Henri Lefebvre. It is noteworthy that Lefebvre published a book on Rabelais in 1955. Although Bakhtin began writing the Rabelais book in the 1930s, Valet could not have known his work: submitted as a doctoral thesis in 1940, it was not published until 1965. However, there are striking similarities between Bakhtin’s and Valet’s views on literature and politics.40 As we saw in Chapter 3, Valet’s novel was enthusiastically received by the proponents of proletarian literature, but met with criticism from commentators in L’Humanité because it was not sufficiently ‘revolutionary’; that is to say, because it did not conform to the dictates of socialist realism. Both in his biography of Bakhtin41 and in his prologue to the English translation of Rabelais and his World, Michael Holquist has argued strongly for a reading of Bakhtin’s text as a deliberate and sustained attack on socialist realism: He was, in effect, proposing his vision of the novel genre as a celebration of linguistic and stylistic variety as a counter to tight canonical formulas for the novel […] proposed by the official spokesmen for the Soviet government. The ‘grotesque realism’ of which so much is made in this book is a point-by-point inversion of categories used in the thirties to define Socialist Realism.42

Other critics have advanced the opposite argument: in an article first published in Russian in1990, Mikhail K. Ryklin suggests that Bakhtin’s theory is complicit with Stalinism, because his notion of the collective body implies the sort of disregard for the individual which is at the heart of totalitarian terror.43 But Holquist argues 40 The

debate over Bakhtin’s views on Marxism has largely been concerned with the dispute over the authorship of The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928) and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929), texts attributed to Medvedev and Voloshinov respectively, which are more overtly Marxist in orientation than texts published under Bakhtin’s name. It is not of course necessary to resolve this point (and the evidence that would permit scholars to resolve it may simply not exist) in order to claim some degree of leftist political commitment for Bakhtin. See Brandist, The Bakhtin Circle, Chapter 3, pp. 53–87. 41 Holquist and Clark, Mikhain Bakhtin, Chapter 14, pp. 295–320 is of specific relevance. 42 Michael Holquist, ‘Prologue’ to Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, pp. xiii–xxiii (p. xvii). 43 Mikhail K. Ryklin, ‘Bodies of Terror: Theses Towards a Logic of Violence’, New Literary History 24.1 (Winter 1993), 51–74.

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that Bakhtin’s evocation of the ‘folk’ as free and chaotic is a deliberate rejection of the ‘Stalinisation’ of the masses.44 Given Valet’s close association with the proletarian school, it is very likely that Madame 60BIS was a deliberate attack on socialist realism. She certainly uses novelistic techniques – particularly the deployment of carnival images – which have little in common with socialist realism. According to Bakhtin, carnival is expressed through dialogue: Folk-carnival ‘debates’ between life and death, darkness and light, winter and summer, etc., permeated with the pathos of change and the joyful relativity of all things, debates which did not permit thought to stop and congeal in one-sided seriousness or in a stupid fetish for definition or singleness of meaning – all this lay at the base of the original core of the genre.45

The classic socialist realist text is characterised precisely by congealed, one-sided thought and a single meaning. By contrast, the political subtext of Madame 60BIS emerges through Valet’s use of grotesque realism, which depends on oppositions such as life/death, high/low, serious/humorous and so on, as we shall see. Valet refuses the naïve realism and simplistic portrayal of the emergence of the new world and the new man – I use this word advisedly – which was to underpin the socialist realist aesthetic. The question of the political significance of carnival has been much debated. Whilst Bakhtin argues in favour of a political reading of carnival,46 critics have not always agreed with his affirmation of its political efficacy. According to Terry Eagleton: Carnival, after all, is a licensed affair in every sense, a permissible rupture of hegemony, a contained popular blow-off as disturbing and relatively

44 Holquist

and Clark, Mikhail Bakhtin, pp. 310–11. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. by Caryl Emerson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 132. 46 For example, Bakhtin stresses the non-official, illegitimate nature of carnival and maintains that, through carnival images, an author can ‘express unofficial views of the world’’. Rabelais and His World, p. 262. Chapter 7 of Bakhtin’s study, entitled ‘Rabelais’ Images and His Time’, argues for the historical relevance of Rabelais and the capacity of grotesque images to deepen textual explorations of political issues. Bakhtin insists that carnival laughter is liberating, sincere and free, that ‘laughter could never become an instrument to oppress and blind the people. It always remained a free weapon in their hands’. Rabelais and His World, p. 94. 45 Mikhail



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ineffectual as a revolutionary work of art. As Shakespeare’s Olivia remarks, there is no slander in an allowed fool.47

Holquist disagrees, arguing that ‘[t]he sanction for carnival derives ultimately not from a calendar prescribed by church or state, but from a force that pre-exits priests and kings and to whose superior power they are actually deferring when they appear to be licensing carnival’.48 Bakhtin acknowledges the interdependence of official and unofficial feasts and the temporary nature of carnival hilarity, but nonetheless asserts that carnival is imbued with a critical and subversive potential and that its images, when transposed into literature, are revolutionary.49 A Bakhtinian reading of Valet’s novel is not reliant on a resolution of the question of whether or not the Bakhtinian carnival is part of the ‘official culture’ or is a culture apart.50 The women in the maternity hospital are simultaneously both ‘allowed fools’ and in possession of a superior – or at least different – power; Valet presents the maternity hospital both as part of the ‘official culture’ (the patriarchal, capitalist state provides it) and as a culture apart (it is an exclusively female space where solidarity is based on the physical capacity to give birth). It is through the grotesque body images which pervade her novel that Valet suggests a solution to the political dilemma which the narrator proves unable to resolve regarding the problem of revealing proletarian women’s oppression to them, discussed in Chapter 3. Bakhtin maintains that ‘[t]he grotesque conception of the body is interwoven not only with the cosmic but also with the social, utopian, and historic theme, and above all with the theme of the change of epochs and the renewal of culture’.51 He suggests that Rabelais used grotesque body images to express the historical change occurring 47 Terry

Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981), p. 148. See also Peter Stalybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 12–26. 48 Holquist, ‘Prologue’, p. xviii. 49 ‘As opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions’, Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 10. 50 A valuable evaluative description of the polemic is to be found in Ben Taylor, ‘Bakhtin, Carnival and Comic Theory’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Nottingham, 1995), pp. 10–75. 51 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, pp. 324–25.

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around him. Valet uses grotesque body images not to reflect, but to create change, to approach the political dilemma contained in the narrator’s question ‘������������������������������������������������� Que leur dire?����������������������������������� ’ (What could I say to them?). The change Valet seeks to bring about is, of course, primarily a change for women. There have been many feminist engagements with Bakhtin.52 Julia Kristeva’s later work on the abject drew on Bakhtin, however, as Sue Vice demonstrates in her comparative analysis of Kristeva and Bakhtin, the notion of the abject is negative, provoking the subject’s revulsion, whilst the notion of the grotesque is positive, provoking laughter and joy.53 Valet’s humorous and celebratory account of the female procreating body in Madame 60BIS has more in common with the Bakhtinian grotesque than it has with the Kristevan abject. Nancy Glazener has described how Bakhtin is attractive to feminism because of his favouring of a multiplicity of socially and ideologically differentiated ‘voices’ or ‘languages’, and because of his presentation of carnival as anarchic in its otherness. But for Glazener, carnival images are problematic and the female grotesque body creates more problems than it solves.54 In Bakhtinian carnival, the grotesque body image is always positive. To what extent can Valet’s grotesque female bodies similarly be accorded a positive significance? Is Bakhtin’s insistence that carnival ‘is in no way hostile to women and does not approach her negatively’ true for Valet’s text?55 Close reading will show that it is – Valet succeeds in using both grotesquely humorous images and the carnivalesque conflation of spectator and participant 52 See

for example the group of papers on Bakhtin and feminism in David Shepherd (ed.), Bakhtin, Carnival and Other Subjects: Selected Papers from the Fifth International Bakhtin Conference, University of Manchester, July 1991 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), pp. 163–258. 53 Sue Vice, Introducing Bakhtin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 149–99. 54 Nancy Glazener, ‘Dialogic Subversion: Bakhtin, the Novel and Gertrude Stein’ in Ken Hirschkop (ed.), Bakhtin and Cultural Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 109–29. Clair Wills likens carnival anarchy to the situation of the female hysteric theorised in the 1970s by French critics such as Catherine Clément. Clair Wills, ‘Upsetting the Public: Carnival, Hysteria and Women’s Texts’ in Hirschkop (ed.), Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, pp. 130–51. For Wayne C. Booth, Bakhtin’s carnival is problematic in feminist terms because the Rabelaisian source text fails completely to address a female reader. Wayne C. Booth, ‘Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism’ in Gary Saul Morson (ed.), Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on His Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 145–76. 55 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 240.



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to disrupt the potentially objectivising gaze of the male subject on the female body. Carnival and the grotesque body: Henriette Valet The grotesque erupts in Valet’s Madame 60BIS in discrete episodes and in a network of images which recur throughout the novel. I begin by focusing on two episodes in which the grotesque aesthetic is dominant, namely, the parodical performance the women call the revue, and the onset of the labour of ‘������������ la boniche’� (the skivvy). I then turn to the uses Valet makes throughout the text of images associated with animals, with body fluids, with the hole, and with the crowd. According to Bakhtin: ‘[t]he essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation’.56 Degradation is the rhetorical form which characterises grotesque representation. Degradation is ultimately positive, though necessarily ambivalent. Carnival is by its nature ambivalent, focusing on moments of transformation and becoming but always providing a positive ‘other side’ to that which it negates.57 Degradation is: the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity. […] Degradation […] means coming down to earth, the contact with earth as an element that swallows up and gives birth at the same time […] To degrade also means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy and birth. Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one.58

The pregnant female body is a privileged carnivalesque motif. It is ambivalent in its association of new life with death: Bakhtin often makes reference to the idea of ‘pregnant death’.59 Death is ever56 Ibid.,

p. 19. pp. 410–15. 58 Ibid., pp. 19–21. 59 See for example Bakhtin’s analysis of the image of the senile pregnant hag in ibid., pp. 25–26, and his analysis of Gargantua’s wife’s death in childbirth in ibid., pp. 407–408. 57 Ibid.,

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present in the maternity ward of the Hôtel ��������������������������� Dieu����������������� , as many of the women have been admitted not only because they are poor and pregnant, but because they are also dangerously ill. Degradation provokes carnival humour. Carnival is characterised by a collective festive hilarity which is at once deriding and triumphant; it is a free and liberating laughter which banishes fear.60 The revue, which takes place every evening in the maternity ward of the Hôtel-Dieu�� ������������(MSB, pp. 63–67), is striking in its combination of these elements into an effusion of carnival images. Valet describes how the women parade their swollen bellies in a celebratory competition of largeness: – En avant! Marche! Un, deux, crie la moucharde. La file s’ébranle; les ventres énormes, distendus, bosselés, sans nombril, se suivent en cadence, perchés sur des pattes. Des pattes longues ou courtes ou tordues, lisses ou velues, qui s’écartent comme les branches des compas. Un! Deux! Les femmes creusent les reins, enflent leur ventre. En avant! sans arrêt elles font cercle, elles passent, repassent; les ombres dansent sur le mur […] une voix nasillarde et vacillante chantonne. C’est une musique étouffée, irréelle, un jazz mortuaire, une musique à scander les hémorrhagies, les agonies, la fin de tout. C’est infiniment triste et il y a de quoi crever de rire. C’est une parade obscène, une ronde macabre et rigolarde, une caricature bouffonne de la fécondité. La mort et la vie se mêlent! (MSB, pp. 64–65) (‘Forward! March! One, two!’ cried the snitch. The line of women moved off; the huge stomachs, distended, lumpy, with no navels, followed each other in step, perched on the top of their legs. Long legs or short legs or twisted legs, smooth or rough, which move like the arms of a compass. One! Two! The women hollowed their backs, stuck their stomachs out. Forward! They circled without stopping, round and round, and their shadows danced on the wall […] a nasal and shaky voice sang out. It was a suffocated music, unreal, a funereal jazz tune, music to accompany haemorrhages, death throes, the end of everything. It was infinitely sad and it was enough to make you die laughing. It was an obscene parade, a macabre and hilarious round dance, a ridiculous caricature of procreation. Death and life were combined!)

The description of the labour pains of ‘������������������������� la boniche’�������������� is similarly carnivalesque. She goes into labour in a frenzy of drunkenness and a concert of sounds and bodies (MSB, pp. 196–200): Il faut le fêter, le chérubin. Qui a du pinard en réserve? Allons, sortez les bouteilles, amenez-les, apportez tout ce qui se boit, les médicaments, les 60 Ibid.,

pp. 87–96.



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purges, tout. Remplissez les verres. Qu’on se saoule, qu’on rigole. Qu’on crève de rire […] Je veux être saoule, saoule! Je veux arriver sur le billard à quatre pattes. Je veux accoucher en rigolant. Si le médecin connaissait son métier, il mettrait une chopine de Beaujolais à côté de moi […] Attendez que je gueule un coup. Non, commencez quand même. En cadence, un, deux, un, deux. Et toi, la clocharde, tu dis jamais rien. Tu sais pas de chansons? Eh bien tousse, rote, pète, crie, pleure, pince-toi, accouche, mais fais du bruit. (MSB, pp. 196–198) (We’ve got to celebrate the little cherub! Who’s got some wine left? Come on, get the bottles out, bring them here, bring everything drinkable – medicines, purgatives, everything. Fill the glasses. Let’s get drunk, let’s have a laugh. Let’s laugh ourselves to death […] I want to be really drunk. I want to be on all fours when I get to the operating table. I want to give birth laughing. If the doctor knew what he was doing he’d get me a bottle of Beaujolais […] Wait a minute while I scream. No, start anyway. In time, one, two, one, two. And you, the tramp, you never say anything. Don’t you know any songs? Well then, cough, burp, fart, yell, cry out, pinch yourself, give birth, but make a noise.)

