Jeu de masques : Les femmes et le travestissement textuel (1500-1940) (review)

This wide-ranging volume of essays stems from a conference held at the University of Montreal in 2009 on the theme of the myriad ways writers have "cross-dressed" textually, that is the ways women have assumed a male identity or position (and also, though less frequently, the ways men have presented themselves as women) in literary texts in French. The volume is the first work to be devoted entirely to this topic of authorial masking (as distinct from the theme of cross-dressing as a topic within literary texts themselves), as the editors remind us in their preface, and although this might sound like a very focused and specific field, the range of forms such textual travesty may take is truly daunting, as this volume testifies. To begin with, there is the vast chronological sweep encompassed here, from the Renaissance to the mid-twentieth century. The end point of this collection of essays is 1940, meaning that World War II, women's suffrage in France, the impact of Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex, the second wave of the women's movement, écriture féminine, and so on all fall outside the scope of this book, but this nevertheless leaves several centuries to cover. And then there is the range of genres, comprising everything from gynecological tracts (invoked by Claude La Charité) and polemical writing (Renée Claude Breitenstein) to journalism (Joyce Carlton Johnston on Delphine de Girardin). Since the book originated as a conference, most of the essays are somewhat short in length (twelve pages or so in print), but this means that many more voices can be included without making for an impossibly long volume. It also means that some authors are the subject of more than one essay: there are three on Rachilde alone (Marie-Gersande Raoult, Patrick Bergeron, and Marilou Denault), and two on the emerging figure of Claude Cahun (Charlotte Maria and joint authors Andrea Oberhuber and Nadine Schwakopf), though only one each on George Sand (Françoise Alexandre) and on Colette (Angelica Rieger). The reader will encounter some names that are expected (Mademoiselle de Montpensier, for example, treated here by Virginie Cassidy) along with some who are more off the beaten path but welcome additions nevertheless to the canon of women's writing (Madame Daudet [Virginie Pouzet-Duzer] and Valentine de Saint-Point [Paul-André Claudel]). And while the focus is on women who laid claim to textual masculinity, the stakes of putting on metaphorical skirts are not ignored, with an essay by David Martens on Prosper Mérimée's dressing himself up as Clara Gazul.

These enticing topics make for quite a spread, hence they are organized chronologically into three sections. The first is Postures rhétoriques et discours auctoral, which, in addition to those already mentioned, contains essays on Jeanne Flore (Cathleen M. Bauschatz), Helisenne de Crenne (Dora E. Polachek), Mathurine (Jean-Philippe Beaulieu), and Suzanne de Nervèze (Sylvie Tremblay). The middle section, Effets de pseudonymie, contains aforementioned essays on Girardin, Sand, Daudet, and Mérimée along with Juliette Figuier (by Valérie Narayana), while the last section (Se masquer, se travestir, s'écrire) is devoted to the more modern authors Rachilde, Saint-Point, Colette, and Cahun. The editors do an admirable job of summarizing and highlighting all the essays in their introduction (they are able to do so more extensively than the limited space of a review such as this can allow), and for readers who want to get a sense of the many complex issues raised by literary cross-dressing, dipping into this preface is highly recommended. Some readers will want to go straight to the essays on one period or author, but they will find that browsing is rewarded. The volume has a useful bibliography and, thank goodness, an index, so that if the reader wants to know if...