H-France Review Vol. 1 (April 2001), No. 12
James Smith Allen, Poignant Relations: Three Modern French
Women. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. xiii +
270 pp. Notes, bibliography and index. $42.50 US. ISBN 0-8018-6204-3.
Whitney Walton, Eve’s Proud Descendants: Four Women Writers
and Republican Politics in Nineteenth-Century France. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2000. 308 pp. Notes, selected bibliography and index.
$49.50 US. ISBN 0-8047-3754-1.
Review by Victoria Thompson, Arizona State University.
Biographies, whether of a single individual or of a group, have always
had a place in historical writing, and yet until recently they had fallen
out of fashion among academic historians. The strong influence of the
Annales paradigm, with its focus on the longue durée, along with
the long-standing predominance of social history, which privileged the
study of social groups and large-scale structural change, contributed
in part to this lack of interest in biography. Cultural historians, influenced
by poststructuralist theorists such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida
and by anthropology, focused on culture as an expression of a coherent
collective identity, a tool used by one group to dominate/resist another,
or a vehicle by which different groups in society could interact to negotiate
meaning, and thus power. Focusing on the study of groups and influenced
by theorists that called into question the agency and autonomy of the
self, many historians did not see biography as a meaningful approach to
the study of history. To change slightly the terms of the question posed
by Jeremy Popkin in his essay on contemporary French historian-autobiographers,
many wondered if biography was “possible in a climate that lacks a firm
belief in the coherence of the self.” [1]
In recent years, however, is seems that historians have become more comfortable
with the notion that identity can be contested, conflicted, and multiple,
that it can be embedded in and the product of social and cultural structures,
and yet still exist as a meaningful topic of historical exploration. This
has allowed the re-entry of biography into historical scholarship. In
her Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives, Natalie
Zemon Davis moved away from the tendency to see collective biography as
a mirror of group identity, writing of her three subjects that the “variant
patterns [of their lives] alert us to mobility, mixture, and contention
in European cultures.” [2] Joan Wallach Scott also presented identity
as diverse and multiple, exploring the intellectual and ontological paradoxes
that feminists struggled with as a group and as individuals. In Only
Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man, Scott
examined individual women as “sites--historical locations or markers--where
crucial political and cultural contests are enacted and can be examined
in some detail. To figure a person--in this case, a woman--as a place
or location is not to deny her humanity; it is rather to recognize the
many factors that constitute her agency, the complex and multiple ways
in which she is constructed as historical actor.” [3]
The work of such historians has alerted us to the new possibilities for
biography. As the recent set of essays published in French Historical
Studies (many of which also appear in the newly published collection
The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France)
indicates, historians are turning to the study of individuals for new
perspectives on the “construction of social and psychological identity.”
This “New Biography” entails, in the words of Jo Burr Margadant, “an explicit
recognition of the constructed nature of identity and of the dependence
on contextualization for elucidating an individual’s ‘meaning’ to the
self or others.” [4]
The works by James Smith Allen, Poignant Relations: Three Modern French
Women and Whitney Walton, Eve’s Proud Descendants: Four Women Writers
and Republican Politics in Nineteenth-Century France offer excellent
examples of the way in which collective biography can be used to explore
the creation of a self-identity in relation to multiple contexts. Through
the lens of collective biography, these authors address issues including
the process of self-creation, the relationship between the self and society,
and the possibility of transgression through self-creation.
Allen’s book explores the “discursive relations of women to themselves,
to others, and to the world” within a context of “subordination, even
oppression” (pp. 1, 2). He contends that the act of writing was a means
of creating identity and a sense of agency for the three women he studied:
Marie-Sophie Leroyer de Chantepie (1800-1888), a novelist, literary critic
and correspondent of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert, Geneviève Bréton-Vaudoyer
(1849-1918), a diarist and correspondent of Henri Regnault and Jean-Louis
Vaudoyer, and Céline Renooz-Muro (1840-1928), a scientist, historian,
journalist and polemicist. Influenced by both their life experiences and
the texts they read, these women used writing as a means to create and
assert a sense of self. Calling them “feminists in all but name,” Allen
argues that through their writing these women transgressed the prescribed
limits of feminine identity in nineteenth-century France and proposed
alternative ways of being female (p. 13).