We are clearly in the realm of ‘the lower stratum of the body’. Any conventional abstract, romantic ideas about the delights of motherhood are degraded, brought down to earth. In the revue, the key elements are, firstly, the ambivalent coexistence of life and death, ‘pregnant death’, and, secondly, the hyperbolic representation of the belly. Bakhtin notes that, according to Victor Hugo, the belly was the centre of the Rabelaisian grotesque aesthetic.61 Bakhtin similarly makes the pregnant belly central to his analysis: as Ryklin points out, ‘[t]he verb to give birth and words cognate to it can, along with the adjective cheerful, be considered the keys to the whole Rabelais book’.62 Valet’s novel turns around the grotesque image of the massive, swollen, pregnant belly: the women’s bodies seem to be entirely summed up by this one body part. Such synecdoche is typically carnivalesque: Rabelais presents a number of typical grotesque forms of exaggerated body parts that completely hide the normal members of the body. This is actually a picture of dismemberment, of separate areas of the body enlarged to gigantic dimensions.63

61 Ibid.,

p. 18, pp. 125–26. ‘Bodies of Terror’, p. 55. 63 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 327–28. 62 Ryklin,

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‘La boniche’’s labour has drinking and noisy celebration as its central images: even medicine is to be drunk in this hyperbolic orgy of consumption which is typical of carnival. Eating and drinking, like pregnancy, concern the belly, and, like childbirth, their results are expelled from the body via its lower stratum. The strange births of both Gargantua and Pantagruel in Rabelais’s texts involve extended images of eating and drinking: Gargamelle consumes vast quantities of tripe before Gargantua is born; the narration of her labour is interrupted by a drunken chorus, ‘Les propos des bien yvres’ (The drunkards’ conversation); the baby’s first words are ‘A boyre! à boyre! à boyre!’ (Drink! Drink! Drink!).64 Pantagruel is preceded out of the womb by cartloads of salty food, which the attendant midwives interpret as an incitement to drink wine: ‘Voicy bonne provision; aussi bien ne bevyons-nous que lâchement, non en lancement; cecy n’est que bon signe, ce sont aiguillons de vin’ (Here is fine fare. We were only drinking slackly, not like Saxons. This is bound to be a good sign. These are spurs to wine).65 Singing is an integral part of carnival: Bakhtin notes that ‘in the atmosphere of Mardi Gras, revelling, dancing, music were all closely combined with slaughter, dismemberment, bowels, excrement, and other images of the material body lower stratum’.66 As well as these two discrete outbreaks of carnival, an extended network of imagery pervades Valet’s text which situates it within the grotesque aesthetic. The hyperbolic representation of the female body as a swollen belly and the general focus on the lower stratum of the body have already been illustrated. The association of the female body with bestial images, flow, the hole, and with the viscous are all significant manifestations of the grotesque. Whilst these elements might be problematic for a feminist reading of the text, some feminist theorists have attempted to rescue these sorts of images from the jaws of patriarchy. For example, in her study entitled Volatile Bodies, Elizabeth Grosz has argued for a positive reinterpretation of the conventionally negative association of 64 ���������� Rabelais,

La Vie Très Horrifique de Grand Gargantua (Paris: Flammarion, 1968),������������ pp. 57–68; Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. by J.M. Cohen (London: Penguin Books, 1987), pp. 48–53. See also Bakhtin’s analysis of this episode in ibid., pp. 220–27. 65 ���������� Rabelais, Pantagruel (Paris: Gallimard, 1964���������� ), p. 65; Gargantua and Pantagruel, p. 176. Bakhtin analyses this episode in Rabelais and His World, pp. 325–40. 66 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, pp. 223–24.



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women with fluids, with seepage, and with the viscous in terms of a transgressive refusal to conform to reassuring oppositions such as solid/fluid.67 Bakhtin tells us that ‘[t]he combination of human and animal traits is […] one of the most ancient grotesque forms’, noting ‘the grotesque character of the transformation of the human element into an animal one’.68 In the analysis of the scene of guests eating which precedes Gargamelle’s labour, Bakhtin points to a pun on the word tripes which allows grotesque identification of the guest’s own internal organs with the meat they consume; the image continues in the next chapter with Gargamelle’s consumption of tripes and �������� the consequent descent of her own internal organs. Bakhtin explains: These images create with great artistry an extremely dense atmosphere of the body as a whole in which all the dividing lines between man and beast, between the consuming and consumed bowels are intentionally erased. On the other hand, these consuming and consumed organs are fused with the generating womb.69

Man and beast become indistinguishable, and this hybrid is associated with the pregnant womb. Valet describes women who give birth ������������������ ‘comme une bête’��(MSB, p. 106) (like beasts), she describes Madame 61’s ‘grognement ������������������������������� de bête dérangée’��(MSB, p. 8) (growling of a deranged beast), and the ‘����������������������� gémissements animaux’��(MSB, p. 10) (animal groanings) which fill the maternity ward at night. Thébaud’s reserch suggests that such images were quite common in inter-war literary representations of birth.70 Childbearing reveals the body in all its grotesque animality, placing it in an ambivalent position on the borderline between the human and the bestial. It is not Valet’s intention here to produce images which will confine women to the status of just another of nature’s procreators; this would be in contradiction to the text’s message about the need for women to be emancipated both as individuals and as a ‘class’. Her representation of the animality of childbearing – along with the images of holes and fluids – is rather part of an attempt to shock readers out of their 67 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 192–210. 68 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 316. 69 Ibid., pp. 224–26. 70 ��������� Thébaud, Quand nos grand-mères donnaient la vie, pp. 267–68�.

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romanticised views about birth by presenting this experience in all its messy and undignified carnality. Frequent reference is made in Madame 60BIS to women’s body fluids. When she arrives at the Hôtel-Dieu��������������������������� ������������������������������������� , the narrator immediately notices ‘les ���������������������������������������������������� chemises fripées, tachées de lait et de sang’ (�MSB, p. 7) (the creased nightshirts, stained with milk and blood) worn by the women in the hospital ward. The expectant mothers identify with the body fluids of other females: Le lit de La Pologne est resté ouvert. Des malades, l’une après l’autre, s’approchent, se penchent, reniflent le sang encore chaud. Un sombre plaisir passe dans leurs yeux. Elles restent silencieuses, pâles et voluptueusement troublées. (MSB, p. 107) (The Polish woman’s bed was still unmade. One after the other the patients went up to it, bent over it and smelled the blood that was still warm. A sombre pleasure lit up in their eyes. They remained silent, pale and sensuously troubled.)

Women’s bodies seem to be fluid. A fat Polish woman is described as ����������������������������������������������������������������� ‘[i]nforme et blême, avec les seins gélatineux comme les grosses méduses laissées sur le sable par la marée’ �(MSB, p. 164) (formless and wan, with gelatinous breasts like huge jellyfish washed up by the waves). Her breasts are����������������������������������� ‘deux mottes de beurre fondantes’ (MSB, p. 171) (two melting pats of butter). The grotesque similarly privileges body fluids. Bakhtin asserts that ‘defecation and other elimination (sweating, blowing of the nose, sneezing)’ join with eating, drinking, copulation, pregnancy and dismemberment as actions which are ‘performed on the confines of the body and the outer world’ and are thus grotesquely ambivalent, transgressing the body/world demarcation.71 The privileging of the hole represents the same transgression. The grotesque stresses orifices, particularly the gaping mouth, which is further associated with the open womb. The wide-open mouth of the carnival mask is still a familiar cultural reference. The bowels, genital organs and anus are similarly holes via which ‘the confines between bodies and between the body and the world are overcome; there is an interchange and an interorientation’.72 Valet’s 71

Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 317. p. 317.

72 Ibid.,



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labour room is full of ‘����������������������������� corps béants’���������������� (gaping bodies) and ‘des ������������ chairs ouvertes’��(MSB, pp. 228–29) (open flesh). The reader’s response to the grotesque imagery is, however, complicated by the narrator’s attitude to manifestations of the grotesque. The narrator cannot bear the nauseating sight of the open mouth of the sleeping Madame 61: ‘Je �������������������������������� voudrais fermer brutalement ce trou béant’ �(MSB, pp. 9–10) (I wanted to slam that gaping hole shut). She responds with horror to the merging of individual female bodies into one viscous mass of undifferentiated flesh, an image which is privileged in the grotesque aesthetic. She describes her first experience of the communal hospital bathroom in the following terms: Les corps sont si rapprochés dans la nuée dense qu’ils forment bloc. C’est un monstre informe, blanchâtre, gluant, grouillant de têtes, gesticulant de ses pattes innombrables. Je commence à mieux voir. Des femmes se détachent, fragments du monstre gélatineux. Je les vois se profiler sur le fond blanc comme sur un écran, ventres, seins, fesses, chevelures […] Je voudrais quitter ce lieu. Je me sens fondre et devenir gluante dans cette vapeur. Je voudrais échapper à cet amas sans contours et sans formes. Mais la pièce est petite et les corps sont mêlés; au moindre mouvement on se touche, la peau colle à une autre peau. Le contact des chairs moites et flasques me fait frémir. (MSB, pp. 13–14). (The bodies are so close to each other in the dense cloud that they seem to be one. A formless monster, whitish, swarming with heads, waving its numerous limbs. I start to see better. Women emerge, fragments of the gelatinous monster. I see them in profile on the white wall, as if on a screen – stomachs, breasts, bottoms, hair […] I want to get out of this place. I feel myself melting and becoming sticky in the steam. I want to escape from this shapeless, formless mass. But the room is small and the bodies are mingled – with the tiniest movement you touch someone, skin sticks to other skin. The contact between wet, flabby skin makes me shudder.)

But for Bakhtin, as we have seen, the transgression of self/other, fluid/solid and inside/outside oppositions is grotesquely positive. A Bakhtinian interpretation of the women in the hospital bathroom might link them with ‘the pressing throng, the physical contact of bodies’ which characterises the celebrating crowd in the street or marketplace.73 Bakhtin asserts: 73 Ibid.,

p 255.

248

Forgotten Engagements We find at the basis of grotesque imagery a special concept of the body as a whole and of the limits of this whole. The confines between the body and the world and between separate bodies are drawn in the grotesque genre quite differently than in the classic and naturalist images. Actually, if we consider the grotesque image in its extreme aspect, it never presents an individual body; the image consists of orifices and convexities that present another, newly conceived body […] the grotesque ignores the impenetrable surface that closes and limits the body as a separate and completed phenomenon.74

The image of the women in the shower, to which Valet’s narrator responds with revulsion, would seem to be a positive image for Bakhtin, an example of the ‘people’s mass body’ in its ‘sensual, material bodily unity and community’ which he interprets as a model for a popular, non-hierarchical and unofficial mode of association: The carnivalesque crowd in the marketplace or in the streets is not merely a crowd. It is the people as a whole, but organized in their own way, the way of the people. It is outside of and contrary to all existing forms of the coercive socioeconomic and political organization, which is suspended for the time of the festivity.75

It is exactly this representation of ‘the people’s mass body’ which Ryklin finds so disturbing. Discussing real deaths in the Gulag, he remarks: No matter what kind of death this individual suffered, the folk won’t find time for the funeral, since the event is banal, and since the body is replaceable and has already been duplicated in kind many times over: ‘The death of the individual is only a moment necessary for their rejuvenation and completion’.76

Should Valet’s image of corporeal fusion be read, after Ryklin and against Bakhtin, as a depiction of the political danger of the notion of the mass body? The narrator’s revulsion at the sight of the women apparently merging in the shower, and the metaphors of viscosity, of bestiality and of bodily orifices certainly do contribute to the overall impression created in the novel of the unpleasantness of the women’s 74 Ibid.,

p. 315, p. 318. p. 255. 76 Ryklin, ‘Bodies of Terror’, p. 54. Ryklin is quoting Bakhtin; the italics are Bakhtin’s. 75 Ibid.,



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surroundings in the Hôtel-Dieu������������������������������������� ����������������������������������������������� and, therefore, of their experience of maternity. This impression of physical unpleasantness points directly to the text’s militant function – to persuade readers that the conditions in which working class women presently give birth in Paris must be improved. There is then a sense in which Ryklin’s analysis is pertinent to the text, but it is not Stalin’s treatment of the masses with which Valet is concerned, but rather, the failure of the Parisian medical profession to take account of working class women as individuals. We shall see later that Valet’s novel concurs with Françoise Thébaud’s analysis of the inter-war medical profession as often negligent in this respect. A literal reading of the grotesque images in Madame 60BIS treats the texts a social document. Reading rhetorically, the novel’s grotesque images can however be interpreted positively in opposition to the narrator’s negative response. This reading reveals another way in which the novel can be said to contest socialist realism. Whilst the text’s message about female solidarity and leftist commitment certainly is, in Suleiman’s words, ‘inscribed in capital letters, in such a way that there can be no mistaking it’,77 this inscription does not take place exclusively through the narratorial voice, as socialist realism required. Madame 60BIS is characterised by dialogism, insofar as the narratorial voice can be heard alongside the voice of the textual imagery, rather than to the exclusion of it. The relationship between the narrator and the grotesque is ambivalent: she responds negatively to the bestial, to fluidity, to holes and to the viscous, but positively to the carnival episodes of the revue and la boniche’s�������������������������������� labour. In these episodes, the narrator does not express revulsion, but recognises their deriding and triumphant hilarity: ‘C’est ������� infiniment triste et il y a de quoi crever de rire (MSB, p. 65, my emphasis) (It was infinitely sad and it was enough to make you die laughing). The narrator’s unease when faced with the grotesque is related to the text’s overall message about the relationship between the individual and the collective. For the mass body is not presented in the text as a permanent state, any more than carnival could ever be a permanent mode of social organisation. In Madame 60BIS, the political potential of the image of the collective female pregnant body relies on the latter’s ability to separate itself out again into individual women. Whilst pregnant, the narrator discovers female 77 Suleiman,

Authoritarian Fictions, p. 10.

