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L'Esprit Créateur automatic feature of Caribbean identity; Naipaul, no less doubled in his narrative voice and discourse , would seem to contradict this automatic attribution, despite his "modernist decentering of narrative discourse," as Murdoch describes Maximin. Murdoch might have resolved these problems had he built his analyses more on the historical notion of antillanité rather than the cultural notion of créolité as the basis for Caribbean identity . Such an historical grounding would not serve to define identity, nor to insure oppositionality , as the Caribbean has been marked by all the complexities of assimilation and collaboration that other colonial sites have known. But it might have led to greater nuance in his claims for oppositionality and identity as "ineluctably" arising from the Caribbean heritage ("the ineluctable disparateness and difference of his Caribbean heritage [is] translated into a multiform discourse of opposition and identity ..." [204]). The marshaling of an impressive theoretical apparatus, the joining of the fray in key intellectual debates circulating around créolité, and the intelligent close readings provide us in the end with a study of major importance whose contestable claims will no doubt do much to excite further controversy. Kenneth W. Harrow Michigan State University Lisa G. Algazi. Maternal Subjectivity in the Works of Stendhal. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2001.Pp. vii + 231. The question of Stendhal's "feminism" has occupied critics as diverse as Simone de Beauvoir , Philippe Berthier, Richard Bolster and Julia Kristeva. While building on the insights of these authors, Algazi concentrates her attention on the figure of the mother in order to explain more fully Stendhal's view on women and gender. Her boldest claim is that Madame de Rénal embodies "maternal subjectivity and its revolutionary potential" (205). This coupling of maternity and revolution may strike some readers as a contradiction in terms. What could possibly be "revolutionary " about Stendhalian motherhood? Algazi begins with a chapter on psychoanalysis and motherhood. The Lacanian concepts of the Symbolic and Imaginary will function as a kind of explanatory grid for her later readings. The Symbolic is equated with patriarchy from which Stendhal's hero is forever fleeing, while the Imaginary offers a safe harbor which envelops him in maternal love. In the next chapter, she offers a brief literary history of the representation of motherhood from the Renaissance to the French Revolution. After examining the works of Rabelais, Madame de Sévigné, Madame de Lafayette, and Rousseau, she concludes that the ancient portrayal of women as either courtesans or chaste mothers remains more or less intact Stendhal's work challenges this age-old stereotype. Through a series of close readings in the second-half of her book, Algazi demonstrates that two of Stendhal's heroines manage to find a third way: they are depicted as both desiring and desired subjects. In the liminal space of the convent or prison cell, Clélia Conti in La Chartreuse de Parme and Madame de Renal in Le Rouge et le noir simultaneously lay claim to the status of "good mother" and sexually active mistress. Algazi reads this possibility of an escape, however short lived, from the strictures of bourgeois patriarchy as revolutionary. Revolutionary because Clélia and Madame de Renal act on their desires and remain figures of supreme idealization for the heroes—Fabrice and Julien—of these two novels. Algazi is to be commended for her provocative thesis and her marshaling of a variety of different sources from literature, history and psychoanalysis to make her argument. However, the daunting task of theorizing the relationship between these diverse fields is left undone. As a result, the evocative use of concepts such as revolutionary or emancipatory remains tantalizingly vague. For whom is maternal subjectivity revolutionary? While I do not wish to belabor the issue of chronology, Algazi certainly overstates the immutability of die virgin/whore stereotype. Rousseau's Madame de Warens is only the most famous example of aie eighteenth-century's eroticizing of the 142 Spring 2002 Book Reviews maternal. The painter Marguerite Gerard, whose work "Maternité" appears on the book's cover, portrayed motherhood with a understated sensuality, reminiscent of Vigee-Lebrun's portraits of mothers and children. These shortcomings notwithstanding, Algazi's book...

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