Poignant Relations: Three Modern French Women (review)

Allen, James Smith. Poignant Relations: Three Modern French Women. Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. Pp. xiii + 270. ISBN 0-8018-6204-3

The three very different women that are the subject of this book are Marie-Sophie Leroyer, Geneviève Bréton-Vaudoyer, and Céline Renooz-Muro, figures inhabiting collectively the span of the nineteenth century, and writers of letters, diaries, novels, articles, and scientific treatises. The overriding argument that James Smith Allen presents to link them together is that the personal was indeed the political for each one in her different but painful circumstances. His concern is to present a case for this political as "feminist" in the sense of a desire for freedom from various kinds of private circumstantial, and public legal, bondage as set out by the Code Napoléon and its upholders: Church, State, and patrilinear Family. The expression of this bondage for each of these women was multiform and extensive, but involved the active taking hold of the pen in private and public contexts. For Allen, what groups them together is strong independence of mind. The central chapters of the book devote attention to what are essentially three biographies, but shaped so as to cover similar topics such as education, influence of family and personal relationships, religious inclination, and connections to the public arena. Every attempt is then made to compare their three case histories. Every attempt is made to reconstruct these stories with a sympathy that allows the woman to speak herself through excerpts from her work. The conclusions and contextual settings argue for three voices independently collaborating in some wider voicing of women's place in nineteenth-century France, hidden until now because men's history has occluded it and feminist scholarship has concentrated on more politically active women.

Yet these are three very different individuals. Covering similar topics in their lives does not constitute comparative analysis, except superficially. Due to their position at different periods of a very turbulent period of French history, the vastly different experiences of these three women need more concerted integration into the wider political picture. For example, more careful elucidation and detailing of the very freedoms and advantages these women already had in terms of financial, social, and educational privilege would have enhanced the project. From the politically correct current viewpoint of the author, the introductory context does not draw sharply enough the realities of a deeply misogynistic nineteenth-century France. Allen would have strengthened his case on many occasions with more detailed analysis of all of these considerations, particularly the legal loopholes that these women, through intention and circumstance, exploited.

Yet what is poignant in this study is not perhaps the relations of these three disparate women. It is the advocacy that Allen takes up on their behalf. This kind of history matters to him and he is suggesting it should matter to the discipline or to interdisciplinary study. His approach is a blend of traditional historical study, biography, women's studies recuperation of forgotten women and their political struggle, and an americanized version of Cixous's écriture féminine. His writing claims indistinguishable visceral qualities to forms of female expression. Allen wants to speak from the gut and muster support from previous feminist critical methodologies as well as from influential women advocates for his work to highlight their work too. But where does this leave the woman whose voice has been silenced except by the stronger male voice? Leroyer has always been known through her correspondence with the much more influential and important Flaubert. However large is her own corpus of novels, by comparison with those of Flaubert and Sand which she overtly admired, hers are not of their calibre. The same can be said in the case of the novels of Vaudoyer, mother and son. And Renooz's unconventional (read unacademic because she was automatically outside Academy and University) science and proselytizing for La Société Néosophique, for all its...