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123 French and Francophone Women's Autobiography in the Twentieth Century E. Nicole Meyer University of Wisconsin-Madison From the early 1980s on, women's autobiography has experienced a resurgence, both in publication of seminal works by Duras, Sarraute, Ernaux and others and in critical interest. Indeed, autobiography (an individual's retrospective account of one's own life) has been at the center of a number of important trends in French literature and culture. The role of women's autobiographical writing has attracted particular critical interest, as many critics focus on various aspects of women's writing, their coming to voice as well as their position as subjects and not objects. Many challenging questions erupt from this new focus: can one distinguish a female T? Do female language, experience or ways of perceiving justify the concept of self as distinctly female? Are there certain central themes or concerns unique to these writers? Is there a "female" difference to Philippe Lejeune's autobiographical pact? This pact is frequently used as a starting point in any discussion of autobiography: "DÉFINITION: Récit rétrospectif en prose qu 'une personne réellefait de sa propre existence, lorsqu 'elle met l 'accent sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier sur l 'histoire de sa personnalité" (Le Pacte autobiographique 14). At its base is the assumption of the individual self as well as the retrospective and authentic nature of autobiographical narrative. While Lejeune's pact stresses a mode of writing defined by the narrated individual and his or her individual history, recent women's autobiographies demonstrate and enact the author's discovery of her own individual voice and the relationship ofthat voice to the social cacophony that surrounds her. Gender differences in roles, classes, social positions and in the role models that the authors emulate complicate any representation of self. Critics differ in their approaches to these issues. An invaluable examination into the "female" experience, Carolyn Heilbrun's Writing a Woman 's Life tracks the gender-based confines and rules that women authors have had to surpass and negotiate when writing in an exclusively masculine literary tradition. From preestablished social models, like the distinction between "public" (male) and "private" (female) selves (and how each is a specific gender trait), to a violation of masculine turf through eccentricity, a label often attributed to a woman author who is more like a "man" than the rest of her "gentler sex"—Heilbrun chronicles the complex lives of authors like Sand, Eliot, Woolf, and Stein. Most significant is Heilbrun's examination of how each of these women had to negotiate the 1 24FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE WOMEN constricting and limiting obstacles of writing a woman's perspective in a man's world, oftentimes by using pseudonyms and explosive self-revelation. Distorting a narrative voice that was most often associated with one gender or the other (never both), and exposing topics and themes commonly tagged either appropriately male or female, each author in Heilbrun's examination attempted to simultaneously disrupt or "re-violate" (in Nancy K. Miller's words) the masculine confines of literature, while creating or inventing a wholly independent model that might allow a woman to simply write, without distraction and controversy. In sum, Heilbrun studies women's choices, the importance of expressing anger, thus finding their voice, and most importantly, gaining power and control oftheir narrative. Miller questions, however, whether a specific female retrospective exists. She suggests a "double reading" of any text, particularly any text written by a female author: an autobiographical reading and a fictional reading, neither of which is privileged, but merely taken together as each functions throughout the text (Subject to Change 59-60). She argues that if one takes only an autobiographical approach without a fictional reading (and vice versa), then the result is an imprisoning model confined within a canonized cell that essentially "bars women from their own texts" (60). Ultimately, Miller declares that the problems that exist in identifying a comfortable, definitive autobiographical model rest closely linked to the problems, in general, associated with any reader response approach. The question remains clear, in Miller's view: when we read Colette's La Naissance du jour, for instance, are we reading a...

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