Since Elaine Showalter's proposal of "gynocriticism", a considerable amount of
work has been done in English-speaking countries to establish the existence o f a "female
tradition" in literature. In France, where feminist critics have focussed on new ways "to
write the feminine", there has been relatively little interest in reexamining the production
of lesser-known women writers. The canon of French literature remains comparatively
unchallenged, and few people are aware o f the many women who wrote at the beginning
of the twentieth century. This dissertation is a contribution to the rereading of three of
such authors, looking at the representation of femininity in relation to feminism. Three
novels, one by Sidonie Gabrielle Colette, one by Marcelle Tinayre and one by Lucie
Delarue-Mardrus. The careers of these "femmes de lettres", all established before World
War I, were comparable, yet two o f them have been forgotten.
These novelists remained ambivalent in relation to feminist efforts at that time to
achieve the emancipation o f women. Despite their own relative freedom and lack of
conformity in their lives, and the criticism o f established norms embedded in their
narratives, all three kept their distance from feminism as a movement. The three texts
compared here all have conservative endings, in spite of other elements that challenge the
status quo. A t the core of their ambiguity is the tension between two concepts which
remain in conflict today: on one hand the feminist agenda aimed at greater freedom and
autonomy for women is based on the idea that gender roles are constructed, whereas on
the other hand the concept of femininity is inseparable from the idea of an "essential"
woman, represented, in the early 1900's in France by a particular nationalist concept of
the French Woman. A close look at critical texts published in the first part o f the
twentieth century shows the weight of that concept in the evaluation o f women's writing
of that period. The growth in the number and reputation o f women writers ("femmes de
lettres") was accompanied by a declaration o f the need to maintain French femininity
("l'etre femme"), and individual women authors like Colette, Delarue-Mardrus and
Tinayre were caught in a dilemma.
They all proclaimed their allegiance to the French ideal of femininity, while
contributing to its denial and renewal by their own performance as successful women
writers. Their representation of femininity as performed in their novels (as it was in their
lives) shows the various ways in which it was possible to negociate a compromise
between being feminine and challenging that concept through writing. These texts also
demonstrate that women's literary production of that period in France is far more
diversified than standard anthologies of French literature would lead us to believe.
Colette appeals to reader's senses and aims to seduce, Tinayre appeals to reason and aims
to convince, while Delarue-Mardrus appeals to the emotions and aims to move. All three,
combine the "feminine" and the "feminist" in different ways, constructing literary models
that represent a range of responses to a similar problem: how to remain a woman while
contesting the notion of "woman".
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/13481 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Collado, Mélanie Elmerenciana |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | French |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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