The Mother in/and French Literature

BOOK REVIEWS
129
The Mother in/and French Literature
Edited by Buford Norman
Amsterdam/Atlanta, Rodopi, « French Literature Series » 27,
2000, xix + 233 pp.
« French Literature Series » publishes the Proceedings of the annual
French Literature conference of the Department of French and Classics
of the University of South Carolina, a conference that focuses each
year on a pre-announced topic. The 1999 conference, whose papers are
published in volume XXVII, was dedicated to the Mother, as the title
indicates, although the complexities thus foregrounded in the
relationship between the Mother and French Literature receive rather
little elaboration beyond the opening of Nancy Lane's Introduction.
With the notable exception of Jeanette Marie Hecker's discussion of
the over-medicalization of maternity in France (which has no literary
angle whatever but nevertheless echoes many of the themes evoked in
other papers), the contributions focus for the most part either (and most
often) on the mother as thematized within French Literature or on the
mother as producer of French Literature. Of the fifteen chapters, only
Domna Stanton's discussion of Madame de Sévigné, Aimée Boutin's
analysis of Lamartine's Manuscrit de ma mère and Daniela Di Cecco's
exploration of French and Canadian novels for teenagers written by
women treat of the tensions that arise between writing of the mother
and writing as a mother. However, the collection is likely to be of
interest to anyone concerned with these questions for a number of
reasons. It suggests, as indeed Nancy Lane points out in her
Introduction, that de Beauvoir and Irigaray are de facto the primary
theoretical references for thinking about the mother-daughter
relationship, Chodorow and Klein scarcely featuring in the works cited.
A message of general importance comes across insistently from a
number of contributions relating to the seventeenth century. Contrary
to the received wisdom that the emergence of what Domna Stanton
terms 'maternalism', the idealization of the 'bonne mère' at the expense
of the woman, took place in the eighteenth century — a belief that
some of the non-seventeenth century specialists quote in this very
volume — Domna Stanton, Holly Tucker and Deborah J. Hahn each
independently adduce evidence for situating its emergence rather in the
seventeenth century. Of the individual contributions, perhaps the most
audacious — certainly the most controversial — is Aimée Boutin's
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COMPTES RENDUS
valorization of the mother-son mirroring in Lamartine's corpus,
'despite its tendency to silence the mother's voice' (136). The volume
is to be commended for the range of authors it covers: while, for
obvious reasons, most of the women writers covered belong to the
twentieth century, an impressive amount of attention is paid to
seventeenth-century women, as said above, and there are articles on
Swiss, Canadian, Caribbean and African writers as well as a chapter on
French African cinema. The articles dealing with the nineteenth
century all relate to male authors, and it is a little disappointing that
there is no discussion of the differences which may exist between the
relationship to the mother of sons and daughters. The very targeted
focus ensures that the book retains its coherence and on the whole has
much to recommend it to anyone interested in representations of the
mother.
Mairéad Hanrahan
National University of Ireland, Dublin
Marshall C. Olds, Au Pays des perroquets. Féerie théâtrale et
narration chez Flaubert
Amsterdam/Atlanta, Rodopi, « Faux Titre » 202,2001,267 pp.
Le but que se fixe Marshall C. Olds dans cette étude est de présenter le
perroquet de Flaubert comme appartenant à une « race féerique et
romancière ». Il s'agit surtout de l'importance de faire le lien entre
l'œuvre théâtrale de Flaubert (généralement jugée médiocre, y compris
par son auteur) et son œuvre romanesque (qui puise parfois dans la
technique théâtrale). Olds s'intéresse essentiellement à la période de
féerie théâtrale (1861-1863) et aux documents (plans, brouillons,
scénarios de pièces et féeries — 12 au total), dont un inédit {La
Princesse a un don féerique), qui ont été découverts pour certains,
redécouverts pour d'autres, ces dernières années, et qui jettent une
lumière essentielle sur l'œuvre canonique de Flaubert. Le fait qu'Olds
les réunit tous en appendice permet aux lecteurs de suivre son argument
et aux chercheurs de s'y référer aisément. Il y apporte, en outre, dans
sa critique, d'utiles mises à jour quant aux dates auxquelles certains de
ces travaux furent composés. L'originalité du travail d'Olds, qui adopte
une approche clairement annoncée et chronologique, est, d'une part, de
réévaluer tous ces documents à la lumière du travail d'écriture
collective (certains furent conçus avec Louis Bouilhet et, parfois,