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solidarity, but, after the birth, she assumes her non-pregnant body again and goes out into the world as an individual. Thus Valet’s image of the female collective body resolves the problem of the relationship between the individual and the collective, and does not succumb to the threat of the subsuming of the individual within the (Soviet) collective. Because Valet’s representation of female solidarity depends on a temporary physical state (pregnancy), she can present a female subject who is able both to view the collectivity as a source of strength, and to operate, and demand respect, as an individual agent. In this respect, pregnancy is a useful and appropriate image of political solidarity: there is no danger that the women in the Hôtel-Dieu���������������������������������� �������������������������������������������� will be cloistered there forever. Political production and sexual reproduction Having identified elements of carnival in Madame 60BIS, I shall now consider in more detail the political implications of the manifestations of the grotesque in Valet’s text. Whilst the relationship between carnival and politics has been the subject of debate, Valet’s carnival imagery does appear to carry a positive political significance. For Valet, the experience of maternity pinpoints and illuminates that which is execrable in contemporary culture. The living-out of certain aspects of working class maternity reveals pressure points where the full horror of society’s treatment of its underclass becomes clear. To express this message, Valet places grotesque realism in the service of socio-political analysis. The episode in which ‘���������� la petite femme chétive’���������������������������������������������������� (the little scrawny woman) gives an account of her miscarriages is perhaps the most striking example: Les fausses-couches, c’est rien de les faire, ce qui est dur c’est de se débarasser du truc. Ça bouche les cabinets et ça fait des ennuis avec le propriétaire, vous pouvez m’en croire. On ne peut pas le garder chez soi. Le brûler je n’ai jamais eu le courage! Faut le foutre dans un égout ou dans la Seine. Non, vous ne pouvez pas vous rendre compte de ce qu’il peut y avoir des flics sur les ponts quand on veut faire quelque chose. Y a peut-être un brigade exprès pour les fausses-couches! et ce qu’il peut y avoir aussi des passants, juste au moment où on n’en a pas besoin! Je restais des heures, avec mon petit paquet à la main. Des fois on allait ensemble, mon homme et moi. Moi j’avais l’air de venir des grands magasins avec mon paquet bien enveloppé. Lui faisait le guet. ‘Vas-y, jette-le’, qu’il disait, et puis pan, v’la quelqu’un.



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Alors on s’en allait plus loin. Pour s’occuper, et pour avoir l’air de rien, on faisait semblant de se disputer. Puis on se disputait pour tout de bon à la fin. Ce que ça donne des ennuis, la maternité. Mais je vais pas lui raconter ça à Rothschild; ça jetterait un froid … (MSB, pp. 49–50) (Having a miscarriage, that’s nothing, it’s getting rid of the thing that’s hard. It blocks the toilet and that causes problems with the landlord, believe me. You can’t keep it at home. I’ve never had the courage to burn it! You have to chuck it down a drain or into the Seine. You’d never imagine how many bobbies can be around those bridges when you want to do something. Maybe there’s a special brigade for miscarriages! And there’s always so many passers-by just when you don’t need them. I’d stay there for hours with my little package in my hands. Sometimes my bloke and me, we’d go together. I looked like I’d just got back from the department stores with my package all nicely wrapped up. He’d keep watch. ‘Go on, throw it in!’ he’d say, and then all of a sudden someone’d be there. So we’d go further along. To pass the time and so as not to look conspicuous, we’d pretend to have a row. Then we really did have a row. Maternity causes such problems. But I’m not going to tell Rothschild that, he’d be horrified …)

The grotesque manifests itself in the degradation of the horrific image of the dead foetus by the humour of the police brigade and the passers-by farcically appearing over and over again out of nowhere: a paradoxical combination of the banal and the serious. In the juxtaposition of the trauma of miscarriage with the inconvenience of blocking the drains and irritating the landlord, the joy of birth is brought down to the level of the sewer. The sewer is a social manifestation of the lower bodily stratum; it is civilisation’s repository for excrement. A further level of social critique is added by the inappropriate comparison of the woman’s package with the purchases of a bourgeoise�������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������ returning from a shopping spree. The nature of the female body’s ‘disorder’ is social as well as physical. When the unruly female body performs the disruptive and traumatic action of spontaneous abortion, it also threatens to effect a disruption and a trauma in terms of established social configurations, such as the commonly-held view that it is not acceptable to throw a corpse into the Seine. When physical and economic conditions conspire to necessitate such a course of action, the female subject risks punishment at the hands of the (male) law. Thus, Valet’s text asserts that the significance of pregnancy is not confined to the private experience of individual women. The grotesque maternal body is a body politic, because its functioning and its effects are conditioned by social factors.

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A bourgeois such as Rothschild, to whom the women in the hospital intend to write to ask for charity, would be horrified by such a story. The anticipated emotional bourgeois response (‘������������� ça jetterait un froid’����������������������������������������������������������� ) contrasts sharply with that of ‘������������������������� la petite femme chétive’� herself (‘�������������������������������������������������������������� les fausses-couches, c’est rien de les faire’).��������������� Working-class experience is so saturated with the necessity of coping with material difficulties that emotion and reflection are no longer feasible. On one level, there is humour in the Bakhtinian degradation which characterises this episode. On another level, the social critique contained within such degradation is too acute to be funny. The reader is presented with the same annihilation of the ‘appropriate’ response (that miscarriage is traumatic) to a given set of material circumstances by those circumstances themselves as is in evidence in the working class women’s inability to perceive their misery and their enslavement. The description of the experience of miscarriage is one example of the way in which Madame 60BIS uses the grotesque in order to demonstrate how social, political, and economic forces constrain proletarian women to experience their bodies in a particular way. The text also broadens its focus to examine the ways in which, in a given social, political and economic environment, culture reads the experience of maternity and re-presents it to women in the form of discourse. We have already seen in Chapter 4 that Valet undertakes such a critique in relation to discourses on female sexuality. Valet uses the grotesque aesthetic in order to ‘degrade’ discursive constructions of maternity. The stereotype of the joy of maternity is revealed to be merely a discursive construct, and one which must be deflated, the text argues, if political progress is to be achieved: ������������� ‘Ah, la joie des mères, le sacrifice des mères, l’honneur d’être mère! Comment résisterait-on à ces discours!’ �(MSB, p. 179) (Oh, a mother’s joy, a mother’s sacrifice, the honour of being a mother! How could those discourses be resisted?). In the maternity ward, the narrator sees clearly that, brought down to its material level in both physical and economic terms, maternity ceases to be a joy: Joie de la maternité? Mais ça n’a aucun rapport avec ce que je vois. Mots mystificateurs, duperies, mensonges. On nous dit cela pour que notre souffrance soit étouffée, pour que nous ne hurlions pas de notre douleur – pour que nous ne croyions même pas à notre douleur. Menteurs! Menteurs! Est-ce de la joie quand nous ne savons pas comment nourrir notre petit? Est-ce de la joie quand pour aller travailler, il faut le



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laisser seul ou bien dans des maisons tristes et sombres où ils végètent dans l’humidité et l’ennui? (MSB, pp. 179–80) (The joy of maternity? But that has nothing to do with what I have seen. Mystifying words, trickery, lies. They tell us that so that our suffering will be muffled, so that we don’t yell out in our pain – so that we don’t even believe in our pain. Liars! Liars! Is it joy when we don’t know how we are going to feed our child? Is it joy when, to go out to work, we have to leave the child alone or in depressing, dark places where they vegetate in damp and pitiful conditions?)

The danger of such discourses is that, like discourses on sexuality, they are internalised by women. For example, the Polish woman who refuses to bring up her child in abject poverty and instead gives her baby up to the social services is seen by the other women as not really a woman: ‘Oh, ������������������������������������������������������ la misérable! elle n’a pas de cœur; elle n’a pas d’entrailles de mère! abandonner son enfant! Quelle chienne! on ne devrait pas lui donner à manger!’��(MSB, p. 137) (Miserable woman! She’s got no heart, she’s got no maternal organs. Abandoning her child! What a bitch! They shouldn’t give her anything to eat!). Because the Polish woman has refused to adhere to the dominant discourse, her maternal body is called into question by other women ����������� (‘elle n’a pas d’entrailles de mère’)��������������������������������������� . The culture which forces proletarian women to give birth in misery and pain is precisely the culture which feeds them the discourse of the joy of motherhood, so that they will not revolt against their condition, and their oppression will be perpetuated to the economic advantage of their oppressors. The text offers an analysis of such discourses of maternity in terms of the specific political ends for which they are created. The mobilisation of soldiers is a key example. The discourse of the devoted and self-sacrificing mother who should proudly and willingly relinquish her sons to the war appears in the novel as an intentional and politically expedient manipulation of maternity through the agency of male-authored language: Et enfin, quand ‘ils’ nous les enlèvent pour ‘leurs’ guerres? C’est à ce moment qu’il faut en dire des mots et des mots pour transformer en joie sublime la douleur des mères. On les étourdit, on les rend insensées à force de mensonges. On les précipite dans la folie. Drapeaux, discours, musiques, médailles, – sacrifice, sacrifice – joie, joie – héroïsme! si l’on tue nos enfants, il faut encore que nous soyions joyeuses!’ (MSB, p. 180)

254

Forgotten Engagements (And then when ‘they’ take them from us for ‘their’ wars? That is when so many words are required to transform mothers’ pain into sublime joy. They are dazed and stunned by lies. They are driven mad. Flags, speeches, music, medals – sacrifice, sacrifice – joy, joy – heroism! Even if they kill our child, we still have to be joyous!)

This discourse is also to be internalised by the female subject: Les plus nobles, les plus belles âmes, celles qui atteignent réellement au sublime, supplient leur enfant de se faire tuer en héros et de leur donner la suprême jouissance: l’auréole des mères martyres. (MSB, p. 181) (The most noble and beautiful souls, the ones who have really achieved the sublime, beg their child to go and get killed as a hero to give them the ultimate ecstasy – the halo of the mother-martyr.)

The mutilation of the male body is to accord great glory to the mother. She may not give her own life for the cause; her patriotic jouissance must therefore be derived from the body of her son. Fred Bud Burkhard has read the revue as a disruption of the discourse on the role of mothers in the mobilisation of soldiers: In its military theme it is evident that la Revue is not simply a parody, inversion or assertion; la Revue is a protest against a society with a tremendous gender disparity caused by war, a protest by poor and pregnant women scorned by a society that called unceasingly for them to produce sons to fill the army and the factories, a society that gives military-style medals to particularly fecund mothers who did their reproductive duty for la Patrie. Women leaving for the delivery room are bid farewell with a sarcastic singing of the ‘������������������ Chant du départ’��. La Revue is not just a protest against immediate reality, the women’s present in the ward, but against their children’s future, against the social and political order called France.78

Such a reading is perfectly consistent with the messages Valet expresses on this issue elsewhere in the text. The episode is a highly suggestive one which, in addition to Burkhard’s ideological reading, will support a feminist interpretation. Valet invites such a reading when she shows that, during the revue, women’s bodies appear differently from stereotypical representations in aesthetic discourses: Que les décadents, les érotiques, les esthètes qui s’excitent aux mots ‘une femme’, ‘une femme nue’ viennent donc les voir, les femmes, leurs corps et 78

Burkhard, ‘Henriette Valet’s Madame 60BIS: French Social Realities and Literary Politics in the 1930s’, pp. 510–11.



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leur nudité, et ce qu’on en a fait! On: les dévorants, ceux qui vivent de la vie des autres, ceux dont plus tard on parlera comme d’étranges génies malfaisants et puissants qui ont tenu la terre dans leurs mains. (MSB, p. 65) (So let the decadents, the sensualists, the aesthetes who get excited at the words ‘woman’ or ‘naked woman’, let them come and see them then, women, their bodies, their nakedness, and what has been done to them. By whom? By the devourers, those who live off the lives of others, those who afterwards will be called strange geniuses, evil and powerful, who held the earth in their hands.)

The ��������� dévorants have consumed the reality of women with the discourses they have created, and it is precisely in opposition to such representations that Valet presents the female body, via the aesthetic of grotesque realism, in terms of its animality, its fluidity, its viscosity and its holes. This passage is a striking attack on conventional representations of women in bourgeois literature, and demonstrates once more that these images have a positive function in the text, despite the narrator’s response to them. The dévorants are the bourgeois male writing subject, responsible for creating discourses which idealise the female body and have little to do with the reality of its physical form as Valet’s narrator sees it in the ������������������������������������������������������� Hôtel-Dieu.�������������������������������������������� The male Look is the Look of the bourgeois who creates or is taken in by discursive production about the female body. ‘������������������������������������������������������������� Plus tard’��������������������������������������������������� – after the revolution – these discourses will be revealed for what they are: powerful and dangerous lies. Valet restates this point in the description of her labour: ��������������� ‘Dans un coin, tout près de moi, des étudiants discutent. Ils parlent littérature. Ils trouvent beau de résister, dans la puanteur des corps et la douleur des femmes, et de garder leur idée de la “Beauté” ’��(MSB, p. 230) (In a corner, near to me, some student doctors are chatting. They are talking literature. They think it is good to resist, amidst the smell of bodies and women’s pain, to hold on to their idea of “Beauty”). In her choice of the terms ‘��������������������������������������� décadents’, ‘érotiques’ and ‘esthètes’�, Valet uses the vocabulary typical of left-wing condemnation of bourgeois literary production found in contemporary literary reviews. Thus Valet deliberately locates her text within the new tradition of revolutionary literature and against the aesthetic norms and values vilified by the inter-war left as bourgeois and decadent.79 79

For an analysis of the terms in which communist literary critics condemned bourgeois literature, see Angenot, La Critique au service de la révolution, pp. 91–135.

