Life without Father: Revisions of Paternity in Women’s Writing in France

Abstract

The first effect of the father’s absence is to make more visible to his heirs the marks of his presence everywhere in their landscape. The second is to give them the space to assess his legacy and choose to assume or reject it. In the matter of choosing, the most interesting case studies come from moments when generational conflict expresses itself in the larger political conflicts of revolutionary social change. The interest increases when the focus is on daughters, whose relatively marginalised position in the public domain has often offered them options for transforming the inheritance which are more open and more radical than those of sons. Consideration of the work of three women writers, selected from three points of France’s evolution from monarchy to democratic republic (abandoning the King, father of his people, for the brotherhood of the citizen-State), shows three very different ways of coming to terms with the authority of the father, through challenge, compromise or outright collusion. The three are Anne-Louise-Germaine de Staël (1766–1817), arguably the most important writer of the Revolution of 1789 and its Napoleonic aftermath, George Sand (pseudonym of Aurore Dupin, 1804–76), whose most interesting work falls between the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, and the fin-de-siècle novelist Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery, 1860–1953), writing after the repression of the Commune in 1871 and against the socialist fervour which swept France and Europe in the 1880s and 90s.

My father died, leaving traces everywhere. (Hélène Cixous)