Colette, Leduc, Despentes: the Ordinary, the Failed, and the Abject
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Colette, Leduc, Despentes: The Ordinary, the Failed, and the Abject by Marion Elizabeth Phillips A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in French and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Michael Lucey, Chair Professor Debarati Sanyal Professor Dora Zhang Summer 2019 Abstract Colette, Leduc, Despentes: The Ordinary, the Failed, and the Abject by Marion Elizabeth Phillips Doctor of Philosophy in French Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality University of California, Berkeley Professor Michael Lucey, Chair This dissertation explores how the concepts of the ordinary, of failure, and of abjection shape the works of three French women writers across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. I engage with theories of the quotidian, queer and affect theory, feminist literary criticism and work on life-writing, and sexuality studies. Each of the writers under investigation here demands a reorientation to their texts from readers, as styles and subject matter shift to challenge patriarchal discourse. I focus on the last two original works of Colette (1873-1954), which experiment with her short forms and observational style. I connect her insistence on material objects to the everyday existence and corporeal realities of an aging writer. I then turn to Violette Leduc (1907-1972), a little-known protégée of Simone de Beauvoir whose writings on love and sex between women were censored by her publishers. Finally, I connect Colette’s fashioning of feminine identity to that which is systematically dismantled by Virginie Despentes. Despentes (1965- ), a punk rocker and lesbian activist, tests the limits between cinema and pornography in her films and between feminist theory, philosophy, autobiography, and noir fiction in her writing. She portrays a postcolonial, multiracial, and fractured contemporary French society in her sweeping literary frescoes. This study prioritizes descriptions of embodied experience and challenges representations of female desires and sexualities. It also considers failure as a strategy for critiquing systems of power that invalidate, silence, and objectify women and women’s writing. After discussing the difficulties in expressing written accounts of the ordinary and the abject, I explore potential ruptures and continuities for Cixous’s écriture féminine as well as the category of women’s writing. 1 In memory of Marion R. Glansberg (1926 – 1980) i Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................ iii INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER 1: COLETTE’S ORDINARY: THE QUOTIDIAN, THE MATERIAL, THE CORPOREAL ............................................................................................................................. 12 I. The Quotidian ............................................................................................................... 15 II. Material Objects ........................................................................................................... 24 III. The Writing Body ......................................................................................................... 31 IV. Colette and Leduc and the Ordinary ............................................................................. 41 CHAPTER 2: VIOLETTE LEDUC AND THE ART OF FAILURE, OR, FAILURE IS AN OPTION ....................................................................................................................................... 51 I. Writing Literary Failures .............................................................................................. 54 II. Social Failures: Class and Illegitimacy ........................................................................ 61 III. Failures of Femininity: Beauty and Appearance .......................................................... 67 IV. Failures of Femininity: Sexuality and Romance ........................................................... 74 V. Literary Failures and Censure ...................................................................................... 81 CHAPTER 3: FETISHIZING THE ABJECT AND ABJECTING THE FEMININE IN DESPENTES ............................................................................................................................... 90 I. Theorizing Abjection .................................................................................................... 93 II. Shadow Feminism and the Bad Feels ......................................................................... 101 III. Corporeality and Counter-Fetishization ...................................................................... 108 IV. Self-Fashioning: Failures and Formations of Femininity ........................................... 117 V. Conclusion: Connecting the Ordinary to the Abject .................................................. 125 CODA: BEYOND “WOMEN’S WRITING”? ....................................................................... 128 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................... 135 ii Acknowledgements My sincerest thanks to my adviser, Michael Lucey, for his insightful and generous readings of my work and for his helpful guidance throughout this process. Thanks also to my committee members Debarati Sanyal and Dora Zhang, for their advice and encouragement in bringing this project to fruition. In the French Department, I can’t thank Mary Ajideh and Carol Dolcini enough for their kindness and wisdom. At Berkeley, I had the pleasure of working with gifted teachers like Seda Chavdarian, Rick Kern, and Vesna Rodic. Their skill and dedication continue to inspire me. For their friendship and comradery in writing, a heartfelt thanks to Kathryn Levine, Linda Louie, and Elyse Ritchey. I am incredibly grateful to the following people for supporting me during this process. Thank you for caring for me and feeding me, from across the world and across the hall: Zane Burris, Bill Cline, McKenna Davis, Doug Fake, Laura Kline, Kaitlyn Murphy, Jay Neuner, Bridget O’Connor, Matt Peterson, Megan Ulmert, Vincent Visentin, Alina and Zhenya Zinchik, and Pauline Ziserman. To Corine Labridy and Michael Arrigo. There are no words. Just eternal gratitude. To my dad and stepmom, Will and Mary. Thank you for your steadfast support and encouragement. To my sister Anna, the fiercest person to have in your corner. Thank you for being my rock. I love you and Nir and Ladybug so much. And to my mom, Karen. Thank you, Mom, for your support, your love, and your commitment to my education. And thank you for teaching me that sometimes at the library you just have to wander the stacks to find the books you don’t know you need. Wandering among books has been my favorite part of working on this dissertation. iii Introduction No dissertation on the work of Colette, Violette Leduc and Virginie Despentes can begin without first acknowledging how their personal and literary reputations shape readers’ perceptions of their writings. Certainly, they have been thought of together before. Colette and Leduc have appeared together before in literary criticism and analysis about women’s life- writing (with Leduc occupying much less space than Colette), and Despentes cites Leduc as an author she admires. Here I propose considering the three of them together in order to explore commonalities and variations on certain themes within and between their works. I delve into the unglamorous and at times ugly sentiments portrayed in the works of these authors and examine how my three central concepts – the ordinary, the failed, and the abject – appear in and shape their writing. I also investigate how these concepts resonate more widely in both literature and in works of feminist and queer theory. I see these three terms as situated on a spectrum of undesirable, unremarkable, and unpleasant elements. Can these categories be reclaimed? Do they need to be resituated? In any case, the ordinary, the failed, and the abject merit sustained inquiry and illustration. Colette wrote from the Belle Époque through the years immediately following World War II, overlapping with the beginning of Leduc’s literary career, which continued until the posthumous publication of her last work in 1973, the same year as her death. Despentes began writing in a post-punk, post-porn, post-feminist context of the 1990s and 2000s, a moment in which Leduc was beginning to be rediscovered thanks to interest in queer studies and her relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. Although these authors figure in bibliographies for “queer women writers,” it is important to acknowledge that the term queer is a label applied to Colette and Leduc anachronistically and rather inaccurately. Neither writer explicitly claimed a lesbian or bisexual identity, nor did they engage in any political or social activism.1 Leduc did perform some of the questioning of gender and sexual norms that the contemporary term queer implies, but only as they related to her personal experience. Relationships with other women were described poetically by both writers, with Colette’s descriptions more euphemistic and Leduc’s full of imagery. Relationships with men also take up significant space in their