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In this passage, Valet explains the political and literary significance of grotesque realism – it makes visible aspects of the female body which bourgeois literature hides. Grotesque imagery is the means to undo the mystifying work of conventional bourgeois aesthetic representations of female physicality. Valet is Bakhtinian in her assertion that the idealisation of the female subject is equally as damaging as overt misogyny. Wayne C. Booth points out that Bakhtin’s defence of Rabelais’s feminism relies on the latter’s refusal to ally himself with ‘a simplified debasement of women in the misleading form of idealization’.80 However, Booth goes on to assert that Bakhtin’s argument is doomed to failure because the Rabelaisian source text is a male-authored narrative which creates for itself a male readership. Here Valet’s feminist credentials are impeccable: the revue is exclusively female in both ‘authorship’ (the women who invent and perform the revue) and ‘readership’ (the narrator who spectates). Valet goes much further than Bakhtin can take Rabelais in re-reading discourses of femininity through the grotesque. Mary Russo asks how it might be possible to use the category of the female body as grotesque in a positive way in order to ‘destabilize the idealizations of female beauty or to realign the mechanisms of desire’.81 Valet’s text shows how this can be achieved. Through the culmination of grotesque images in the revue, the text also attacks the specularity of conventional representation. The revue is both performance and participation, since there is no audience present. This textual celebration mirrors Bakhtin’s carnival celebration in the street. Ann Jefferson argues convincingly for a conception of carnival as alternative, rather than anterior, to conventional representation. For her, this constitutes its potential for transgression: Crucially, what carnival reveals is that relations of representation can be reconstituted as relations of participation, or at the very least that the specular basis of classical representation can be transformed into one which implies an involvement with representation, its objects and its recipients.82 80

Booth, ‘Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism’, p. 162. 81 Mary Russo, ‘Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory’ in Teresa de Lauretis (ed.), Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 213–29 (p. 221). 82 Ann Jefferson, ‘Bodymatters: Self and Other in Bakhtin, Sartre and Barthes’ in Hirschkop (ed.), Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, pp. 152–77 (p. 164).



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Proletarian literature in the inter-war period similarly sought to replace the structure of specularity with a structure of involvement; this was precisely the point on which the proletarian school objected to populism’s representation of the working classes from the outside. We have seen that Poulaille’s definition of proletarian literature in Nouvel âge littéraire takes as its point of departure the criterion of authenticity: the true proletarian writer can only write what he or she has experienced. Authentic proletarian témoignage implies an aesthetic of involvement and a rejection of a specular aesthetic. If we understand the narrator as a proletarian witness, her ambiguity begins to make sense. Although female and pregnant like the other women, she acts as a commentator on the revue, judging the relative sizes and shapes of the protruding bellies. Thus she remains, to a certain extent, within the structure of specularity, able to see what the other women cannot see, occupying a position of greater lucidity. She thus occupies the potentially traumatic position of the proletarian seeking access to culture: once bourgeois culture is acquired, for example via authorship, the proletarian writer risks being haunted by the spectre of class betrayal.83 Valet’s narrator – like Valet herself – balances on the tightrope which separates solidarity from critical reflection. Valet’s distrust of the structure of specularity also relates to the questioning of the inside/outside demarcation which is vital to the text’s political message. Madame 60BIS shows how society and culture conventionally draw distinctions between inside and outside: for example, between the Hôtel-Dieu and the city of Paris, between the exclusively female world of childbearing and the public sphere of political and social action. Valet’s aesthetic implies a desire for transgression of such boundaries. We have seen that, for Bakhtin, the grotesque aesthetic is founded upon the transgression of the inside/outside demarcation: the central images of the grotesque body are concerned with the body’s orifices and its consumption and expulsion of material, all of which takes place on the boundary between self and world, inside and outside. Valet’s text constructs the ‘inside’ as a site of female power, but it also envisages the possibility of this power productively taking its 83 On

this point, see Rosemary Chapman, ‘Autodidacticism and the Desire for Culture’, Nottingham French Studies 31.2 (Autumn 1992), 84–101. Chapman studies the examples of Guéhenno, Poulaille, and Sartre’s autodidact in La Nausée.

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place in the ‘outside’. Inside, women entre elles can access a power which resembles Bakhtin’s carnival crowd, ‘organized in their own way […] outside of and contrary to all existing forms of the coercive socio-economic and political organization’.84 Inside the ����������� Hôtel-Dieu� the women are outside conventional coercive political organisation. Valet reinterprets the confinement which, according to Foucauldian analysis of the medical institution, might be interpreted as an example of such coercive social organisation. Thébaud is also keen to stress the coercive nature of the medicalisation and institutionalisation of maternity in inter-war France, stating that ���������������������� ‘les femmes subissent le dirigisme des pratiques médicales; punies, rachetées, conseillées, elles ne savent pas et ne décident pas; leur personnalité est pour un temps niée, mise entre paranthèses’ (women ������������������������� were subjected to the authoritarian regime of medical practices: punished, ransomed, advised, they did not know and they did not decide; for a period of time their personality was denied, placed in parenthesis).85 But Valet invests medical confinement with radical potential. For within this female inside, the solidarity, expressed in terms of the body, which the presence of the male gaze prohibits, can find full expression: Ici, plus de pudeur, pas de gêne […] Loin des regards des hommes, il n’y a plus ni jalousie, ni désir, ni admiration, ni dégoût. Nous sommes toutes confondues. Personne ne songe à regarder. (�MSB, pp. 13–14) (Here there is no more modesty, no embarrassment […] Far from the eyes of men, there is no more jealousy, no more desire, no more admiration, no more disgust. We are all the same. No-one thinks to look at anyone else.) Comme presque toutes les femmes, dès qu’elles sont loin des regards des hommes, la pruderie qu’on leur a apprise est mise de côté avec une sorte d’ivresse. Elles adorent qu’on s’occupe de leur corps, qu’on en parle et que prenne une si grande importance officielle ce qu’elles cachent d’habitude. En vacances, la pudeur! C’est une sorte de détente. (MSB, p. 142) Like most women, once they are far from the eyes of men, they put aside the prudishness they have been taught with a sort of exhilaration. They love it when someone is interested in their body, when it is talked about, and when the thing they usually hide takes on such a great importance. Modesty has departed! It is a moment of relaxation.)

84

Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 255. Quand nos grand-mères donnaient la vie, p. 282.�

85 ��������� Thébaud,



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Freed from their culturally imposed modesty, the women form a carnivalesque celebrating crowd, illustrating Bakhtin’s assertion that ‘the grotesque ignores the impenetrable surface that closes and limits the body as a separate and completed phenomenon’.86 Drunkenness and relaxation and a new focus on corporeality also suggest carnival. The path is laid for the liberating laughter of the revue which arises from the solidarity of being a part of one continuous grotesque female body which is life-affirming and powergiving. Their laughter expresses a new freedom from patriarchal constructions of their identities. When the male gaze penetrates the female inside, by contrast, the female subject reverts to the conventional position of object in the gendered structure of specularity: Sous les draps, de loin, elles s’offrent à la visite, corps tendu, jambes déjà écartées. Il y a une espèce de concurrence; on jalouse celles qui sont regardées longuement par le patron et ses internes. (MSB, pp. 26–27) (Under the sheets, even when the doctors are still far off, they offer themselves up to the examination, bodies taut, legs already spread. There is a sort of competition: the women are jealous of the ones the doctor and his interns take a long time over.) Des étudiants reviennent dans les salles, aussitôt que le patron est parti, pour examiner quelques femmes. Des femmes? Non. Des utérus. Pour eux les malades sont des objets, des monticules, sur lesquels ils promènent gravement leur stéthoscope et dans lesquels ils fouillent. Non seulement les femmes se laissent faire, mais elles s’offrent. Poings sous les hanches, elles soulèvent bien haut leur ventre tendu et écartent généreusement les cuisses en regardant d’un air vainqueur les voisines: ‘Ma petite, c’est moi, hein!’ Cette humiliation est transformée en puérile vanité. (MSB, p. 30) (The students come back into the ward as soon as the doctor has gone, to examine some of the women. Women? No. Uteruses. For them the patients are objects, mountains of flesh which they examine seriously with their stethoscopes and into which they plunge their hands. The women don’t just let them get on with it, they offer themselves. With their fists in the small of their backs, they lift their taut stomachs right up and spread their legs wide, looking triumphantly at their neighbours – ‘My dear, it’s my turn now, isn’t it!’ This humiliation is transformed into puerile vanity.)

86

Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 318.

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Repairing an omission of which Taylor accuses Bakhtin, Valet shows, via her account of the women’s response to the doctors, that the carnival crowd might also be complicit with the hierarchy against which it sets itself. She does not fall into Bakhtin’s trap of assuming the ‘people’ or the carnival crowd to be an unproblematically revolutionary and homogenous entity.87 In representing both female solidarity and the disunity and impotence which complicity with the objectivising male gaze produces, Valet dramatises the contrast between a Bakhtinian degradation, which is joyful and productive and female-focused, and a self-degradation before the male gaze, which is oppressive.88 This is the sort of objectivisation via the Look which the revue criticises and subverts. The quotations just cited correspond to Foucault’s account of the medical examination, as of the nineteenth century, as a tripartite structure which involves seeing (�regarder longuement, examiner) touching (fouiller)�������������� and hearing (promener leur stéthoscope)�.89 As in Foucault’s account, the dominant mode of medical knowledge in Valet’s text remains the Look – the specularity of the encounter is stressed over and over again. The use of the stethoscope and the rough handling evoked by the phrase ‘dans ������������������������������ lesquels ils fouillent’ show how the other senses are also involved. But the sheer brutality and carelessness of ‘fouiller’ (it is the word used to express scrabbling about in a bag or other container) introduces an element of sociopolitical critique which is less important (though not completely absent) in Foucault’s analysis. Thébaud’s research suggests that the dehumanising gaze of the doctor was a social reality in inter-war France. She cites a contemporary account of maternity hospitals by Madeleine Vernet, in which the author notes a basic lack of compassion for the patients as individuals on the part of doctors and midwives. Thébaud also cites the careless attitude of doctors as one possible reason why many women resisted the medicalisation of pregnancy.90 This lack of care almost kills Valet’s narrator. She describes in graphic terms the artificial delivery of her placenta:

87 Taylor,

‘Bakhtin, Carnival and Comic Theory’, pp. 34–41. Ginsburg, ‘The Pregnant Text. Bakhtin’s Ur-Chronotype: The Womb’ in Shepherd (ed.), Bakhtin, Carnival and Other Subjects, pp. 163–75 (p. 167). 89 Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, pp. 165–68. 90 ��������� Thébaud, Quand nos grand-mères donnaient la vie, pp. 271–73; p. 251. 88 Ruth



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Sans mettre de gant (j’aurai la fièvre puerpérale deux jours après; en est-ce la cause?), il plonge sa main dans mon ventre. Je les perçois au centre de ma chair, ses doigts longs et fins que j’ai vus tout à l’heure sur le boc de viande flasque. Elle fouille, cette main, elle tâtonne, elle essaie d’aggriper. La douleur est inimaginable. (MSB, p. 238) (Without putting any gloves on (I was to get puerperal fever two days later; was this why?) he plunged his hand into my stomach. I perceived his fingers in the centre of my flesh, those long, fine fingers I saw earlier round that slimy meat. That hand searched, touched, tried to grasp. The pain was unimaginable.)

The narrator subsequently nearly dies of puerperal fever. The dehumanising gaze is oppressive; the dehumanising touch can actually kill. In Madame 60BIS, Valet uses grotesque images to contest both the situation of proletarian women under capitalism and the aesthetic values of bourgeois literature. Throughout the text, bodies and ideas are ‘degraded’, in the Bakhtinian sense, brought down from their lofty pedestals to the level of flesh and blood wherein lies their ultimate, but often hidden, reality. It is through degradation that the disturbing truths about the female body and about capitalism are revealed. Degradation allows Valet to ‘déranger ������������������������������ certains mensonges’ (expose certain lies), which, as we saw in Chapter 2, was how she described her motivation for writing in her response to Aragon’s survey in Commune. Valet’s grotesque carnival imagery is political because it has the power to demystify, and therefore to open the floodgates of revolution. According to Holquist, Bakhtin uses Rabelais in order to demonstrate that: [t]he decline of freedom in the Renaissance becomes apparent when it is charted as a proportionate rise of new practices for repressing certain aspects not only of the body, but of language.91

Like Bakhtin, Valet wants to suggest that if the body can be rescued from the multiple social and linguistic repressions to which it is subjected, freedom can be achieved.

91 Holquist,

‘Prologue’, p. xxi.

