"Insightful readings towards our contemporary recovery and interpretation of texts by women writers."—L' Esprit Createur
"Observes that women's access to writing—to what Sankovitch calls 'the world of the Book'—has been, throughout history, fraught with difficulties. . . . The 'anxiety of authorship' and the problematic relation of the woman writer to a male literary tradition is one of her chief preoccupations, more specifically, with the ways in which individual French women writers have negotiated the difficult entry into literature. . . . An informative book."—The Women's Review of Books
"An immensely provocative book. . . . This carefully researched and extremely readable book should further stimulate interest in feminist studies and in these and other women writers who have 'taken apart' the 'deadly mythologies' of their respective societies and cultures, to rebuild and reinvent them in the image of 'female mythopoeic creativity.'"—Romance Quarterly
Description
Women have been largely excluded from the world of myths-those meaningful stories we tell in order
to explain, interpret, and arrange or rearrange our experiences, histories, and ourselves. Even when women are present in male myths, it is often as caricatures, such as the femme fatale, the odalisque, or the earth mother. It has been especially in the area of expression—of the book, writing and literature—that the absence of women’s myths has been detrimental.
Marie de France (12th-13th centuries) used the myth of an imaginary Celtic past as a way to gain access to writing. Madeleine and Catherine des Roches (mother/daughter, mid-16th century) drew upon their classical knowledge to create an original myth of the female muse. Marie de Gournay (16th-17th centuries) turned to France’s mythical past and to Plato’s Greece for the material to envision a self-portrait of an androgynous hero.
Sankovitch completes her study with two modem writers: Simone de Beauvoir and Helene Cixous. De Beauvoir developed her mythic structures to liberate and affirm her (and all women’s) place in the intellectual and artistic worlds. In Cixous’s mythmaking, which she sees as inseparable from access to writing, myth transforms female experience into a completely new and unrepressed existence and writing.
Through their separate uses of myth, these two modem writers add individual dimensions to those created by the four early writers, yet the same underlying needs and desires are present throughout—the drive to establish themselves in the world of the Book. French Women Writers and the Book will appeal to medievalists, Renaissance and contemporary scholars, and those interested in feminist criticism and women’s writing.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Marie de France, The Myth of the Wild
The Dames des Roches, The Female Muse
Marie le Jars de Gournay, The Self-Portrait of an Androgynous Hero
Simone de Beauvoir, The Giant, the Scapegoat, the Quester
Helene Cixous, The Pervasive Myth
Conclusion
Index
About the Author
Tilde A. Sankovitch is professor and chair in the department of French and Italian, Northwestern University. She has published widely in the area of French medieval and Renaissance literature and is a contributor to Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Related Interest
6 x 9, 176 pages, 6 black and white illustrations
April 1993