Narratives of Mothering: Women’s Writing in Contemporary France by Gill Rye (review)

RYE, GILL. Narratives of Mothering: Women’s Writing in Contemporary France. Newark: UP of Delaware, 2009. ISBN 978-0-87413-040-9. Pp. 221. $52.00. Mothers have long been an object of study in literary writing and criticism, and the focus of feminist and psychoanalytical theories. The 1970s and 1980s saw an abundance of texts in which mother-daughter relationships, in particular, were at the center of diverse discourses. Previously, very few of such narratives were told from a mother’s point of view. Rye argues that a new generation of women appearing on the French literary scene in the 1990s is again making mothers, maternity, and mothering “fashionable” (20), but with a double twist. First, mothers are no longer the objects but rather the subjects of discourses, and the critic therefore focuses on texts where “the mother is herself either the first-person narrative subject, or, in third-person narratives, the figure whose point of view is paramount” (17). Second, contemporary women’s writing reflects on complex changing practices in French society (in particular new laws, new family patterns, and new technologies) and their subsequent impact on mentalities and ways of parenting. Rye explains that her preference for the term “mothering” (over “maternity” or “motherhood”) “lies in its ability to privilege the multiple and individual experiences of mothers” (31–32). The first part of her study succinctly covers the historical , theoretical, and literary contexts in which the issue of mothering has evolved in both French and Anglo-Saxon feminisms, and then proposes an overview of mothers in French literature. It shows that contemporary voices portray different aspects of complex subjectivities and experiences in controversial new ways: these different outlooks on mothering coincide with the weakening of psychoanalysis as the dominant French theoretical paradigm. In each of the following chapters, informed by appropriate theoretical work, Rye narrows her study down to two stylistically different texts that illustrate similar aspects of what it means to be a mother in the present French cultural moment. Interestingly, part 2 (“Mothering: Loss, Trauma, Separation”) challenges common notions of the joys of motherhood. Representative authors Camille Laurens and Laure Adler place the death of their child at the center of Philippe (1995) and A ce soir (2001), formulating a model of mourning different from Freud’s and Melanie Klein’s and suggesting that recurrent grief “is not necessarily pathological” (53). By giving voice to the body through childbirth and miscarriage , Christine Angot’s autofictional Interview (1995) and Leïla Marouane’s Le Châtiment des hypocrites (2001) work through other pains and sufferings, such as rape, torture, or the contradictions of “what it might mean to be ‘presque consentante ’” in an incestuous relationship (61). Marie Ndiaye’s La Sorcière (1996) and Chantal Chawaf’s La Sanction (2004) offer a revision of the mother-daughter relationship, underlining a sense of powerlessness in front of maternal responsibilities and stereotypes of the good mother. Part 3, “New Stories of Mothering,” picks up on the notions of empowerment and disempowerment. It explores the managed ambivalences of a single mother who loses custody of her son (Week-end de chasse à la mère [1996] by Geneviève Brissac), the anxieties of another who cannot cope and commits a tragic act (Véronique Olmi’s Bord de mer [2001]), the need for visibility in lesbian couples, with the legal issues they face in reproduction, parenting, and co-parenting (Eliane Girard’s Mais qui va garder le chat? [2005], and Myriam Blanc’s Et elles eurent beaucoup d’enfants... histoire d’une famille homoparentale [2005]). Finally, Rye 822 FRENCH REVIEW 84.4 revisits the “ubiquitous culture of mother blaming” (141) and studies how Angot’s Léonore, toujours and Darrieussecq’s Le Mal de mer contrast with it. Clearly written, this book shows that “the figurative power of the female reproductive body is [currently] taken to new horizons” (74) and that women’s narratives “reveal how their individual experiences as mothers [continue to be] in tension with ideologies of good mothering” (116). Rye’s insights are both well-informed and illuminating. Davidson College (NC) Catherine Slawy-Sutton THIBAULT, BRUNO. J. M. G. Le Clézio et la métaphore exotique...