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Conclusions: inside/ouside. Beyond the Hôtel-Dieu Through Bakhtin, we have seen how Valet endows the female body with political potential. But as a writer committed to the revolutionary left, Valet does not leave the reader with no more than an abstract evocation of political possibilities. For she is ultimately concerned with using aesthetic representation to achieve real change. Her story is an authentic testimony to the experience of giving birth in poverty; Valet’s text is fully aware not only of the value of this experience in itself, both politically and aesthetically, but also of its real consequences for the proletarian woman who is about to become a single mother. Valet presents pregnancy as a political choice for the narrator: Vais-je tenir jusqu’au bout? Ne vais-je pas défaillir et m’avouer vaincue et regretter d’avoir voulu cet enfant, de l’avoir voulu pour moi seule, malgré les lois et les gens? Vais-je souhaiter honteusement de revenir en arrière et m’apercevoir que je veux l’impossible? (MSB, p. 147) (Am I going to make it to the end? Am I not going to weaken and admit that I’m beaten and regret having wanted this child, having wanted it just for me, despite the laws and despite what people say? Am I going to wish shamefully that I could go back, and realise that I want the impossible?)

To actively choose (to write about) single motherhood in 1934 is indicative of a particular political standpoint, a deliberate and active refusal of, or resistance to, social and cultural norms. If the narrator is to succeed in making use of the political potential she has discovered, thanks to this choice, in the maternity hospital, she must actively assume the situation she has created for herself. Unlike Beauvoir, Valet is keen to present pregnancy as a project through which the female subject can actively assume her physical condition, thereby achieving positive political and ontological development. The process begins when the narrator finally experiences labour. The birthing body is a source of power: Et pourtant je me sens forte, je respire à pleine bouche […] Oh! Quelle force! Je pourrais soulever un monde! La force implacable me traverse et de toute ma force j’y contribue. Mon corps est emporté par une fatale tempête – c’est moi-même – et mon enfant … (MSB, pp. 234–35) (And even so I feel strong, I take deep breaths […] Oh, what strength! I could lift up the world! The indomitable strength flows through me and



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I contribute to it with all my strength. My body is carried away by a fatal storm – myself, and my child …)

This is an example of Friedman’s childbirth-creativity metaphor: Valet equates giving birth with female power and creativity or, as Friedman puts it, ‘woman’s doublebirthing potential’.92 The contrast with Weiss’s maternal metaphor is obvious: whilst for Weiss, (political) creativity followed sequentially from procreation and replaced it, for Valet, these are one and the same. The solidarity of the labour ward is only the first step on the long road which is to lead to political change. And so, despite her assertion of the power of female solidarity, Valet does not propose a separatist politics. The power afforded by the solidarity of the allfemale world inside the hospital must ultimately be taken outside if it is to be of any use. As Clair Wills asserts, political efficiency depends on communicability: I have argued that for Bakhtin, carnival must be brought into dialogue with official forms through the medium of literature, in order to be politically effective: analogously, the ‘lawlessness’ of the witch, the hysteric and the proletarian woman must be brought within the public sphere, conforming to some extent with its norms, if it is to become a language which can engage politically with the ‘official’ language.93

For Valet, the power of female solidarity and female grotesque degrading laughter must communicate with the outside if it is to be politically effective. Therefore the inside does not sever its links with the outside. The world of the Hôtel-Dieu�������������� ������������������������ is ambiguous: Plus vrai que l’autre, celui du dehors, et faux cependant, puisqu’il y manque les ferments qui tout en apportant la confusion et les mensonges et en obligeant aux précautions, apportent aussi le tourment et le tourbillon des passions et des actions véritables. Le monde réel vient se révéler ici. Ici mes compagnes montrent ce qu’on a fait d’elles ‘là-bas’. Et pourtant quel lieu étrangement factice et irréel! (MSB, p. 217) (More true than the other world, than the outside world, and yet false, since those agents are missing which, whilst causing confusion and telling lies of which you have to be careful, are also the cause of the torment and the whirlwind of passion and true actions. 92 93

Friedman, ‘Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor’, p. 58. Wills, ‘Upsetting the Public: Carnival, Hysteria and Women’s Texts’, p. 138.

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Forgotten Engagements The real world is on show here. Here my companions show what has been done to them ‘out there’. And yet, what a strangely artificial and unreal place!)

The ������������������������������������������������������������������ Hôtel-Dieu�������������������������������������������������������� is both real and unreal, true and false, it is outside the city and yet penetrated by the ‘real world’, it transgresses the inside/outside boundary. The hospital building, described in the novel’s opening pages, is a grotesque edifice represented in terms of large holes and the flowing Seine. Because the building is permeated by holes, that which it takes into itself can also be expelled back to the outside. The narrator’s post-natal re-entry into the city reads like a symbolic birth: she leaves via a long corridor; it is a struggle to emerge from the inside; and then, finally reaching the boundary, she finds that ‘���������������������������������������� [l]a porte cochère énorme est ouverte’��(MSB, pp. 240–42) (the enormous gate is open), just like the gaping bodies and the open flesh of the labour room. And yet when she was first incarcerated, it was the city outside which the narrator envisaged as a body, a body from which the Hôtel-Dieu���������������������� �������������������������������� was to separate her: Je pressais le pas, j’étais ivre de ma force, je bousculais les passants sur les trottoirs dans les rues étroites. J’étais alors une cellule de cet immense corps, la ville, un point mouvant et vigoureux dans la masse. Maintenant je suis enfermée, à l’écart. (MSB, p. 34) (I hurried, I was drunk on my own strength, I jostled the passers-by on the pavements of the narrow streets. I was one cell of this enormous body, the city, one moving and vigorous point in the mass. Now I am closed in, separated.)

From body to body, boundaries are constantly transgressed in this text. The representations of the Hôtel-Dieu����������������� ��������������������������� and of the city suggest the possibility of a politically productive transfer between these areas. The female solidarity achieved via the grotesque within the hospital has a place in the polity. Such externalisation is also required at the level of the relationship between the text and its readership. As Maroussia Hjdukowski-Ahmed has argued, ‘[a] resisting discourse cannot be mistaken for a politically subversive act; nor does it transform social practices unless the subject has access to an interpretive community and to power’.94 As Emmanuel 94 Maroussia

Hjdukowski-Ahmed, ‘The Framing of the Shrew: Discourses on Hysteria and its Resisting Voices’ in Shepherd (ed.), Bakhtin, Carnival and Other Subjects, pp. 176–96 (p. 194).



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Bouju argues, the committed text only has meaning when it finds a place in the public domain and thus is inscribed within a social community.95 Valet’s grotesque female body is a resisting discourse; its aim must be to transform discursive practice through the power accorded to it by the interpretive community of readers. This need for externalisation, as regards both the novel and the female subject, is dramatised in the text by the movements between inside and outside. Valet’s political analysis takes place between two poles: the text’s grotesque imagery, and the refusal of the majority of the women in the Hôtel-Dieu������������������������������������������������� ����������������������������������������������������������� to embrace the political potential suggested by their birthing bodies. The text thus contains an autocritique in that it acknowledges that it is difficult to persuade women of their own political potential. Valet’s novel acknowledges the obvious sociocultural limitations to the model of female politicisation it proposes. Nonetheless, the revue demonstrates that even among the sceptical and the mystified, the grotesque birthing body can create free laughter and solidarity, which represents political progress. Valet thus shares Bakhtin’s idealism, but Valet’s idealism is tempered by an acute awareness of material reality.96 The experience of the female body and of female solidarity permitted by pregnancy function as symbols of female political solidarity without denying social and cultural obstructions to progress. Through the women’s collusion with their oppression, and through the narrator’s lucid, but not infallible, reading of their situation, the text suggests that, until modes of representing women to themselves and to culture at large have changed, ‘������������������������������������������������� Que leur dire?’���������������������������������� remains an unanswerable question. Valet’s text differs from those of Téry, Thomas, Pelletier and Weiss in that it establishes a causal link between the female body and politics. Valet proposes a somatic politics which stands in marked contrast to the tendency in inter-war literature by both male and female authors towards a disembodiment of the politicised subject. In Thomas’s novel, ideal communist commitment is associated with the ability to overcome the physical body, which manifests itself in the protagonists’ ability to recover from physical trauma and in her decision to reject sexuality. Téry pays little attention to the female 95

Bouju, �������������������������������������� ‘Avant-propos’ in Bouju (ed.), L’Engagement littéraire, p. 15. Bakhtin’s idealism, see Brandist, The Bakhtin Circle, especially Chapter 8, pp. 173–91. 96 On

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body. Pelletier believes that embodiment can only limit the subject’s potential; women are particularly susceptible to this sort of limitation because of their capacity to fall pregnant. Weiss’s Délivrance �������� differs from the other novels since its privileging of femininity points to some sort of valorisation of corporeal difference, however, we have seen that Weiss’s politics of maternity is not in fact a politics of the maternal body. Valet’s novel can be read literally as a social document which constitutes an indictment of the physical humiliation suffered by proletarian mothers in France in the 1930s and as a statement of the legitimacy of a single woman’s desire to bear a child. It can also be read rhetorically as a creative engagement with the grotesque aesthetic which asserts the maternal body as a source of political solidarity and contests conventional representations of the female body in terms of an idealised aesthetic of beauty. Her novel thus represents an original and stimulating contribution to the debate on the female body which was taking place in inter-war France. Terry Eagleton has suggested: There is a pressing need for what we might call a ‘political somatics’, a study of the historical body that attends not only, in negative fashion, to its past and present imprintings, but which may learn from such sources as Bakhtin something of is revolutionary potential.97

Valet’s Madame 60BIS provides a wealth of material for such a ‘political somatics’; this chapter has attempted to make progress in responding to the need Eagleton identifies in the context of 1930s literature.

97 Eagleton,

Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism , p. 150.

Conclusion Tout roman est politique mais tout roman n’est pas un roman politique.

Every novel is political but not every novel is a political novel. This is how the conclusions reached by Nikola Kovaã in his recent study of the political novel are summarised in the text’s preface. Although Kovaã proposes a definition of the political novel which is much more circumscribed than that which has informed my analysis here, his conclusion is more generally applicable. All novels are political in the sense that they are situated: they betray their socio-historical conditions of possibility, and they reveal a particular view of a part of reality, however limited in scope. All novels are political in the sense that they engage with the human condition and therefore depict relations of power. The novel which proposes an ideological thesis seeking to recommend a specific mode of organisation of the social domain and its institutions is a political novel; its scope exceeds the domain of the aesthetic and thus it poses a specific set of questions. Kovaã defines the reality (as opposed to the aesthetics) of politics as the changing relationships between the individual and the group, between the dominant and the dominated, between masters and slaves. He concludes that: Le rattachement de l’homme à la société et à ses institutions constitue le fondement anthropologique de sa situation; c’est le champ de toutes ses espérances et de tous ses projets. (Man’s attachment to society and to its institutions constitutes the anthropological foundation of his situation; it is the field of all his hopes and of all his projects.)

 ����������� Nikola Kovaã,

Le Roman politique. Fictions du totalitarisme (Paris: Editions Michalon, 2002���������������������������������������������� ), with a preface by Tiphaine Samoyault, p. 8.  For Kovaã, the term ‘political novel’ designates only texts which depict a hero who is the victim of the totalitarian state, and whose situation, for example, of incarceration, is without hope. Kovaã cites Kafka’s The Trial and Camus’s The Stranger as examples of such novels.  Kovaã, Le Roman politique, p. 15.  Ibid., p. 20.

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If we accept this view – it seems to be well founded – and if we adopt it as the definition of ‘political’ in the syntagm ‘political novel’, then we must conclude that women’s relationship to the political novel is not the same as that of men. For what women’s history, as well as literary and cultural studies, have revealed beyond doubt is that legislation and multifarious cultural forms have together ensured that women’s relationship to society and its institutions is different to that of men. In the course of this study I have attempted to show how this difference operates in specific texts. We have seen that the female writer of political fiction in inter-war France was placed differently in relation to genre, because of a complex dynamic between exclusion and inclusion. We have also seen that the thematic focus of her texts was different, because of the specificities of the ontological relationship between the female subject and politics, and because culture and legislation placed her in a different relationship to such founding categories of human experience as sexuality and the body. The different situation of the female subject produced different inflections in her writing. Certain facts of gender difference are generally applicable to all the writers in this study: as women, they were all excluded from the vote, from standing for election, from obtaining a legal abortion, they were all subject to prevailing views about what constituted ‘femininity’ and thus to received ideas about what constituted appropriate female behaviour and activities. However, we have seen that their responses to difference in their texts were particular and related to their own situations both in terms of their individual trajectories and within particular ideological groupings. These two views of gender difference correspond to what Sonia Kruks, in a wide-ranging study of existentialism, postmodernism and feminism entitled Retrieving Experience, terms ‘global difference’ and ‘multiple difference’; they are two forms of identity politics (that is, they are based on women’s identity qua women) which have generally been seen as antagonistic. Kruks suggests that ‘global difference feminism’ – the argument that all women are fundamentally different from all men – and ‘multiple difference  Sonia

Kruks, Retrieving Experience. Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001). On global difference feminism and multiple difference feminism, see especially Chapter 4, ‘Identity Politics and Dialectical Reason: Beyond an Epistemology of Provenance’, pp. 107–28.



