Writing makes the woman: Excerpts from selected texts and contributions: 1 of 1, #1

By Stanislas Kazal

Compendium means an abstract or summary, in the form of a compilation, of a corpus of knowledge in a given field. If some women have been great writers and have been pushed to genius by the eloquence of the heart, the delicacy of the mind, the wisdom of judgment, the art of grouping the entire world around them, the literary history has often been reserved to only a small portion. We, Corinne Tisserand -Simon and I had after this observation, the desire to give read extracts that testify to the fact that literature is not built solely from the male point of view. It is time to say that women's writing is not an epiphenomenon in literary history to pave the way for a reading that would take into account the obstacles, the compromises, the weight of forms and norms with which women fought, flayed, censored to pass as they could then, under a speech sometimes too agreed, too suitable, under masks, denial or forbidden, a woman's writing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Le Satellite
• Release date: Nov 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386845119

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COMPENDIUM REVIEW

Selectorial: n ° 1

Writing makes the woman

Excerpts from selected texts and contributions

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COMPENDIUM REVIEW ©

Selectorial: n ° 1

––––––––

Director of Publication:

Stanislas Kazal

Editor in Chief

Corinne Tisserand-Simon

Contributing writers

with their permissions

Corinne Tisserand-Simon ©

Martine Macre© Monique Marta©

Marie Delvigne© Mary Myriam©

Mathilde de Beaune©

Publication: January 2018

Table of Contents

Editorial

Introduction

Emancipation Space, Women's Space

The Duchess of Abbrantes

Introduction of the History of Paris Salons

Madame Roland's Salon

OLYMPE DE GOUGES

The Scream of the Sage; by a woman

The Convent or Forced Vows

Madame de Stael

Corinne or Italy

Georges Sand

Indiana

The little fadette

Claim, Challenge, Engagement

Hubertine Auclerct

Social and political equality of Man and Woman

Typed speech

at the Socialist Congress of Marseille in 1879

The Arab woman in Algeria

To do a Muslim doctor

The brain of a young girl

––––––––

Louise Michel

Feminist Extracts from Louise Michel's Memoirs

(posthumous works )

poems

Maria Deraismes

Eve's foreword in humanity

A woman and the Law

Write her body, write her being, contributions

Corinne Tisserand-Simon

Excerpts of Moira or The Children of the Desert

Poems

Martine Macre

Storms and Silences

AWoman from the inside

Monique

Marta Stone

Married Delvigne

My body

Mary Myriam

Louise-Michel, of Paris from barricades to tales of the kanaky,

poetry of the real and the everyday

Mathilde de Beaune

Women and Literatures: The double misunderstanding

Editorial:

A Writing Woman

––––––––

Stanislas Kazal

Compendium means an abstract or summary, in the form of a compilation, of a corpus of knowledge in a given field. If certain women have been great writers and have been pushed to genius by the eloquence of the heart, the delicacy of the mind, the wisdom of judgment, the art of grouping a whole world around them, their literary history is often reserved only to a small portion.  We had, Corinne Tisserand-Simon and me after this observation, the desire to give a read to the extracts that testify to the fact that the sphere of literature is not solely built from a male point of view. It is time to say that women's writing is not a phenomenon in literary history to pave the way for a reading that would take into account the obstacles, the compromises, the weight of forms and norms with which women fought, flayed, censored to pass as they could then, under a discourse sometimes seen to be too convinced, too suitable, heavily veiled, denied or forbidden, a woman's writing.

The compilation has been dressed in an alibi for me because I dare to admit that I dreaded the meeting with the dark shadows of writing. It is always difficult for me to accept as a man, to conceive without repression and denial that our unconscious would have partly censored the feminine part of history.

Indeed, although the writings of women have always existed, they are constantly the point of a conflict between the desire to write and publish and a society that manifests with regard to this desire either with a systematic hostility or with to a lesser degree, but more perfidious one, a form of irony and depreciation.

After having been cantoned and been illustrated in the literary salons such as the ones of Duchess of Abbrantes, it was necessary to grant them ground in this domain: the conversation of letters and the feminine novel, the complaint of the unmarried and the chronicle of everyday life, the delicacies of the heart and the tears of passion.

Society wanted to see women's books, but it was not counting on the talent and intelligence of those who have appropriated literature as an emancipation space to make it a woman's business.

When women came out of these grounds, society sought the paternity of their works: the lover, the friend, the brief advisor and while we were women by the heart, they were men by the brain! All this to ward off a simple question.

How can you be a woman and be a writer? Well, it's just that women write.

Far from any theoretical presumptions, ideological biases or identity postures, we draw attention in this first issue of the Compendium to this naive reality truncated in a multi-secular way and revealed in the form of a truism: that women write!

