L'Imaginaire du féminin dans l'oeuvre de Renée Vivien (review)

The prolixity of this study of the fin-de-siècle poet Renée Vivien (one of the noms de plume of Pauline Tarn) betrays its origins (it must surely have been a thesis), but it is a pleasure to see Vivien being taken seriously as a poet who merits a monograph. Bartholomot Bessou's ambitious study comprises four sections: the theme of exile (all women are symbolically exiled from themselves); Vivien's use of mythical female figures and the need to re-define them; Vivien's attempts to give voice to a female subjectivity; and Vivien's own reworking of Sappho and her work. Bartholomot Bessou grounds her readings in thorough research, drawing on biographical sources, a familiarity with the entire corpus of Vivien's work, the intellectual history of gender as a concept and the intricacies of the work of Sappho and its reception. The book takes its place as a force to be reckoned with in the field of Vivien studies, which is not to say that there are no shortcomings. The author occasionally fails to make it clear if she is attributing certain ideas about women to Vivien only or is asserting them to be the case in a broader sense, for example in her discussion of certain archetypal images. In an era that often treats sex roles as social constructions, questions about authentic forms of female self-expression are more complicated: what underlies the authenticity of such expression? Vivien may have believed in the possibility of authenticity, but does that mean her contemporary readers must share those beliefs? More clarity, but also more nuance, are needed. Similarly, Bartholomot Bessou goes intro great detail about Vivien's borrowings from Sappho and classical tradition. On the one hand, this is fine erudition and goes far beyond the usual pro forma acknowledgment of Sappho's role as a forerunner for Vivien. On the other hand, it seems overreaching to imply that, because specific traditions had certain connotations for Sappho, Vivien intentionally invokes the same connotations when she alludes to those topics; sometimes adding local colour is just a rhetorical effect. This said, the argument (in the final section of the book) that Vivien was developing a theory of intergenerational female same-sex love that paralleled yet rivalled the male tradition of paï derestia is a rather interesting — and even revolutionary — claim that merits further debate. Vivien died so young (she was thirty-two) and seems so immured in her adolescent experiences (her attachment to Violet Shillito, for example) that it is easy to assume that, for her, love was only ever between perpetually youthful peers, but perhaps a deeper understanding of her views on a female form of pederasty could go a long way to explaining the hold that her older lover and 'Master' Hélène de Zuylen de Nyevelt seems to have exerted over her, since no one seems to have found the rotund 'brioche' (as she was nicknamed) particularly sexually charismatic. In the best possible way, then, Bartholomot Bessou's study raises more questions than it attempts to answer.