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feminism’ – the argument that differences between women should be respected – are not mutually incompatible, and that the latter does not render the former redundant for feminism, as those who favour a postmodernist/poststructuralist deconstruction of identity are apt to affirm. The corpus of novels in this study illustrates the combination of ‘global difference’ and ‘multiple difference’ (even in the work of an author such as Edith Thomas who preferred to deny the significance of ‘global difference’): all are different, but each is differently different. The briefest of overviews of male-authored political fiction in inter-war France suggests that ‘global difference’ must obtain in relation to female-authored political fiction. In the introduction to a study of the relationship of inter-war writers to modernity, which considers no female writers, Michel Raimond points to a new tendency on the part of novelists after 1930 to integrate an analysis of the realities of the modern world into their fiction, and he suggests a series of figures via which they achieved this: the ex-combatant, the doctor, the ‘homme ����������������������������������� révolté’ (������������������ the man in revolt) and the militant. It is easy to see why authors made use of such figures in order to give an account of the social and political changes wrought by modernity in the inter-war period. But I need hardly point out that they are all male figures, roles which simply could not be occupied by women on the same terms. Does the notion of ‘global difference’ then imply that we should oppose absolutely the female-authored political novel to the male-authored political novel? Of course not, because, on another level, global similarity also exists. All human experiences (being a woman, being a man, writing a book, engaging in politics) are simultaneously comprehensible in terms both of the particular and the universal: as Kruks argues, ‘[w]e can make sense of difference only by also recognizing a certain oneness to the human condition, a generality that is the horizon against which particularity is configured’. Thus, there are recognisable elements which are common to all political novels, regardless of the sex of the author; Suleiman’s analysis of the roman à thèse ��������������� can be applied to novels by women. But as paradigms are translated into actual  ���������������� Michel Raimond,

Eloge et critique de la modernité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), pp. 10–11.  Kruks, Retrieving Experience, p. 94. On the relationship between the particular and the universal, see also pp. 41ff and 164ff.

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texts, they mutate, producing different layers of commonalities and particularities. Political novels by women in a particular period have something in common, but differ in the specifics of their textual realisation; thus novels by communist women will have elements in common, as will novels by proletarian women, by pacifist women, and so on. One could of course continue to imagine ever smaller categories along a decreasing spiral whose end point would be, for the poststructuralist theorist, the sort of radical individualism which denies any common ground whatsoever. The female-authored interwar political novel is then different from the male-authored version, but it is not completely different, and nor is it identical to every other contemporary female-authored political novel. If we accept then that female-authored political fiction of the inter-war period in France differs from corresponding maleauthored novels, in what ways does the study of their texts affect existing accounts of political fiction in this period? When Susan Suleiman argues in Authoritarian Fictions – a study based entirely on male-authored texts – that the roman à thèse is a monological genre, she nonetheless admits that there is always the possibility of slippage regarding the interpretation of meaning, which the text tries to minimise via such techniques as redundancy, the uses of a doctrinal intertext, an omniscient narrator or the Bildung structure; she recognises that some texts (such as Malraux’s novels) are less monological than others; and she argues that a complete absence of contradiction would render the text unacceptable to the reader. She thus sees the roman à thèse as caught in a double bind: its thesis will best be conveyed by a lack of contradiction (monologism), but if it eliminates contradiction completely (that is, if it eliminates dialogism), it will weaken its own credibility as an expression of reality. The texts I have analysed in the present study suggest that this is no double bind, but rather, a deliberate, constitutive and defining textual strategy. Louise Weiss’s recommendation of pacifism, Simone Téry’s and Edith Thomas’s recommendations of communism, Madeleine Pelletier’s recommendation of an integral approach to socialism and feminism and Valet’s condemnation of capitalism are unambiguous and prove that the thesis to be transmitted must indeed be cast in the monological mode if the novel is to be effective in its ideological aim. The novels explain historical  Suleiman,

Authoritarian Fictions, p. 189.



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reality in terms of a specific world view, and admit no contradiction in this respect. From this point of view then, the works of Weiss, Téry, Thomas, Pelletier and Valet show that the political novel is indeed an authoritarian fiction, in Suleiman’s terms. However, in all the texts, the monological account of a particular ideology is doubled by an account of the difficulties faced by the female subject in her attempt to make commitment to that ideology into a constituent part of her subjectivity. This doubling of an ideological narrative with an existential one is particularly acute in female-authored texts because politics is part of the stereotype of masculinity, not femininity, and because politics is in direct contradiction to femininity as it manifested itself in dominant cultural discourses of the inter-war period. The existential, or ontological aspect of politics – the ways in which the individual incorporates the experience of politics into his or her subjectivity – must, if it is to convince the reader, be cast in an exploratory mode, not an explicative one, it must be openended, not closed, it must therefore permit multiple explanations: in other words, it must be dialogical. In the texts I have analysed, what Suleiman calls a double bind appears rather to be a deliberate combination of monologism and dialogism which recognises that an account of the process (and, crucially, the difficulty) of the subject’s active engagement with an ideology (for example, through party membership or by holding political office) is as important as the strictly political recommendation of that ideology. This model of the political novel ascribes monologism and dialogism to different textual functions, namely, the account of ideology and the account of subjectivity, respectively. Recalling Steven Ungar’s definition of committed literature, which I cited at the end of Chapter 1, where he describes the inscription of ‘the thematics of decision and identity centred on the individual within issues of social involvement and allegiance to specific doctrines, world-views and ideologies’, it is clear that such a combination of monologism and dialogism is far from being exclusively a feature of female-authored texts. Ungar bases his account on male-authored literature; clearly, the existential relationship between the male subject and political commitment was explored in interesting and complex ways in male-authored political literature in inter-war France. Nonetheless, in literary  Ungar,

‘Existentialism, Engagement, Ideology’, p. 145.

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histories of the period, it is the ideologically dogmatic nature of these texts which prevails, and often, as in Suleiman’s account, the rather more open-ended account of subjectivity appears as an aberration, in contradiction with the text’s main didactic aim. This is because the coincidence of masculinity and politics can easily be taken for granted, whilst, since politics is not part of the stereotype of femininity, the exploration of the ontology of commitment in the female-authored political novel will likely be one of conflict and contestation. Therefore, the dialogical representation of political subjectivity will tend to dominate in female-authored texts. This argument is supported by contemporary reviews of the work of a novelist such a Simone Téry, whose texts are, as we have seen, excessively dogmatic at the level of their ideological thesis. Whilst many reviewers of Le Cœur volé objected ��������������������������������� to its partisan nature, most focus their discussion not on the ways in which a dogmatic representation of ideology ‘ruins’ a novel, but rather on the (openended) question of whether Téry’s account of Vera Boissard’s attempt at politicisation is pro- or anti-feminist. They state their objection to partisan literature briefly, but expound at length on the text’s representation of the (gendered) ontology of commitment. To acknowledge the appropriateness in the political novel of an investigation of the ontology of commitment presented via an exploratory, dialogical narrative mode raises the question of the writer’s relationship to her or his own text. Reviewing her literary output to date, in 1945, Edith Thomas described Le Refus as a profession of faith. The inter-war political novel can offer no guarantee as to the relationship between the text and the reader: it is impossible to know how individual readers reacted to particular texts (other than literary critics), however stories of political conversions as a result of reading a novel certainly do not abound. For most readers, a political novel could only ever be a small part of their conversion story, and, for most writers, the idea that their novel alone might convert individuals in droves to communism, or fascism, or pacifism, or any other ideology, is patently absurd. Literature does not have the power to legislate, it cannot make irrevocable decisions on the part of society, it cannot even be certain of persuading the reader to adopt its point of view. However, ������������� the context of production of the inter-war political novel suggests that such texts can offer a guarantee of the relationship between the text and its author. Because inter-war women writers found themselves



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in a position of exclusion from politics and from narrative, their political novels point up particularly clearly the ways in which the literary text functions as a claim for political and cultural legitimacy on the part of the author. Their novels illustrate Emmanuel Bouju’s literal interpretation of engagement as ‘le ������������������������������ geste par lequel un sujet […] met en gage quelque chose de lui-même’�������������������� (my emphasis) (the gesture through which the subject pledges something of itself) and his location of engagement ‘��������������������������������������������� entre caution et pari’ (between ���������������������� a surety and a bet).10 In the contract between reader and writer implied in these novels, the female writer offers her own subjectivity and experience as a bet or a guarantee to underwrite the possibility of the existence of a female political identity. The function of the inter-war political novel as a declaration of belonging, as well as of belief, should not be underestimated. In the inter-war period in France, the production and consumption of political literature was part of a broader discursive environment focused on literary-political journals and the groups of committed individuals associated with them, in which the discussion (oral and written) of different sorts of texts – literary, political, theoretical, economic, propagandistic, journalistic, and so on – resulted in the creation and reinforcement of politically militant communities such as the AEAR, Monde, or Poulaille’s proletarian school. Here, the iterative relationship between text and context is clear: whilst inter-war literary-political schools arose in part out of existing texts, so too the form and character of new texts was in part determined by these ‘interpretive’ communities, which clearly had a creative as well as an analytical effect. This feature of inter-war political literature is revealed particularly clearly by women writers’ relationship to genre, as we saw in Chapter 2. The genre choices made by inter-war women writers of political fiction challenge readers and critics to revisit the values according to which women’s writing is judged. One reason why the novels in this study have been passed over by literary critics – feminist literary critics included – is that they appear to replicate ‘masculine’ modes of realist writing, a writing strategy which is valued negatively by theorists of women’s writing. It is significant that the inter-war women writers who have been recuperated by feminist scholarship and who now receive considerable critical attention are those whose texts contest ‘masculine’ norms in a very obvious way – Colette’s 10 ����������������������������� Bouju, ‘Avant-propos’, p. 11.

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treatment of sexual politics or Marguerite Yourcenar’s formal experimentation are clear examples. However, Michel Raimond’s account of 1930s literature as focused on figures such as the excombatant, the doctor, the man in revolt and the militant suggests immediately that women writers interested in expressing and creating political change through their novels must have been engaged in a process of rewriting of masculine narrative norms. This process of rewriting could not consist in a complete overthrow of textual and sexual conventions, for, as we saw in Chapter 2, this would have undermined the need to use the literary text as a strategy for political acceptance and legitimisation. Rather, the inter-war woman writer of political fiction produced a ‘literature of her own’ by engaging in a delicate process of imitation and adaptation. The texts analysed in this study show that new archetypes were thereby produced: the bourgeoise déclassée (Thomas and Téry); the professional female politician (Weiss and Pelletier); the mère révoltée (the mother in revolt) (Weiss and Valet). The novels I have considered underline the appropriateness of the term ‘commitment’ which has frequently been employed by critics to characterise 1930s political literature in France. I hope to have gone some way towards demonstrating the complexity of this term; its significance goes beyond the straightforward observation that many of the characters in such novels are ‘committed’ to some ideology or belief system. ‘Commitment’ is an appropriate term because it designates precisely the point at which ideology and the ontology of politics coincide; ‘commitment’ encapsulates the productive combination of monologism and dialogism, by suggesting an active and critical engagement of a subject with politics, the intermingling of ontology and ideology. ‘Commitment’ also suggests a negotiation of the individual and the collective, which accurately describes the situation of the inter-war writer of political fiction as both an individual producer of a single text, but inevitably therefore part of a network of other writers, organised into groups with clearly defined identities, in relation to which he or she sought to define his or her ideological and aesthetic legitimacy. The notion of gendered subjectivity which emerges from inter-war women writers’ attempts to negotiate and represent commitment in relation to obstacles and exclusions is generally applicable to the literature of commitment in France between the wars. The exploration of gendered subjectivity contained in Kruks’s



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Retrieving Experience is useful in determining what sort of notion of subjectivity is implied by committed literature. Kruks aims to rescue concepts such as ‘self’ and ‘agency’ from postmodern/ poststructuralist condemnation, without returning to the naïve view of the subject, associated with Enlightenment thinking, as autonomously self-constituting. This she does most convincingly, suggesting that postmodernism/poststructuralism often does in fact tacitly assume a self outside of discourse, and that there are realms of experience, such as embodied experience, which cannot adequately be accounted for by discourse analysis alone. Kruks summarises her view of the subject as ‘an embodied subject that, although not the site of an untrammelled freedom, is more than the plaything of social and discursive forces; a subject that creates and that affirms values, though never ex nihilo’.11 To affirm the desirability of commitment presupposes a view of the subject as having agency: the capacity to choose between ideological alternatives, to choose whether and when to act, the capacity actively to assume ‘politics’ as part of the self. As Kruks argues, postmodernism tends to displace agency from the subject to discourse, which results in a view of subjectivity as radically socially constructed, as constituted rather than constituting. Whilst such insights are valuable in that they take us beyond the notion of the Cartesian self-constituting subject to show how subjectivity is determined by its situation, they present a subject at the mercy of discourse, potentially passive and thus incapable of political action.12 What is needed, in Kruks’s opinion, is a view of the subject as both constituted by discourse and possessing agency. It is just such a dual view of subjectivity which emerges from the inter-war political novels by women this study has analysed. All the authors recognise that their freedom to choose and to act is circumscribed by socially produced discourses: this is the context in which they explore the ontology of commitment, examining the relationship between their ‘actual selves’ and the gendered accounts which society offers them of what their ‘selves’ should be. But none of them abandon the belief that they also have a margin of freedom: their commitment, and that of their protagonists, rests on the belief

11

Kruks, Retrieving Experience, p. 176. pp. 11–13. This is the basis on which theorists have claimed that postmodernism is detrimental to feminism. 12 Ibid.,

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that they can act to change their personal situation and to change society and its institutions. Whether or not it is appropriate to follow Kruks as far as to assert with her the value of female bodily experience for an understanding of gendered subjectivity and for a theory of effective political action is a matter for the individual reader (or writer) of the political novel. Kruks describes the development of feminist thinking on experience as follows: Earlier concepts of women’s experience presupposed the existence of relatively stable ‘core’ selves: selves that were conceived as indubitable authorities about their own experiences. By contrast, postmodern feminist theory, informed by the work of Derrida, Foucault, and others, insists that such selves and their experiences can never be other than discursive effects. The confluence of these two strands of critique, multiple-difference feminism and postmodern feminism, has put into question the continuing relevance of the concept of experience for feminism.13