And why not because as Olympe de Gouge noted, they rise well to the framework, as much to the framework of life as that of history.  The institution tries to ignore it, neutralize it or recover it. Women are caught between the desire to be accepted and the need to assert their transgression.  Spirited women like Germaine de Staël destabilizing Napoleon or a woman wanting to live through her pen entered through a little gate of journalism within literature such as the manner of a Georges Sand they force the obsolete institution trying to capture this raw flood in a subtle dialectic of specious legitimations or condemnations.

Women writers rightly feel that there is something revolutionary about finding an autonomous expression. What is given goes far beyond the questioning of a literary specificity. The question of women, therefore, is of their writing and inseparable from that of social evolution. Thus, we must give up an addiction presented as a protection.  Let's listen to this call for freedom, which sounds like a bitter fanfare of demands, disputes and especially commitments at the homes of Hubertine Auclerct, Louise Michel and Maria Deraismes.

It is necessary for a liberation, of course, to seek salvation in literature, but to do so, a woman who writes must divest herself of the woman she has become. Women must overcome the millennial and arbitrary specifications that confine them to an androcentric vision of femininity

It is not a question of the woman claiming only the right to be a man like the others but also to be a woman as oneself.  Neither to affirm the words of her father in the body of the mother but to write her words, to write her being.

Interrogation of an individual experience in listening to a singular feminine unconscious minds our contributors: Corinne Tisserand-Simon, Martine Macre, Monique Marta, Marie Delvigne, Mary Myriam and Mathilde de Beaune conjugating the female condition in the feminine plural.

In this way, they take us to an immense area that has never been completely cleared and that belongs to men no more than it would belong to women.

It took this long road to educate contraception, work, external responsibilities, legal and political rights, it took women to engage in these battles for equality, it took women to fight for the free disposition of their body, it was necessary that be said: the woman is the proletarian of the man, it took the disappointment of the traditional struggles so that this feminine specificity instituted by men to marginalize women in literature, today becomes a standard. This specificity, the women who recognize it. They find themselves in there and transform themselves. Men too: they can reject it, or they can ignore it, they can discover otherness and discover it. It is not in this literature, that there is an opening to a singular universe, different to what would have been without writing, closed to the other forever? This first issue of Compendium is dedicated to making writing for women a room to themselves, which is not an ivory tower nor a vow of silence, but a room flooded with light, grand ladies open to dialogue between men and women.

S.K

Back to the summary

Introduction

Women of the Old World, queens of the salons and, earlier, routes that inspired writers, sometimes regenerate them (...) I'm tempted to erase myself to allow their shadows to pass over. Marguerite Yourcenar

The first woman received

at the French Academy

Thursday 22 January 1981

The female writer upsets the social order

By Corinne Weaver-Simon

Writing: escaping, distance and emancipation

All writing is engaging because it is a medium of individuation. It is necessary to distinguish the process of writing in itself from the writing subordinated to a cause. You do not write to prove something to someone but to prove something to yourself. 

Writing is a deviation. It poses to the individual a writing that ruptures with their own environment. The women who held literary salons, had to assume a triple role, that is to say:

- First of all to be in the domestic sphere, which consisted in organizing the event, making the invitations and especially not to cause a problem - worrying about stewardship, though, most of them were seconded by house staff. 

- Second of all: to be in the social sphere, that is to say, to receive, to ensure the comfort of the guests, to make conversation, being aware of course of the latest trends of the time. Eventually, play with their charms to appease nascent tensions... 

In short, nothing but very natural for a woman... 

And the woman says, says to herself:

- Third of all: I am me this afternoon, I wrote this, and tonight, I'll read it!

Then it is at this moment, and only then, that the woman knows if her Salon is literary... or not!

Applause, shouts of raucous laughter follow the reading from the hostess. 

Then if other texts are read, men or women who so long live in the Salon, the Salon will live on!

Emancipation Space, Women's Space

"The dedication to this is awful

in its consequences, that it does not ordinarily serve neither to the one who offered it nor to the one who received it. "

Laure Junot d'Abrantes

The Dutchess of Abbrantès

Laure Junot, Duchess of Abrantès,

born Laure Adelaïde Constance Perlon

November 6, 1784 in Montpellier

and died on June 7, 1838 in Paris,

is a French memorialist.

Women are the soul of all intrigues, they should be relegated to their household, government halls should be closed to them.

Napoleon BONAPARTE (1769-1821), Letter from him who is still only a young general to his brother Joseph,

September 8, 1795

Introduction of the History of the Paris Salons

It is a serious matter to be treated in the annals of a country like France, that of the History of the Paris Salons. Since for a certain time, this story is closely linked to that of the country, and especially to the intrigues always attached to the political plans which so long to upset the kingdom. The time of the birth of a society in France, in the positive sense of the word, goes back to the reign of the cardinal of Richelieu. In  recalling the nobility around the throne, by assigning her functions, creating for her expenses and squares, of which her pride was to enjoy, Richelieu gave security to the Crown, which was constantly exposed by the caprices of the great lords, like the Duke of Bouillon, the Duke of Longueville, the Duke of Montbazon, and a host of others who, freer in their castles, were conspirators by state and taste.

