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  • Portraits de jeunes filles : L'adolescence féminine dans les littératures et les cinémas français et francophones
  • Elissa Gelfand
Di Cecco, Daniela , ed. Portraits de jeunes filles : L'adolescence féminine dans les littératures et les cinémas français et francophones. Paris : L'Harmattan, 2009. Pp 253. ISBN 978-2-296-09157-3. 23,50€, paper.

The essays in this collection examine "la construction de la jeune fille" (10) in fiction and film, crossing time and French-speaking cultures and using a variety of perspectives. Yet, they share a common focus: the tension young heroines face between accepting and contesting the gender norms of their time and place. Di Cecco's introduction situates the articles in relation to the literary model of the adolescent male adventurer, the standard since adolescence was recognized as a separate stage of development at the start of the twentieth century. Beth Gale's fine piece on the social and political forces of the Third Republic that shaped women's education argues that girls were pawns in the Church-State debates of the period. The fiction of Marcelle Tinayre, however, radically challenged traditional precepts about women's destinies. Mélanie Collado's essay on Lucie Delarue-Mardrus uncovers four forgotten novels whose female protagonists resist entering adulthood; at the same time, their defiance highlights the few life choices available to French women through 1945. And, Di Cecco's well-documented study of interwar fiction contrasts Victor Margueritte's progressive La Garçonne with Berthe Bernage's morally conservative Brigitte novels. Despite the opposing ideologies they symbolize, both Margueritte's freethinking heroine Monique and Bernage's self-abnegating Brigitte did little to improve real women's status during the era's backlash against gender equality.

Moving geographically, Juliette Rogers' contribution outlines important reforms in girls' education in France and Quebec, together with the changing literary images that accompanied them. Rogers also makes rich connections to sociological theories of female maturation. Nicole Côté's excellent discussion of Elise Turcotte's novel, L'île de la Merci (1997), grounds the adolescent narrator's "construction d'une identité composite" (116) in Judith Butler's concept of "performativity." The heroine, whose identity is hybrid and unstable, continually "negotiates" within the constraints—what Butler calls the "existing regimes of power" (qtd in Côté 100)—that construct her gender identification. Lucie Guillemette considers two Québécois books for young readers, Mary Décary's Nuisance Publik (1995) and Charlotte Gingras' La Fille de la forêt (2002), in relation to postmodernism's "narcissistic" cult of the self (120). Applying Carol Gilligan's idea of female "relationality" and ecofeminism's engagement with environmental concerns, Guillemette posits that the adolescent [End Page 136] heroines in these stories eschew selfish individualism for collective engagement. Lastly, Danielle Thaler uses a historiographic approach to recent French historical fiction for young adults. She incisively probes the female protagonists, claiming they reveal the attempt to reconcile the forward-looking expectations of contemporary readers with the backward realities of women's position in the past.

Set in the contexts of Africa and the Caribbean, Gloria Nne Onyeoziri's astute analysis of Maryse Condé's Desirada (1997) and Calixthe Beyala's La Petite fille du réverbère (1998) establishes childhood as the point where adolescents are shaped by the social pressures of their culture. Both novels use narrative voices that fuse the girl and the adult woman's perspectives; further, the two heroines encounter parallel racial, familial, and gender obstacles in their problematic construction of self-identity. Judith Sinanga Ohlmann interrogates the role the bodies of African girls play in maintaining family honor and social order. She points to the rituals that sexually control women depicted in the works of Mariama Bâ and Calixthe Beyala.

The final articles look at current French films by women that explore adolescent themes.

Claire Denis' US Go Home and Patricia Mazuy's Travolta et moi, both televised in 1994, are the subject of Marja Warehime's insightful discussion of the portrayal of young women's desire.

In each case, there is a tension between the film's narrative focus on the heroine and the male...

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