FRENCH 216 Mothers and Daughters

This course will examine the mother/daughter relationship in French literature, in autobiographical writing including personal correspondence, and in art from the late seventeenth century to the present in the context of evolving concepts of motherhood and the education of girls in French culture. Recent feminist criticism will be brought to bear on the conflicts and complexities of the mother/daughter dynamic, highlighting both its enabling and engulfing aspects and its role as a vehicle for transmitting societal values as well as challenging them. Authors and artists include: Sévigné, Lambert, Genlis, Rousseau, Charrière, Vigée-Lebrun, Sand, Desbordes-Valmore, Colette, Irigaray and Chawaf.
Prerequisite: At least one unit of 206, 207, 208, 209 or above, an SAT II score of 690-800, an equivalent departmental placement score, or an AP score of 5.

In this course we study representations of the primordial, complex, vital, often conflicted relationship between mothers and daughters in literature, autobiographical writing and art from the late seventeenth century to the present. Beginning with two archetypal embodiments of the mother/daughter dynamic in the Dames des Roches and Sévigné, we trace the emergence of a public, pedagogical and politically charged discourse of maternity in late-seventeenth and eighteenth-century writings on education by Fénelon (De l’éducation des filles), Anne-Thérèse de Lambert (Avis d’une mère à sa fille) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Emile), novels by Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis (Adèle et Théodore) and Isabelle de Charrière (Lettres écrites de Lausanne), and in Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s Souvenirs and mother/daughter portraits, as well as images by male artists such as Fragonard, Greuze and Chardin. Through complex negotiation with the emerging ideology of motherhood and a subtle rhetoric of dissidence, creative women in the eighteenth century attempted to afford daughters a measure of independence even as they acknowledged their cultural subordination to fathers and husbands.

In nineteenth-century poetry by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore we see how the mother/daughter model, featuring continuity and fluid identities rather than separation and subordination, can be viewed as a positive alternative to the patriarchal one. In contrast, George Sand’s early novella Mattea shows a deeply conflicted mother/daughter relationship, not unlike that of the author with her own mother, and the rebellious daughter’s quest for separation from the mother and self-determination.

We explore the mother/daughter dynamic over three generations in twentieth-century autobiographical fiction by Colette and Chantal Chawaf. The first of three autobiographical narratives showing how the play of sameness and difference with respect to the mother shapes the daughter’s identity as woman and writer, La Maison de Claudine is the only one portraying Colette’s relation to both her mother and her daughter. Viewed also in the light of their letters to each other, it affords special insight into maternal possessiveness, filial rebellion, sexual awakening and the “reproduction of mothering.” Autobiographical fictions by Chantal Chawaf--Retable, exploring her symbolic bond with the mother from whose dying body she was extracted during a World War II bombing, and the recent La Sanction (2004, excerpts), drawing on her relationship with her own daughter--deepen our understanding of the ethical, political, psychological and literary import of giving symbolic form to the primordial connection to the mother’s body. Our discussion throughout will be informed by the classical myth of Demeter and Persephone and by Et l’une ne bouge pas sans l’autre, a brief poetic meditation on a daughter’s ambivalent feelings toward her mother published by Luce Irigaray at the height of the feminist movement in France.

Texts:
Course booklet (including poetry, short stories, letters and excerpted texts)
Isabelle de Charrière, Lettres écrites de Lausanne
Colette, La Maison de Claudine
Chantal Chawaf, Retable
Luce Irigaray, Et l’une ne bouge pas sans l’autre

Assignments: three short papers and a final paper or final project.