The meeting of all those great names around the throne gave her more than security, he took over the grandeur; but also, the first blow was taken to the nobility:

She didn't have more than these large companies to drive her, which imperiled both her and the head of the conspirators and the fate of the State.

Richelieu, with that correctness of vision which made him see evil in every way, conjured him by calling the nobility to the Louvre; but he could not prevent it from preserving what was inherent in its nature, as it was always drawn to intrigue and to movement. Thus, even under the majesty of Richelieu, women of high importance, such as Princess Palatine, Madame de Chevreuse, Madame de Longueville, and a host of other all-powerful women were conspired against in Paris due to their position in society. the world, their spirit or their beauty. Power hungry, these same women seized, the way that the cardinal himself had left them, as soon as they understood it. They prevailed before in a far-away kingdom, a castle inhabited by men that were the best and therefore most enjoyable who often only learned evil; now they were in the middle of Paris, in this place which, even at that time, was still not embellished by all the prestige of a Parisian Society, of this society which for so long gave everywhere, in Europe, the model of taste and perfectly nobility and elegant manners already forming the perfect gentleman. It was then in each particular house they had to find a Queen giving its laws and pointing to an opinion. It is in the Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, in this model-book, that we can recognize this truth in those of Madame de Motteville.

See the Abbé de Gondy herself arriving at Madame de Chevreuse's. Follow the trails that she made to travel there one night, to reach out to the Duchess, when it is, however, a friend of her daughter. Then you meet her in the crowded salons, where M. de Beaufort, M. le Duc de Nemours, M. de La Rochefoucauld, and yourself are told the important secrets of the time. The salon of Madame de Longueville, like those of Mademoiselle, Madame de Lafayette, had become like clubs of a revolutionary time. Gaston, a model of the Abbe de Lariviere, directed everything of the Palais Royal, and the Court itself was no more than a mechanism.

Richelieu did not live enough to see the effect of what he brought; yet Mazarin saw both the usefulness and danger, and became more than severe supervisor: it was what was necessary...

Later the intrigue changed form and took refuge in literary coteries and society, where after la Fronde in which France breathed under the reign of Louis XIV. Bouquets of straw and knots of blue ribbon were no longer made in the most fashionable salons of Paris. Louis XIV himself became a very elegant and a man of the world. At the same time, he was the most sumptuous King of Europe; prevailing with politics, love and courtly intrigues. The king alone occupied with his favorites, thus gave the first example of what was to be done, and the salons of Paris then became the theater of what occupied most the generation of that time.

Yet, as the intrigue was essentially attached to the high society of Paris, the salons were only occupied with the horrors of the Brinvilliers and of La Voisins. Sorcery itself was introduced into intimate societies, and when the House of Poisons was instituted, the first names of France appeared at the bar of a fiery chamber.

Later, this still more powerful society took a force the times had prepared it for and for occasionally found itself to be in unison with the royal power. Louis XIV often saw, in spite of his absolutism, dominating his will by that of a woman, like Madame des Ursins, the Princess Palatine, or by any other united by the heart or intrigue by force against the royal authority. Still closer to him, Madame de Lafayette, Madame de la Suze, Madame Scarron, Madame de Sevigne, exercised a sovereign power which swayed his. As time passed, the society expanded its base and was taking on a larger and more formidable attitude. The Hotel de Rambouillet made arrests, and the salon of Madame de Sevigne was dreaded by those who were judged there. The end of the reign of Louis XIV was another time when the society of Paris grew anew. Women who were truly independent, by their new arrangements, was looked after for as long as that power was given to them by this meeting of individuals around the same person. Then came the Regent. It was then that what was called the Society and what we completely lost in memory, formed in new ways. Love held was in every head and elsewhere filled the life of every person of any importance.

Love was everything. The great lords, grand ladies, the princes of a true blood, the King himself, all thought only of love, and if they were bold enough to go against this code, they were suffocated under the weight of everything; the spirit was itself subordinate to this mania of love.

If a painter made a historical painting, it was Diane de Poitiers and Henri III, Henri IV and Gabrielle; it was Hercules at Omphale's feet and all at the figure of Louis XV. If they wrote a poem, it was the art of love! And any other similar platitudes; but gradually it came at a time of transition, and this time was a philosophical triumph. Yet even in this new regeneration, although the work of centuries had prepared the human mind to receive this baptism of light, it underwent the influence of the spirit of the moment. The institution of the Academies was another benefit of Richelieu because,