The Notorious Life of Gyp, Right-Wing Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle France (review)

186 SHOFAR Fall 1996 Vol. 15, No. 1 motivations behind such strategies, Michael Bernstein also helps us better understand ourselves. Norman Ravvin Department of English University of Toronto The Notorious Life of Gyp, Right-Wing Anarchist in Fin-de-Siecle France, by Willa Z. Silverman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. 325 pp. $35.00. Before she died in her Neuilly mansion, amid faded furniture, knickknacks, and cats, subsisting largely on orange juice, Sibylle-Gabrielle Marie Antoinette Riquetti de Mirabeau, countess of Martel de ]oinville (1849-1932), had, under the pseudonym "Gyp," been one ofher country's most well-known female writers. The 83-year-old woman, her daughter said, approached the end calling "for death with all her soul. " Gyp's fame rested on a fantastic output of over 100 novels, 20 plays, four volumes of memoirs, countless articles, and piles of letters of correspondence. Although much ofthis now was considered old fashioned, "outdated Lalique" was how one critic phrased it, Gyp did not die forgotten. Most Parisian dailies announced her passing with front-page articles, and a Who's Who from France's literary, political, and intellectual elite showed up at her funeral, including Andre Maurois, Paul Valery, Alexandre Millerand, Gabriel Hanotaux, and Marshal Lyautey. In many respects, Gyp's life was more interesting than her fictitious creations. Born during the ill-fated brief Second Republic, she grew to adolescence under the Second Empire, and lived most of her life under the Third Republic, a regime for which she felt the utmost contempt., But her real enemy, although she did not acknowledge it, was the ~ale­ dominated society whose institutions limited and defined her role. Willa Silverman observes: Most of her later life and works would involve the pursuit, internalization, and reconstruction of specific models of authority and masculinity, personified by her father and grandfather and epitomized by Napoleon. Gabrielle would project these personal fantasies onto the national plane. . . . Striving to combat a perceived "feminization" of France, she would campaign actively to restore to her country the type of "male" authority,she felt lacking in her own life. Book Reviews 187 Such a fight she was bound to lose. However, the struggle often led her, into extreme and reprehensible directions. The novels that brought her fame, especially those produced in the 188Os, were mostly satirical observations on bourgeois society, albeit shon on character development and weak in narrative. She wrote them in playlike structure (the dialogue-novel), a non-demandingbits-and-pieces format which her middle-class clientele appreciated because the works could be read rapidly and left no unpleasant aftenaste. Her themes were discreetly anti-materialistic and anti-modernist, frequently containing attacks on the corruption of Republican politicians. Sometimes there was antisemitism, reflecting a growing rightist and Catholic tendency to blame the Jews for everything wrong with the country. For example, her mentor Edouard Drumont in his best-selling diatribe La France juive (Jewish France) (1886), castigated the Jews for the collapse ofthe ancien regime, the loss ofthe war to the Prussians in 1871, and all current problems with the economy. Drumont's antisemitism accelerated and inspired a rash oflike pamphlets, books, and anicles from other writers, Gyp included. According to Silverman, Gyp's antisemitism stemmed in pan from her simultaneous embrace and condemnation of power which was rooted in her ambivalence towards gender. The Jewish scapegoat of her invention was a dual symbol of her impotence as a woman ... the most violent manifestation of her hatred ofall "oppressors." ... It was a measure of her acute sense of marginality as a woman, an aristocrat, and a writer trying to eke out a living in a competitive market. Silverman views her subject as the product of a hypercritical, hateful mother, an absentee father, and a devoted grandfather to whom she was erotically attached. The contention is cenainly provocative and may even sound reasonable, but given the absence of psychological documentation it must remain conjecture. Less doubt, though, exists of the contribution that Gyp made to the popular stereotyping ofJews as avaricious, smelly, ignorant, and treacherous . Gyp's antisemitism was racial and visceral, and the older she got the more intransigent it' became. During the Dreyfus affair she described...