The Review of Contemporary Fiction

French Erotic Fiction: Women's Desiring Writing 1880-1990 by Alex Hughes and Kate Ince
Marc Lowenthal

Alex Hughes and Kate Ince, eds. French Erotic Fiction: Women’s Desiring Writing, 1880-1990. Berg, 1996. 191 pp. Paper $16.95.

This volume groups together six analytical essays on six French writers. The period of time covered is rather broad, stretching from the decadence of Rachilde’s scandalous early novels (which granted her the in absentia honor of a two-year jail sentence from her ex-homeland of Belgium) to the later pared-down works of Marguerite Duras. What narrows the scope is that the writers analyzed are all female and the subject at hand is the ever-shifting terrain of women’s desire and its expression in the works of Rachilde and Duras, as well as of Colette, Violette Leduc, Monique Wittig, Helene Cixcus, and Duras. Although the issue of lesbian love links four of these six essays, if such a subject as female desire, as evinced in this book, were to be constrained to one definition, it would be as a quality that destabilizes. Taken together, these essays do not so much attempt to define or even identify our already uprooted notions of desire and difference as to deconstruct them further, especially with what remains the unresolvable issue of heterosexual sadomasochism. Hughes and Ince’s investigations of the writings of Leduc and Duras deal with this issue most explicitly, while also pinpointing the frequent and unsettling presence of erotic pessimism: a baldly realized “impossibility of erotic love” where difference remains as distance—a “highbrow” impossibility in stark contrast to pornography’s “lowbrow” spectacle of insatiability. Diana Holmes illuminates the awkward prototypes of Rachilde’s “monstrous women,” exposing their “chaste perversity” as more of a rejection of nature in the decadent tradition than the rejection of societal roles in the feminist tradition to come. Margaret Callander brings more light to Colette’s own “chastity,” shading in for us what she considers to be the subversive silence within her work. Jennifer Birkett outlines Wittig’s efforts at constructing a new utopian myth and dictionary for the lesbian body she envisages, while Emma Wilson attempts to magnify the decidedly (even aggressively) blurred regard Cixous has toward female homosexuality.

If, as the introduction (quoting Lucienne Frappier-Mazer) claims, eroticism “denotes a quality,” it is a quality I would be hard-pressed to discern in these essays: at its worst, the writing gets academic, and foreknowledge of the writers in question is obviously desirable if much is to be drawn from this book. As an extension of these writers’ work, though, and as some further elucidation on the complications of women’s sexuality and subjectivity, this collection should prove to be worthwhile reading. [Marc Lowenthal]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction French Erotic Fiction: Women's Desiring Writing 1880-1990 by Alex Hughes and Kate Ince Marc Lowenthal Alex Hughes and Kate Ince, eds. French Erotic Fiction: Women’s Desiring Writing, 1880-1990. Berg, 1996. 191 pp. Paper $16.95. This volume groups together six analytical essays on six French writers. The period of time covered is rather broad, stretching from the decadence of Rachilde’s scandalous early novels (which granted her the in absentia honor of a two-year jail sentence from her ex-homeland of Belgium) to the later pared-down works of Marguerite Duras. What narrows the scope is that the writers analyzed are all female and the subject at hand is the ever-shifting terrain of women’s desire and its expression in the works of Rachilde and Duras, as well as of Colette, Violette Leduc, Monique Wittig, Helene Cixcus, and Duras. Although the issue of lesbian love links four of these six essays, if such a subject as female desire, as evinced in this book, were to be constrained to one definition, it would be as a quality that destabilizes. Taken together, these essays do not so much attempt to define or even identify our already uprooted notions of desire and difference as to deconstruct them further, especially with what remains the unresolvable issue of heterosexual sadomasochism. Hughes and Ince’s investigations of the writings of Leduc and Duras deal with this issue most explicitly, while also pinpointing the frequent and unsettling presence of erotic pessimism: a baldly realized “impossibility of erotic love” where difference remains as distance—a “highbrow” impossibility in stark contrast to pornography’s “lowbrow” spectacle of insatiability. Diana Holmes illuminates the awkward prototypes of Rachilde’s “monstrous women,” exposing their “chaste perversity” as more of a rejection of nature in the decadent tradition than the rejection of societal roles in the feminist tradition to come. Margaret Callander brings more light to Colette’s own “chastity,” shading in for us what she considers to be the subversive silence within her work. Jennifer Birkett outlines Wittig’s efforts at constructing a new utopian myth and dictionary for the lesbian body she envisages, while Emma Wilson attempts to magnify the decidedly (even aggressively) blurred regard Cixous has toward female homosexuality. If, as the introduction (quoting Lucienne Frappier-Mazer) claims, eroticism “denotes a quality,” it is a quality I would be hard-pressed to discern in these essays: at its worst, the writing gets academic, and foreknowledge of the writers in question is obviously desirable if much is to be drawn from this book. As an extension of these writers’ work, though, and as some further elucidation on the complications of women’s sexuality and subjectivity, this collection should prove to be worthwhile reading. [Marc Lowenthal]

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