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IN THE fall of 1984 I taught, for the first time, a course entitled French Women Writers. The title of this paper is thus factual. It is also metaphorical, as I discovered when I began to compose the following narrative of my experience. “The first time,” with its resonances of innocence lost and of the beginning of a new phase, turned out to be a time of re-visioning a part of my past experience, that of my education in French language and literature. What follows is also a record of some significant changes in the way I think about teaching as well as in my practice that have resulted from my creating and teaching a course on French women writers—for the first time.
For the better part of my career—some sixteen years of full-time teaching—I had assumed that my formal education in French literature at two institutions, one a Seven Sisters women's college and the other an Ivy League university, was a superior one, which met the criteria for excellence that are discussed so often today. I might add that I was a college student in the late fifties and a graduate student in the sixties, a time before the advent of feminist scholarship with its rediscovery of so many women writers and its challenging new questions to be asked of all texts. The change in context from the sixties to the eighties is significant in understanding my experience. It took me, however, until the beginning of the summer of 1984, the time I had set aside to prepare my new course, to understand at a profound level that my fine education in French had been designed for a gentleman. What I had been taught was a white male curriculum in French literature. It quickly became clear that I needed some more education, and this time I was to be my own teacher.
Before leaving campus for the summer, I had got approval for a course described in part as “A study of works by women writing in French from the Middle Ages to the present.” In June, when I sat down to work, I confronted some major questions. First, which writers and what texts should I include? This problem, which I face whenever I plan a course, is usually difficult because I have to decide what to exclude. The problem in this case, however, was the opposite: I could think of only a very few texts by women in French that I had ever actually studied.
As I considered choices from the Middle Ages, Marie de France came to mind. Hers is a celebrated name. It occurred to me that I'd never been obliged to read any of her works, although medieval literature by male authors such as La chanson de Roland , the novels of Chrétien de Troyes, and the poetry of François Villon had been required texts in my graduate course.
Christine de Pisan was a writer whose name I'd recently encountered in “Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des femmes 1400–1789,” an article by Joan Kelly. As far as I could recall, however, this major medieval writer—a woman who, as Richards (one of her translators) notes, wrote hundreds of poems, a 26,636-line essay on universal history, major prose works in defense of women in literature and history, essays on war and politics, a book entitled Le livre des fais d'armes et de chevalerie (a manual of instruction for knights), and the only work in Joan of Arc's honor written during her lifetime (Richards xxiv)—had never been mentioned by any professor at either of my elite alma maters. In fact, few of her works are currently in print, although some are being published because of the new interest in women writers.
Other women writers who had appeared in course syllabi had been falsely caricatured and were usually discussed in the context of their relationships with men. I had learned about Louise Labé, a poet of the French Renaissance, as a wild young woman, the author of passionate sonnets to her lover. But I had never encountered the dedicatory preface to her complete works, a letter to Clémence de Bourges, a young noblewomen of Lyon, in which Labé analyzes the relations between the sexes, the importance of women's education, and the pressing need for women to write.
Marie de Gournay was presented to graduate students in my doctoral program solely as the editor and adopted daughter of her celebrated mentor, Michel de Montaigne, her status for posterity being derived merely through her relationship to a famous male writer. No one alluded to her own writing or her role as a leading intellectual of the early seventeenth century.
The seventeenth century was an exception of sorts. Mme de Sévigné and Mme de Lafayette are familiar to all of us in French. Because my students had already studied de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves , I chose Mme de Sévigné, and the mother-daughter relationship proved a provocative one in class discussions.
I find it ironic that my choice for the eighteenth century, Marie Jeanne (Philipon) Roland de la Platière, known as Mme Roland, was a writer whom I might have learned about in graduate school. The one woman on the faculty at the time was doing research on Mme Roland. The general course on the Age of Enlightenment, however, was given by a more senior professor and did not include texts by any women writers. As a student, I had never read a word by or about Mme Roland.
Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, a prolific poet of the Romantic period, was discussed in a nineteenth-century poetry course I had taken. In reviewing my notes, I found no mention at all of the theme of women in her poetry, the power of the mother, female friendship, the significance of the mother-daughter relationship, or the daughter as muse. I learned of her as one of the Romantic poets whose themes were similar to those of Lamartine. In looking for some translations of her work, I came across the 1957 volume Penguin Book of French Verse, 3: The Nineteenth Century (ed. Hartley). The introduction on Desbordes-Valmore, written by the editor, Anthony Hartley, reads as follows: “Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1780–1859) passed a life chiefly notable for a passionate and unhappy love affair, of which the poem given here is one of the results. She also worked as an actress” (v). In fact, an edition of Desbordes-Valmore's complete poetic works runs 524 pages long—and it uses very fine print.
