Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature by Jane Gilbert (review)

pieces stand out. Merete Stistrup Jensen’s “Le travestissement narratif dans les écrits d’Isabelle Eberhardt”explores the multiple voices in the recently restored manuscripts salvaged at the time of this young and enigmatic author’s death. Although Eberhardt does at times adopt a feminine narrative voice,it is only when writing—and dressing— as a man that she can overcome the social and physical limits of her sex and,consequently, experience broader intellectual and creative freedom. Jensen carefully demonstrates how the recurring motif in Eberhardt’s works of liberty resulting from the abandonment or killing of a woman mirrors the author’s own struggles, whereby writing is possible only after the female point of view has been neutralized.While Jane Dieulafoy shares her contemporary’s preference for male disguises,they have little else in common. As Natascha Ueckmann points out, far from the expectation that nineteenth-century European women travelers deal with colonialism differently because they themselves are both colonizer and colonized, Dieulafoy projects the same ethnocentrism as her male counterparts. Paradoxically, it is her emancipation from the constraints her own culture places on women that provides Dieulafoy with the opportunity to be an overt accomplice in Western efforts to subjugate other cultures.Although the second section, “Genre et altérité,”contains only one article on French travel writing, it is perhaps the most provocative of all. By examining George Sand’s Un hiver à Majorque and Flora Tristan’s Les pérégrinations d’une paria, Christine Planté shows how these two contemporaneous authors, both famous and considered similar in their time, are in fact polar opposites when read from the perspective of otherness. Despite her inexperience as both a traveler and a writer, Tristan is more conscious and accepting of all forms of alterity, whereas Sand, who generally highlights humanist values in her works, shows pronounced intolerance in her travel narrative. Hiding her gender, her own otherness, Planté argues, causes Sand to disregard or devalue the cultural, linguistic, and environmental differences encountered in her travels. The third and final section,“Formes du voyage et possibles narratifs,”is the weakest in terms of thematic cohesion and analytic quality. One article painstakingly attempts to define different categories of female travel writers only to conclude that it cannot be done. Another suggests that women publishing in geographic or scientific journals reinforce colonialism, a well-worn and somewhat superficial position. Minor shortcomings aside, Voyageuses européennes introduces us to several courageous women whose actions and words place them well ahead of their time. Ohio University Herta Rodina Gilbert, Jane. Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. ISBN 978-1107-00383-5. Pp. 283. $90. In her introduction, Gilbert sketches the basic theoretical foundation of her study, defining some of the medieval attitudes toward death that she intends to explore, 262 FRENCH REVIEW 87.3 Reviews 263 and also certain philosophical arguments of Lacan related to death, particularly his readings of Antigone,and the Lacanian concept of entre-deux-morts.Chapter 1,“Roland and the second death,”is largely informed by Lacan’s ideas on the death drive, and also proposes different approaches to Roland’s death based on the major textual variants of the work. Chapter 2,“The knight as the Thing: courtly love in the non-cyclic prose Lancelot,” explores Lacan’s interpretation of courtly love, argues that the termination of the Arthurian order represents a kind of “collective death drive”(61), and considers some interesting ambiguities associated with Galehot, trapped in the state of entredeux -morts. The following portion of the study,“The ubi sunt topos in Middle French,” focuses on a ballade by Eustache Deschamps and the three ballades from Villon’s Testament related to the ubi sunt topos, including the famous Ballade des dames, highlighting complex patterns and tensions revolving around mortality and sexuality, and“Villon’s intense engagement with existence, extinction, and the literary”(150). In “Ceci n’est pas une marguerite: anamorphosis in Pearl,” the author probes the rich symbolic connotations of the marguerite, which she finds“linked to a debate relating the complex of life, death, and life beyond death to that of desire, love, and poetry” (169). The final...