Women's Words: Essay on French Singularity

Public Interest, Fall, 1998 by Diana Schaub

Ozouf's biographical project gives rise to a perplexing question: Why is the French take on what used to be called "the woman question" so distinctly different from the Anglo-American? Why was French feminism so little occupied with suffrage, and why is it today so comparatively mild and so much less man-hating? According to Ozouf, French feminists, even academic feminists,

lack the militant thrust that transforms female unhappiness into a badge of honor; they do not adopt an aggressive tone. They do not oppose men, collectively guilty, to women, their collective victims.... The ordinary discourse of feminism in America ... is unacceptable in France, where we have difficulty believing that violence is lurking behind every exchange between men and women or that mere verbal insistence on the part of men is sufficient to constitute rape.

The book concludes with a fascinating "Essay on French Singularity," promised by the subtitle, in which Ozouf attempts to account for the unique path of French feminism. It is a journey for which Montesquieu and Rousseau serve as philosophic escorts.

In taking seriously "women's words," Ozouf finds herself between two camps and in opposition to both. To her rear are the traditional male practitioners of the genre of the woman's portrait, authors such as C.A. Sainte-Beuve and Jules Michelet, whose sentimental and idealized sketches rarely delve into their subjects' recorded thoughts. Sainte-Beuve is explicit about his disinclination: "He argues that the woman's portrait escapes the genre of literary 'criticism,' which is too brutal a word, he thinks. One has only to love, to sympathize, to produce a few light pages." Oddly enough, contemporary vanguard feminists are equally dismissive of distaff dialectics, since they believe that whatever women of the past said, it was necessarily subject to male determinations and thus inauthentic. While one group swathes female authors in the diaphanous robes of the eternal feminine, the other regards them as held within the straight-jacket of patriarchal false consciousness. Neither really bothers to listen to women's reasonings.

Ozouf's desideratum is to understand the author as the author understood herself. Although she does not use that formula, her more nuanced version is every bit as challenging of contemporary assumptions. Here is her elegant defense of her method:

It is these immediately original voices I wish to make heard. That supposes first of all that I capture them as faithfully as possible, thus breaking with the violent prejudice that disqualifies what men and women say they do, as if they were always and everywhere the least well placed to understand their own actions, as if we had to take their words for dissimulation or naivete. For although it seems reasonable not to take witnesses at their word, to suppose that they do not always know the truth about their own lives, and to question their lucidity, it seems unreasonable to refuse them that truth while granting it generously to the most mediocre of their interpreters. Before giving in to the movement of mistrust and arrogance, let us wager that there is something to cull from what they truly have to say.

It is a wager she wins. The portraits themselves - engaging mixtures of incident and reflection - are beautifully crafted (and beautifully translated by Jane Marie Todd).

Much depends on her choices. Henry James, reviewing the English translation of Sainte-Beuve's Portraits of Celebrated Women, felt there was "something sad and spectral in the sight of these poor old French ladies, summoned from their quiet graves, deep in the warm and comfortable soil of oblivion, and clad afresh in the chilly drapery of our American speech." James's sensibilities would be even more offended today when so many academics spend their careers in history's proverbial dustbin gleaning what they can from the mute inglorious Miltons and, more especially, the lady Miltons, presumed to have been forcibly muted. But Ozouf (whose most recent book is on Henry James) would, I believe, meet even his rigorous standards. She improves greatly on Sainte-Beuve's decemvirate by selecting women worthy of posterity and publicity. Her women are all "exceptional" - women who felt the conflict between fame and love in their lives, but who in their deaths could not be understood to prefer the "soil of oblivion." Indeed, Ozouf's ladies seem delighted to be back in society again. They are luminous.

Aside from receiving the attention due them, they help us by delivering a sentimental education of sorts, one that highlights the diversity of female character. Ozouf says that she herself (rather like Montesquieu's Persian travelers upon encountering the women of Paris) became convinced "not of the fixity of a shared female destiny, but rather of the inventive variety of individual paths." To speak of female multiformity is not to deny the existence or force of nature, but it is to say that these are daughters of Eve, engaged in complicated relations with God, man, and devil. Each has her own view of, and experience of, love, marriage, and motherhood. Some were happy, others "tumultuously unhappy." Ozouf includes hedonists and ascetics., rebels and the peaceable, "the nasty and the conciliatory, the obstinate and the absentminded, the prosaic and the imaginative, the tender and the despotic." Her portraits have the reality of characters in good novels, who become our companions and guides (sometimes by negative example). All of which is to say that Ozouf herself is a sure and knowing judge of human character. In telling these lives so deftly, she better equips us to lead our own lives. As a stylist, she may not quite equal Sainte-Beuve, but she far surpasses him as a moralist, being more in the mode of Plutarch.