Des femmes en littérature (review)

In Des femmes en littérature, Martine Reid seeks to contribute to our scholarly understanding of the gendered nature of literature written by women in France. She reminds us that French women have been both writing and publishing since the Middle Ages. Their existence as producers of literature is not in question. In fact, Reid points to a large body of scholarly work devoted to the study of French women's writing. Nonetheless, she cautions that women's place in overarching descriptions of literary history and in collective memory is still problematic: regardless of the large numbers of texts they produced, relatively few women writers are typically represented today in university curricula or in scholarly reflections on literature. Reid explains this absence by hypothesizing a systematic erasure of women's literary contributions. She argues that during the mid- to late-nineteenth century, male critics capitalized on widely-accepted ideas of gender to marginalize progressively and eventually erase the works of women authors from literary history. Reid adopts a two-fold corrective approach to re-thinking women's place in the literary historical record. She first explores the reception of women authors after the Revolution and then analyzes a variety of post-revolutionary women's novels. Throughout the text, she convincingly argues that women's writing is always "singulière;" each text should be approached as a unique literary creation, not reductively categorized under a monolithic label.

The first part of her book, "Discours," aims to sketch a history of the reception of post-revolutionary women authors and to highlight the obstacles facing them as they embarked upon literary careers. In her first chapter, "Défenses et illustrations," Constance Pipelet, Germaine de Staël, and Félicité de Genlis serve as examples of the various ways in which women writers defended their own involvement in literary pursuits given the social constraints of gender. In chapter two, "Bas-bleus," Reid turns her attention to pictorial representations of women writers in the nineteenth century. She examines criticism of the bas-bleu in the illustrations of Jules Janin, Frédéric Soulié, and Honoré Daumier. For her, these images represent commonly held perceptions of women writers as a threat to social order because of their perceived transgression or rejection of socially accepted gender roles, especially those of wife and mother. By creating laughable images of women authors, caricaturists took the first step in what Reid views as a process aimed at erasing women's literary contributions. The third chapter, "À Titre d'hommage," examines works by Sainte-Beuve and Lamartine to illustrate further the nineteenth century's growing hostility toward women's literary involvement. At the end of part one, Reid turns to the field of literary history, to demonstrate definitively the existence of a slow process aimed at expunging women writers from the French literary record. She shows how, by the end of the nineteenth century, women writers had been successfully relegated to the margins of literary history. For Reid, the effects of the process are felt even today: although a significant number of Anglophone and Francophone scholars have excavated and explored many forgotten works, women authors have been only weakly integrated into the broad scope of literary history and have yet to occupy their true place.

In the second half of her book, "Fictions," Reid turns to literary texts, primarily novels, to illustrate the ways in which gender affected women's literary production. By using gender as a critical lens, Reid hopes to begin the process of fully integrating women's writing into the literary historical record. Before beginning her in-depth textual analyses, she explores the implications of publication for women. Then, she examines and questions the common association of women with the novel, suggesting that persistent association of women with the genre was yet another effort to keep women on the margins of literature. In chapters seven through twelve, Reid carefully analyzes novels of varying lengths by a diverse selection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers. Her goal is to reveal the extreme...