Women's Lives in Contemporary French and Francophone Literature

Florence Ramond Jurney, Karen McPherson, Florence Ramond Jurney, Karen McPherson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783319408507
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria moderna

The essays in this volume provide an overview and critical account of prevalent trends and theoretical arguments informing current investigations into literary treatments of motherhood and aging. They explore how two key stages in women's lives—maternity and old age—are narrated and defined in fictions and autobiographical writings by contemporary French and francophone women. Through close readings of Maryse Condé, Hélène Cixous, Zahia Rahmani, Linda Lê, Pierrette Fleutieux, and Michèle Sarde, among others, these essays examine related topics such as dispossession, female friendship, and women's relationships with their mothers. By adopting a broad, synthetic approach to these two distinct and defining stages in women's lives, this volume elucidates how these significant transitional moments set the stage for women's evolving definitions (and interrogations) of their identities and roles.

Part I
Defining the Mother

© The Author(s) 2016

Florence Ramond Jurney and Karen McPherson (eds.)Women’s Lives in Contemporary French and Francophone Literature10.1007/978-3-319-40850-7_1

Begin Abstract

Aban-donner: The Maternal in Le jour où je n’étais pas là

Laurie Corbin¹

(1)

Department of International Language and Culture Studies, Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, Fort Wayne, IN, USA

End Abstract

In Le jour où je n’étais pas là, Hélène Cixous frames her relationship to the son who died in infancy between the words abandonner and donner. The text presents a linked series of images of helpless creatures, beginning with a dog that is abandoned in a park, then Cixous’s baby, then chickens who are bred to be eaten without ever having a chance to fly. There is an emphasis on the fragility and innocence of these beings with an underlying suggestion that we do not treat well those who are seen as inferior, whether because they are animals and/or because they are viewed as imperfect. Parallel to this series of images is a reflection on giving that weaves through the entire text, with an attention to the ambiguity of the concept of the gift: a concept which can include giving death to someone. This reflection, as with the series of images that leads the reader to consider “the abandoned” of our societies, leads us to consider the ethics of giving.

This chapter will suggest that this complex view of our responsibility to others, to be scrutinized both in our abandoning and in our giving, comes to stand for the always complex relationship of the mother to her children. In this sense Cixous’s text is part of the discourse on the maternal shaped over the course of the twentieth century by such diverse thinkers as Sigmund Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, and Julia Kristeva, as well as Cixous herself. It also continues her work on le don, a concept central to her views on femininity since her early essays and often linked to her views on women’s relationship to childbearing. Although Cixous’s text cannot be considered an autobiography,¹ it is at the same time a deeply personal reflection on the loss of a child and a more general reflection on what is a fiercely contested issue in many societies: the responsibility of the mother. My analysis of the treatment of this subject in Cixous’s text will show that she challenges common views of the mother and her responsibility, opening these up to further examination.

Cixous’s theorization of le don began with her essay “Le rire de la méduse,” written in 1975.² This well-known work presented a new view of what women are and could be, and was a manifesto for the entry of women into language. Cixous theorized a feminine relationship to giving, shaped by a woman’s relationship to her body, her sexuality, and her potential for giving birth. “S’il y a un ‘propre’ de la femme, c’est paradoxalement sa capacité de se dé-proprier sans calcul: corps sans fin, sans ‘bout’, sans ‘parties principales’” (“Rire” 50). Challenging phallocentric assumptions of what a woman’s relationship to her body should be, Cixous suggested that women’s more diversified erogeneity helps them to give freely, without thought of exchange or “calculation,” this last word used both in the sense of self-interested scheming and in the sense of mathematically determining profit or loss. She also plays with the word propre, which has as one of its meanings the idea of possession and suggests that what a woman “owns” is the ability to dis-own, to let go of any sense of things belonging to her and simply give. Alan D. Schrift, in “Logics of the Gift in Cixous and Nietzsche,” explains:

In particular, [Cixous] draws our attention to maternal gifts as ones that escape the logic of appropriation structuring the commodity economy she calls “masculine.” Mother and child do not stand in a relationship of self/other, opposing parties with competing interests, and the gift to the child of a mother’s love or a mother’s breast is not comprehensible in terms of quantifiable exchange values or the law of return that governs an economy based on the exchange of commodities. (118)

While Schrift focuses in this passage on the giving of maternal love or the maternal breast, it is clear that Cixous is writing about more than a woman’s conscious choice to be a mother and care for a baby; she is suggesting that this possibility in a woman’s life gives her a different relationship to giving. “Mets l’autre en vie: la femme sait vivre le détachement; accoucher n’est pas perdre, ni s’augmenter” (“Rire” 52). A woman’s relationship to the gift of life places her at the center of an opposition that dissolves in this theorization of giving: giving life is neither giving as in giving up something nor is it increasing what one is or has. Yet she does not suggest that a woman must have a child: “Tu veux un gosse ou tu ne veux pas, c’est ton affaire” (“Rire” 51). Cixous both connects a woman’s possibility of giving birth to a different kind of giving, one that does not imply or require any reciprocity, and disconnects the capacity for reproduction from woman’s inherent nature or duties. She is free to choose for herself, yet this relationship to her body—its jouissance and its ability to menstruate, gestate, give birth, lactate—allows her to exist in a different relationship to the propre.

Cixous’s attention to le don in Le jour où je n’étais pas là begins when the narrator’s mother, Ève Cixous, recounts her guilt for not having done as her mother, Omi, had asked as she neared the end of her life:

D’ailleurs Omi m’avait demandé: donne-moi quelque chose. À quatre-vingt-quinze ans j’ai assez vécu. Je m’ennuie. Avant de tomber. Avant qu’elle tombe. Elle n’avait pas encore perdu la tête. Donne-moi quelque chose et ne me le dis pas. (Jour 78)

This request “Donne-moi quelque chose et ne me le dis pas” returns throughout the text and is contrasted to the decision that Ève Cixous had apparently made years earlier when Cixous’s infant son, a child with Down’s syndrome and a heart defect, began to experience severe cardiac problems: according to Cixous’s brother, a doctor, he had been about to administer medicine to alleviate the problem, when his mother stopped him, telling him that he should allow the child to die, which he did. In the case of Omi, Ève Cixous reproaches herself for not ending her mother’s life; in the case of the baby, it appears that she believes that she did what was right in allowing the child to die without prolonging what would have been a short life increasingly filled with suffering. The ethical dilemmas inherent in the gift of death—not given in the case of the grandmother of the narrator, given in the case of her son—become increasingly prominent throughout the rest of the text. The implicit question is, of course, how to know what is right when we are able or required to make life-and-death decisions, decisions that could involve prolonging the suffering of those over whom we have this power.

The word donner comes to have a wider meaning in the text as Cixous thinks about the choice that she had made, as a young woman already pregnant with another child, to give her son to her mother so that he could be cared for in the maternity clinic that Ève Cixous directed in Algiers. Her realization that she would like to know the details of the baby’s death, details that she had never asked for, raises the question of to whom these details belong. She wonders if they belong to her, the mother who gave up her baby, or to her own mother, the mother who accepted the baby. She seems uncertain of her rights in the situation: “Comme si j’avais exercé un droit indéniable de curiosité parce que j’étais la mère et indu parce que je n’étais pas la mère” (Jour 170).³ The questions underlying this uncertainty concern how we define “mother”: is Cixous the mother because she gave birth to the child or is her mother the mother since she accepted responsibility for him? Is a mother defined by her physical ability to bear a child or by the choices she makes in caring for this child? How are we to understand what a mother is in the context of the infinite variety of choices that women make concerning whether or not to have children? It would seem that Cixous is returning to her exploration of maternity first presented in “Le rire de la méduse,” yet explicitly through the lens of experiences of the writer’s own life.

