‘Woman, your hour is sounding’ continuity and change in French women's great war fiction, 1914–19

‘Woman, your hour is sounding’ continuity and change in French women's great war fiction, 1914–19 Nancy Sloan Goldberg; Macmillan, Houndmills and London, 1999, £32.50, ISBN: 0-333-913 892 (Hbk)

War literature, in France as elsewhere, was long assumed to be a masculine genre, and clearly the attempt to come to terms imaginatively with the direct experience of warfare – at least in the 1914–8 war – was the task of male writers. However, women's lives were also turned upside down by war, and (as several recent feminist studies have demonstrated) fiction was extensively used as a space where women writers and readers could explore the practical dilemmas and the changed moral landscape of their lives. With no French equivalent of the Virago Press – the women-only publishing company des femmes has never shown much interest in popular or middlebrow texts – and little French academic interest in rediscovering women's best-sellers now lost from history, virtually all the French female-authored fiction of World War I remains out of print, and the study of it has been mainly undertaken by British or American feminists. Nancy Goldberg has unearthed a huge corpus of now virtually unknown ‘women's’ novels that were widely read in the war period, while their female authors were often garlanded with prizes and honours. The use of such a large and little known set of texts carries a cost, in that argument is inevitably outweighed in some sections by a great deal of plot summary and explanation, but the book's guiding thesis always resurfaces, and its contribution to the archaeology of women's writing is extremely valuable. Quotations from the novels are translated into English, but also (sensibly) given in the original French in the footnotes.

In the pre-war years, the French feminist movement had reached its peak of influence and popularity, and it was widely – and, as it turned out, quite wrongly – assumed that women's suffrage would soon be achieved. However, the movement was dominated – with a few magnificiently radical exceptions such as Madeleine Pelletier and Nelly Roussel – by a moderate, reformist vision of gendered rights, which Goldberg characterizes above all as adherence to the doctrine of Republican motherhood. Women claimed civil rights on the grounds that they made an equal, but different, contribution to the nation's health: women were as strong and capable as men, but their strength took the form of domestic management, motherhood, moral and emotional support, not only at the micro-level of the family, but also as the educators and the moral conscience of the nation as a whole. Goldberg argues that this same ideal of feminine identity underpinned most mainstream women's fiction of the period.

With the massive departure of men to the Front, women suddenly found themselves not only anxious or in mourning for the men they loved, but also in possession of unexpected freedoms: new jobs, greater mobility, an unfamiliar degree of responsibility and agency. A hostile Press told stories of unfaithful wives, of callous, sensation-seeking military nurses, of frivolous women exploiting new freedoms as their men suffered and died. Women novelists, on the other hand, provided narratives that focused on female experience, acknowledging and endorsing the pleasurable sense of strength that comes from self-determination, but countering guilt and bad conscience through a range of narrative devices. The most conservative redeemed their guiltily emancipated heroines by having them repent their selfish freedoms and turn instead to self-abnegating devotion to the war wounded. The majority, though, made female empowerment respectable and compatible with patriotism, by constructing plots in which what Goldberg terms ‘sheroes’ contribute to the war-effort by daring action or by heroic self-sacrifice, or by having their heroines channel their (considerable) moral and emotional energy into motherhood and active public service. With few exceptions – notably those novels that make class an issue, as well as gender – female emancipation is rendered compatible with the most traditional view of gendered identity, and the uncomfortable sense that the war, while massacring their loved ones, might in some senses have benefited women is both acknowledged and skilfully neutralized. Goldberg demonstrates well how these novels might have been pleasurable and comforting to read, in and immediately after the war years.

The ‘continuity’ of the title turns out, then, to be a more powerful force than the ‘change’, and in a sense the story Goldberg uncovers is a depressing one. The post-war years would show that moderation and self-sacrifice to the national cause gained French women nothing: the backlash against the largely mythical ‘New Woman’ was as fierce as if she were real, and civil rights would be a long time coming. But the book rightly refuses to indulge in easy condemnation: the tension between, on the one hand, the potent ideology of feminine identity as nurturing and supportive and, on the other, the will to greater freedom and self-determination could not easily be overcome. These commercially successful novels may not have been a radicalizing force, but they did provide a valuable arena in which women writers and readers could explore ways of negotiating contradictory desires, and enjoy their fictional resolution.