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Women In French Studies, 2018 is comprised of the proceedings of the 2018 Winthrop-King Institute conference, Women In French Studies. This conference was held at Florida State University, February 8-10, 2018.
Inspired by the phenomenon of “child witches” in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Léonora Miano’s second novel, Contours du jour qui vient (2006), reveals the psychological and physical violence children accused of witchcraft experience and its detrimental consequences. This article examines the manner in which Musango, the protagonist of the novel, reconstitutes her fragmented sense of self and reestablishes relationships with others after surviving her mother’s violence and her banishment from home. After analyzing the extent of the damages Musango sustained within her own home and community, especially her trauma-induced mutism, I examine how an already fragile Musango witnesses the silencing of women in a human trafficking camp and in a community revivalist church. I show how this silencing engenders a resistance within Musango and sparks a desire to use her voice. Lastly, I study how this resistance is further cemented and refined by the women she meets in the second half of the novel. These women guide Musango in her transformation from a mute traumatized self to a self-assured vocal individual. Furthermore, these women show her the ability of women’s voices to not only transmit knowledge and values but to also change the community for the better. Ultimately, I demonstrate how Musango is able to affirm her self-worth, reconstruct her fragmented sense of self, establish a connection with others and become a guiding voice through her interactions with the women she meets in her journey to recovery., Publication Note: Selected essay from the Women In French International Conference 2018
Historian, translator, publisher, novelist, and journalist, polemicist and political activist during the French Revolution, Louise de Keralio (1756–1822) challenged prevailing gender roles by her ambitious incursion into areas considered the sole province of men. Yet, in apparent contradiction with her bold actions, authoritative voice and ambitious writing projects, she also reiterated gender stereotypes and made antifeminist remarks, much to the perplexity of recent critics such as Annie Geffroy (“Louise de Kéralio-Robert, pionnière du républicanisme sexiste”). I argue that this contrast between her “masculine” endeavors and authoritative voice, on the one hand, and her espousal of normative femininity, on the other, may best be understood by analyzing the discursive strategies she adopts to express her gender-nonconforming ambitions. From her earliest writings, a fundamental dilemma pits her female body, her “corps petit,” viewed in Rousseauian terms as consigned to modesty and domesticity, against her “âme grande” with its ambitious longing to do something for the benefit of society as a whole, to publish and enact her equally Rousseauian progressive ideas. They reveal that, for Keralio, writing is enabled by the repetition of restrictive gender norms, even as it is undercut by them. Her attempt to substitute for this binary thinking of gender in terms of either/or a utopian logic of both/and ultimately results in the silencing of her female-gendered, yet powerful, male-coded political voice during the evolution. Even so, her ideal of both/and endures.
In “‘Ma voix se dégagea’: Music, Risk, and the Heroine’s Voice in George Sand’s Malgrétout,” I argue that Sand’s 1870 novel Malgrétout offers a view of the complexity of Sand’s thinking about sound, whether in a child’s holistic and mythical understanding of nature and music, in an artist-hero’s exhausting performances of genius, or in the erosion of the restraint and pragmatism in the heroine’s musical production. Returning through the novel, as a fulcrum on which the heroine, Sarah, balances her relationship with violin virtuoso, Abel, is the little children’s song Sarah invented, “La Demoiselle.” I propose that “La Demoiselle,” which begins as a musical exercise for a child, becomes for Sarah a means to measure Abel’s commitment to their relationship through his interpretation, arrangement, and dissemination of the little song. At stake in the returns and reiterations of Sarah’s song is a reconceptualization of the Romantic artist story through the heroine’s narrative of the discovery of the sound of her own voice and soul. Moreover, drawing from feminist care ethics, Sand studies, and sound studies, I propose that Sand’s narrative of vibrating instrumental chords, shivering bodies, and trembling voices, which explores the intersubjective and relational nature of sound, articulates a vision and ethics of people as fundamentally and vitally relational beings., Publication Note: Selected essay from the Women In French International Conference 2018
Marie-Madeleine Jodin and Olympe de Gouges were among the women who believed that the new state created by the French Revolution would offer equality to men and women. Both of them published political pamphlets arguing in favor of their sex: Vues législatives pour les femmes by Jodin in 1790 and (among other writings) Déclaration des Droits de la Femme in 1791 by Gouges. Jodin’s pamphlet shows the extent of her culture: she quotes philosophers, uses examples from history, and offers some remarkable perspectives (on prostitution for instance). Gouges’ pamphlet, the most famous of all, is a clever pastiche of the 1789 Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme, and contains her thoughts on marriage,divorce, and illegitimate children. While neither one of them seems to have been truly active in women’s manifestations and clubs or developed contacts with the Assembly or other proto-feminists, both women participated in the Revolution and its events mainly through these writings. This paper explores Jodin’s and Gouges’ paradoxical participation (loud in print but silent in speech) and compares them to other female writers of the Revolution: was their participation atypical or did it represent the norm?, Publication Note: Selected essay from the Women in French International Conference 2018
