The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France (review)

Burr Margadant, Jo, ed. The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nine-teenth-Century France. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. Pp. 298. ISBN 0-520-22141-9

The New Biography successfully challenges assumptions about the role of nineteenth-century French women in the public sphere while it convincingly illustrates the identities women created and performed in order to gain access to that sphere. This collection of essays, edited by Jo Burr Margadent, consists of biographies of eight French women and is intended primarily for an audience of undergraduate and graduate students in such areas as biography, French history, and the history of women and gender. Spanning the period from the Bourbon Restoration through the outbreak of World War I and profiling the lives of a variety of women, from the notorious to the relatively little known, the collection nonetheless achieves coherence thanks to the notion of identity as "performance," derived from theorists such as Judith Butler, which informs each of the essays.

In her excellent introduction, Margadant situates the project of this collection within a renewed trend towards biography. While the Annales school, with its materialist approach, had shifted interest away from traditional historical practices such as the "old" biography, a more recent, "ethnographic"consideration of history has emphasized the ways in which culture - through naming, categorizing, and assigning values to experience - creates meaning. This questioning of the meaning of categories like "class" or "woman" has, in turn, prompted a reconsideration of the virtues of individual biography as a propitious site for the examination and empathetic understanding of cultural politics in action. The "new biography," however, is biography with a difference: its subject is no longer conceived as a "unified persona," but rather as a self that is "performed" in response to specific needs, conditions, and goals.

The collection is framed by two essays that reflect on the exploitation of notions of motherhood. The first essay, by Margadant, traces the positions adopted by the duchesse de Berry to assert post-Revolutionary values in the face of the ancien régime style of the Restoration court. Teenaged bride of the duc de Berry, nephew of Louis XVIII, the duchess flouted Bourbon etiquette and flaunted her stylishness. But, Margadant argues, it was not until the assassination of the duc de Berry and the duchess's giving birth to a posthumous male heir to the throne that her public image began to lend itself to a reconfiguration of royal motherhood. Her performance of this role in an effort to reclaim the throne for her son after the July 1830 revolution seems anticlimactic in the author's narrative, but Margadant does provide good evidence that, for legitimists, the duchess embodied a notion of royal motherhood more consonant with the bourgeois ideals of her time. The concluding essay, by Elinor Accampo, chronicles Nelly Roussel's "mission" to preach "liberté de maternité" in the pre-World War I years. If, in fact, Roussel left the burden of raising her own children largely to others as she crisscrossed France on lecture tours, the acceptability of her message favoring birth control depended, according to Accampo, on her consciously cultivated public image as a model mother.

Essays on Flora Tristan, by Susan Grogan, and on Marguerite Durand, by Mary Louise Roberts, emphasize even more the notion of performing the self as a truly theatrical role. Grogan argues that the feminist and socialist Flora Tristan, while struggling to claim legitimacy as a woman in the face of a public discourse which defined a woman's sphere of influence as domestic, conceived of herself as a heroine of melodrama, the virtuous victim of her villainous oppressors. Additionally, drawing upon the very discourse of emotion which denied women a public role, Tristan saw in women's capacity for love a moral superiority over men which endowed her mission with a messianic quality. With respect to Marguerite Durand, former actress turned editor and creator...