Women writing in contemporary France

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Gender and narrative in three novels by Baroche 123 keeper, is also ‘un peu féminin’ (slightly feminine) – sensitive, a dreamer, passive. In La Rage au bois dormant, the mirroring motif works rather differently. While, in L’Hiver de beauté, it is as if Queria and Isabelle each have different sides of the same face, so it is, in La Rage au bois dormant, that the two principal women characters, Adèle and Judith, manifest two different sides of women’s identity. Similar pairings are to be found elsewhere in Baroche’s novels – in Isabelle and her sister Madeleine in L’Hiver de beauté and in the sisters Marthe and Magdelène in Les Ports du silence.In La Rage au bois dormant, Adèle, first a prostitute, then a wife and mother, is largely passive and unquestioning. For example, she remains blissfully ignorant of her husband’s illegal business activities until long after his death. This is all the more surprising since, not only was the couple forced to flee to South America because of it, but also Adèle herself is a real gossip – at least as far as other people are concerned. Judith, on the other hand, is a passionate, independent and active woman: also a wife and mother, she is, however, first a committed resistance fighter, and then a successful business woman, her work and her love of horses sustaining her in the face of repeated tragedy. None the less, the relationship between the two women ultimately complicates any straightforward mirroring structure and works against the fixing of their identities,as it becomes clear that gossip,fantasy and embroidered memories are part and parcel of the life stories that are being told within the diegesis. Adèle does not really know much about Judith; the stories she tells are attempts to save her own life story from the failing memory of old age; they are one set of stories among many possible stories, the many possible narratives of what it means ‘to be a woman’. It is in (hetero)sexual politics that the radical potential of the gender identities suggested in Baroche’s novels can be seen most clearly. Heterosexuality has long been critiqued as a normative institution by various forms of feminism and more recently by queer theory, 8 but contemporary feminist analyses of heterosexuality itself that take on board changing practices and the diversity within it have been fewer. 9 Sexual politics are a key determinant of individual heterosexual relations and the ways in which gender identities are lived in turn impact on social and sexual relations between men and women. In Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses,Mme de Merteuil is a female Don Juan, and thus, for a while at least, reverses traditional sexual politics. Baroche’s novels go further, and, rather than simply reversing the binary oppositions man/woman, masculine/feminine, active/passive, they disrupt them, as we have seen, and relationships
124 Writing the dynamics of identity between men and women go against the grain. Leaving behind the rigid etiquette and hierarchies of French court society (Les Liaisons dangereuses) and the conventions and proprieties of bourgeois Rotterdam (L’Hiver de beauté), Isabelle and the man she loves (Armand-Marie) will, it is intimated in the latter novel, develop their relationship, each on their own terms. A new life in the New World, to where they are bound at the end of the eighteenth century, functions as a promise of different possibilities for living out both social and sexual relations. Similarly, in the same novel, Queria embarks on her own love affair (with Barney) at the same time as she embarks on a whole new way of life. She flies to South America to be with him, but this is no romantic walk into the sunset, since, before leaving, she makes firm plans for a new career on her return. The couple’s rendez-vous on the beach at Rio problematises romantic clichés further. Each enjoying their solitude, they defer the moment of their meeting which in romantic genres would have been a conventional ‘happy end’ in itself. Queria wants Barney to love her, ‘mais pas trop’, to be there, ‘mais pas trop’ (p. 289) (but not too much). The sexual politics between Barney and Queria that are sketched out in Baroche’s novel are thus sufficient to signal that their relationship will not conform to conventional patriarchal formulas, but the way in which this is to be lived out is not actually represented in the novel. It is left for the reader to work with the pointers in the text. Les Ports du silence arguably gives its readers a little more practical detail on the subject of heterosexual sexual politics. The relationship between Jaime and Elodie is suffused with silence and mutual respect: ‘je reste où je suis, je ne franchis pas sa frontière. . .’ (p. 82) (I stay where I am, I don’t invade her territory. . .). They are ‘deux solitudes’ (p. 254) (two solitary people), a ‘fils’ and a ‘fille du vent’ (pp. 127, 207) (son and daughter of the wind), independent, with different lives, different desires. Jaime loves Elodie for her vitality, for the life she has in her; Elodie, in turn, will love Jaime ‘une fois pour toutes’ (p. 254) (once and for all). They love but they do not need – each other, anyone. Again, here, there is little explicit detail, but there is no sense given in the text that they depend on each other for anything. None the less, they have a child; Jaime leaves and returns; they have another child; but never do they constitute a conventional nuclear family. Although it is Jaime who goes away to work and Elodie who stays behind, a situation that may, on the face of it, seem to reinforce conventional gender roles, this arrangement is none the less open to positive feminist readings. In fact, the traditional male/female split between active and
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WOMEN’S WRITING IN CONTEMPORARY F
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Copyright © Manchester University
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vi Contents 10 Saying the unsayable
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viii Contributors SHIRLEY JORDAN is
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to t
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2 Introduction introduce to English
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4 Introduction became more and more
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6 Introduction French ‘difference
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8 Introduction essential issues to
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10 Introduction Indeed, much contem
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12 Introduction phototextual projec
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14 Introduction about the body or e
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16 Introduction European Union) has
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18 Introduction Béatrice de Jurque
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20 Introduction and the group, the
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22 Introduction Feminist Perspectiv
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24 Introduction Barthes, Image, Mus
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26 Introduction 33 This is a wider
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1 VICTORIA BEST Louise L. Lambrichs
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Lambrichs: trauma, dream and narrat
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Memory and identity in Redonnet’s
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3 KATHRYN ROBSON The female vampire
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Chawaf ’s melancholic autofiction
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4 GILL RYE Lost and found: mother-d
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Mother-daughter relations in Consta
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Page 88 and 89: 5 ELIZABETH FALLAIZE Puzzling out t
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Page 102: II Writing the dynamics of identity
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Page 117 and 118: 7 SARAH ALYN STACEY ‘On ne s’en
Page 129 and 130: 8 GILL RYE Textual mirrors and unce
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Page 141 and 142: 9 SIOBHAN MCILVANNEY The articulati
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Page 166: III Transgressions and transformati
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174 Transgressions and transformati
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13 MARGARET-ANNE HUTTON ‘Il n’y
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GILL RYE AND MICHAEL WORTON Conclus
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224 Conclusion bi-cultural selves o
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INDIVIDUAL AUTHOR BIBLIOGRAPHY Chri
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228 Individual author bibliography
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GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY Abraham, Nicol
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252 General bibliography Cottenet-H
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254 General bibliography Irigaray,
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256 General bibliography Roudinesco
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INDEX Literary works can be found u
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260 Index fiction(s) (cont.) detect
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262 Index Sebbar, Leïla (cont.) Pa
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Women writing in contemporary France

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