Imperfect Words for an Imperfect World: Language and Translation in Chroniques du Pays des Mères by Élisabeth Vonarburg

Abstract

Chroniques du Pays des Mères (published in 1992, and translated the same year as In the Mothers’ Land, or The Maerlande Chronicles) by Élisabeth Vonarburg depicts a separatist matriarchy, where the male birth rate is below 3%, lesbianism is the norm, and society is organized around procreation. Vonarburg’s feminist utopia subjects French—a marked language where the masculine can be both specific and generic—to its own defamiliarization process, overruling grammar rules to favor the feminine. Feminist writers have a long tradition of neutering French’s phallogocentrism; as Anna Livia points out, feminist experimentations with language are influenced by linguistic determinism, and more specifically the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (Livia, Pronoun Envy 2000). This article is concerned with both linguistic and conceptual (feminist, sociopolitical) levels of discourses in Chroniques. The first section explores how Vonarburg relies, uses, and challenges the mundus inversus tropes of feminist utopias and SF. Second, I examine Vonarburg’s subversion of language and how it delivers her critique of phallogocentrism. In the final section, I draw on a connection between translation and female reproductive work, examining how the novel’s subversion of gender tropes ultimately critiques capitalism and patriarchy by transferring some of its structures into a feminist utopia, questioning society’s progression toward patriarchy.