French Women's Writing 1900-1938
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Overlooked and Overshadowed: French Women’s Writing 1900-1938 Margaret Ann Victoria Goldswain Student No: 18550362 Bachelor of Arts (UNISA). Bachelor of Arts (UWA) Diploma in Modern Languages (French) (UWA) This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Western Australia School of Humanities (Discipline-French) 2014 ABSTRACT Overlooked and Overshadowed: French Women’s Writing 1900-1938 This study examines how women in France between 1900 and 1938 (before during and after the Great War) were represented in the writings of four selected women writers - Marcelle Tinayre (1870-1948), Colette Yver (1874-1953), Lucie Delarue-Mardrus (1874-1945) and Marcelle Capy (1891-1962). These authors, fêted in their time have now been largely excluded from contemporary studies on women in early twentieth-century France. The thesis demonstrates how their personal circumstances and the politico-social events of 1900-1938 influenced the way each writer represented women over time, and reveals that women’s writings were not homogenous in theme or in focus. By reading these texts alongside other contemporaneous texts (newspaper articles, reviews and writings by other women), the analyses show that Tinayre, Yver, Delarue-Madrus and Capy challenge and complicate stereotypical perspectives produced mainly by male authors of the same era. Using a longitudinal approach, the study explores each author’s selected texts across three distinct periods - the belle époque, the Great War and the inter-war. Such a reading makes it possible to assess changes in their writing in response to contemporary social and political events in France. By looking at four writers writing across the same era the diversity of women’s lives is also underlined. In these fictional texts which depict inter-personal relationships, professional choices and women’s struggle to earn a living as writers one can locate the origins of post Second World War feminist thought in France. With this study the dual goal of recuperating selected work of four neglected French women writers and reinserting their representations of women into French cultural historiography is achieved. ii STUDENT DECLARATION This thesis contains only sole-authored work, some of which has been prepared for publication under sole authorship. The bibliographical details of the work and where it appears in the thesis are outlined below. A paper entitled A Feminine Witness of the Great War or the Nomad of Peace was given at the 18th George Rudé Seminar in French History and Civilization on 12-14th July 2012 Auckland New Zealand. It is awaiting publication in the conference proceedings. It concerns activist journalist Marcelle Capy (1891-1962) the subject of Chapter 5 in this thesis. It has a different focus to that of the thesis as the paper outlines her contribution to feminist journalism and her pacifist activities throughout her life as expressed in two of her books. BIBLIOGRAPHY Capy, Marcelle. Une Voix de femme dans la mêlée. Paris: Édition censurée. Librairie Ollendorff, 1916. Capy, Marcelle. Des hommes passèrent… Paris: Éditions du Tambourin, 1930. Student Signature .................................................................................. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My first debt of gratitude is to my supervisor, Professor Srilata Ravi who has patiently and enthusiastically guided me long distance through the years of this study. It has not been an easy road but she has continued to support me despite her relocation to Alberta, Canada. My warmest appreciation and thanks go to Professor Andrea Gaynor for her unfailing encouragement, wise words and humour that sustained me during the last year of the study. I acknowledge the important role of the Librarians at the Reid Library of the University of Western Australia and especially those in the Inter-Library loan department without whose tireless efforts none of this work could have been accomplished. Thanks also to the librarians of the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand in Paris and the enthusiastic and patient staff of the Regional Archives in Tulle, Limousin, France. À mes amies françaises, Benedicte, Barbara, Catherine, Simone et Arlette – merci pour votre soutien pendant des années. Finally I would like to thank my husband Peter, whose continual reassurance at home and whose driving skills in France were essential elements in furthering my research. Many thanks to my children Andrew, Philip and Diana for their interest and constant support for this project. iv SPECIAL NOTES AND ABBREVIATIONS 1) All references in footnotes and bibliography are in referenced in MLA unless specified otherwise. 