Women writing in contemporary France

72 Rewriting the past
la mort de son père et à un degré moindre – maman, je t’aime! – celle de sa
mère’ (La Fille du Gobernator, p.94) (‘She wanted her father dead and,
though less (Mummy, I love you!), her mother too’ (The Governor’s
Daughter, p.72)). If the effects on Tiffany, Chrétienne and Aurore of the
losses they suffer (of animals, people, places) are interpreted through the
lens of Kleinian thought as repeated reworkings of the original infantile
position, then Aurore’s epiphanic memory of her mother’s face at the end
of Confidence pour confidence suggests that, ultimately, she attains effective
mourning. To remember is creative; indeed, in the context of mourning, it
is reparative. To be able to remember is evidence that grieving is giving way
to successful mourning, and that the process of restoring the lost loved one
in the bereaved psyche has begun. 7
Klein argues that artistic production (including writing) can be part of
this reparative process. It is highly significant then that Constant’s Aurore
is a writer. In Confidence pour confidence, writing is undoubtedly part of the
way in which Aurore works through the process of mourning. But how and
why does actual rememoration finally come about? At the very end of
Confidence pour confidence, the new man in Aurore’s life brings her a chimp
from his zoo and it is at this very point that Aurore is able to break through
the veil obstructing her memory and to picture her mother’s face. The
presence of the chimp is highly pertinent, since it was Aurore’s mother
who gave her Délice, the pet chimpanzee of her childhood. None the less,
this moment of rememoration at the very end of Confidence pour confidence
is the culmination of a long process in Aurore’s psychological development,
and thus it is also important to look more closely at what comes
before.
It is true that bitter rivalries characterise relations between the women
in Confidence pour confidence. This novel certainly does not offer an idealised
portrayal of a feminist sisterhood. If Aurore’s surname (Amer) connotes
a return to the mother, it also signifies bitterness; Babette and Gloria
detest each other; Lola loathes women in groups; Gloria is in the process
of plagiarising one of Aurore’s novels: purporting to translate and summarise
it, she is making a collage of it and passing it off as a book of her own
authorship. Gloria also assumes a mothering role vis-à-vis the other
women, with all the resulting ambivalences that surround real
mother–daughter relations. On the other hand, however, the confidences
the four women exchange during the morning they spend together mean
that they reveal to each other something of the pain of the private selves
behind their public identities: despite their mutual dislike, Gloria puts her