Women writing in contemporary France

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Escalle’s tales of transgression 219 which Renée’s mother is torturing her by disembowelling her with a knife, an experience which the child experiences as an almost sexual ‘ecstasy’ (p. 7). Renée returns to this scene later, when she ‘offers’ her ageing body to her dead mother and muses in chillingly eucharistic overtones: ‘Tu cherches dans le sang et le corps de ta fille l’idée que tu te faisais de l’amour, de l’enfance, de la maternité’ (p. 137) (You seek in the blood and the body of your daughter your idea of what love, childhood and maternity should be). In Où est-il cet amour, Anne is often locked in a wardrobe for long periods of time – according to her mother, for ‘educational’ purposes, so that she learns about ‘the vicissitudes of life’ (p. 10). Her mother hurts her physically when punishing her, yet it is in the wardrobe, cramped and howling that Anne has her first erotic experiences (pp. 10–11). The novels suggest clearly that the ‘perverse’ and self-abusive sexualities of the women characters are formed in childhood, notably in relationship to (and against) cruel mothers who withhold love. However, one must avoid the temptation of thinking simplistically that Escalle’s mothers are responsible – and blamed – for their daughters’ adult perversities. As Bataille has affirmed, eroticism ‘is the problematic part of ourselves’ (p. 273). Much more than her men, who conform to stereotypical norms of dominant male heterosexual behaviour, Escalle’s women live out unconventional and challenging sexualised lives – because that is how they are. Psychoanalytical and psychological theories and models can aid us to understand the context in which they live and submit, but they are not sufficient, since we are dealing here with fictions, which have meaning on their own terms, rather than as narrations of psychodramas. Foucault has persuasively argued that in Sade, ‘sex is without any norm or intrinsic rule that might be formulated from its own nature’. 17 I would not argue that Escalle is a Sadean woman in any simplistic way, in that her expository scrutiny of ‘perverse’ sexual practices and sexualities has more to do with the (inner and social) politics of identity than with the philosophy of being. However, it is undeniable that she is a transgressive writer in the sense that she chooses to write about subjects that are surrounded by taboos and moral interdictions. Her novels involve complex personal relationships between people who are emotionally damaged, psychologically unstable and sexually disturbed. At least, that is how we may initially judge them. Yet the reader is drawn into these fictional worlds as if they are quite normal – and certainly the novels present them as such. Escalle deals with the very real problems of abuse, exploitation, emotional inadequacy, violence and ‘perverse’ sexuality. However, in reality, these
220 Transgressions and transformation issues are all too often marginalised, relegated to specialised discourses or simply not discussed at all, or, at worst, criminalised. Escalle’s work confronts the oppressive power of the normal by saying – simply, directly – that another world, another way of living, is (also) normal, one in which the marginal, the silenced and the occulted become mainstream and are posited as the ‘norm’. As a creator of fictions, Escalle can and does establish her universe with authority, in a prose which is clear, confident and focused. These novels do not request understanding; they state and so compel acceptance, even if only at the time of their reading. The media have been unjust to Escalle in over-rapidly compartmentalising her as one of the ‘new barbarians’. Her work is best seen as belonging in the long tradition of exploration of the erotic and of the self ’s relationship with it that in France is associated especially with such names as Sade and Bataille. However, as her discourse itself reveals, explicitly or intertextually, the engagement is also with psychoanalysis, with Christianity, and with the problematics of post-colonialism. These works are very modern; they also speak of issues which are in us all, but which society silences for its own reasons of control. To read Escalle is not a pleasurable experience, that is certain. However, both intellectually and emotionally, it is immensely challenging and enriching to read her novels which successfully dare to give voice to the silenced and to open the horizons of the blinkered. Notes 1 See Didier Jacob, ‘Les nouveaux barbares’, in Le Nouvel Observateur, 1816 (26 August 1999), http://archives.nouvelobs.com/. 