Gendered discourse: French women writers and the representation of sexuality, 1880–1910

In 1880, Emile Zola published Nana, an example par excellence of the imbrication of literary and scientific discourses about sexuality at the end of the nineteenth century. Using Foucault\u27s notion of the scientia sexualis, I argue that the sexual discourse that emerged out of this relationship was highly gendered, such that men were in positions of authority as writers/doctors/scientists, while women were the privileged object of their analysis. Thus, the literary quest for scientific mastery in novels like Nana often translates into a quest to master female sexuality. In my dissertation, I consider the ramifications of this cultural and literary fascination with female sexuality on the generation of women writers that followed. I argue that many women writers constructed in their novels sexual counter-discourses that challenged the predominant discursive strategies associated with the scientia sexualis. The writers I consider range from the more or less canonical (Colette, Rachilde); to the obscure (Renée Vivien, Anna de Noailles, Liane de Pougy); to the frequently unknown (Marcelle Tinayre, Odette Dulac, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus). These novelists rarely considered themselves feminist, despite the existence of a burgeoning feminist movement in France at the time; the literary reappraisal of female sexuality was not linked to the feminist political movement, which supported educational reform, suffrage, and even birth control. Yet by suggesting a relationship between female authority and a critical relationship to sexuality and the body, the sexual counter-discourses present in these novels—albeit in disparate forms—predict the arguments of French feminists of later generations, from Simone Beauvoir to Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig. The study of the representation of sexuality in these women\u27s novels thus enables us to better understand this underexplored period in women\u27s literary history, by demonstrating the relationship of these novelists to both the male-authorized literary trends they wrote against and the feminist criticism they pointed towards