Revision and Revolution: Writing Women into Myth and History

WOMEN IN FRENCH STUDIES Revision and Revolution: Writing Women into Myth and History 1 Clytemnestra: 'La reine des chiennes, voilà qui j'étais et qui je suis restée pour la postérité. Mais qui fabrique les mythes? Qui choisit, élargue, ampute, nettoie l'Histoire?'2 The mythopoeic process is...a process of recovery and re-formation, as the 'old' myths are spirited away from their dead, oppressive contexts, and rejuvenated by reinterpretation, rereading, rewriting, all performed in newly found female contexts. Sankovitch Marie Cardinal, who spent many years seeking out "les mots pour le dire" and affirming her right to say them, has been concerned throughout her works with the importance and the revolutionary implications of writing women into myth and history. InAu pays de mes racines, Cardinal attempted to recreate her Algerian mother/land through the space of her writing in order to fill in the blanks and gaps in her identity, to recover her own history. In the two works which follow this autobiographical text—Le passé empiété and La Médée d'Euripide—Cardinal will use myth as the starting point for the recovery of a female story. She has defined her revisionary project thus: "Aborder les mythes mais cette fois avec une tête et des yeux de femme, telle est ce que je veux bien appeler mon invraisemblable prétention" (Au pays 87). Rachel Blau DuPlessis cautions that such a project cannot be undertaken uncritically. She points to the inherently hostile nature of the feminist revisionary mythopoetic enterprise, given the claims of myth to "universal, humanistic, natural, or even archetypal status" (106), and the fact that "one of the social functions of mythic narrative is precisely the solidification, consolidation, and affirmation of a hegemony..." (107). Therefore, for such an endeavor to affirm its emancipatory function, the author must refigure muted female voices through strategies of narrative "displacement" and/or "delegitimation" (108). According to poet and literary critic Alicia Ostriker, this sort of womancentered reinterpretation can be used for both personal and political ends. In her examination of mythopoetical literary strategies, Ostriker states that "In all these cases the poet simultaneously deconstructs a prior 'myth' or 'story' and constructs a new one which includes, instead of excluding, herself (316). 100 WOMEN IN FRENCH STUDIES Cardinal will examine history/myth as a construct, as a story with a political project, and will introduce a counterdiscourse geared towards restoring excised women to the text. In Le passé empiété, published in 1983, the protagonist is an artist who situates herself through her embroidery. That Cardinal has privileged embroidery as the preferred representational form of the protagonist is indicative of her desire to engage in revisionist mythmaking. This is a wellgrounded move, given the metaphoricity of weaving, used in many myths as a stratagem to counter female silence. Carolyn Heilbrun, in an essay tracing the legends of such mythological "websters"3 as Arachne, Philomela and Penelope, suggests that women defiantly implemented their artistic skills in order to create their own narratives (Hamlet's Mother 120-130). These stories are being reclaimed today by writers, like Cardinal, who seek a re-encoding of women and a rescripting of feminine desire through imaginative readings of mythological and historical female figures. Heilbrun elucidates: Sometimes myth, tale and tragedy must be transformed by bold acts of interpretation in order to enter the experience of the emerging female self. (Reinventing Womanhood 1 50) The title of Cardinal's novel frames her own strategy of revision, while also invoking a Proustian sense of personal history and the way in which the past is bound up with myth. A brief passage from A la recherche du temps perdu delineates a potential point of articulation between the two texts. The narrator, remembering "...la sensation des dalles inégales, ...le goût de la madeleine" (Proust 226), posits that these diverse sensations place him simultaneously in the past and in the present, "jusqu'à faire empiéter le passé sur le présent..." (228). The use of the "passé empiété", a needlework stitch by means of which one crosses over a space already covered in order to move forward, coincides well with Cardinal's project...