2) French quotations have not been translated in the text. 3) Abbreviations as cited in the text are as follows: Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand (Paris) denoted as BMD. Archives départementales de la Corrèze (Tulle, Limousin) denoted as ARDC. Service historique de l’armée de terre denoted as SHAT. 4) Texts analysed in the thesis are abbreviated as follows: Marcelle Tinayre La Maison du péché. (MP) La Veillée des armes. Le Départ: août 1914. (VA) Les Lampes voilées. (LLV) L’Ennemie intime. (EI) Colette Yver Les Cervelines. (LC) Princesses de science. (PS) Mirabelle de Pampelune. (MP) Rose, Madame. (RM) Lucie Delarue-Mardrus Marie, fille-mère. (MFM) Un roman civil en 1914. (RC) L’Ange et les pervers. (AP) Marcelle Capy Une voix de femme dans la mêlée. (VM) Des hommes passèrent… (DP) Femmes seules. (FS) v TABLE OF CONTENTS FRONT MATTER i-vi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 Women’s Writing and French Society 1900-1938 During the Belle Epoque 16 During the Great War 34 During the Inter-War Years 49 CHAPTER 2 Marcelle Tinayre (1870-1948) Une plume rebelle ou une romancière accomplie? 58 CHAPTER 3 Colette Yver (1874-1953) Le Deuil blanc 103 CHAPTER 4 Lucie Delarue-Mardrus (1874-1945) De la Princesse Amande à la Duchesse Normande 151 CHAPTER 5 Marcelle Capy (1891-1962) Une Jeanne d’Arc de la paix 200 CONCLUSION 245 BIBLIOGRAPHY 252 vi INTRODUCTION Certainly France has an ambivalence towards women still more visible than in other European countries, and this has affected both its politics and its literary culture.1 In France there has been a reluctance to acknowledge and incorporate the majority of early twentieth-century women writers in the broader history of France and into the history of French literature. The importance of women writers is still contested and it appears as Elaine Showalter proposes that “each generation of women writers has found itself, in a sense, without a history, forced to rediscover the past anew, forging again and again the consciousness of their sex.”2 Women have been handed impossible choices at every moment in history: either to become a poor imitation of the masculine or accept second class and subservient roles. More specifically, in literary history with the exception of “quelques grandes figures au nom du génie,”3 the concept of French literature has remained resolutely masculine despite the continuous historical presence of women writers from the Middle Ages to the present. To justify women’s omission from early twentieth-century French literary history and culture, critics, both male and female, asserted that literature by women is inferior to that of men by virtue of their sex alone.4 Women have been hampered by the demands of reproduction and in early twentieth-century France, society internalized the notion that biologically women had limited intellectual capacity in comparison to men. This mirrors women’s general status in early twentieth- century French society and in particular women writers struggled for recognition as authors at a time when sexual difference became a pressing philosophical and political subject. Anne Epstein’s article points out that the entry of women into the professions began to enlarge the areas of female expertise and 1 Alison Finch. French Literature. A Cultural History. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010. 11. 2 Elaine Showalter. A Literature of Their Own. London: Virago, 1978.11-12. 3 Martine Reid. Des Femmes en littérature. Paris: Éditions Belin, 2010.6. Emphasis in the original. 4 Jean Ernest-Charles. “Femmes de lettres.” Gil Blas. 12 January 1908 (Le Censeur politique et littéraire 92); Paul Flat. Nos femmes de lettres. Paris: Perrin, 1909. 238. 1 authority.5 Nonetheless it was assumed that women were only capable of writing about domestic issues, while philosophy and rational logic were supposedly the preserve of men. Prejudice has prevailed to the present and serves to maintain the “trivialisation of female authorship” as demonstrated by Nancy K Miller.6 As Alison Finch says in her recent cultural history of French literature, few women writers are acknowledged despite successful careers as writers during their lifetime.7 As well as exclusion from the literary canon many women writers of this period are also omitted from French literary history written in the last century.8 The period 1900-1938 is significantly neglected and merits only a few pages in the The Cambridge History of French Literature.9 In the past twenty years there has been a more inclusive approach towards women writers particularly from Anglo-American researchers, for example, American author Eva Martin Sartori has compiled The Feminist Encyclopaedia of French Literature which acknowledges the large number of French women writers of the era.10 In a more recent history of French literature, women have contributed many of the articles and women writers feature to a greater extent than in earlier publications.11 French Global takes a different approach in recasting French literary history in a way that includes marginalised sections of society, such as immigrants and ethnic minorities and has no specific ‘women’s writing.’12 Whilst a large number of women are omitted from French literary history, it should be noted that many male writers who are similarly not well known continue to be 5 Anne Epstein, “Gender and the rise of the female expert during the Belle Epoque,” Histoire@Politique. Politique, culture, société, 14 (May-August 2011): 84-96 96.