Experience is a problematic notion in relation to gendered subjectivity. Kruks does not subscribe to the naïve, biological view of the sexed self as the only and the unquestionable source of gendered knowledge:14 as we have seen, she integrates a view of the discursive construction of subjectivity with an understanding of the subject in terms of embodied existence outside of discourse. Nonetheless, for Kruks, the existence of ‘commonalities of experience’15 which are outside of discourse (such as pain) do permit solidarity between similarly embodied subjects (women, for example, but also people of colour or disabled people), and are the precondition of effective political action. A text such as Valet’s Madame 60BIS suggests the value of this sort of approach to gender difference. In his review of Valet’s Madame 60BIS, Edouard Peisson asserts a fact which seems unlikely to cause contention: a man would not have written this text.16 Peisson thus invokes the criterion of gendered experience as generative of the text. And indeed, it seems that Kruks’s ‘commonalities of experience’ are operative in the reception of 13 Ibid.,

p. 132. For an account of the engagement of recent theory with the category ‘experience’, see Craig Ireland, ‘The Appeal to Experience and its Consequences’, Cultural Critique 52 (Fall 2002), 86–107. See also Scott, ‘Experience’. 15 Kruks, Retrieving Experience, p. 152. 16 Peisson, review of Madame 60BIS. 14



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this text, although we must bear in mind that Madame 60BIS is an extreme example in that it focuses so extensively on the particularity of the female body. Just as Kruks describes her visceral response to seeing a battered woman as different to her response to an injured male face,17 so too the response to Valet’s description of the doctor’s hand plunged into her body experienced by an embodied subject who has, or has had, a womb will surely be different to that of a man. A man may respond with revulsion, sympathy, even action, but this will not be an example of ‘feeling-with’.18 This is because, although sentient human beings feel mutual sympathy regardless of gender, male and female ‘lived bodies’ are both ‘differently socially located’ and ‘organized differently […] in significant ways’: that is to say, they are placed differently in relation to discourse and are biologically different.19 Now the female body is present – if minimally in some cases – in all the texts in this study, even in those which thematise commitment in terms of disembodiment: in Weiss’s abortion metaphor (Délivrance);������������������������ in Jeanette’s physical response to Guirec’s inappropriate embrace �(Où l’aube se lève);���� in Pelletier’s account of Mme Lecornu’s fatal pregnancy �(La Femme vierge);���������������������������������������������������������������� and even in Brigitte’s maternal identification with a group of women and a child �(Le Refus),����������������������������������� though this moment is immediately ruptured by class difference. However, in a text such as Le Refus, the opportunities for the sort of somatic ‘feeling-with’ which Kruks describes are so minimal that their effect on the text’s reception would be negligible. The value of Kruks’s approach in Retrieving Experience for an understanding of the inter-war political novel lies rather in her conceptualisation of subjectivity as both aware of its capacity for agency and for solidarity, and prey to the constituting powers of discourse. These are the givens of the view of subjectivity implied by the inter-war political novel. The subject of these novels is characterised neither exclusively by Enlightenment self-sufficiency (because it must, as it engages with the ontology of commitment, recognise external discursive obstacles to its assumption of belief and action) nor exclusively by postmodern or poststructuralist determinism (because it must, like the Sartrean subject, freely choose 17

Kruks, Retrieving Experience, pp. 166–67. pp. 159–60. Kruks borrows the term from Sandra Bartky’s reworking of Max Scheler’s Mitgefuhl. 19 Ibid., p. 167. 18 Ibid.,

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a course of action). The novels analysed here suggest that the role of the body in the equation is not a given but a variable: it depends on the attitude to embodiment held by both author and reader. The aims of this book have been to bring to light a valuable corpus of female-authored literature previously neglected by literary history and criticism, and to show that these texts, whilst sometimes imperfect in their realisation, have much to tell us both about women’s experience of commitment in inter-war France and about the nature and functioning of the inter-war political novel. These novels deserve to be read as rich testimonies of women’s experience of politics and of literature. Their existence disproves the widespread assumption that women made no contribution to the political novel, the mode of writing which dominated French literary production in the 1930s. A study of these novels does not, for specific historical and ideological reasons which have to do with aesthetic and political acceptability, reveal radically different ways of combining politics and literature. It rather suggests that the extent to which a text rejects narrative norms is not always an appropriate evaluative criterion for assessing women’s writing. Because of the fundamentally problematic nature of the relationship between female gender identity and politics, the novels studied here draw attention to certain features of political fiction which also constitute productive avenues of inquiry as regards the analysis of maleauthored texts, and therefore offer the possibility of a more nuanced understanding of 1930s French political literature in general. They suggest the usefulness of focusing on the ways in which texts combine a monological and a dialogical mode of presentation, on the function of legitimacy in the production and reception of the political novel, and on the conception of subjectivity presupposed by this sort of fiction. This study has shown that, in inter-war France, fiction was a fertile ground for the investigation of political identities and ideologies for the disenfranchised as well as for the enfranchised.

Bibliography Some of the inter-war articles listed below were consulted in the original source publication, some were consulted in archives, and some in both. The following abbreviations have been used to indicate that a given text is archived: BMD

Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand. This library holds dossiers on Téry, Thomas, Pelletier and Weiss, catalogued by name. BHVP Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. This library holds the Fonds Bouglé, which includes dossiers on Téry (Dossier 694), Thomas (Dossier 703), Valet (Dossier 716) and Weiss (Dossier 753) under Biographies, actualités, série 80. The BHVP also holds a Fonds Madeleine Pelletier and a collection of Pelletier’s letters to Arria Ly. (NB. Newspaper articles extracted from their original source publication and held in these archives are not always accurately dated, and page references are not always given.) Primary texts Pelletier, Madeleine, L’Amour et la maternité (Paris, undated) Pelletier, Madeleine, Le Célibat, état supérieur (Caen: Imprimerie Caennaise, undated) Pelletier, Madeleine, L’Emancipation sexuelle de la femme (Paris: Girard et Brière, 1911) Pelletier, Madeleine, Pour l’abrogation de l’article 317. Le droit à l’avortement (1913), reprinted in Felicia Gordon and Maire Cross, Early French Feminsims, 1830–1940 (Cheltenham, UK and Brookfield, US: Edward Elgar, 1996), pp. 177–83 as ‘The Right to Abortion’ Pelletier, Madeleine, L’Education féministe des filles (1914), reprinted in Felicia Gordon and Maire Cross, Early French Feminsims, 1830–1940 (Cheltenham, UK and Brookfield, US: Edward Elgar, 1996), pp. 167–77 as ‘The Feminist Education of Girls’

280

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Pelletier, Madeleine, Mon Voyage aventureux en Russie communiste (Paris: Marcel Giard, 1922, reprinted Paris: INDIGO and côté femmes, 1996) Pelletier, Madeleine, ‘Capitalisme et communisme’ (Nice, 1926). Dossier Madeleine Pelletier, BMD Pelletier, Madeleine, ‘La Morale et la loi’ (Paris, 1926). Dossier Madeleine Pelletier, BMD Pelletier, Madeleine, De la prostitution (L’Anarchie, November 1928). Dossier Madeleine Pelletier, BMD Pelletier, Madeleine, Une Vie nouvelle (Paris: Eugène Figuière, 1932) Pelletier, Madeleine, La Femme vierge (Paris: Valentin Bresle, 1933) Pelletier, Madeleine, La Rationalisation sexuelle (Paris, n.p., 1935) Pelletier, Madeleine, letters to Arria Ly, BHVP, Dossier CP 4249 (série 83, féminisme) Téry, Simone, L’Ile des bardes. Notes sur la littérature irlandaise contemporaine (Paris: Flammarion, 1925) Téry, Simone, Le Cœur volé (Paris: Denoël, 1937) Téry, Simone, ‘Eve émancipée’, Marianne, 14 April 1937, p. 18 Téry, Simone, Front de la liberté. Espagne 1937–1938 (Paris: Editions sociales internationales, 1938) Téry, Simone, Où l’aube se lève (New York: Brentano’s, 1945). Reprinted as La Porte du soleil (Paris: Editions hier et aujourd’hui, 1946, reprinted Paris: Les Editeurs françaises réunis, 1951) Thomas, Edith,����������������������������� ‘La position sentimentale’, Commune, No. 9, March–April 1934, pp. 865–70 Thomas, Edith, short text on Gorki, Commune, No. 36, August 1936, p. 1463 Thomas, Edith, Le Refus (Paris: Editions sociales internationales, 1936) Thomas, Edith, review of Henry de Montherlant’s Le Démon du bien, Commune, No. 48, August 1937, pp. 1515–16 Thomas, Edith, review of Clarisse Francillon’s Coquillage, Commune, No. 53, January 1938, p. 606 Thomas, Edith, review of Irmgard Keun’s Après minuit, Commune, No. 70, June 1939, p. 745 Thomas, Edith, Le Témoin compromis, ed. and with an introduction by Dorothy Kaufmann (Paris: Viviane Hamy, 1995) Thomas, Edith, Pages de journal, 1939–1944, ed. and with an introduction by Dorothy Kaufmann (Paris: Viviane Hamy, 1995)



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Valet, Henriette, Madame 60BIS (Paris: Grasset, 1934) Valet, Henriette, response to Aragon’s survey ‘Pour qui écrivezvous?’, Commune, No. 7–8, March–April 1934, pp. 769–70 Valet, Henriette, Le Mauvais temps (Paris: Grasset, 1937) Weiss, Louise, Délivrance (Paris: Albin Michel, 1936) Weiss, Louise, La Marseillaise, 3 vols: Vol. I – Allons, enfants de la patrie (Paris: Gallimard, 1945) Vol. II – Le Jour de gloire est arrivé (Paris: Gallimard, 1945) Vol. III – L’Etendard sanglant (Paris: Gallimard, 1947) Weiss, Louise, Sabine Legrand (Paris: Julliard, 1951, reprinted Paris: Jacques Grancher, 1981) Weiss, Louise, interview, Echo de notre temps, No. 93, 1974, pp. 32–33. Dossier Louise Weiss, BMD Weiss, Louise, Dernières voluptés (Paris: Albin Michel, 1979) Weiss, Louise, Mémoires d’une Européenne, 6 vols: Souvenirs d’une enfance républicaine (Paris: Denoël, 1937) Mémoires d’une Européenne, Tome I: 1893–1919 (Paris: Payot, 1968)����������������������������������������������������� [this text incorporates and expands the 1937 text]. Reprinted as Une petite fille du siècle, 1893–1919 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1978) Mémoires d’une Européenne, Tome II: 1919–1934 (Paris: Payot, 1969). Reprinted as Combats pour l’Europe, 1919–1934 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1979) Mémoires d’une Européenne, Tome III: 1934–1939 (Paris: Payot, 1970). Reprinted as Combats pour les femmes, 1934–1939 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1980) Le Sacrifice du chevalier, 3 septembre 1939–9 juin 1940 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1974) La Résurrection du chevalier, juin 1940–août 1944 (Paris: Albin Michel,1974) Tempête sur l’occident, 1945–1975 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976) Contemporary texts, reviews and articles Anon, ���������� rev������� iew of Passagère, L’Œuvre, 6 January 1931. Dossier Simone Téry, Fonds Bouglé, BHVP Anon, press report on La Femme nouvelle, Le Figaro,16 February 1936. Dossier ������������������������� Louise Weiss, BMD

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Anon, press report on Louise Weiss, Paris-Midi, 24 April 1936. Dossier Louise Weiss, BMD Anon, review of Délivrance, Minerva, 3 January 1937. Dossier Louise Weiss, BMD Anon, ‘C’est ��������������������������������������������������������������� l’avis des travailleurs qui compte’��������������������� [article describing Thomas’s resignation from the PCF��� ], L’Humanité, 17���������� December 1949 Aragon, Louis, Pour un réalisme socialiste (Paris: Denoël, 1935) Braunshcvig, Marcel, La Littérature française contemporaine étudiée dans les textes (Paris: Armand Colin, 1947) Constant, Etienne, ‘Madame 60BIS n’a pas tout dit’, Regards, No. 49, 11 May 1934 Dreher, S. and Rolli, M., Bibliographie de la littérature française 1930–1939 (Lille: Librairie Giard and Geneva: Librairie E. Droz, 1948) Fréville, Jean, ‘Maternité et capitalisme’, L’Humanité, 30 April 1934 Guilloux, Louis, ‘������������������������������� “������������������������������ Le Refus”, par Edith Thomas’, Ce soir, 12 March 1937 Lapierre, Marcel, ‘Un livre de femme: Madame 60BIS ’, Le Peuple, 14 March 1934. Dossier Henriette Valet, Fonds Bouglé, BHVP Larnac, Jean, Histoire de la littérature féminine en France (Paris: Éditions Kra, 1929) Nemo, Jane, review of Délivrance, La Française, 6 December 1937. Dossier Louise Weiss, Fonds Bouglé, BHVP Nizan, Paul, Les Chiens de garde (Paris: Editions Rieder, 1932) Nizan, Paul, ‘Littérature révolutionnaire en France’, La Revue des vivants, September–October 1932. Reprinted in Paul Nizan, Pour une nouvelle culture, ed. by Susan Suleiman (Paris: Grasset, 1971), pp. 33–43 Nizan, Paul, review of Drieu la Rochelle’s Socialisme fasciste and Journal d’un homme trompé, Monde, 25 January 1935. Reprinted in Paul Nizan, Pour une nouvelle culture, ed. by Susan Suleiman (Paris: Grasset, 1971), pp. 71–75 Nizan, Paul, review of Ramon ������������ Fernandez’s Les Violents, Monde, 1 August 1935. Reprinted in Paul ������������ Nizan, Pour une nouvelle culture, ed. by Susan Suleiman (Paris: Grasset, 1971), pp. 172–74 Nizan, Paul, ‘L’Œuvre d’Eugène Dabit’, L’Humanité, 6 September 1936. Reprinted in Paul Nizan, Pour une nouvelle culture, ed. by Susan Suleiman (Paris: Grasset, 1971), pp. 211–16