The question of whose child the baby was seems to be answered by one of the last sentences of Le jour où je n’étais pas là: “J’ouvre les mains. On ne reprend pas l’enfant qu’on a donné. Il faut que je m’arrête me dis-je” (Jour 190). In this way the text ends with a statement on motherhood and on giving—“On ne reprend pas l’enfant qu’on a donné”—and interrogates both: how does a mother give a child? how does a mother give a child? In a sense, a child cannot be given because ethically a person cannot be treated as property. Further, the mother who “gives” her child does not necessarily eradicate the part of her identity that includes “mother” by deciding that someone else is capable of caring for the baby. So since a person is not ethically something that can be used in an exchange of commodities, the “giving” of this baby to her mother is a very different use of the word “to give.” We could see the “giving” of a baby as le don described in “Le rire de la méduse”: existing outside of the masculine economy of appropriation, outside of the propre.

It would also seem that in the case of this son, whose needs were so different from those of children who are not developmentally and physically challenged from the beginning of their lives, the relationship to these concepts is even more complex: “Devant lui, pensé-je, tous les mots d’être, d’avoir, de pouvoir, d’aller, tous ont vacillé et plié” (Jour 12). The words vaciller (waver or wobble) and plier (bend or yield) suggest a lack of solidity in certain fundamental states or actions in our lives—being, having, being able, going—undermining traditional views of our existence and abilities. It should also be noted that wavering, wobbling, and bending are typical actions of small children when learning to walk. We can see therefore an intersection of this baby (or the thoughts about this baby so many years later) and language: by our existence we form and reform language as by its existence language forms and reforms us. The word vaciller could also be related to the narrator’s use of the word flou, meaning “vague,” to describe her baby: this might be connected to his tenuous hold on life but could also be connected to what is for Cixous a problem with definitions, particularly when they concern human beings.

Qu’est-ce qu’un enfant? Qu’est-ce qu’un être humain? Les mots de semblable, normal, loi, propre, tous les mots hérités, d’héritage, sombrent. Des questions viennent à nous violemment, par surprise, sans demander ni attendre de réponse, non les questions viennent à la place des réponses, elles répondent par moqueries de notre irresponsabilité, une interrogation mondiale nous fait glisser, tomber dans la rue, fait vaciller nos croyances-clichés. (Loup 118)

In these two citations, we can see that language itself becomes destabilized when we try to use it to define things that cannot be defined: with the foundering of categories, words founder as well.

It is painfully clear to the narrator that many view Down’s syndrome babies as babies who would be better off not living: “Eh bien, votre petit client, on aurait mieux fait de le tuer. Un végétal. Au mieux un animal […] dit le pédiatre juif à la sage-femme ma mère” (Jour 66). This comparison of a baby to “an animal at best” is shocking in several different ways. obviously to compare a baby to an animal is to see the baby as less than human. We are reminded of the many times throughout history that peoples have been described as “subhuman” and forced to endure terrible treatment. The narrator’s brother addresses as well the medical practices that have developed over the course of the decades since the birth of this son: “De nos jours on les détecte et on les interrompt dans l’oeuf. Bientôt il n’y en aura plus jamais, dit mon frère” (Jour 116). Again, the use of the term oeuf, although this is linked to a common idiom that could be translated as a “to nip in the bud,” disconcertingly reconnects us to the animal world (where we belong in fact), bringing us to new questions about the value of life.⁴ As we saw in Cixous’s questioning of what a child is, what a human being is, a baby such as her son who died is valuable, with one of the reasons for his value being that he shakes up (fait vaciller) our certainties, beliefs, and stereotypes.

As with the question of how Ève Cixous should have handled her mother’s request to be given something to help her die, the question of how to evaluate the worth of the life of a baby who will suffer from serious physical problems and developmental challenges is an agonizing one. when thinking of her brother’s statement that soon Down’s syndrome babies will no longer be allowed to be born, Cixous speculates: “Plus tard on ne saura plus ce qu’il nous apportait en nous ôtant ce qu’il nous donnait en nous déportant ce qu’il nous causait, quel dommage, quelle mutation, quelle brûlure, quelle émotion” (Jour 116). Thus a gift from the baby is a new awareness of what it is to be different, how it is that we see people as “imperfect,” and the results of this evaluation. The interchange in this passage between what the baby brings and what is taken away by the elimination of this possibility is made very complex by the series of verbs apportait, ôtant, donnait, déportant, causait, with the three verbs in the imperfect tense emphasizing what the baby brings (the imperfect tense is significant in this sorrowful sentence that questions how we deal with “imperfection”) and the two present participle verbs emphasizing, along with the impersonal on as subject, what is being carried out upon us all. The four nouns—dommage, mutation, brûlure, émotion—underline the sorrow of this future absence with their different feelings, sensations, and states—pity, mutation, burning, emotion, a list of words that are not clearly sequentially linked but that seem to waver between positive and negative connotations.

