Revolution and Women's Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century France (review)

Through the study of three women writers — Flora Tristan, George Sand and Louise Michel — and their autobiographical texts, Kathleen Hart develops the hypothesis that female autobiography in nineteenth-century France is closely bound up with the challenging of fixed hierarchies and the new dynamic models of individual and social existence which followed in the wake of the Revolution of 1789. Hart contends that, writing within a new ideological framework informed by the doctrines of Fourier, Saint-Simon and Pierre Leroux, nineteenth-century female autobiographers drew on the utopian socialist idealization of the feminine in their self-narratives, emphasized relatedness rather than egocentric detachment, and linked their personal experience to socio-political change. Each of the three autobiographical texts is thus studied in the context of the revolutionary moment which preceded it: 1830 for Tristan's Peregrinations of a Pariah, 1848 for Sand's Story of My Lifeand 1871 for Michel's Memoirs(regrettably for French scholars, the texts are presented in English translation without the original French). As Hart develops her central thesis, a number of significant insights emerge. Reading Peregrinationsalongside Tristan's novel Méphis, she addresses the problematic allegorization of the female figure in utopian socialist thought, and shows how Tristan's focus on locomotion overwrites such symbolic idealization of the feminine with the agency of the real woman. In her analysis of Michel's work, Hart also draws out successfully the recurring motif of the 'souffle', and links Michel's revolutionary impetus to oral culture and to the maternal power of nature. On the other hand, throughout her study Hart evinces a reluctance to engage with the concept of self-construction in the autobiographical narrative, and instead seems to suggest that this 'revolutionary' sense of self pre-exists its narrative realization. A more theoretically informed approach to the mise-en-scèneof the autobiographical self would have added an extra dimension to the analysis. This is not, however, the work's most serious shortcoming. The claim on the back cover that this book is the first 'devoted exclusively to the topic of women's autobiography in nineteenth-century France' is technically correct, but misleading. It ignores the seminal contribution of Marie Maclean's The Name of the Mother (Routledge, 1994), which is strikingly absent from Hart's bibliography. While Maclean approaches the same three autobiographical texts as part of a broader study of male and female autobiography, and from the perspective of maternal genealogies and illegitimacy, both she and Hart cover substantially similar ground. The failure to draw on and engage with Maclean's insights does not fundamentally undermine Hart's study, but opening up such a critical dialogue would undoubtedly have enriched her arguments and enabled her to establish more clearly the originality of her own critical position.