Reecriture des mythes: l'utopie au feminin.(Review)

Joelle Cauville and Metka Zupancic, eds. Reecriture des mythes: l'utopie au feminin. Etudes de langue at litterature francaises no. 123. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997. x + 266 pp. $66.00 cloth. $18.00 paper.

THE 20 ESSAYS collected here have been gathered to address what the editors perceive as a lacuna--the rarity of studies linking the use of mythology and "utopia in the feminine." The latter concept overlaps with the Anglo-American "feminist utopia" but does not coincide with it completely. Here we find the French word "utopie" taken beyond the boundaries established by More to include "utopian impulse," "utopian space," "uchronie" (untranslatable but roughly, "timelessness"(1)), "heterotopia," and (especially) the kind of non-representational linguistic utopia that comes to life solely in the act of writing or reading. What puts these "in the feminine" is the revalorization of women and the acknowledgement of the female body, both for itself and in its relation to other bodies. The theoretical sources cited in these essays include a number of French writers on utopia who have not yet been translated. Each essay spends a paragraph or two defending the inclusion of its subject in utopian studies and then goes to work establishing its link with mythologies of various kinds.

Only three essays deal with utopias written before the nineteenth century. Colette T. Hall and Derk Visser examine the biblical and theological sources of the medieval Christine de Pizan's Cite des dames. According to them Pizan countered the misogyny of her times by reinterpreting past women's lives and re-inscribing them into the biblical tradition. From Pizan we move to Eric Paquin's article on two eighteenth-century women, Felicite de Genlis and Isabelle de Charriere, whose polyphonic epistolary novels about emigres reveal a kind of mobile egalitarian society emerging among aristocrats and laborers who redefine their roles during the course of their travels from place to place. Both writers were to some degree influenced by Fenelon's Telemaque, a didactic novel in which Ulysses's son is accompanied on his travels by a mentor named Mentor who is really the goddess Minerva in disguise. The nineteenth century is represented by the feminist socialist Flora Tristan (1803-44), who was acquainted with Fourier and the Saint-Simoniens. Her own utopian writings begin in her work Peregrinations d'une paria, recording her travels to Peru where she sought the biblical lost paradise but found, instead, a country as oppressive to women as the France she had just fled. In her later utopian work, she came to regard the terrestrial utopia as only a better society on its way to a celestial utopia. In her historical novel Loin de Medine, the twentieth-century francophone Algerian writer Assia Djebar also rewrites a religious tradition--Islam in her case--to include feminism, thus contradicting both Moslems and the western stereotypes of them.

The theme of Adam and Eve's lost paradise crops up frequently in these essays, but with a feminine twist that emphasizes Eve as the original mother of women. Thus, according to Michele Bacholle, French-Canadian Anne Hebert's novel Le premier jardin conflates Eve with Demeter as its heroine goes in search of her daughter. Such a matriarchal utopia existing in the absence of men can also be found in the works of Jovette Marchessault, who acknowledges the influence of previous women writers on her plays. According to Benedicte Mauguiere, Marchessault also rewrites numerous old myths, satirizing the sexist ones and emphasizing those which deal with the relationships between women. Monique Wittig also does this in Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amants and Le corps lesbien, as shown in an article by Marie-Miguet-Ollanier. Extending the descendents of Eve metaphor to represent women writers as the progeny of earlier women writers, the contemporary French novelist Jeanne Hyvrard contributes an autobiographical essay in which she situates herself and her ...