2 See Isabelle Falconnier, L’Hébdo, 35 (2 September 1999), www.webdo.ch/ hebdo/hebdo_1999/hebdo_35/culture2_35.html. 3 See Damien Le Guay, ‘Rentrée féminine?’, France Catholique, 2714 (12 November 1999), pp. 22–3. 4 Hélène Cixous, Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva, ed., trans. and introd. Verena Andermatt Conley (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), p. 112. 5 Hélène Cixous, ‘The last painting or the portrait of God’, in ‘Coming to Writing’ and Other Essays, introd. Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed. Deborah Jenson, trans. Sarah Cornell, Deborah Jenson et al. (Cambridge, MA and London; Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 119. 6 Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s time’, trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, in Toril Moi (ed.) The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 187–213 (p. 209). 7 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 5.
Page 2:
WOMEN’S WRITING IN CONTEMPORARY F
Page 5 and 6:
Copyright © Manchester University
Page 7 and 8:
vi Contents 10 Saying the unsayable
Page 9 and 10:
viii Contributors SHIRLEY JORDAN is
Page 11 and 12:
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to t
Page 13 and 14:
2 Introduction introduce to English
Page 15 and 16:
4 Introduction became more and more
Page 17 and 18:
6 Introduction French ‘difference
Page 19 and 20:
8 Introduction essential issues to
Page 21 and 22:
10 Introduction Indeed, much contem
Page 23 and 24:
12 Introduction phototextual projec
Page 25 and 26:
14 Introduction about the body or e
Page 27 and 28:
16 Introduction European Union) has
Page 29 and 30:
18 Introduction Béatrice de Jurque
Page 31 and 32:
20 Introduction and the group, the
Page 33 and 34:
22 Introduction Feminist Perspectiv
Page 35 and 36:
24 Introduction Barthes, Image, Mus
Page 37 and 38:
26 Introduction 33 This is a wider
Page 40 and 41:
1 VICTORIA BEST Louise L. Lambrichs
Page 42 and 43:
Lambrichs: trauma, dream and narrat
Page 44 and 45:
Page 46 and 47:
Page 48 and 49:
Page 50 and 51:
Page 52 and 53:
Page 54 and 55:
Memory and identity in Redonnet’s
Page 56 and 57:
Page 58 and 59:
Page 60 and 61:
Page 62 and 63:
Page 64 and 65:
3 KATHRYN ROBSON The female vampire
Page 66 and 67:
Chawaf ’s melancholic autofiction
Page 68 and 69:
Page 70 and 71:
Page 72 and 73:
Page 74 and 75:
Page 76 and 77:
4 GILL RYE Lost and found: mother-d
Page 78 and 79:
Mother-daughter relations in Consta
Page 80 and 81:
Page 82 and 83:
Page 84 and 85:
Page 86 and 87:
Page 88 and 89:
5 ELIZABETH FALLAIZE Puzzling out t
Page 90 and 91:
Sibylle Lacan’s Un père 79 for o
Page 92 and 93:
Sibylle Lacan’s Un père 81 attac
Page 94 and 95:
Sibylle Lacan’s Un père 83 Howev
Page 96 and 97:
Sibylle Lacan’s Un père 85 fathe
Page 98 and 99:
Sibylle Lacan’s Un père 87 other
Page 100 and 101:
Sibylle Lacan’s Un père 89 propr
Page 102:
II Writing the dynamics of identity
Page 105 and 106:
94 Writing the dynamics of identity
Page 107 and 108:
Page 109 and 110:
Page 111 and 112:
100 Writing the dynamics of identit
Page 113 and 114:
Page 115 and 116:
Page 117 and 118:
7 SARAH ALYN STACEY ‘On ne s’en
Page 119 and 120:
Page 121 and 122:
Page 123 and 124:
Page 125 and 126:
Page 127 and 128:
Page 129 and 130:
8 GILL RYE Textual mirrors and unce
Page 131 and 132:
Page 133 and 134:
Page 135 and 136:
Page 137 and 138:
Page 139 and 140:
Page 141 and 142:
9 SIOBHAN MCILVANNEY The articulati
Page 143 and 144:
Page 145 and 146:
Page 147 and 148:
Page 149 and 150:
Page 151 and 152:
Page 153 and 154:
10 SHIRLEY JORDAN Saying the unsaya
Page 155 and 156:
Page 157 and 158:
Page 159 and 160:
Page 161 and 162:
Page 163 and 164:
Page 166:
III Transgressions and transformati
Page 169 and 170:
158 Transgressions and transformati
Page 171 and 172:
Page 173 and 174:
Page 175 and 176:
Page 177 and 178:
Page 179 and 180: 168 Transgressions and transformati
Page 193 and 194: 13 MARGARET-ANNE HUTTON ‘Il n’y
Page 229: 218 Transgressions and transformati
Page 233 and 234: GILL RYE AND MICHAEL WORTON Conclus
Page 235 and 236: 224 Conclusion bi-cultural selves o
Page 237 and 238: INDIVIDUAL AUTHOR BIBLIOGRAPHY Chri
Page 239 and 240: 228 Individual author bibliography
Page 261 and 262: GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY Abraham, Nicol
Page 263 and 264: 252 General bibliography Cottenet-H
Page 265 and 266: 254 General bibliography Irigaray,
Page 267 and 268: 256 General bibliography Roudinesco
Page 269 and 270: INDEX Literary works can be found u
Page 271 and 272: 260 Index fiction(s) (cont.) detect
Page 273: 262 Index Sebbar, Leïla (cont.) Pa
show all

Women writing in contemporary France

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?