GENDER, POLITICS AND FICTION IN 1930s FRANCE by Ange1a Kershaw, M.A. Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, May 1998. CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter 1 La Fran~aise desire administrer les interets de la cite comme elle administre les interets de son foyer: Literary representations of gender and commitment. 21 I A history of exclusion 25 A story of exclusion 11 Le tomb eau de la feminite 49 Etre une femme A Utopian erasure of difference III Aragon's answer, or, idealism is no solution 76 Chapter 2 Pleasure displaced: politics and female sexuality 87 I A radical refusal 94 A refusal of the radical 11 Le Celibat, etat superieur 114 'Les femmes sont toute sensualite' III Un roman d' amour? 131 Cri d'espoir? Chapter 3 Dulce et decorum est... : politics and male sexuality 150 I The dominant fiction 155 11 A fascist fiction 160 'A desperate engagement with that which unmans man' III Demystification 183 IV War and peace 193 Chapter 4 The grotesque female body as political possibility: the example of Henriette Valet 205 I Carnival and the grotesque body: Bakhtin 210 Carnival and the grotesque body: Valet 11 Disembodiment: the fleshy body and the body politic 222 Political production and sexual reproduction The stains of war: mutilation and malfunction III Political possibilities 256 Conclusion 269 Bibliography 278 ABSTRACT This study examines French political fiction of the 1930s, taking gender as its primary category of analysis. It considers texts by female novelists whose work has been largely excluded from critical attention, in order to bring their particular contribution to inter-war French literature to light. It integrates this analysis into a consideration of relevant and representative texts of the exclusively male canon of French political fiction dating from the 1930s, exploring points of contact and divergences to show how the work ofthe female authors relates to the wider context of French inter-war literary activity. Texts by eight writers are considered in detail, namely Madeleine Pelletier, Edith Thomas, Henriette Valet, Louise Weiss, Louis Aragon, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Andre Malraux and Paul Nizan. The analysis of the female-authored novels informs the study of their male counterparts, whose texts also offer fertile ground for an analysis in terms of gender. The corpus is approached, in broad terms, through the themes of commitment, sexuality and the body. These themes permit an investigation of the gendering of politicization as it is manifested in 1930s literature. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis would not have been possible without the help and support of a number of people. I am very grateful to my friends, colleagues and teachers in the French Department at Nottingham University who have been offering constant encouragement and intellectual stimulation since 1989. I should like to thank my supervisor, Rosemary Chapman, for her incisive criticism and for her patience and generosity in reading numerous drafts of this work, and to acknowledge her role in its development. My thanks also to Paul Smith, for sharing his knowledge with me and for reading parts of my work, and to Katie Attwood for her academic support and personal encouragement. I should like to thank my family: my parents, John and Irenee Kershaw, without whose moral and financial support this project could not have been undertaken, and my husband, John Snape, who has helped me in innumerable ways to bring it to its conclusion. This thesis is dedicated to them. A.M.D.G. ABBREVIATIONS AA - Aden Arabie, Paul Nizan BMD - Bibliotheque Marguerite Durand C - La Conspiration, Paul Nizan CB - Les Cloches de Bdle, Louis Aragon CE - Combats pour L 'Europe, Louise Weiss CF - Combats pour les femmes, Louise Weiss CH - La Condition humaine, Andre Malraux D - Delivrance, Louise Weiss E - L 'Espoir, Andre Malraux FV - La Femme vierge, Madeleine Pelletier G - Gilles, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle MSB - Madame 60 BIS, Henriette Valet R - Le Refus, Edith Thomas Te - Le Temoin compromis, Edith Thomas VF - Le Vote desfemmes, Colette Yver VN - Une Vie nouvelle, Madeleine Pelletier 1 INTRODUCTION This study began with a deceptively simple-sounding question: were women writing fiction about politics in France in the 1930s? Various works of criticism, literary history and bibliographical sources have confirmed that women's fictional output was considerable in the inter-war period. 