Damned Women: Lesbians in French Novels, 1796–1996 by Jennifer Waelti-Walters (review)

258 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 ists accepted that slavery could not be abruptly terminated in the colonies, since it was felt that the slaves would be incapable of dealing with freedom without a transitional period in which they were moralized and missionized . Some abolitionists were informed by abstract principles, while the colonists referred to their experiences of dealing with African slaves. Curiously the one abolitionist militant of African descent who was prominent in Paris, Cyrille Bissette, was distrusted by most of the abolitionist group. A contemporary engraving portrayed him with a light European complexion. Bissette was seen as an impulsive spendthrift and a liability by the genteel abolitionists. He called for immediate abolition, whereas many abolitionists were gradualists. Foreign and religious elements in the French abolitionist campaign were significant, and negative, factors. An English Quaker and some French Protestants were involved in the 1822 committee against the slave trade. The person identified as a Catholic theologian is certainly Juan Antonio Llorente, a former Spanish inquisitor who became a collaborator with the French at the time of the invasions of his country and subsequently lived for years in Paris during the Restoration, where he was the darling of the liberals. A recent book by Sheryl Kroen has shown how strong the anticlerical element was in political agitation against pious ultra-royalism. Abolitionism was resisted by Anglophobes and also by Catholic royalists hostile to Protestantism. Jennings has written a richly informative book about the pervasive conservatism of much of the French ruling elite in the nineteenth century punctuated by sudden political crises in Paris. On 27 April 1848 the abolition of colonial slavery decree was signed by all members of the provisional government that resulted from the February Revolution. (DAVID HIGGS) Jennifer Waelti-Walters. Damned Women: Lesbians in French Novels, 1796B1996 McGill-Queen=s University Press. xii, 270. $60.00, $24.95 Jennifer Waelti-Walters=s Damned Women: Lesbians in French Novels covers two hundred years of French literature (1796B1996) and over 130 novels featuring lesbian characters. Such a large corpus will appear amazing to many specialists of French literature, since most of these novels are never mentioned in books of literary history and have never been studied. Damned Women partly overlaps two preceding books: Lillian Faderman=s Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (1981) and Marie-Jo Bonnet=s Les Relations amoureuses entre les femmes du XVIe au XXe siècle (1995), in-depth contributions to feminist and lesbian research which are neither exhaustive nor up to date. Waelti-Walters=s aim is to write an all-inclusive historiography of lesbian characters, and from the start, she defines lesbians as women who HUMANITIES 259 have sexual relations with other women, a contemporary and convenient definition, since it allows her to eliminate the eighteenth-century issue of >romantic friendship= (Faderman) and focus on the theme of of bisexuality. She divides her book into three main chronological sections roughly based on two interesting notions: that of the male gaze, and that of the specificity of French history and culture. In the first part (1796B1929), the male gaze appears as a fluid concept rooted in either social power or identification with dominant ideologies concerning women=s social roles. In the eighteenth-century novel (Diderot=s La Religieuse), this gaze is mainly voyeuristic and humorous, but in the nineteenth century, it often degenerates into a contemptuous and hateful vision of lesbians, rooted in the fear of women=s autonomy: from Balzac and Baudelaire to D=Argis, Mendès, and De la Vaudère, lesbians are depicted as predatory animals, lascivious, debauched, or diseased monsters, incapable of love and competing with men in triangular relationships. Although, at the beginning of the twentieth-century, such writers as Colette, De Pougy, Vivien, Saint-Agen, Margueritte, Proust, and Lacretelle attempt to go beyond the prototypes of the male gaze of their time, lesbian love continues to be presented mostly as a perversion or an inferior short-lived diversion from heterosexuality or a totally doomed solution to women=s needs. This first part of the book, also the longest, seems to me the best, as the concept of the...