Simone de Beauvoir, my choice for the twentieth century, had been mentioned in graduate school, but more in the context of her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre than in her role as a writer. Courses in the program were given on Gide, Proust, Camus, the surrealists, the modern theater. Women writers were neglected.
In the process of putting together my list of texts, I began to understand that a problem existed, but I was not yet able to define it. A careful rereading of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own illuminated the many economic, social, political, and personal factors that prevented most women from writing and publishing. Germaine Brée's Women Writers in France , which sketched portraits of several of the writers I had chosen for the course, presented facets of their lives and work different from those I had encountered in traditional critics. Domna Stanton, professor of French and women's studies at the University of Michigan and a friend of mine from college and graduate school, provided some sound advice and copies of texts I had not been able to locate, either in my own library or in that of the large university where I had done my graduate work.
This brings me to the next phase: finding the texts. The only textbook currently available for a course on French women writers is Dezon-Jones's Les écritures féminines , a series of passages from the works of selected authors. The book presents a number of problems such as inaccuracies in the texts and out-of-date bibliographies. Obtaining individual texts by French women writers was also difficult. For example, although editions of Christine de Pisan's love poetry are available (poems where the male lover is the main character), most of her major works are not in print. The text I wished to use, Le livre de la cité des dames , was unavailable in French, although it was republished in modern English by Persea Press in 1982 (trans. Richards).
The Louise Labé dedicatory preface was in my textbook (43–44), as were passages from Marie de Gournay's Egalité des hommes et des femmes (49–54), but the complete text of the latter was to be found only in a 1910 volume by Schiff (55–86), a text I was able to borrow from Professor Stanton, as it was in the library at the University of Michigan. The Letters of Mme de Sévigné are widely available, but those of Mme Roland were to be found only in an 1867 edition. Her Mémoires were republished in 1966, but I wanted my students to share the young Marie Jeanne Philipon's relationship with her two closest friends, Sophie and Henriette Canet. Luckily, the Xerox machine was handy to copy the 1867 texts.
At this stage in the development of French Women Writers, costs became a serious concern. I had to pay the library of my former graduate school seventy-five dollars a month to borrow whatever texts they did have. Copying costs mounted. Several French texts were unusually costly, even for imported books. I allude to this problem because I had never encountered one like it in any other course I had ever taught.
By mid-July, I had procured some texts and had read several perceptive critics. As I began to prepare my syllabus and bibliography, I became aware of the importance of historical context. Preparation of the course on French women writers deepened my awareness of the sexist assumptions of the typical university history curriculum. The Renaissance offers a useful example of the need to question traditional interpretations of history. It is generally portrayed as an intellectual and cultural peak that follows the valley of the Middle Ages. After reading some feminist re-visions of the Renaissance, however, particularly “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” by the women's historian Joan Kelly, I found that when you look at history in terms of women's estate, the peaks and valleys often reverse themselves. The Renaissance was a time of domestication for women, an age when their public role was greatly diminished, while the early Middle Ages with its decentralized social structure and predominance of family fiefdoms was a period in which women owned property, shared power with men, and often ruled in their absence. During the Middle Ages in France, women were creators of the literature of courtly love, and, as Kelly notes, “great noblewomen, such as Eleanor of Aquitaine and Marie of Champagne, Eleanor's daughter by her first marriage to Louis VIII of France, could make their courts major cultural and social centers and play thereby a dominant role in forming the outlook and mores of their class” (“Did Women” 146, 147). No such opportunities existed for women during the Renaissance, and they shared little in the intellectual rebirth we associate with this period.
In teaching French Women Writers, it is also necessary to become acquainted with the history of publishing. In “Early Women Writers: Inscribing, or, Reading the Fine Print,” Susan Schibanoff writes that Christine de Pisan's Le livre de la cité des dames was translated into English in the fifteenth century by Bryan Anslay. When Henry Pepwell published the translation in 1521, Christine's name disappeared from it, and the book arrived in the hands of the readers as the “project and product of two gallant English gentlemen who were ever diligent to praise the ladies” (478). Schibanoff tells us further that
After Christine was written out of her City, the work itself was written off. Despite the fact that it exists in 25 contemporary manuscripts and was important enough to be copied for the Queen of France, the Duke of Burgundy and other royal subscribers, the original French text has never been edited and made available to secondary readers. (478)
By the end of August, I had found the texts and become acquainted with some of their relevant historical contexts. I had gone through a loss of innocence followed by a period of anger and frustration, and I had finally experienced a time of productivity. I had a syllabus and bibliography for French Women Writers, and I was ready to go back to the classroom.
