Abstract
The first effect of the father’s absence is to make more visible to his heirs the marks of his presence everywhere in their landscape. The second is to give them the space to assess his legacy and choose to assume or reject it. In the matter of choosing, the most interesting case studies come from moments when generational conflict expresses itself in the larger political conflicts of revolutionary social change. The interest increases when the focus is on daughters, whose relatively marginalised position in the public domain has often offered them options for transforming the inheritance which are more open and more radical than those of sons. Consideration of the work of three women writers, selected from three points of France’s evolution from monarchy to democratic republic (abandoning the King, father of his people, for the brotherhood of the citizen-State), shows three very different ways of coming to terms with the authority of the father, through challenge, compromise or outright collusion. The three are Anne-Louise-Germaine de Staël (1766–1817), arguably the most important writer of the Revolution of 1789 and its Napoleonic aftermath, George Sand (pseudonym of Aurore Dupin, 1804–76), whose most interesting work falls between the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, and the fin-de-siècle novelist Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery, 1860–1953), writing after the repression of the Commune in 1871 and against the socialist fervour which swept France and Europe in the 1880s and 90s.
My father died, leaving traces everywhere. (Hélène Cixous)
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Notes
Hélène Cixous, Dedans (Paris: Des Femmes, 1986), p. 14.
This issue has been interestingly discussed in Kelly Oliver, Womanising Nietzsche: Philosophy’s Relation to the Feminine (New York/London: Routledge, 1995)
Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique: L’avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle: Lautréamont et Mallarmé (Paris: Le Seuil, 1974)
Julia Kristeva, Histoires d’amour (Paris: Denoël. 1983), p. 56.
See for example Simone Balayé, Madame de Staël: Lumières et liberté, Chapter 2, ‘Madame de Staël et la Révolution’ (Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1979)
Marie-Claire Vallois, Fictions féminines: Mme de Staël et les voix de la Sibylle (Saratoga, California: ANMA Libri, 1987)
Béatrice Didier, Ecrire la révolution (1789–99), Chapter 6,’ sensibilité et Histoire: Les Considérations de Mme de Staël’ (Paris: PUF, 1989).
Madame de Staël, Corinne ou l’Italie, 2 vols. (Paris: H. Nicolle, 1807).
George Sand, Histoire de ma vie, 10 vols. (Paris: Victor Lecou, 1854–5).
Denise Brahimi and Christian Pirot (Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire: Christian Pirot, 1993).
George Sand, Mauprat, 2 vols. (Paris: Félix Bonnaire, 1837).
Jean-Pierre Lacassagne (Paris: Gallimard, 1981).
George Sand, Lélia, 2 vols. (Paris: Dupuy-Tenré, 1833)
Pierre Reboul (Paris: Garnier, 1960).
Rachilde, La Marquise de Sade (Paris: Monnier, 1887).
Rachilde, Monsieur Vénus (Brussels: Auguste Brancart, 1884).
Rachilde, La Jongleuse (Paris: Mercure de France, 1900).
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© 1998 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Birkett, J. (1998). Life without Father: Revisions of Paternity in Women’s Writing in France. In: Spaas, L. (eds) Paternity and Fatherhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13816-6_8
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