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Sartre, Jean-Paul, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (Paris: Gallimard, 1947���������������������������������� ), trans. by Bernard Frechtman as What is Literature? (London: Methuen, 1967) Sautman, Francesca Canadé, ‘Invisible Women: Lesbian Workingclass Culture in France, 1880–1930’ in Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan, Jr (eds.), Homosexuality in Modern France (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 177–201 Savage, Catharine, Malraux, Sartre and Aragon as Political Novelists, University of Florida Monographs: Humanities, 17 (Fall 1964) Schalk, David, The Spectrum of Political Engagement: Mounier, Benda, Nizan, Brasillach, Sartre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) Schalk, David, War and the Ivory Tower: Algeria and Vietnam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) Scott, H.G. (ed. and trans.), Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934. The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism in the Soviet Union (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977) Scott, Joan W., ‘“Experience”’ in Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (eds.), Feminists Theorize the Political (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 22–40 Scott, Joan W., Only Paradoxes to Offer. French Feminism and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1996) Scriven, Michael and Tate, Denis, European Socialist Realism (Oxford: Berg, 1988) Shepherd, David (ed.), Bakhtin, Carnival and Other Subjects: Selected Papers from the Fifth International Bakhtin Conference, University of Manchester, July 1991 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993) Shields, Rob, Lefebvre, Love and Struggle (London and New York: Routledge, 1998) Showalter, Elaine, A Literature of their Own (London: Virago, 1999; first published Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) Sledziewski, Elisabeth G., ‘L’universalité trompeuse de la Révolution de 1789’ in Gisèle Halimi (ed.), Femmes: Moitié de la terre, moitié du pouvoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp. 49–58 Smith, Paul, Feminism and the Third Republic: Women’s Political and Civil Rights in France 1918–1996 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) Smith, Paul, ‘Political Parties, Parliament and Women’s Suffrage in France, 1919–1939’, French History 11.3 (September 1997), 338–58



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Index abortion, 25, 26, 113, 116, 122, 162–63, 164, 180, 186, 191, 197, 202, 223, 227, 228, 232, 268, 277 AEAR (Association ������������������������������ des écrivains et artistes révolutionnaires)��������� , 5, 49, 53–54, 57–58, 62, 70–72, 108, 273 Alquier affair, 162 Aragon, Louis, 2, 3, 50, 56, 59, 65, 70–71, 74, 102, 218–19, 261 Audoux, Marguerite, 69 Aury, Dominique, 207 autobiography, 15, 74, 91–96, 116, 169 Avant-Poste, 14 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 221, 236–66 carnival, 221, 236–50, 256–60 and feminism, 240–41, 256 grotesque, 239–58, 261, 263–65 monologism and dialogism, 249, 270–71, 278 Barbusse, Henri, 50, 51–52, 53, 54, 62, 64, 212 Barnay, Nathalie, 212–13 Bildungsroman, 36–37, 74–81, 83, 84, 88–89, 102, 169, 170–72, 186, 270 Blum, Léon, 2, 18, 20, 30 Bourdieu, Pierre, 47, 48 Briand, Aristide, 2, 116–17 Brunschvicg, Cécile, 20, 31 Butler, Judith, 166–67, 173, 190 Cabet, Etienne, 99–100, 199 chastity, 175, 176–84, 188, 196–97, 209, 215–19 citizenship, women and, 16, 17, 23, 24, 27–28, 110–12, 120, 124–26, 131, 137, 222, 225, 227, 233 Clarté,����������� 50, 51, 59 Conseil national des écrivains�������� (CNE), 1, 2 Colette, 4, 204, 213, 214, 273–74 Commune, 5, 43–44, 57–58, 65, 70, 72, 261 Congress of Revolutionary Writers, Kharkov (1930), 50, 57, 59

Congress of Soviet Writers for the Defence of Culture, Moscow (1934), 55–56, 58, 59, 62, 63, 70, 87, 98–99 Congrès pour la défense de la culture, Paris��������������������� (1935), 62, 145, 171 contraception, 162–63, 164, 180, 190, 217, 223, 227, 232 Crevel, René, 145 de Beauvoir, Simone, 132, 223, 262 Declaration of the Rights of Man, 27–28 Decour, Jacques, 1 Doff, Neel, 69 February 1934, riots in Paris, 56–57, 90n145 fellow-travellers, 13, 51–52, 54, 62, 63, 140, 142, 173, 204, 213 First Conference of Proletarian and Revolutionary Writers, Moscow (1927), 50, 61n83 First World War, 1, 15, 17, 18, 88–89, 111, 112, 115–16, 158, 185 Foucault, Michel, 22–23, 165, 166, 183, 193–95, 234, 258, 260, 276 Fréville, Jean, 53, 54, 62, 66–68, 69 Galzy, Jeanne, 213 Gide, André, 36, 54, 59, 61–63, 94 L’Humanité, 12, 19, 50, 53, 54, 61, 66–68, 140n51, 237 Ibaruri, Dolores, 153 Istrati, Panaït, 53 journalism, 12, 15, 72–73, 85–87, 90–91, 108, 147–48, 152, 154–57 Joyce, James, 59, 88 Joliot-Curie, Irène, 20 Juppé, Alain, 30–31 Kauffmann, Caroline, 3, 180

304

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Kristeva, Julia, 240

views on femininity, 112, 142, 159, 228 see also virilisation Lacore, Suzanne, 20, 31 on genius, 11 Lapierre, Marcel, 66, 67, 68–69 ‘integral’ feminism, 11, 140, 158, 159, Lefebvre, Henri, 3, 14, 237 270 lesbianism, 104, 189, 203–14, 215 lesbianism, 208–9, 211–14 Literature of World Revolution, 50 representation of maternity, 228–32, Ly, Arria, 3, 99, 134, 209 235, 266, 277 science fiction, 12, 63, 98–99, 101 Malraux, André, 12, 37, 61–62, 63, 84, Solidarité des femmes, 179–180 86, 88, 94, 102, 153n66, 218–19, 270 utopianism, 63, 98–101, 132–33, 169, Margueritte, Victor, 163 170, 172–73, 196–98, 202, 228, maternity, 67–69, 116, 120–32, 140, 231–32 159, 162, 186, 187–88, 189–95, 197, virilisation, 97, 101, 104, 132–39, 159 202, 215–16, 221–266, 277 working class origins, 189 inter-war legislation on, 232–36 works ‘maternal thinking’, 124–26, 130–32 La Femme vierge, 11–12, 96–98, Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 58–59, 62 101, 133–39, 158–60, 172–73, Michel, Louise, 206 178–84, 188, 198, 208–9, 218, miscarriage, 250–52 277 Mouvement de liberation des femmes Une Vie nouvelle, 11, 97–101, 133, (MLF), 26 169, 170, 173, 196–98, 202–3, modernism, 45–46, 56, 58–62, 63, 208, 228–32 86–88, 168 Le Peuple, 63–64, 66, 68–69 Monde, 50, 51–52, 53, 54, 108, 273 political parties, women’s membership of, 19 Naville, Pierre, 50, 59 Popular Front, 18, 20–21, 30, 43–44, Nelken, Margarita, 153–54 56–58, 63, 71–72, 74, 76, 89, 145, Nizan, Paul, 2, 3, 4, 37, 39–40, 41, 53, 158 56–57, 74, 75, 78–79, 80, 97, 102, populism, 51, 52, 53, 257 107n1, 145, 169, 218–19 Poulaille, Henry, 3, 14, 50, 51–52, 53, 62, 63–70, 89, 95, 236, 257, 273 Orwell, George, 199 proletarian literature, 14, 49, 50–52, 53, 57, 63–70, 89, 95, 108, 128–29, pacifism, 21–22, 89, 103, 113, 117, 118, 140, 169, 170, 192, 194, 237, 238, 122–23, 124–26, 158, 210, 211, 227, 257, 273 270 pro-natalism, 161–62, 233 parity, 23–31, 110–111, 141, 222–25, psychoanalysis, 56, 59, 135–36, 168–69 234, 235–36 party literature, 52–54, 63, 80–86, 89, Rabelais, François, 221, 236–50 158, 272 and feminism, 256 Paulhan, Jean, 3, 207 inter-war interest in, 236–37 Pelletier, Madeleine, biography, 3, Gargantua, 236, 244, 245 11–12 Pantagruel, 244 views on abortion and contraception, RAPP (Russian Association of 162–63, 180, 197, 202, 232–33; Proletarian Writers), 50, 51, 52, 54 aesthetic naivety, 96–97 reportage, 12, 83–86, 169 views on chastity, 178–84, 188, revolutionary romanticism, 55, 63, 98 196–97, 215–17 Rolland, Romain, 64

roman à thèse, �������������������������� 34–36, 71, 73–74, 87, 89, 102, 104–6, 153, 169, 171, 172, 202, 214, 218–19, 269–71 romance, 80–83, 84, 88–89, 103–4, 145–49, 169, 170–72, 202, 215 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1, 46, 277–78 science fiction, 12, 63, 98–99, 101 Serge, Victor, 50 Showalter, Elaine, 104–5, 274 socialist realism, 49, 54–56, 60, 61, 62, 69, 70, 74, 80, 84, 98–99, 145n58, 237–38, 249 Soviet Union, see USSR Spanish Civil War, 3, 12–13, 80, 85–86, 147–51, 152–57, 158, 171, 199–202 suffrage, female, 17–19, 20, 23–31, 89, 102, 113, 118–20, 137, 141–42, 160, 222, 223–25, 268 surrealism, 53, 59

Index 305 involvement with AEAR and Commune, 70–72 use of Bildungsroman, 74–80, 83, 102, 169, 170–72 representation of the body, 225–26, 265 views on chastity, 175, 176–78, 183–84, 188, 209, 215–19 views on femininity, 112, 141–43, 159, 167–68, 177, 269 journalism, 72–73, 152, 154–57 lesbianism, 78n116, 204–8, 211–14 and the PCF, 140 and the Resistance, 1, 2–3, 13, 140–42, 155, 207 views on women’s writing, 75–76, 78, 141 works L’Homme criminel, 52n37 La Mort de Marie, 13 Le Refus, 13–14, 39–40, 63, 71–80, 83, 142–44, 158, 171–78, 182, 187, 188, 201, 204–8, 217, 225–26, 265, 272, 277 Le Témoin compromis, 13, 72–73, 74n109, 76, 139, 142, 151–52, 154–55, 177 Triolet, Elsa, 39n2

Téry, Gustave, 12 Téry, Simone, biography, 3, 12–13 use of Bildungsroman, 75, 80–81, 83, 84, 170–72 representation of the body, 226–27, 265–66 views on femininity, 112, 149–51, 159–60 journalism, 12, 83–87, 147–48, 154–57 USSR, 41, 50–56, 61, 62, 67, 70, 74, party literature, 63, 80–86, 89, 158, 98–99, 200, 236, 237–38, 248, 250 272 utopianism, 47, 55–56, 63, 97–101, reportage, 12, 83–86, 169 132–33, 169, 170, 172–73, 195–203, romance, 80–83, 145–49, 169, 215, 228, 231–32, 239 170–72, 202, 215 Valet, Henriette, biography, 3, 14–15 utopianism, 173, 196, 199–203, 215 views on female difference, 112, works 126–32, 139, 159 Comme les autres, 12 proletarian literature, 63–70, 89, 95, Le Cœur volé, 12, 80–83, 84, 140, 169, 170, 194, 238, 257 145–47, 149, 150, 155, 158, representation of prostitution, 171–72, 272 191–95 Front de la liberté, 12, 13, 85, 86, representation of maternity, 67–69, 149–50, 152–57, 200 140, 215–16 Où l’aube se lève, 13, 80, 83–86, see also Madame 60BIS 145, 147–51, 156–57, 158, works 171–72, 173, 199–203, 215, Madame 60BIS, 15, 16, 63–70, 82, 226–27, 277 126–32, 140, 158, 159, 170, Passagère,������ 86–88 173, 189–95, 225, 228–32, Thomas, Edith, biography, 1, 2–3, 13–14 236–66, 276–77

306

Forgotten Engagements

Le Mauvais temps, 15, 39, 140 Vaillant-Couturier, Paul, 50, 54, 70 Vernet, Madeleine, 260 Viollis, Andrée, 12 Weiss, Louise, biography, 1, 2, 15–16 use of autobiography, 15, 91–96, 116, 169 use of Bildungsroman, 88–89, 186 L’Europe nouvelle, 15, 89, 112–13, 114, 140 views on female difference, 112, 114–20, 121, 126, 137, 139, 159, 169, 184–88, 210, 215, 227–28 feminism, 103, 120, 126, 136, 141–42, 158, 160, 228 see also ����������������� La Femme nouvelle La Femme nouvelle, 2, 15, 113, 118–20, 140

individualism in writing, 63, 89–91 lesbianism, 104, 210–14 representation of maternity, 116, 120–26, 131–32, 159, 186, 187–88, 215, 227–28, 263, 266 pacifism, 89, 103, 113, 124, 158, 210, 211, 227, 270 views on nomination of women ministers, 20 works Délivrance, 15, 88–92, 104, 113–17, 120, 122–23, 126, 130, 131, 158, 169, 170, 173, 184–88, 210–11, 218, 227–28, 266, 277 Mémoires, 15, 90–96, 114, 121–22, 170 Woolf, Virginia, 9, 39, 42 Yourcenar, Marguerite, 4, 274