1 Most recently, Jennifer Milligan's The Forgotten Generation: French Women Writers of the Inter-war Period has made an extremely significant contribution to scholarship in this field, answering her own hope that 'some of the missing links in the chronicles of literary history will be filled' .2 Literary history has described the popular, almost feminist novels ofMarcelle Tinayre, and the equally popular but less feminist novels ofColette Yver, as well as the symbolist poetry ofLucie Delarue-Mardrus, and even the novels ofthe working-class Marguerite Audoux, whose 'Marie-Claire' series was widely read in the 1920s and 1930s, so that these names are becoming familiar. But literary history would have us believe that this is where the story ends. It has not so far attempted to investigate possible links between inter-war writing by women and the genre which is more usually taken to characterize French inter-war literature, and particularly 1930s literature, namely, the literature of commitment, or Iitterature engagee, in Jean-Paul Sartre's terms.3 That is the purpose ofthis study. I S. Dreher and M. Rolli, Bibliographie de la litteraturefran~aise 1930-1939 (Lille: Librairie Giard; Geneva: Librairie E. Droz, 1948) includes a not inconsiderable number of female entries. Relevant recent critical works include Margaret Crossland, Women ofIron and Velvet (London: Constable, 1976), Dominique Desanti,LaFemmeau temps des anneesfolles (Paris: Stock, 1984), Domna C. Stanton, The Defiant Muse (New York: Feminist Press, 1986), Shari Benstock, Women ofthe Left Bank: Paris 1900- 1940 (London: Virago, 1987), Jennifer Waelti-Walters, Feminist Novelists ofthe Belle Epoque: Love as a Lifestyle (lndianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990) and Waelti-Walters and Steven C. Hause, Feminisms of the Belle Epoque: A Historical and Literary Anthology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). 2 Jennifer Milligan, The Forgotten Generation: French Women Writers ofthe Inter-war Period (Oxford: Berg, 1996), p.5. 3 Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu 'est-ce que la litterature? (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). 2 Happily, the answer to my initial question is, yes. This study examines in detail the work of four such authors: Madeleine Pelletier, Louise Weiss, Edith Thomas and Henriette Valet.4 The first two names will be very familiar to scholars of French women's history. Madeleine Pelletier (1874-1939) has been the subject of various critical and biographical studies.s The child of a right-wing Catholic greengrocer and a disabled father, Pelletier received a Catholic education until the age of twelve, after which, although her formal education ceased, she continued to study independently, passing the baccalaureat and gaining entrance to medical school. Her political career began at an early age when she became involved with anarchist groups after having left school. As an adult her commitment was to feminism and socialism. In 1921 Pelletier travelled to the Soviet Union to witness Russian politics first hand. On her return to France she became president of the feminist organization Solidarite des femmes which produced a journal, La SujJragiste. It was in the 1930s that Pelletier turned seriously to fiction, although there is no evidence to suggest that her novels were widely read. Pelletier's main profession was as a doctor. She famously advocated abortion, and for these activities was incarcerated in the asylum ofPerray-Vaucluse at the age of65, where she died. Her (1!uvre includes a large number of essays encompassing political, sociological, medical and psychoanalytic topics, but only four works of fiction: a play, Superieur! (1923), which traces the political development of an anarchist sympathizer, two novels, Une Vie nouvelle (1932) and La Femme vierge (1933), and an undated collection of short 4 Milligan's study makes brief reference to Pelletier and Weiss, although it does not mention their 1930s fiction at all, refering only to their feminist activities and to Weiss's autobiography. Milligan does not include Thomas or Valet in her study. S The most detailed is Felicia Gordon's The Integral Feminist: Madeleine Pelletier 1874-1939 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). See also Madeleine Pelletier (1874-1939): Logique et in/ortunes d'un combat pour l'egalite, ed. by Christine Bard (Paris: cote femmes, 1992), and Gordon and Maire Cross, Early French Feminisms. 1830-1940: A Passion/or Liberty (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1996) which makes available some important essays by Pelletier in translation for the first time. 3 stories, Trois contes.6 Louise Weiss (1893-1983) remained politically active until the 1970s: she founded the Institut des sciences de la paix in Strasbourg in 1970 and was elected as a Gaullist Deputy to the European Parliament in 1979. Her life, which she documented herself with tremendous detail in the six volumes of her autobiography, Memoires d'une Europeenne, was dominated by feminism and pacifism. Her career as a journalist was accompanied by work with L 'Europe nouvelle, the pacifist organization of which she was the founder and driving force until increasing hostility between the states of Europe made her internationalist position untenable. So, in 1934, she turned her attention to suffragism, founding the group La Femme nouvelle and gaining notoriety for her street politics which included mock female elections, symbolic chaining and throwing face powder at policemen. She was ultimately awarded the Legion d 'honneur. Weiss was active in the Resistance during the Second World War. Many of the countless obituaries which survey her life and work suggest that her fictional writing began only in 1951 with Sabine Legrand, omitting to mention her 1936 novel Delivrance, or her three-volume post- Second World War work, La Marseillaise.