Vanessa Springora et le fossoyage des mythes de la séduction « à la française »

Abstract

Le Consentement by Vanessa Springora took the French literary world by storm in 2020. In the wake of the #metoo movement, the memoir’s impact has much to do with its ability to uncover the concealing power the persona of the seductive, “civilized,” French man; relatedly, it demystifies a notion of romantic and sexual consent that is problematic in its association of female amorous and sexual desire with the guilt and violence of a destructive and romantic passion. This essay first proposes to historically and culturally situate the twofold deconstruction that Springora achieves within a genealogy, not of love, but of the “French” occultation of violence and sexual abuse. It offers historical distance by putting Le Consentement in dialogue with the cultural context of the First World War, which the essay frames as a rupture that marked a significant change in gender relations in modern France and produced longstanding myths shaped in response to traumatic sexual violence. Second, the article focuses on how Vanessa Springora deconstructs gender domination as conveyed by fairy tales and literature to show that the denial of consent is not romantic.

Keywords:

• V. Springora
• consent
• sexual violence
• French exception
• World War I
• fairy tales

Notes

1 Voir Valérie Rey-Robert, Une culture du viol à la française? Du “troussage de domestique” à la “liberté d’importuner,” Montreuil, Libertalia, 2018.

2 Pour une analyse récente de la notion de spécificité française des relations amoureuses et des enjeux de son historicisation, voir Jean Elisabeth Pedersen, “Representations of Women in the French Imaginary: Historicizing the Gallic Singularity,” French Politics, Culture & Society, vol. 38, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1–20. https://doi.org/10.3167/fpcs.2020.380101

3 Telle qu’initialement nommée et problématisée par Éric Fassin (1999). Éric Fassin, “The Purloined Gender: American Feminism in a French Mirror,” French Historical Studies, vol. 22, no. 1, 1999, pp 113–138. https://doi.org/10.2307/286704

4 Ruth Harris, “The Child of The Barbarian: Rape, Race and Nationalism in France During the First World War,” Past & Present, vol. 141, 1993, pp. 170–206.

5 Georges Docquois, La Chair innocente, L’enfant du viol Boche, Paris, Albin Michel, 1917, cité par Susan R. Grayzel dans Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War, U of North Carolina P, 1999, p. 53.

6 Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14-18, Retrouver La Guerre, Paris, Gallimard, 2000.

7 Sans pouvoir multiplier ici les exemples, on renverra notamment aux illustrations de Gerda Wegener, “Fanfan la Tulipe,” La Baïonnette, 21 Jul. 1917, p. 461, et Chéri Hérouard, “Les Poilus sont autorisés à chasser sans permis,” Paris, La Vie Parisienne, 1917, p. 1.

8 Voir à ce sujet Angélique Ibáñez Aristondo, “Seduction, Aggression, and Frenchness in La Vie Parisienne (1914-1918),” French Cultural Studies, Online First, 2021, pp. 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558211032362

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Angélique Ibáñez Aristondo

Angélique Ibáñez Aristondo defended her Ph.D. in French at the City University of New York (CUNY) in October 2021. Her dissertation retraces the impact of the First World War upon the cultural construction of romantic love, women’s sexual consent, and gender-based violence in France. Her new research project focuses on the significance of colonial discourse on violence and gender upon the history of gender-based violence across France and its empire in the interwar period. Recent and forthcoming publications have appeared in French Cultural Studies and French Studies.

Lucie Nizard

Dr. Lucie Nizard is a former student of the École Normale Supérieure of Lyon. In November 2021, she defended a thesis in French literature about the poetics of female sexual desire in the French novel of manners of the second nineteenth century, at the University Sorbonne Nouvelle, under the supervision of Éléonore Reverzy. She works on female sexuality and consent from a sociocritical and gender studies perspective. She teaches Expression and Communication at the University of Paris.