The Feminizing of the Trojan Horse: Marie Chauvet's Amour as War Machine

Women In French Studies The Feminizing ofthe Trojan Horse: Marie Chauvet's Amour as War Machine Any important literary work is like the Trojan Horse at the time it is produced. Any work with a new form operates as a war machine, because its design and its goal is to pulverize the old forms and formal conventions. And the stranger it appears, nonconforming, unassimilable, the longer it will take for the Trojan Horse to be accepted. Eventually it is adopted, and even if slowly, it will eventually work like a mine. It will sap and blast out the ground where it was planted. Monique Wittig, "The Trojan Horse" In her concise and insightful 1984 article, "The Trojan Horse," Monique Wittig compares "any important literary work" to a "war machine." Like the images of the Trojan Horse or the land mine which she evokes, Wittig's rhetoric is belligerent. She does not equivocate about the subversive intent of her own literary texts. Indeed, Wittig's chosen weapon of revenge against patriarchal texts is her writing: a strange, new form which transgresses limits and confounds expectations. Wittig's article recalls Hélène Cixous' feminist manifesto, "Le rire de la méduse," in which Cixous, more specific than Wittig, describes the impact ofthe "feminine text:" Un texte féminin ne peut pas ne pas être plus que subversif: s'il s'écrit, c'est en soulevant, volcanique, la vieille croûte immobilière, porteuse des investissements masculins et pas autrement; il n'y a pas de place pour elle si elle n'est pas un il? Si elle est elle-elle, ce n'est qu'à tout casser, à mettre en pièces les bâtis des institutions, à faire sauter la loi en l'air, à tordre la "vérité" de rire. (Cixous 49) Cixous evokes the image of the bomb with the use of the explosive verbs and verbal locutions "casser," "mettre en pièces," and "faire sauter ... en l'air." Like Wittig's Trojan Horse and landmine, Cixous' bomb depends on the element of secrecy or disguise for its effectiveness. Each of these "war Women In French Studies machines" takes the enemy by surprise precisely because it does not appear dangerous. As is apparent in these two excerpts, both Hélène Cixous and Monique Wittig explicitly embrace the idea ofwaging war on outmoded literary forms and patriarchal notions. Wittig's and Cixous' theoretical texts have broad implications for a fairly recent phenomenon in French and Francophone literature: the increase in the number of overtly angry, predominantly firstperson narratives written by women from the 1960s to the present. The literary expression of anger, like its expression in the personal sphere, has always been fraught with difficulties for women: anger is an acceptable male emotion, but is considered unsuitable in the female. Women, therefore, have traditionally silenced their anger or displaced it in their texts because they are either consciously fearful of societal repercussions or unconsciously unable to identify with such a disturbing feeling. This is not to suggest that anger was completely absent from women's texts in French literature prior to the 1960s. There are certainly angry moments in the narratives of George Sand, Madame de Staël, Colette, Violette Leduc and Marguerite Duras.1 The distinguishing factors in late twentieth-century texts are first of all that the containment and release of anger is the thematic and formal engine of this fiction and secondly, that anger is finally permissible in the speaking subject herself. Hence it appears that women are no longer as hesitant to explore this emotion and its violent repercussions in their fiction. The angry text erupts out of a seemingly firm bedrock of patriarchal beliefs as a provocative revolt against oppressive strictures. This phenomenon is not limited by national, cultural, class or racial boundaries. In fact, my interest in this topic has been stimulated by the discovery that the theme ofwomen's anger and violence is a common thread connecting narratives from Quebec to Guadeloupe to Haiti to Senegal to continental France itself. I would argue that the appearance of these enraged texts within a twenty five year period in various countries around the world indicates more than...