Editor’s Preface

For the twenty-fifth annual volume of Women in French Studies, I am happy to bring back a feature from the early years of our journal, but which has not been a part of the annual volume since 2003: the special dossier. This year we have a group of seven articles on women in Martinican literature, guest edited by Suzy Cater of the University of Birmingham in the UK. Her idea for this dossier sprung from a panel that she organized at the 2016 MLA convention in Austin, and was followed up by her international call for articles. I am grateful to Suzy Cater and the eight other reviewers who carefully read and evaluated the submissions that she received. The seven articles that made the final selection cover almost a century of writing from Martinique, beginning with Annette Joseph-Gabriel’s article on white Martinican women writers’ language of loss in relation to colonial racial hierarchies and the Mount Pelée eruption of 1902 in two novels: Coeurs Martiniquais from 1919 and Le Sang du volcan from 1997. The second article of the dossier, by Michael Wiedorn, probes Mayotte Capécia’s ambivalent attempts to say the unsayable in her novels Je suis martiniquaise (1948) and La Négresse blanche (1950), advancing recent critical recuperations of her work. The following piece by Erika Serrato focuses on the character Mycéa in both La case du Commandeur (1981) and “La Folie Célat” (2000) by Edouard Glissant, and on his uses of Mycéa’s “délire verbal” to symbolize Martinicans’ struggle with what he calls their “non-Histoire”. Stève Puig writes about Audrey Pulvar’s first novel, L’Enfant-bois (2004), and her development of traumatic memory for the main character, Éva, not only from the consequences of slavery but also from personal experiences of maternal violence. The next two articles of the special dossier focus on two works by Fabienne Kanor: her first novel D’Eaux douces, published in 2004, and her 2006 novel Humus. The first, by Ann-Sophie Persson, examines issues of patriarchal and colonial culture and their impact on Frida’s actions in D’Eaux douces. The second article on Kanor, by Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François, explores the narrative hybridity and memorial polyphony of Humus. To close the special dossier, we read about Mérine Céco’s 2013 novel La Mazurka perdue des femmes-couresse in Katia Gottin’s article on transgenerational transmission and new models for young women in Martinique today. In all, this collection of articles on women in Martinican literature offers an important contribution of new research paths for Caribbean studies as well as for women’s studies. I am truly thankful to Suzy Cater for her fine editorial work on this special dossier.

The essays that form the regular annual volume also contribute new knowledge and original approaches to a variety of texts and paintings. The first article, by Amanda Strasik, analyzes the 1761 portrait of la dauphine Marie-Josèphe by Maurice Quentin de La Tour, and provides us with insights into the ways that Marie-Josèphe was able to bring her own agency into the choices for her painting and how it would present her. In the second essay, Anne Marcoline offers a new interpretation of George Sand’s classic Les Maîtres Sonneurs from 1853, with her study of the ways in which Sand destabilizes traditional definitions of motherhood as natural or instinctive. Hope Christiansen’s article on Gabrielle Reval’s novel Une bachelière from 1910 indicates that the author Reval includes many of the features of a feminist Belle Epoque novel about professional women but then invalidates many of those qualities that it had appeared to be upholding. Erin Ponnou-Delaffon also explores the ways in which Elsa Triolet both creates and undoes the figures of the traditional fairy tale in her 1959 novel Roses à credit. In the following article, Cathy Jellenik explains how Annie Ernaux’s L’Autre fille (2012) is a letter written to her absent sister Ginette, who died at age six, before Annie was born, thus serving as a way...