Motherhood is often seen as the most natural state in the world and yet at the same time, the views of what a good mother is vary enormously according to the era and society in which a woman lives, as well as many other factors such as race, class, religion, age, and sexuality. Indeed, the value of a woman’s life has sometimes been assessed primarily on the basis of whether she has had children, what their sex is, whether their health is good, if they have become productive members of society, and so on. This paradox of what is seen as “natural” but is socially determined, if not overdetermined, is foregrounded in Le jour où je n’étais pas là when Ève Cixous describes the difficulties that she saw women undergo in Algiers when she was a midwife.

[L]es enfants sont une belle fatalité, on est obligé d’en vouloir on ne peut pas leur échapper, alors la femme est obligée d’en vouloir à Dieu ou celui qui a fait ce moulin infernal obligatoire où il faut faire ce qui finalement s’avère être en peu de temps la ruine et le malheur de toute la famille comme si on se conformait de naissance au mystérieux décret de l’infortune, tous ces gens qui sont dans un état de dépendance désespérée tantôt à l’enfant qu’il faut absolument obtenir, le certifiant, tantôt à l’enfant qui arrive maintenant comme une vengeance et une calamité, avec toujours un enfant volant au-dessus des têtes de la famille dans une imminence insupportable. Toute sa vie la femme la passe dans cette persécution tantôt courant après le jeton tantôt fuyant et à tous les coups ne gagnant que pour s’endetter plus avant. (Jour 132–133)

This view of women’s lives dominated both by the need for a child (preferably male) and by the fear of too many children to be able to feed, a “moulin infernal obligatoire,” reminds the reader that motherhood can be torture for women who lack choices because of their economic or familial circumstances. If they cannot bear children, they might be scorned as useless. If they are very fertile, they risk bringing children into the world who will suffer a range of lacks or at least disadvantages. Women who must bear unwanted children, either for lack of contraception or societal pressures against the use of contraception, can feel trapped by their bodies. The narrator’s mother expresses this view of the poverty and fear that she has witnessed in her clinic in a flow of words that evokes fluids that accompany a woman’s different physical states, often taking on crucial importance: menstruation, lactation, sharing her own good or bad health with the fetus in the womb through her amniotic fluids. In Ève Cixous’s description of the lives of the women she saw in Algiers, there is a sense of the women themselves being abandoned—by their societies, their families, their husbands—if they are unable to fulfill their reproductive “duties,” or if they fulfill them too well for the family finances or the husband’s preferences.

Although the definitions of “mother” and “good mother” have certainly been shaped and reshaped over the course of human history, the following overview will focus on the evolution that has taken place in these definitions beginning in the late nineteenth century, as this period has most clearly impacted contemporary thinking on motherhood, particularly when we look back at the development of psychoanalytic theory. Sigmund Freud’s theorization of the Oedipal crisis led to the widespread belief that boys needed to turn away from their mothers to develop into psychologically healthy men; if there was a “failure” in their development, often the mother was seen as having harmed their successful transition to adult masculinity. Following this, Melanie Klein’s formulation of object relations theory, although in disagreement with some of Freud’s suppositions, added an important dimension to views of the infant’s needs and emotions which came to be translated into recommendations for adequate parenting: whereas Freud seemed mainly to describe how women’s successful or unsuccessful transition to “normalcy” affected their ch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Defining the Mother
• 2. Defining the Aging Self
• Backmatter