Walton likewise sees the four women whose lives and writings she explores
as feminists due to their unconventional personal choices and their insistence
on women’s ability to contribute to society by participating in the public
sphere. All four of these women were well-known writers during the July
Monarchy: George Sand (1804-1876), Marie d’Agoult (1805-1876), Hortense
Allart (1801-1879) and Delphine Gay de Girardin (1804-1855). Calling her
work “both a biographical study of the four women and an historical analysis
of French literary and political culture,” Walton argues that each of
the four women “wrote herself as a republican woman, as a female individual
with certain public responsibilities” (pp. 3, 2). These women, Walton
contends, “wrote themselves into existence,” and, in the process, they
also “rewrote the republican script regarding family relations, positing
egalitarian alternatives to the patriarchal family of male republicanism”
(pp. 121, 3).
Both Allen and Walton highlight the relational aspect of self-creation.
Rather than posit the notion of a coherent, contained self, the authors
emphasize the fluid boundaries of the self as expressed in writing, in
relation to others, to personal experience, and to society. Allen’s study,
heavily informed by feminist and poststructuralist theory, explores the
fluid nature of what he calls the feminine “I,” arguing that as a “discursive
practice” the “I” “ignores generic boundaries. The text of the female
self appears wherever women write as subjects in their own right” (p.
33). Allen demonstrates that no matter in what genre the women chose to
express their ideas--and their writings included diaries, letters, novels,
travel literature, scientific tracts and newspaper articles--they consistently
wrote of and for themselves. In these literary “assemblages” as he calls
them, the women moved back and forth between genres, so consistently incorporating
their life story into each text that all of their writings were, in some
way, autobiographical. (p.34). Leroyer, for example, wrote novels that
drew upon her own experiences, which she also discussed in her correspondence
with Sand and Flaubert as well as in her book reviews. Likewise Bréton,
in her diaries and letters, as well as in a novel and travelogue, “wrote
purposefully, self-consciously,” using these various genres to define
her sense of self (p. 114). The women Walton studies also wrote in a variety
of genres, producing novels, works of non-fiction, plays, journalistic
pieces and autobiographies. For both Allen and Walton, the belief in the
fluidity of generic boundaries in the women’s writings, as well as in
the omnipresence of the self throughout their texts, shapes their methodological
approach. Each author moves back and forth among the different works written
by these women, drawing from them indiscriminately as evidence of a process
of self-creation.
Just as the women writers pursued the process of self-creation in a variety
of texts, they also shaped their sense of self in relation to other texts
and other individuals. Renooz’s autobiographical writing perhaps best
illustrates the role of other texts in the process of self-creation. Allen
asserts, “rusty pins hold in place fragments of Renooz’s childhood journal,
letters she received and copies of those she sent, articles clipped from
scholarly reviews and various newspapers, and pages torn from her other
writings” (p. 141). Allen uses this example of an “assemblage” to highlight
the way in which Renooz constructed her sense of herself, as a scientist
and prophet, by responding to other texts. Likewise, Walton argues that
“individuals construct their lives and their identities out of the culture
that surrounds them,” a culture that includes other texts (p. 3). The
four women in Walton’s study read and commented upon each others’ work
and created themselves in opposition to the texts, and the personalities,
of their contemporaries. Sand in particular served as a “foil, as well
as a model, to the three other authors,” as she did to Leroyer, who corresponded
with her and strongly identified with her novel Lélia (Walton,
p. 103, Allen, p. 57).
Experience also plays a role in these works, as the authors explore the
relationship between the women’s lives and their texts. Both Allen and
Walton describe the life experiences of the women they study, discussing
their childhood, affective relationships, and family situations, as well
as, when relevant, their efforts to play a public role as intellectuals,
salonnières, and journalists. For Allen, experience functioned
as material that had to be reworked through the process of writing before
it could become integrated into each woman’s sense of self. He argues
this most forcefully in the case of Bréton, stating that writing for her
involved “an effort to mediate experience and give it form” (p. 114).
Walton similarly argues that the women’s experiences informed their texts,
leading in particular to a feminist reworking of romanticism and republicanism.
