Le masculin dans les oeuvres d’écrivaines françaises éd. par Françoise Rétif (review)

Reviews 213 she herself translated her own works into English). The remaining articles focus on the semi-autobiographical Illiryne ou l’écueil de l’inexpérience by Mme de Morency, a courtisane lettrée who revises masculine libertinism into a feminine gendered libertinage; Isabelle de Charrière’s Trois femmes, a philosophical tale about three French émigrées in Germany during the Revolution, which inquires into the role of literature in troubled political and economic times and poses philosophical queries in light of Kant’s newly released Critique of Pure Reason; Anne-Marie du Boccage’s fascinating Lettres sur l’Angleterre, la Hollande et l’Italie, commenting on the diversity encountered and the treatment of women; Mme d’Aulnoy’s fairy tales as social reflection; Charlotte de Bournon-Malarmé, a highly successful commercial novelist who marketed her own works; and the extraordinary number of women authors in the royal library of Queen Marie-Antoinette. Finally, the last four studies focus on the debate among women writers on the education of women; the translation of French women writers in Spain; and the role of the Digital Humanities and e-archives in focusing attention on the transnational reception of women writers and their accessibility on line. This rich collection should open new paths for further exploration of French Enlightenment women authors. Hope College (MI) Anne R. Larsen Rétif, Françoise, éd. Le masculin dans les œuvres d’écrivaines françaises. Paris: Garnier, 2016. ISBN 978-2-406-05937-0. Pp. 280. This collection of essays ambitiously aims to show how masculinity has been represented in works by female authors from the Middle Ages to the present. How have some women writers used literature to transgress and criticize their“procreative” function (7) in society as well as to imagine an idealized masculinity? But the collection seems superficial and incomplete:“[C]et ouvrage [...] ne peut prétendre à l’exhaustivité [...] Le panorama des attitudes et fonctions prêtées au masculin n’est que partiel”(12). Moreover, the observations made by its various contributors merely revisit ground already trodden by other critics: Louise Labé subverts the traditional, if not simplistic opposition between the feminine and the masculine; Christine de Pizan asks how to think of and represent oneself as gendered,“d’altérité multiple”(53), while providing in her works a “survival kit” of existential strategies (71) for women of letters; compared to King François I, the brother she idealized, Marguerite de Navarre exposes “ordinary” men—priests, clerks, salesmen, for instance—as hypocritical and flawed; the “Précieuses” of the seventeenth century strive in their poetry, for example, to deconstruct masculine authority through “débrutalisation” (112); many novels by women of the eighteenth century are shaped by the“marriage plot”(which has already amply been explored by Joan DeJean in her study of women and the origins of the novel in France), with male protagonists serving as a“miroir négatif”for their female counterparts; the “masculine” in novels by Marie Jeanne Riccoboni and George Sand should neither be seen as fundamental to nor representative of male protagonists but should rather be read as“texte, comme vieille histoire par rapport à laquelle et l’héroïne et l’auteure se trouvent obligées de se situer pour affirmer leur identité”(134); if Sand expresses her androgynous self through the male protagonists she creates, and Marguerite Duras, after her, vacillates“en dérapage semi-contrôlé”(212), in her representation of males, Simone de Beauvoir, for her part, mediates between genders in her writing, while privileging the androgynous, “l’être humain [...] qui réussit à être [...] le féminin et le masculin” (210) over the masculine, “le sexe qui tue” (11); finally, dramatistYasmina Reza strives to modify or“stabilize”(254) the in-your-face hegemonic masculinity of her male characters, tempering them through the integration of socalled “feminine” qualities, such as empathy, and thereby exposing in her plays the gendered roles of her male characters on the stage as little more than social constructions. Following the volume’s bibliography are useful indexes of names, works, and ideas discussed by its contributors. But the English “translations” of the French summaries of each of the essays seem...