Mothers of Invention: Feminist Authors and Experimental Fiction in France and Quebec (review)

In this exhaustive and well-documented study, Miléna Santoro analyses selected novels by four francophone feminist writers, two of whom hail from France, and two from Quebec: Hélène Cixous, Madeleine Gagnon, Nicole Brossard, and Jeanne Hyvrard. As considerable attention has already been devoted to the theoretical and philosophical issues surrounding French feminism, Santoro chooses to concentrate on the fictional writings of these four authors, who share 'similar political, ethical, and aesthetic goals with virtually identical creative strategies.' Postulating the existence of a transatlantic feminist community during the 1970s, Santoro claims that these women's experimental works constitute the final chapter of twentieth-century avant-garde writing. The focus of her analysis is on the mother figure, the representation of maternity, and the subversive use of language in the complex, original novels under scrutiny. The 'mothers of invention' announced in the title are multiple, as this expression refers to the four authors themselves, the 'birth' of their inventive scriptural strategies, and the various configurations of the mother that are proposed, revisited, contested, and valorized in their novels.

Throughout this volume, Santoro demonstrates her vast knowledge of each author's oeuvre, of the critical analyses previously published on the novels in question, and of the social and political contexts of French and Québécois feminism of the 1970s. A different chapter is devoted to each of the four writers, and each of these chapters is divided into three sections: a brief introduction to the author's works, context, and career achievements; a consideration of the principal thematic concerns of the novel in question; and finally, an analysis of the experimental narrative strategies deployed therein. Santoro performs meticulous, close readings of each novel, showing a keen sensitivity to the text and an eye for detail.

The book's opening chapter provides a useful survey of the social and historical background of the revival of feminism in France and Quebec in the 1970s, setting the groundwork for the analysis of the novels in the later chapters, and elucidating the notions of écriture féminine (feminine writing, as proposed by Cixous) and écriture au féminin (writing in the feminine, an expression used in Quebec). While much of this material has been reviewed elsewhere, Santoro's discussion has the merit of explaining the various 'similarities and reciprocal influences' between the different writers on both sides of the Atlantic. The final part of this chapter rightly calls for a revision of the male-dominated avant-garde canon, insisting on the inclusion of women's texts and specifically those penned by these four authors, given their disruptive use of language, coupled with their ethical and political stance.

In the following four chapters, Santoro provides a detailed analysis of the four selected novels, beginning with Hélène Cixous's La. Concentrating on the novel's rewriting of several intertexts, Santoro charts the narrator's difficult metamorphosis from an initial moribund state - induced by patriarchy - to her eventual 'rebirth' as a joyful subject at the novel's conclusion. Santoro convincingly illustrates the importance of La's intricate intertextual network, but this study could have benefited from more extensive recourse to theories of intertextuality, such as those of Gérard Genette (who is rather hastily dismissed in a footnote), Laurent Jenny, or others, especially given the preponderant role of the Egyptian Book of the Dead as La's major hypotext. Turning her attention to Madeleine Gagnon's poetic novel Lueur, which features the relationship between grandmother and granddaughter, Santoro again examines numerous textual devices, including intertextual references to classical myth and theoretical discourse, the construction and transmission of a 'specifically woman-centered ancestral memory or tradition,' the novel's emphasis on mother figures, death, language, and the body, and its innovative combination of different literary genres.

A similar departure from traditional narrative conventions is observed in Nicole Brossard's L'Amèr ou le chapitre effrité, in...