She raises the possibility, however, that the women understood their experiences
without the need to write of them. In her discussion of d’Agoult’s romantic
journey to Switzerland with Franz Liszt, for example, Walton explores
the way in which d’Agoult used a discussion of nature, in both her autobiography
and in her novel Nélida, to convey a sense of the sexual awakening
she was experiencing. In this passage, Walton moves deftly back and forth
between d’Agoult’s experience with Liszt and her textual representation
of that experience, but ultimately leaves unresolved the question of whether
d’Agoult’s account of her sexual feelings used the metaphor of nature
in order to make sense of what she was experiencing for herself or to
make it more acceptable to her readers. Walton seems to lean toward the
second interpretation when she argues that women writers had to find a
way to “write about sexual transgression while still remaining ‘women’”
(p. 51). Although Walton clearly believes that writing was crucial to
the creation of a self-identity for these women, she often implies that
the self being created was a public self. Allen, in his study of three
women far less in the public eye, implies that no distinction existed
between a public and a private self.
As this discussion of the private versus the public self indicates, both
Allen and Walton argued that the women writers created their identities
in relation to the society in which they lived. Although they each provide
examples of the way in which the women writers were able to craft lives
that suited their personalities and desires, both Allen and Walton characterize
the impact of society on the woman in negative terms, emphasizing the
way in which social and cultural limitations aimed to circumscribe women’s
roles and opportunities. Allen in particular emphasizes these limits,
focusing on three women who did not achieve great recognition for their
writings or their ideas. While both Allen and Walton present a view of
the women writers operating in “a world not of their own making,” they
also demonstrate the way in which women were able to draw upon cultural
conventions meant to deny women agency and use them for their own purposes
(Allen, p. 2). Both authors see the self that the women writers created
as an ultimately transgressive self, one able to break beyond the strictures
of society and attempt, in so doing, to challenge the rules and norms
that place limitations upon it. Allen, studying women who lived in “relative
obscurity,” argued that the act of writing was in itself transgressive,
a protest against the “patriarchal prohibitions against [an] intellectual
life” for women (pp. 9, 3). The act of writing, he argues, established
a sense of consciousness, which, in a society that denied women self-conscious
individuality, laid the foundations for resisting society’s limits. Following
Mikhail Bakhtin and Michel Foucault, Allen furthermore argues that the
fluid generic boundaries in the diverse texts produced by the women he
studied can be seen as a strategy of resistance in their insistence on
heterogeneity and a plurality of sites of resistance (pp. 45-6). The lack
of boundaries between public and private self, between self and text,
between text and experience thus become in Allen’s work evidence of a
will to resist that he describes as feminist. The nature of this feminine,
transgressive self and the process of its creation are the main foci of
Allen’s study.
Walton likewise sees the process of self-creation as transgressive, although
her focus is less on practice and heterogeneity than on the way in which
women writers were able to transform dominant cultural discourses such
as romanticism and republicanism. Here, she argues for a close relationship
between experience and text, contending that the women’s experiences in
family and sexual relationships, in the world of letters and in politics
profoundly affected the way in which they interpreted dominant cultural
discourses, thus giving them the material with which to reshape these
discourses in a feminist manner. In her discussion of republicanism, for
example, Walton suggests that “all four [women writers] to some extent
reshaped republicanism by performing and articulating a model of republican
womanhood” (pp. 157-8). The notion of a “performative self,” which also
ties together the essays in The New Biography, privileges the way
in which women shaped their lives for the public gaze. In so doing, it
implies a gap between the public and private self, appearing to leave
the second ultimately unknowable. Likewise, although Walton discusses
the private experiences of these women, the lens through which she sees
those experiences is that of their public writings, and the purpose of
her discussion is to examine how the public self-creation of these women
shaped the culture of their time. Walton thus argues that the women’s
works and lives “opened up possibilities for a less rigidly gendered republicanism
[and] made improvements in women’s status a significant component of their
republicanism” (p. 158). In crafting this argument, Walton offers us a
new, less exclusionary view of women’s possibilities for participation
in the public sphere during the July Monarchy. Walton argues, for example,
that studying the “different styles of political engagement of Sand, d’Agoult,
Allart, and Girardin suggest[s] that the legal exclusion of women from
politics was by no means complete” (p. 155).
The two authors both place their discussion of the process of self-creation
within the context of feminism, although each asserts that by many standards
the authors they discuss would not be considered feminists. The women
in Allen’s study never participated in feminist organizations, nor did
they particularly identify with feminism. Those studied by Walton likewise
refused association with socialist feminists and did not believe, in 1848,
that women yet warranted the vote. Yet in each case, the authors see the
creation of a transgressive self, whether one destined for the public
eye or one that recognized no boundary between public and private, as
a feminist act. As Walton puts it, in words with which Allen would agree,
“these women writers […] promoted a feminist project of claiming women’s
right to and ability for intellectual endeavor” (p. 87). In their writings,
they developed and communicated to others an alternative model of the
female self, one that broke beyond the boundaries placed upon it by society.
