Lost and Found: Mother–Daughter Relations in Paule Constant's Fiction

Lost and found: mother–daughter relations in Paule Constant’s fiction In Paule Constant won the Prix Goncourt for her seventh novel Confidence pour confidence to much controversy. Her novels had been shortlisted for the Goncourt several times before, and she had gained many other literary prizes. However, press coverage was generally of the opinion that, although the most prestigious French literary prize was long overdue to her, Confidence pour confidence itself was not especially deserv- ing of that glory. The controversial reception afforded this novel relates primarily to its subject matter: set in contemporary Kansas, USA, it por- trays a group of middle-aged women the morning after a feminist confer- ence. Described variously as banal (because it is about women?) and anti-feminist (because of the bitter and rivalrous women-to-women relations it describes), on first impressions this text seems quite different from Constant’s earlier novels, four of which are set in Africa, one in Cayenne and the other in eighteenth-century France. Although each novel stands on its own, shared characters, motifs and themes connect them into a coherent body of work. None the less, Confidence pour confidence not only actually does have thematic links with other Constant novels but it even alludes to them within the text itself. Most particularly, the problematic relations between women in Confidence pour confidence echo difficult female relationships throughout Constant’s work, notably between mothers and daughters. This chapter places Confidence pour confidence within Constant’s œuvre as a whole, and argues for a more positive reading of the novel–areadingthatalso throws light on the trajectory of mother–daughter relations in her fiction. In Constant’s work, the mother–daughter relationship is most often represented as negative, even destructive, and many of her little-girl Gill Rye - 9781526137999 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/25/2021 09:29:37PM via free access Rewriting the past characters suffer from maternal deprivation to the extent of losing all sense of self. Moreover, the deeply ambivalent mother–daughter relationship, which is most evident in Constant’s first novel Ouregano and again in La Fille du Gobernator, is echoed in maternal configurations beyond the bio- logical relationship, such as the pupil–teacher dyad in Propriété privée,a foster mother in White spirit as well as the women-to-women relations in Confidence pour confidence. This chapter focuses on the specific connections between Confidence pour confidence and four of the earlier novels, Ouregano, Propriété privée, Balta and La Fille du Gobernator, making links between three female characters: Tiffany (a -year old in Ouregano, growing up to her teenage years in Propriété privée and an adult in Balta), Chrétienne, the little-girl character of La Fille du Gobernator and Aurore, a French writer and one of the four principal women characters of Confidence pour confidence.1 The parallels between the characters Tiffany and Chrétienne are strik- ing: in Ouregano and La Fille du Gobernator respectively,both aged ,they are taken to live in the Tropics when their fathers take up colonial appoint- ments (Tiffany to the fictional Ouregano in Africa,Chrétienne to Cayenne, South America). During their stay,they are both marked for life by what is experienced as rejection and abandonment by their parents. In Confidence pour confidence, the adult Aurore has a somewhat different history but suffers a similar fate: born in Africa, she was orphaned as a child, both her parents killed in a bushfire from which she alone escapes.In all three cases, both parents are involved in the trauma suffered by their daughters, but it is always the loss of, or abandon by,the mother that is the most difficult to cope with. However negative the mother–daughter relationship, the strongest of emotions continue to be invested in it. If the three characters are connected by trauma associated with the mother–daughter relationship, all five novels under discussion are also linked by another loss: the leitmotif of a dying creature which has to be put out of its misery. In Ouregano, it is ‘la petite bête’ (the tiny wild animal), adopted by Tiffany, which escapes and, in the ensuing confusion, is trodden underfoot. Tiffany’s mother’s voice joins others in urging the -year old girl to finish it off, but she is quite unable to do so. Echoes of this episode haunt the following novel Propriété privée,most notably when Tiffany symbolically lays to rest the memory of her ‘petite bête’ by being the only one of her class to be able to kill a suffering guinea pig in the science laboratory.In Balta, the victim is human; here, it is the African boy Balta himself, dying of rabies, whose last moments are eased not only by an injection of morphine but also Gill Rye - 9781526137999 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/25/2021 09:29:37PM via free access Mother–daughter relations in Constant’s fiction by the human warmth provided by the adult Tiffany who conquers her fear of the sick and dying to cradle him in her arms. That this recurring motif is a trope for the psychological trauma endured by Constant’s little-girl characters, and emblematic both of the loss of the self and of the mother that is at the heart of all the novels,is never clearer than in La Fille du Gobernator,in which Chrétienne secretly adopts a puppy against the express orders of her parents.When the animal falls ill, she is ill-equipped to look after it, and in a cruel punishment inflicted by her father, the little girl is forced to shoot the half ant-eaten creature herself to put it out of its misery. If Chrétienne had killed herself instead, the nar- rative suggests, it would have been preferable to the trauma of living with the memory of this scene for the rest of her life. It is most telling that this particular episode is juxtaposed with the departure of Chrétienne’s mother to a leper camp,never to return; she has finally achieved the martyrdom she has been seeking: to become a leper. Significantly, these two events are described in the novel with the same vocabulary. According to Chrétienne’s father: ‘l’abandon d’un animal est un crime’ (p. ) (‘it is a crime to abandon an animal’ (p. )), while the narration goes on to reveal that Chrétienne’s mother ‘était partie pour toujours. Elle l’avait définitivement abandonnée’ (p. ) (‘was gone for ever. She had aban- doned her for good’ (p. )). The use of the word ‘abandon’ for both epi- sodes is noteworthy, since it programmes the judgement of the reader against the parents in favour of the little girl. In sacrificing herself, Chrétienne’s mother has also made a sacrifice of her daughter,and if,in the view of Chrétienne’s strictly Christian father,it is a moral crime to abandon an animal, it must surely also be one to abandon a child. What is more, Chrétienne’s father subsequently ‘abandons’her too as he goes on to abne- gate responsibility for everything and disappears,shipwrecked,thus fulfill- ing his own desired destiny. In Confidence pour confidence, Constant very explicitly reworks the motif of the suffering creature yet again, when the character Gloria squeezes to death a dehydrated pet jerboa (which she refers to as a ‘rat’) in order to put an end to its suffering. Here, the system of mirroring between the five novels is also turned in on itself to produce a mise en abîme that challenges the distinction between fiction and reality within the novel itself. Not only are multiple references made to a similar scenario from one of the books the character Aurore has written, but also memories resurface of an event in this character’s own childhood,which,in turn,is strongly reminis- cent of the petite bête episode in Constant’s Ouregano.The fact that Aurore Gill Rye - 9781526137999 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/25/2021 09:29:37PM via free access Rewriting the past is portrayed as a writer in Confidence pour confidence is crucial in the forging of connections between Constant’s individual novels and the con- struction of a cohesive œuvre. In a US lecture, Constant suggests that the character Aurore could actually have written both Ouregano and La Fille du Gobernator,the latter as a fictional autobiography.2 This does not mean, however, that Tiffany, Chrétienne and Aurore are one and the same character; nor can they be read autobiographically, and related in a straight- forward way to Constant herself, despite the fact that obviously autobiographical elements are included in her work: as a child, Constant lived in turn in Africa and Cayenne with her parents, and she makes no secret of the fact that Confidence pour confidence has its roots in her own US experiences. Rather, the metafictional aspects of Confidence pour confidence throw into relief the complex relationship between fiction and autobiography, and Constant’s individual novels are woven ever more closely into a labyrinthine but connecting literary œuvre. The characters Tiffany, Chrétienne and Aurore are thus entwined, the thread which connects them, providing the key both to their evolution and to the progression of the mother–daughter relationship in Constant’s work. With the intention of following this thread, my focus now shifts to the endings of each of the five novels.The trajectory of the three different characters that is thus revealed unravels a psychological itinerary in which the mother–daughter relationship is deeply implicated. Constant’s first novel, Ouregano, terminates on Tiffany’s separation from her mother at the end of a desperately unhappy year in Africa, in which there is no place for the little girl in her parents’ new colonial life.

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