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Nineteenth Century French Studies 30.3 & 4 (2002) 382-385



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Book Review

Masculin/Féminin:
Le XIX Siècle à l'épreuve du genre


Bertrand-Jennings, Chantal, ed. Masculin/Féminin: Le XIX Siècle à l'épreuve du genre. Toronto: Centre d'Etudes du XIXe siècle Joseph Sablé, 1999. Pp. 227. ISBN 0-7727-8905-3

The collection of critical essays Masculin/Féminin offers an eloquent testimony of the continuing relevance of gender studies to our understanding of nineteenth-century French culture. Informed by different perspectives and methods, this book examines the intricate interrelations between representations of femininity, institutional authority and consecration, gender constructs and aesthetic movements. In so doing, the authors persuade us that gender relations and representations of gender do not merely offer a perspective that can be added to our understading of the cultural and [End Page 382] political developments of nineteenth-century culture, but rather contributed signi-ficantly to those transformations.

In "Prose/Poésie, Masculin/Féminin," Christine Planté studies the relations between literary genre and gender. Planté investigates how female authors, most notably Germaine de Staël in her philosophical treatise De la littérature and her novel Corinne, popularized a model of poetry which is irreducible to verse and contributed to the formation of more fluid boundaries between poetry and prose. This poetic prose was feminized in being associated with alterity and sensibility, for which women functioned as privileged models.

To appreciate the influence of gender upon Romantic aesthetics, Sandrine Raffin argues in her essay "Des Filles Réelles aux Filles Virtuelles: La Gloire des Contemplations de Victor Hugo," it is equally necessary to examine the writings of influential male authors. Most notably, Victor Hugo's fictional and poetic world, like his life, is richly populated by women. Raffin demonstrates that the author's artistic tropes and themes - his subtle erotization of Nature, his theodicy, his representation of human anguish - cannot be properly understood without an investigation of the role of images of femininity and of the profound effect of women (such as his daughter, Léopoldine) upon the author's life, poetry and fiction.

In "Femme-auteur et Réflexivité: Madame de Genlis," Jeanne Goldin provides a context for understanding the contributions of female authors to nineteenth-century literature. Using Madame de Genlis - an author of conduct books, memoirs and novels - as her symptomatic example, Goldin exposes the precariousness of women's position in their role as public authors who ostensibly endorsed traditional models of femininity. Expanding upon this subject, Megan Burnett's essay "Prescrire la Femme: Stratégies et Autorités Narratives dans les Textes Prescriptifs du Dix-Neuvième Siècle" couples the theoretical approach of Gilbert and Gubar with a careful linguistic analysis to show how nineteenth-century female authors struggled to attain a delicate balance between respectability and influence.

Aesthetic movements stimulate ideological and political shifts perhaps as much as they are affected by them. In the chapter entitled "Masculin/Féminin: Codes de l'Honneur dans Olivier ou le secret de Claire de Duras," Chantal Bertrand-Jennings performs a literary analysis of de Duras's novel. Placing Olivier in the tradition of psychological novels such as Mme de LaFayette's La Princesse de Clèves and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse, Bertrand-Jennings examines how the novel reshapes both the aristocratic and the republican models of honor to create a broader, more feminine, understanding of honor as a form of Romantic sensibility.

According to Aristotle's poetics, the ending of a narrative tells us much about its possible meanings. Anna Rosner, in "Clôture et Ouverture: Le Refus de Mariage dans La Princesse de Clèves de Mme de LaFayette et Lavinia de George Sand," takes this assumption as a point of departure for her analysis of how the conclusions of these two novels, which thematize women's independence and refusal of marriage, offer a social critique of existing institutions and provide new ways of envisioning a valuable life for women. [End Page 383]

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