Rebelles et criminelles chez les écrivaines d’expression française ed. by Frédérique Chevillot et Colette Trout (review)

In this edited collection Frédérique Chevillot and Colette Trout embark on an ambitious project to illustrate the transgressive aspect of a range of women’s writing in French from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century in terms of reading, writing, and the contexts in which these activities take place. The volume’s strength lies in its clear structure, with an overarching Introduction leading to fifteen chapters, five of which are in English, and forming a chronological and rich thematic narrative across three sections: ‘La Lente Rébellion des femmes à travers les siècles’, ‘La Résistance des femmes aux violences coloniales et postcoloniales’, and ‘Du récit du meurtre à l’écriture qui tue’. The authors discussed range from Marguerite de Navarre to Virginie Despentes. ‘Rebellion’, ‘resistance’, and ‘violence’ are leitmotifs, interweaving with strands of patriarchy and colonialism, whose pernicious effects are seen to be exercised not only via male perpetrators but also by ‘enlisted’ female protagonists prepared to do violence to their daughters or sisters, particularly if the latter have transgressed social, patriarchal, or religious norms, as in works by Madame de Laisse. For Joyce Mansour and Anne Hébert the punished female (body) finds its survival by way of her/its own acts of violence, while for others, such as Catherine Klein, the violence of their altérité serves to preserve their specificity. Elsewhere, murder committed by women is often perpetrated on the loved one, as mise à mort/a-mour for Amélie Nothomb, or yet via the virilization of the heroine as a form of deviance in Virginie Despentes, finding a new interpretative framework for the taboo of female violence. If to write violence is to voice it, this voice can nonetheless be ventriloquized or silenced, as demonstrated by Marie-Célie Agnant in the case of appropriated Caribbean women’s voices; here the only available solution to the perpetuation of the dual silencing by male and colonial enslavement is seen as infanticide. This is contrasted with examples of the empowering bravado of criminal, liberating ‘madness’, with the text serving as a vehicle of transgression for Calixthe Beyala, and for Leila Marouane, a legitimate form of revenge for violence suffered. This wide-ranging yet coherent compilation, which could have further been enhanced by the inclusion of a composite bibliography and/or index, reveals writing as a contentious and rebellious act — the weapon wielded by the women writers in order to excavate hideous and violent truths — while simultaneously suggesting the empowerment of women’s violence. When, in many parts of the globe, women’s — in particular young women’s — access to the written word still has life-threatening implications, the volume presents in graphic terms the uncomfortable truths surrounding violence against women and of women. Consonant with the depiction of Judith and Holofernes on the book’s cover, the message of this collection is that women, via pen or tablette and however controversially, must continue to take up the sword of the written word. The volume’s pertinence extends far beyond the francophone world treated here.