Eve's Proud Descendants: Four Women Writers and Republican Politics in Nineteenth-Century France (review)

Walton, Whitney. Eve's Proud Descendants: Four Women Writers and Republican Politics in Nineteenth-Century France. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000. Pp. 308. ISBN 0-8047-3754-1

Four nineteenth-century women writers defied conventional definitions of a woman's place, and all four of them stood politically on the side of the republic. How did these women negotiate the contradictions between their non-traditional gender roles and the decidedly masculine gendering of the republic? How could these independent women, successful writers all, not support equal and universal political rights for women? Whitney Walton explores these issues in her biographical and historical study of George Sand, Marie d'Agoult, Hortense Allart, and Delphine Gay de Girardin. By looking in depth at their wide-ranging writings and at the context of their lives and political views, we gain a better understanding of their political and personal choices.

The first few chapters of this study examine the biographies of the four women. Although the simultaneous study of four lives can at times be awkward - both because one takes up the thread of the life story, drops it to look at the others only to pick it up again later, and because there are inevitable repetitions of material - this technique is valuable because it allows us to compare the different developments of these women's histories and thought at similar stages in their lives. In terms of their biographies, several very interesting similarities emerge; for instance, the mothers of all four of these women married for love and chose their husbands independently and sometimes rebelliously. It seems likely that this independence on the part of their mothers had something to do with the fact that three of the women - Sand, d'Agoult, and Allart - violated conventions of respectability in their own love lives, and Girardin married very late, perhaps because of her identity as a writer. Furthermore, the parents of these women, either in their imagined constructions by the women or in reality, encouraged their daughters' individuality and did not confine them to conventional roles. Walton highlights these frequent similarities without neglecting the unique texture of each woman's life and the differences among their beliefs, works, classes - differences which occasionally seem to have come into being because they defined themselves as different from one another.

Love is understandably one of the more important topics in the lives and writings of these four women, and it is the subject of one chapter of the study. In some cases, these women write of their loves in order to defend their unconventional lives, in some cases, writing becomes a substitute for love, in other cases writing itself becomes erotic. But for all of the women, love and desire set the stage for feminist criticism of the limitations placed on women of the time, a criticism which forms the basis of their shared political ideas.

Particularly interesting is the way in which these women handled the negative stereotypes of women writers. All four of them used pseudonyms at some point in their writing careers. Walton rightly attributes this use to several different causes; to avoid using the name of their estranged husbands, to experiment with new identities, to play with readers' expectations. All four of the women both accept and directly confront the negative image of the bluestocking as an ugly, unfeminine, promiscuous woman neglectful of home duties, and they offer in its stead a positive construction of the woman writer. Their success as writers was, claims Walton, in itself feminist, because the writing disproved the supposed irrationality of women and their inability to contribute to the public sphere.

The four women came to republicanism at different times and with different philosophies of the republic. All four of them published their own political ideas, and, according to Walton, all four of them included in their republican goal of social transformation...