My class consisted of six young women students, all seniors and either French majors or international business students with a concentration in French. They had taken a number of courses in French literature before, and each had spent at least one semester in Paris. I asked them as an opening exercise to make a list of all the French writers they could think of. We put the names on the blackboard, and of a total of between thirty and thirty-five writers, three or four were women. We then discussed the implications of what we saw. Why was the list so heavily weighted with names of men? Were only three or four French women writers worthy of study? Who made up this list after all? It was a dramatic beginning that posed many of the questions we were to confront throughout the semester.
During the summer I had considered many possibilities for the first reading, and it became evident that, as Virginia Woolf had helped me to understand why I had read so few women, so should she be available to my students to articulate for them the problems of the search for a female literary tradition. Our second class was an in-depth discussion of A Room of One's Own . We met in the evening and talked far more than the usual hour and fifteen minutes of class time. Students were shocked by Woolf; they were saddened and angered by what she revealed. Several told me that they did not sleep the night after, because Woolf's text and its examples of the oppression of women writers had so disturbed them.
The course as a whole had its high points and its not-so-high ones, as have all courses I have given. The discussions in French Women Writers, however, were more personal, more related to the students' own lives and so more impassioned, because the young women found they could more closely identify with the feelings and experiences described by the writers—mother-daughter relationships, female friendship, problems of identity and questions of equality—than they could in other courses.
My role in French Women Writers was that of collaborator, rather than authority, for I too was discovering the texts for the first time. Discussions were true exchanges, not question-and-answer sessions. Students' written responses to the literature show the intense connection between what they read and their own deepest concerns.
A course on women writers such as the one I have described is a necessary part of the undergraduate curriculum in French language, literature, and culture (and in all other languages as well). It is a significant example of our efforts today to present a more complete idea of what literature is, a view of literature that introduces the student not only to a small number of works representing the white male establishment but to a variety of texts that reflect the literary traditions of us all. Reading literature by women is a powerful reminder of how partial is the vision of any particular element of society, even if that group represents the best and the brightest of writers taught in the traditional French literature curriculum.
Because French Women Writers expanded my repertoire of methods and texts—how to teach my discipline as well as what to teach—it was not just another course. In teaching it for the first time, I discovered a heretofore silent legacy I knew little of. I in turn passed this legacy of women's voices on to my students to broaden their notions of what is included in a renewed French literary tradition, to give them some models for their own attempts at self-expression, and to introduce them to their buried past. We read together for the first time works by women from temporal and cultural contexts vastly different from ours, writers who reached us across the centuries because their texts treat themes, issues, and concerns that deeply engage women today.
The author is Associate Professor of French and Coordinator of Women's Studies at Marymount College, Tarrytown. She is also National Coordinator of Academic Alliances in Foreign Languages and Literatures. This article is basedon a presentation delivered at the joint AATF-ACTFL meeting, November 1985, in New York City.
Brée, Germaine. Women Writers in France: Variations on a Theme . New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1973.
Desbordes-Valmore, Marceline. Les œuvres poétiques de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore . Ed. M. Bertrand. Grenoble: Presses Univ. de Grenoble, 1973.
Dezon-Jones, Elayne, ed. Les écritures féminines . Paris: Mignard, 1983.
de Gournay, Marie le Jars. Egalité des hommes et des femmes . Dezon-Jones 49–54.
Hartley, Anthony, ed. Penguin Book of French Verse, 3: The Nineteenth Century . Baltimore: Penguin, 1957.
Kelly, Joan. “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” Becoming Visible: Women in European History . Ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz. Boston: Houghton, 1983. 139–64.
——— “Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des femmes 1400–1789.” Signs 8.1 (1982): 4–28.
Labé Louise. “A Mademoiselle Clémence de Bourges, Lionnoize.” Dezon-Jones 43–44.
Richards, Earl Jeffrey, ed. and trans. Introduction. The Book of the City of Ladies . By Christine de Pisan. New York: Persea, 1982. xxii–xxvi.
Roland de la Platière, Marie Jeanne (Philipon). Lettres en partie inédites de Madame Roland . Paris: Plon, 1867.
———. Mémoires . Paris: Mercure, 1966.
Schibanoff, Susan. “Early Women Writers: In-scribing, or, Reading the Fine Print.” Women's Studies International Forum 6.15 (1983): 475–89.
Schiff, Mario L. La fille d'alliance de Montaigne . Paris: Champion, 1910.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own . New York: Harcourt, 1929.
© 1987 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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