Career Stories: Belle Epoque Novels of Professional Development (review)

In late-nineteenth-century France, it began to be possible — although not easy — for some women to work in the professions. Schoolteaching was one of the first to open up to women, and although the demand was greatest in this area, by the turn of the century women who trained to be teachers far exceeded the number of teaching positions. Far fewer attempted to become lawyers, doctors, or natural scientists, professions which required considerably more education and resources and in which more was at stake for male professionals, who often opposed the admission of women to their ranks. An interesting and ambiguous case is that of women writers and journalists, who at times viewed themselves as part of a cadre of writers and intellectuals and at others as producers for the general public. Juliette M. Rogers's Career Stories adopts a double perspective on some of the women writers who emerged in France in the first decade of the twentieth century, considering them both as members of a profession and as authors of fictional texts about professional women. Their narratives reflect the emergence of an ethos or ideology of professionalism at this time, as well as ambivalence about the professions, especially among writers. Rogers argues that they also comprise a narrative genre, which she calls the novel of professional development or Berufsroman. The genre includes works by men, as well as women.

While Colette and her novels about Claudine at school are well known, most of the women writers and novels discussed in Career Stories are not. They include Marcelle Babin (Pharmacienne, 1907), Louise-Marie Compain (L'Un vers l'autre, 1903), Miriam Harry (La Conquête de Jérusalem, 1904), Gabrielle Reval (Les Sévriennes, 1900, and La Bachelière, 1910), Ester de Suze (Institutrice, 1902), Marcelle Tinayre (La Rebelle, 1905), and Colette Yver (Les Cervellines, 1903, Princesses de science, 1907, and Les Dames du Palais, 1909). Rogers has not been able to track down biographical data about all of them, but suggests that these writers represent a generation of women who were born about 1870. Their novels about professional women were popular and generally well received in the 1900s, but the female Berufsroman fell into disrepute after World War I. Simone de Beauvoir, for example, mentions Colette Yver disparagingly in her Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée because her novels often end with the withdrawal of women characters from professional life. What to make of such endings? Do they, as Simone de Beauvoir's father seemed to think, bolster the view that women should stick to marriage and motherhood?

Career Stories offers a widely ranging and nuanced response to this question. Sometimes an apparently conservative or traditional ending obscures the positive representation of women's accomplishments in the body of the text. At the end of Yver's Dames du Palais, for example, the protagonist decides to give up the law in order to please her husband, but the novel as a whole emphasizes her skill and intelligence. Rogers argues that it is her conservative family that causes Henriette to withdraw from professional life and that Yver's novel "can be interpreted as an indictment of the social pressures that forced women to choose between family and career during the same period" (200-201). Sometimes the genre of the Berufsroman itself accentuates the difficulties of reconciling professional work with other needs and desires. Like the Bildungsroman, the Berufsroman often incorporates aspects of quest and romance narratives, plotlines that in many novels of professional development by women turn out to be incompatibile. Moreover, women were not the only writers at this time to depict characters who reject professional life. André Gide's L'Immoraliste, for example, features a protagonist who rejects a career as an archaeologist. Works by Bourget and Barrès represent the failure of young men to enter the professions. Novels of professional development by men, however, emphasize the role of...