Most analyses of Violette Leduc’s writing have concentrated on its autobiographical dimension, dealing almost exclusively with her best known volume, La Bâtarde. Violette Leduc: Mothers, Lovers, and Language offers readings of three less familiar first-person narratives — L’Asphyxie, Ravages, and Thérèse et Isabelle - and approaches them not as fragments of a multi-faceted autobiographical corpus, but rather as autonomous works of fiction.
This study, which reads Leduc’s narratives from a feminist and psychoanalytic perspective, has a double focus. Part One scrutinizes the intricacies of her treatment of feminine bonding, seeking to bring new insights - inspired inter alia by theorists such as Melanie Klein, Freud and Luce Irigaray to bear on her representations of mother/daughter and lesbian relations. Part Two examines Leduc’s use of language in Thérèse et Isabelle, probing the extent to which this novella contains examples of feminist and/or ‘feminine’ discourse. By exploring Leduc’s lyrical evocation of feminine homosexuality from both a gender-related and a more traditional, formalist standpoint, the writer exposes the limitations of a purely feminist approach to her work.
Violette Leduc: Mothers, Lovers, and Language focuses on those elements of Leduc’s writing which look forward, however instinctively, to the complex investigations of gender and language produced by French feminist theorists in recent decades, and illuminates the degree to which it is ‘recuperable’ for feminism.
This book, originally published in paperback in 1994 under the ISBN 978-0-901286-41-3, was made Open Access in 2024 as part of the MHRA Revivals programme.
During the eighteen years that followed the publication of her first novel, Violette Leduc’s work drew critical esteem from a small group of intellectuals and fellow writers, but was otherwise largely ignored. During the sixties and early seventies, in the wake of the furore that accompanied the appearance of La Bâtarde, she achieved a degree of popular success which barely fell short of notoriety, and the originality of her writing was finally widely acknowledged by reviewers and critics. Sadly, however, interest in Leduc’s texts waned once more after her death in 1972, and it is only recently that she has re-emerged from literary exile, thanks primarily to work that has been done on her writing in the United States. This monograph seeks to extend and refine a body of critical analysis by scholars who have brought to Leduc’s œuvre the attention and recognition it deserves. A brief account of Leduc’s life and, more importantly, of the critical responses her texts have elicited will guide the reader towards an understanding of the nature and scope of my project.
The twenty-one tableaux which make up L’Asphyxie describe the dealings of its heroine, a child of indeterminate age, with her mother, her grandmother and a host of curious and frequently grotesque individuals who inhabit the provincial French town in which the work is set. Given the ambiguity surrounding the narrative focalization in L’Asphyxie, it is safe to assume that the novel’s account of its heroine’s relations with what are in fact two maternal figures, her mother and her grandmother, somehow amalgamates a youthful and an adult vision of these relations. This chapter seeks to examine some of the different ways in which Leduc’s portrayal of mother/daughter interaction in the novel may be read.
L’Asphyxie may be interpreted from both a political/feminist and a psychoanalytic perspective. Leduc’s first novel does not however invite the kind of critical approach that is generated by the (uneasy? belligerent?) ‘marriage’ of psychoanalysis and feminism. Ravages on the other hand lends itself to precisely this kind of reading. For the feminist critic who seeks to employ insights provided by psychoanalytic theory in order to understand what gender means, the processes whereby it is constructed, and the way in which gender relations function, the novel represents a rich source of interest. In Ravages, the dynamics of the mother/daughter bond are scrutinized even more closely than in L’Asphyxie.
Constituting as it does a revised version of what was originally the opening section of Ravages, Thérèse et Isabelle contains themes and images which are also present in that novel; however, the account of female-to-female bonding which Leduc’s 1966 novella offers is undoubtedly more radical, and more visionary, than that which emerges from Ravages. In Thérèse et Isabelle, whose focus is the electrically homoerotic relationship that exists between its epony. mous, adolescent heroines, Leduc is writing in a pioneering mode. This chapter explores the nature of the sexual relation Leduc envisions in Thérèse et Isabelle, and to argue that while it proves to be transitory, it is characterized by a harmony which distinguishes it from the feminine familial/sexual bonds depicted in Ravages. In creating an account of what might be termed ‘love of the same in the feminine’, Leduc looks forward, instinctively, to Irigaray’s vision of a female homosexual economy, based upon subject-to-subject relations of pleasure and desire between women.
This final chapter investigates the ways in which Violette Leduc views and uses language. Any such investigation clearly necessitates some initial exploration of contemporary analyses of the nature and significance of the linguistic order, and of feminist accounts of the problems of language women encounter. Discussion focuses on the work of French feminist theorists, who have been trained in the speculative disciplines of philosophy and psychoanalysis, rather than on that of Anglo-American women scholars. The theoretical discourses of the former group were published in the decade following Leduc’s death and clearly came into being within a conceptual/political/cultural context she would have found quite alien. None the less, because they focus on concerns which are also in evidence in comments Leduc made regarding the nature of writing and in her own texts, it is productive to use them as a point of departure from which to explore her work.
What kind of a writer is Violette Leduc? What view of her creative skills does a close reading of L’Asphyxie, Ravages and Thérèse et Isabelle afford us?
This title was first published by W. S. Maney & Son Ltd for the Modern Humanities Research Association but rights to it are now held by Modern Humanities Research Association.
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