The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts WOMEN TRANSLATORS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE: GENRE, GENDER, AND LITERARY CREATIVITY A Dissertation in French by Rachel Williams 2010 Rachel Williams Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2010 The dissertation of Rachel Williams was reviewed and approved* by the following: Bénédicte Monicat Professor of French and Women‘s Studies Head, Department of French and Francophone Studies Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee Kathryn Grossman Professor of French Jean-Claude Vuillemin Professor of French Adrian Wanner Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School iii ABSTRACT The goal of this dissertation is to examine the importance of translation in the history of women‘s writings in nineteenth-century France and the ways in which it not only contributed to the development of women‘s intellectual activities, but also afforded access to literary production. I therefore explore how translation, when conceptualized as a women‘s literary activity, both reinforced existing roles for women in literature and at the same time allowed them access to other forms of creativity. For, contrary to the opinion of many scholars of literary genre and gender who do not discuss translation in this context, translation was intimately related to varied forms of textual production. In order to demonstrate this relationship and the enormous impact of translation on women‘s conceptions of their creative capacities, I examine translations, as well as the prefatory discourse that often accompanies them, autobiographical statements by women translators, and fiction by women translators with texts from Thérèse Bentzon, Victorine de Chastenay, and Mme Lesbazeilles-Souvestre. I first address how literary creativity was a gendered activity in the nineteenth century, with women limited to certain secondary modes of literary production. I then examine the relationship between translation and the modes of textual creation named above in order to demonstrate the fundamental related-ness of these writings and, finally, I demonstrate the creative aspects of translation through a close reading of several translations in comparison to their source texts to show how translation was not only a creative activity, but a gendered one as well. Despite the widespread dismissal of translation in consideration with issues of gender and genre in nineteenth-century France, its inclusion opens important new areas of research iv and allows for a fuller understanding of what it meant to write as a woman in the nineteenth century. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements .................................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1: Translation, Women‟s Writing, and Textual Propriety: An Overview .............................................................................................................. 13 1.1 A Brief Overview of Translation in France .................................................... 13 1.2 Translation in Nineteenth-Century France ..................................................... 16 1.3 Contemporary Translation Theory ................................................................. 31 1.4 Translation as a Literary Genre ...................................................................... 35 1.5 Literary Genre and Gender in Nineteenth-Century France ............................ 41 1.6 Women And Translation ................................................................................. 57 Chapter 2: Tentée, An Exploration of the Relationship between Translation and „Creative‟ Writing ....................................................................................... 67 2.1 From Translation to Fiction ............................................................................ 67 2.2 Women, Literary Creation, and Reproduction in Tentée ............................... 76 2.3 Redefining Women in Relation to Creation .................................................. 87 2.4 The Woman Writer and Hybridity ................................................................. 91 2.5 Deconstruction of Masculine Superiority ...................................................... 97 2.6 From Tentée to Translation ............................................................................ 103 Chapter 3: Translation, Writing, and Gender in Victorine de Chastenay‟s Mémoires .............................................................................................................. 106 3.1 Autobiography, Translation, and Literary Initiation ...................................... 106 3.2 Translation, Professionalization, and Authorial Originality .......................... 114 3.3 From Translation to History .......................................................................... 120 3.4 Autobiography, Translation, and the Development of Writerly Voice ......... 125 Chapter 4: The Gendered Construction of Prefatory Discourse in Thérèse Bentzon‟s Preface to Le Roman de la femme médecin and Madame Lesbazeilles-Souvestre‟s Preface to Jeanne Eyre ............................................. 133 4.1 The Translator‘s Preface: Traditions, Conventions, and Idées Reçues ......... 133 4.2 Jeanne Eyre ou les Mémoires d’une institutrice and the Construction of Normative Feminine Discourse ..................................................................... 147 4.3 Thérèse Bentzon‘s Feminist Vision of Sarah Orne Jewett ............................ 163 vi Chapter 5: Sexual, Textual, and Lexical Expectations in Thérèse Bentzon‟s Récits Californiens and Madame Lesbazeilles-Souvestre‟s Jane Eyre .......... 182 5.1 Critical Steps Towards a Descriptive Analysis of Translation ...................... 182 5.2 Thérèse Bentzon‘s Re-imagining of Bret Harte‘s American West ............... 199 5.3 The Reconstruction of ―Feminine‖ Values in Mme Lesbazeilles- Souvestre‘s Jane Eyre ................................................................................... 221 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 239 Works Cited ................................................................................................................ 248 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Bénédicte Monicat, for her unwavering support and guidance. Without her encouragement, I never would have envisaged combining my interests in translation studies and my interests in women‘s literary history in the nineteenth century. Her intellectual rigor and enthusiasm were instrumental in the conception and completion of my dissertation, and I could not have done this without her. I also want to thank my committee members, Kathryn Grossman, Jean-Claude Vuillemin, and Adrian Wanner, for their invaluable advice and comments. I would like to extend my thanks to all of the professors and support staff in the Department of French and Francophone studies: your guidance and input throughout my years at Penn State contributed greatly not only to my dissertation, but to my overall intellectual and professional development. I received my Master‘s degree from the Translation Research and Instruction Program at Binghamton University, and the formation I received there in translation theory and practice was a key component in my continued interest in translation studies and an essential element of my dissertation. I would particularly like to extend my appreciation to Marilyn Gaddis Rose and Rosemary Arrojo. In the summer of 2009, I was the recipient of a Graduate Student Summer Residency from the Institute for the Arts and Humanities. This opportunity allowed me viii to take a summer off from teaching in order to focus on writing my dissertation, for which I remain very grateful. Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank my family and friends, whose support kept me motivated and committed. Introduction My dissertation explores the practice of translation as a women‘s literary activity in nineteenth-century France and how it served both to reinforce and to transform existing roles for women in literature. My goal is to examine and establish the importance of translation in the history of women‘s writings and the ways in which it not only afforded access to literary production, but, most importantly, was a major factor in the transformation of women‘s intellectual identities that contributed to the expansion of their cultural and professional horizons. In so doing, I also question many an assumption with regard to the status and nature of translation in and of itself. While it has been acknowledged that translation has long been an important activity for women, most scholarship on women and translation concentrates on this activity before the nineteenth century. Scholars such as Tina Krontiris, and Danielle Clark, among others, have brought to light the importance of translation as a means of writing for women when publication in their own name was deemed inappropriate, for ―en Occident, durant le Moyen Age et la Renaissance, la traduction est pour elles l‘une des seules pratiques d‘écriture socialement acceptable‖ (Delisle & Woodsworth 154). Yet, when it comes to the nineteenth century, the amount of research on women and translation