Feminism provides a coherent, and in many cases accurate, means of describing
this transgressive self, but it may be a context that is too limiting.
Much recent historical writing has tended to see the self as largely determined
by forces of society and culture. This is particularly evident in works
influenced by Michel Foucault, who argued that the creation of the modern
self, no matter how autonomous it might have felt itself to be, was central
to the dissemination and deployment of new technologies of power.[5] Although
Allen and Walton contextualize the process of self-creation, seeing it
as necessarily linked to existing social and cultural structures, their
emphasis on agency and transgression in the process of self-creation is
significant. Yet what role does gender play in this process? Allen argues
forcefully that women’s liminal position in society, along with their
predisposition for seeing the world in terms of relationships whose boundaries
are fluid, predisposes them to a different sort of writing about, and
thus creation of, the self. Although Walton steers clear of arguments
concerning women’s nature, she also argues that women’s experience of
being both of and not of the public sphere was crucial to the formation
of their public selves. Women may well have had greater insight into the
necessary yet difficult process of establishing one’s identity as both
of and not of society that is integral to the creation of modern selfhood;
perhaps this is why that literary genre most associated with the development
of modern selfhood, the novel, was, at its origins at least, a prototypically
feminine genre. Did this, however, mean that men created different sorts
of selves than did women, or that men were less able to create a transgressive
self-identity?
In addition to the specifically feminine nature of this process, the
works by Allen and Walton raise questions regarding the importance of
writing in the process of self-creation. While both authors also acknowledge
the role of experience, the process of writing is central to their accounts
of self-creation. Allen attributes this to the particularly literary nature
of French culture. This raises the intriguing question of what other mechanisms
might contribute to self-creation, and whether or not it is accurate to
speak in national terms. In other countries, for example, did collective
action play a larger role in creating identities, feminist or otherwise,
for women? Did participation in philanthropic organizations in England,
for example, provide the same mechanism for making sense of experience
and negotiating the relationship between self and society that writing
did for the women studied by Allen and Walton? Until recently, the large
body of literature on the formation of working-class consciousness suggested
that collective action was crucial in the process of self-formation among
working-class men. Does gender determine by what process the self is created?
Does class? Is it accurate to speak of national differences? Or is it
more complex? What other modes, outside of writing, might have provided
means of self-creation for women in the nineteenth century? And if other
modes did contribute, how do we, as historians who depend on textual analysis
for our view of the past, study them? Perhaps by exploring these intriguing
questions, we will find our own sense of our professional selves being
prodded and pushed in new directions. In this sense, the studies by Allen
and Walton can be seen as invitations to embark on a great adventure.
NOTES
[1] Jeremy D. Popkin, "Ego-histoire and Beyond: Contemporary French
Historian-Autobiographers," French Historical Studies 19:4 (Fall
1996): 1164.
[2] Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century
Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 212.
[3] Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists
and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996),
16.
[4] Jo Burr Margadant, "Introduction: The New Historical Biography in
Historical Practice," French Historical Studies 19:4 (Fall 1996):
1057. See also Jo Burr Margadant, ed., The New Biography: Performing
Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2000).
[5] These ideas are discussed in, for example, Discipline and Punish:
The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon,
1977) and The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction,
trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978). Foucault specifically
addressed the issue of self-disclosure in "Technologies of the Self" in
Luther H. Martin, et al, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel
Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachussetts Press, 1988). In an
interview contained in this same volume, Foucault implied that the self
plays a role in its own creation, but this possibility of agency is not
emphasized in most of the work influenced by him. See "Truth, Power, Self:
An Interview with Michel Foucault," conducted by Rux Martin in Ibid.,
19.
Victoria Thompson
Arizona State University
victoria.thompson@asu.edu.
Copyright © 2001 by the Society for French Historical Studies, all rights reserved. The Society for French Historical Studies permits the electronic distribution for nonprofit educational purposes, provided that full and accurate credit is given to the author, the date of publication, and its location on the H-France website. No republication or distribution by print media will be permitted without permission. For any other proposed uses, contact the Editor-in-Chief of H-France.
H-France Review Vol. 1 (April 2001), No. 12
ISSN 1553-9172
