Colette, Beauvoir, and Duras: Age and Women Writers (review)

Bethany Ladimer's study of Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, and Marguerite Duras, seen from the point of view of age and aging as reflected in their lives and works, is original, thoughtful, and well-written. In fashioning her portraits of these three powerhouses of twentieth-century French literature, she has succeeded in bridging the gap between biographical criticism, feminist theory, cultural studies, and literary analysis. Her book has the rare talent of speaking to both a general educated public and also literary scholars interested in the interplay between gender, age, cultural heritage and fictional and autobiographical writing, especially as the latter is informed by the phenomenon of aging.

The introduction sketches the biography and literary output of Colette, Beauvoir, and Duras, all of whom lived remarkably long and productive lives. Writing to the end, they were each conscious of the effect of the process of aging on their work. Ladimer homes in on the socio-historical moment and the milieu in which these women wrote. She articulates the particular problems that face aging women in France, given the cult of conventional feminine beauty, the centering of feminine identity on heterosexual traditions of marriage and family, and the consequent privileging of younger women. For women writers, the French literary tradition has posed additional pitfalls that Ladimer proceeds to outline in chapters one and two. She proposes to show us how these three women writers challenged their cultural heritage, going "beyond" received views of feminine identity and attuning their writing to this "beyond."

Chapters one and two provide an historical overview of the place of the women writer in the French literary tradition, with numerous references to the extant feminist criticism on the topic (Evans, DeJean, Butler, Miller, Sarde, Moi, Hirsch, Woodward, among others). Ladimer examines the dilemma facing French women writers, that is, how to remain a "woman" in France while writing in an authentic voice and redefining feminine identity by redrawing literary boundaries. The interplay of gender and age, she maintains, is not static, quoting Beauvoir's famous and, at the time, daring incipit in Le deuxième sexe that pointed out the constructed nature of gender. ("One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" [35]). The ability to represent one's self in the aging process as liberated, powerful, and sexually appealing is key to reconstructing conventional views of beauty and aging, as Colette in La Naissance du jour and Duras in L'Amant revealed. The latter's acknowledgment, in the book's opening paragraphs, of her "ravaged face" as more beautiful than her youthful and more conventionally-appealing profile, like Colette's embrace of aging as an empowering force, goes hand in hand with their discovery of new literary forms that challenged the boundaries between autobiography and fiction. The intersection of gender, genre, and aging is the topic of the next three chapters, which examine how age and aging permitted these authors to find authentic voices in new forms of fiction.

Ladimer examines representative works of each writer's corpus from their early, middle and late periods to show the evolution in their themes, genres, and character development. Citing, where applicable, previous scholarship, Ladimer deftly interweaves biographical details with textual analysis in a dynamic, non-reductive overview of the question of aging, writing, and new feminine identities as they are exemplified in the works. Preoccupations with the mother, the body, writing, and the self cut across all three groupings of texts. Colette's separation from her mother is materialized in the establishment of a symbolic language lodged in a separate textual space, one that is conflated with the textual body of the author. Beauvoir sought to rewrite the plot for bourgeois Catholic women in France through an extreme rejection of conventional feminine values in favor of freedom and autonomy. Her acceptance, later in life, of a mitigated dependency and her own aging female body is reflected...