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  • Genius Envy: Women Shaping French Poetic History, 1801–1900 by Adrianna M. Paliyenko
  • Aimée Boutin
Genius Envy: Women Shaping French Poetic History, 1801–1900. By Adrianna M. Paliyenko. Pennsylvania University Press, 2016. 368pp., ill.

There are few female poets in the traditional French canon: Christine de Pizan, Louise Labé, and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. Some of the readers of French Studies may [End Page 129] never have heard of Anaïs Ségalas, Malvina Blanchecotte, Louisa Siefert, Louise Ackermann, or Marie Krysinska. Adrianna Paliyenko’s book aims to redress this exclusionary view of the canon through an expertly researched study of these poets and of the sexing of genius, which rationalized their marginalization. Noting the surge of women’s writing in the nineteenth century, Paliyenko reveals the diversity of women’s projects, too often lumped together under the ghettoizing label ‘poésie féminine’ imposed on them by generations of critics. At the same time, however, she stresses their commonalities by arguing that all the poets examined were ‘engaged in the modern struggle over the meaning of genius’ (p. 9). Some treat the relationship between creativity and pain, and between women’s pursuit of knowledge and the ‘myth of Eve’s transgressive desire’ (p. 23). Paliyenko’s method scrutinizes the differences between men’s and women’s poetic output and reception, as well as the differences among women poets, carefully teasing out the evolution of individual poets’ bodies of work and the debate over the sexing of genius from neo-classicism through to the modern positivist era. In Part One, Paliyenko shows that Romantic ideas about genius were often religious in origin, whereas the end of the century witnessed the rise of scientific paradigms that pathologized female creativity — hence women’s ‘purported envy of male genius’ (p. 249) playfully alluded to in the book’s title. A critical analysis of reception history follows, to determine how and when women poets were excluded from canonical, official histories of French poetry. In the 1830s, women poets were considered part of the Romantic school; only later, when the emerging canon was cemented in the 1920s and 1930s, was their poetic output narrowly cast as sentimental or womanly poetry that originated in instinct and feeling (body) rather than genius (mind). Chapter 3 surveys the range of poetry produced by women such as Victoire Babois, Adélaide Dufrénoy, Desbordes-Valmore, Amable Tastu, Élisa Mercoeur, Ségalas, Mélanie Waldor, and Louise Colet. Paliyenko’s argument here is built on the observation that the canonization of Desbordes-Valmore overshadowed other women who wrote in her wake, even while homogenizing her voice to conform to type. Is this a book about a female poetic tradition? Paliyenko stresses that women poets did not consistently acknowledge female precursors or pay tribute to a ‘sorority’ of poets. Part Two considers how individual women resisted the so-called feminine tradition by using poetry to think through social, aesthetic, and philosophical issues. Ségalas engaged with race relations even though history has erased her writings on colonialism in favour of her womanly poetry. The working-class origins of Blanchecotte meant that she positioned her voice in between gender and class, suggesting female creativity was blind to both social categories. Siefert and Ackermann approach poetry as ‘a way of knowing’ (p. 197). The stoic Siefert used (tubercular) pain and poetry to reflect on the dualism of the human condition, whereas the positivist Ackermann adopted a pessimistic stance to weigh ‘science’s power over religion’ (p. 198). In a final, masterful chapter, Paliyenko reclaims Krysinska’s original rights of ownership over vers libre to restate that creative genius emerges suddenly and that, in Mme de Staël’s words, ‘le génie n’a pas de sexe’.

Aimée Boutin
Florida State University
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