Forgotten Engagements: Women, Literature and the Left in 1930s France (review)

This meticulously researched and lucidly argued monograph aims to rescue from oblivion five politically committed French women writers of the 1930s: Madeleine Pelletier, Simone Téry, Edith Thomas, Henriette Valet and Louise Weiss. As Kershaw admits, their works have previously received scant critical attention. Whereas the existing research on women in the inter-war period in France has concentrated either on politics or on literature, Kershaw’s critical lens is bifocal. Within the intersection of politics and literature, she scrutinizes the literature of commitment, or littérature engagée, which hitherto has collectively been envisioned as a masculine preserve. Brief biographical sketches of the five women in question helpfully situate them in their socio-cultural as well as their (left-wing) political specificities. The first chapter deftly synthesizes the existing historical studies of women in politics in 1930s France. Each of the remaining four chapters interrogates a varying number of primary texts presumably deemed typical by Kershaw of the field of women’s literary–political writings in 1930s France. Since little sense of that field’s broader contours is provided, it remains unclear just how representative the chosen texts actually are. However, on their own terms, Kershaw’s analyses of her nine chosen texts are probing and cogent. The axes of enquiry for Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 are, respectively, gender and genre; fictional representations of female commitment; politics and female sexuality; politics and the maternal body. The critical apparatus mobilized is diverse, including not just the many avatars of feminist theory one might expect but also such thinkers as Bakhtin and Foucault. In each case, Kershaw’s control and marshalling of her critical tools are impressive. Her range is unusually wide, for she combines the expertise of the historian with that of the literary and cultural studies theorist. I only have one criticism of her study, and this relates to the instability of the signifier–signified relation with respect to the word ‘political’ and its cognates. While the bulk of her monograph tends to use the word ‘political’ to denote or at the very least connote the concretely institutional and the party-political, Chapter 5, which engages extensively with Bakhtin’s discourse on carnival and the grotesque body, uses ‘political’ in the far more abstract sense of that which is pertinent to power relations generally. The argument that, in depiction of the proletarian pregnant woman, ‘Valet’s grotesque carnival imagery is political because it has the power to demystify, and therefore to open the floodgates of revolution’ (p. 261) fails to convince because Kershaw provides no evidence of any such opening of revolutionary floodgates, either in the diegesis of Valet’s novel Madame 60^BIS (1934) or in the extra-diegetical world of the text’s reception. Thus, while Chapter 5 widens the referential scope of the word ‘political’, it sits uneasily with its neighbours. Admittedly, what for this reader is a diminution of macro-coherence might well prove for others to be a welcome extension of exegetical scope. What is in no doubt is the high intellectual calibre of Kershaw’s monograph overall.