Son(s) and Lovers: The Child as Narrative Linchpin in Marcelle Tinayre's La Rebelle

Abstract

Marcelle Tinayre first made her mark on the turn-of-the-century publishing world with contributions to newspapers and periodicals and garnered further attention when, after being nominated for the Légion d’honneur, she wrote a satirical piece on the award, which resulted in the removal of her name from the list of candidates. Tinayre published a number of novels, including La Rebelle (1905), which critics have characterized as a “Bildungsroman féminocentrique” (France Grenaudier-Klijn, Une Littérature 81), “the romance of an emancipated ‘New Woman’” (Diana Holmes, “Decadent Love” 17), and a “novel of professional development” (Juliette Rogers). This Belle Epoque novel tells the story of Josanne, a feminist journalist whose child, born of an extramarital affair, may appear to play a secondary role in the novel's plot, but who is in fact its force motrice, the linchpin in Josanne's relationships with men and the figure on which her separate yet interconnected roles as woman, lover, and mother pivot.

Keywords:

• Belle Epoque
• child
• feminist
• mother
• novel
• relationships
• Tinayre
• women

Notes

1. Jennifer Waelti-Walters pits these same elements—among others—against each other, stating that “[Tinayre] challenges a vast number of preconceived attitudes and values in the novel, structured as it is by the tensions between a certain number of opposing forces: public and private attitudes toward women, reality and appearance in love, a woman's love for her man and for her child, the public and private nature of women's equality with men, the difference between the life of a woman working outside the home and one working within it, life in the city and in the provinces” (52–53; emphasis mine).

2. Other critics express similar ideas about Josanne's belief in her right to fulfillment in love, including the adulterous variety. Benjamin M. Woodbridge observes, rather effusively, that “[Tinayre's] novels are filled with one theme: the divine right of feminine passion. […] The reader may prefer to call her women romantic titans with a superabundance of corps féminin” (3). According to Diana Holmes, Josanne is “a moral heroine, not in conventional terms, but in those of a modern feminist morality: she is a good mother, a nurturing wife, but one who refuses to sacrifice herself to a tyrannical husband, and feels no guilt about her adulterous relationship because it is motivated by love” (Romance and Readership 36).

3. Collado goes so far as to claim that such behavior extends as well to Noël and emphasizes that this tendency with the men in her life stands in contrast to “sa morale peu conventionnelle” (170).

4. The scene has also been singled out for inclusion in Waelti-Walters and Hause's anthology.

5. Grenaudier-Klijn has emphasized the preponderance of past participles in the Villa Bleue passage, which “soulignent l’inertie et la passivité de femmes que l’on traite et dispose comme des objets […]” (Une Littérature 220).

6. Grenaudier-Klijn contends as well that there are marked stylistic elements in the Villa Bleue episode, which “contribute to the subversive nature of the passages and isolate them from the text. In contrast to the more poetic, elegant, and controlled tone of the main narrative, the language used in [that episode] is deliberately simple, prosaic, even crude. The sentences are brief. […] there are no decorum, no flourishes, no embellishments. The focus is placed on the physical and the tangible” (“Mater Dolorosa” 51).

7. The notion of having a man “dans le sang”—not to mention the reference to a crime—calls to mind certain passages in Zola's Thérèse Raquin describing the interpenetration of Thérèse's and Laurent's bodies: “[Laurent] ne s’appartenait plus, sa maîtresse […] s’était glissée peu à peu dans chacune des fibres de son corps” (77); “D’ailleurs, n’était-il pas lié à Thérèse par un lien de sang et d’horreur?” (143); “Une parenté de sang et de volupté s’était établie entre eux. Ils frissonnaient des mêmes frissons; leurs coeurs, dans une espèce de fraternité poignante, se serraient aux mêmes angoisses. Ils eurent dès lors un seul corps et une seule âme pour jouir et pour souffrir” (157–58); and especially “Jadis, aux jours de passion, leur différence de tempérament avait fait de cet homme et de cette femme un couple puissamment lié, en établissant entre eux une sorte d’équilibre, en complétant pour ainsi dire leur organisme. L’amant donnait de son sang, l’amante de ses nerfs, et ils vivaient l’un dans l’autre […]” (203–04; emphasis mine).

8. Marcelle Biolley-Godino's reaction to this kind of reasoning is to exclaim “[c]’est là qu’on se retrouve en plein ridicule” (63).

9. References to Noël's capacity for violence surface here and there in the text, such as the one describing Josanne's discovery in him of “une espèce de violence latente qu’il surveillait et réprimait […]” (148), or this striking one revealing a breakdown in his “surveillance”: “dominé par l’idée secrète et fixe qui le torture, Noël broie les mains de Josanne, la presse contre le rocher” (238).

10. Here again Zola's Thérèse Raquin naturally comes to mind—specifically Camille's palpable presence between Thérèse and Laurent after they murder him.

11. This passage is strikingly similar to one in Colette's La Vagabonde, which takes place after Renée's first passionate kiss: “Maxime est demeuré sur le divan, et son muet appel reçoit la plus flatteuse réponse: mon regard de chienne soumise, un peu penaude, un peu battue, très choyée, et qui accepte tout, la laisse, le collier, la place aux pieds de son maître” (144). Renée will, in the end, choose to reject her “master,” however.

12. See Yver's novels Princesses de science (1907) and Les Dames du palais (1909) for far less ambiguous conclusions featuring professional women who give up career, independence, and “gloire” (an oft-repeated word in Yver's fiction) to settle for home life and the role of assistant to their husbands.