L'Ecriture : Lien de mère à fille chez Jeanne Hyvrard, Chantal Chawaf, et Annie Ernaux (review)

Book Reviews265 it, as well as the emotions ofindividuals facing it. The two subsequent chapters reconstitute the daily routines of free public day schools and boarding schools and examine the pressures of external society upon the cloistered nuns who ran them. Rapley's rich investigation of the social history of the teaching orders, supplemented by a glossary and an appendix full of important demographic statistics, significantly re-interprets the history and daily life of convents during the Old Regime. It provides an excellent contribution to the religious history of women, is eminently readable, and contains some unforgettable anecdotes. A Social History ofthe Cloister should also prove invaluable to those exploring the stories of women of the Old Regime from the perspectives of literature, and the social sciences. Maureen O'MearaUniversity of Dayton Monique Saigal. L'Ecriture : Lien de mère à fille chez Jeanne Hyvrard, Chantal Chawaf, et Annie Ernaux. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000. ISBN: 90-420-0530-0. Pp. 180. L 'écriture .Lien de mère afilie examines the mother-daughter dyad in the writings ofFrench authors Jeanne Hyvrard, Chantal Chawafand Annie Ernaux. Based on personal interviews with the authors as well as known biographical details, Saigal's readings suggest the importance of each woman's relationship with her mother and how that (often vexed) bond affects the daughter's identity and preoccupations in writing. Despite a nod to the extensive body of criticism on maternity, Saigal's brief introduction makes the arguable claim that little work has been done on the mother-daughter relationship in the literary works ofXXth-century French women writers. Saigal brings together the fiction of Hyvrard, Chawaf and Ernaux as an antidote to this neglect, noting nonetheless that Ernaux's work has attained considerable popularity in recent years, while Hyvrard and especially Chawafremain ofinterest chiefly to specialists. Saigal devotes her first chapter to Jeanne Hyvrard, whose writings display a consistent preoccupation with the mother from Les Prunes de Cythère{\975) to her more recent texts, including La Jeune Morte en robe de dentelle (1990). Saigal begins her reading with an overview of some ofthe recognizably feminist principles at work in Hyvrard's idiosyncratic vocabulary and conceptual universe, explicitly articulated in the theoretical "nomenclature" ofLa Pensée corps (1989). An exploration of Hyvrard's ambivalence with regards to feminism would have been helpful here, however, for this attitude permeates the extraordinarily complex and conflicted thematic and metaphoric network that unfolds around the mother-daughter dyad she privileges. This omission notwithstanding , it is clear that Saigal has a thorough knowledge of Hyvrard's writings, and her approach to reading across this notoriously difficult corpus does much to convey the non-linearity that is one of its central motifs. Saigal performs similarly encompassing readings ofthe works ofChawaf and Ernaux. In the second and longest chapter in the study, she illuminates 266Women in French Studies the "signifiés polyvalents" that are evoked by the maternal metaphor, focusing on the search for origins and the desire to "faire revivre sa mère biologique" (56) that are evident in Chawaf's writings, from Retable-La Rêverie (1974) through the more autobiographical Le Manteau noir (1998). This chapter's strength is in Saigal's close readings of Chawaf that illustrate her powerful lyricism and interesting use of archaic forms and patois in her play with language . Here again, it would have been useful to offer a more nuanced portrait ofChawaf's particular stances and role in the French feminist landscape; without it, the attempt to distinguish Chawaf from other feminist writers (such as Cixous) with which Saigal concludes this chapter seems superficial. While it is clear from the many thematic and aesthetic similarities that their writings present why Hyvrard and Chawaf were chosen for this study, Ernaux's work is distinct in many ways. In Chapter 3, Saigal discusses the "malaise ontologique" provoked by the tension between Ernaux's proletarian origins and the bourgeois milieu she later enjoys, a conflict that the author "tente de résoudre par l'écriture de ses livres" (115). Ernaux's writings are marked by her hybrid style, her use of intertext, and the deliberate intent to create an "ethnotexte" {Journal du dehors 65...