“If only you were a boy…”: Friendship and sexual identity in Mireille Best's Hymne aux Murènes

ABSTRACT

While much French fiction devoted to lesbians focuses on romantic relationships, Mireille Best's (1943–2005) first novel, Hymne aux Murènes (Hymn to the Moray Eels) (1986), depicts a wide variety of relationships between the lesbian protagonist, Mila, and the other young women staying in a sanatorium of sorts for the treatment of an unnamed illness. In this all-female environment, Best depicts relationships between Mila and Paule, a closeted lesbian employee of the sanatorium; between Mila and young women like Josette and Lilli, who are somewhat attracted to Mila but, for the most part, do not act on this attraction; and between very close heterosexual friends (Nicoli and Nicola). In so doing, Best expands the reader's notion of friendship between women and blurs the lines between lesbians and heterosexuals, guiding the reader toward a more complex understanding of female friendship in general and lesbian friendship in particular. Throughout the novel, several characters express frustration about Mila's gender identity by saying, “If only you were a boy…” While Mila remains romantically frustrated, she develops close friendships with several young women, and Best thus conveys optimism about lesbians' ability to form friendships during adolescence and early adulthood, a time of life when, according to her characters, the boundaries between heterosexuality and lesbianism seem less rigid than they might be later in life. In this essay, I focus primarily on Best's first novel, but I include brief reflections on an earlier short story that echoes the presentation of lesbians and friendship found in the novel.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescence
• female friendship
• fiction
• French
• lesbian
• sexual identity

Notes

1. Indeed, the rest of Best's own writings (the novels Camille en Octobre (1988) and Il n'y a pas d'Hommes au Paradis (1995), and the volumes of short stories such as Une Extrême Attention (1985), Le Méchant Petit Jeune Homme (1983), and Orphéa Trois (1991)) all focus on either romantic or familial relationships, with the exception of the short story “Le Livre de Stéphanie” that I discuss here.

2. Mila is a member of several marginalized groups: lesbians, working-class people and, possibly, second-generation immigrants (this last suggested by her atypical first name and references to a difficult-to-pronounce last name). In previous work, I have explored the issue of socio-economic class, but here I focus primarily on issues related to sexuality. Beyond commenting on Mila's name, there is no substantive exploration of ethnicity in the text, although the various girls' reactions to Mila are surely conditioned by her status in their eyes as an exotic “Other” on several levels.

3. Best's work was favorably reviewed by both gay/lesbian publications like these and by mainstream outlets like Le Monde, L'Express, Marie-Claire, and regional newspapers. In addition, positive critiques were published in the Belgian, Swiss, German, and Dutch press.

4. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

5. This type of stylistic experimentation can be traced back to Modern writers in various traditions. However, the more immediate points of literary reference for Best were French New Novelists, such as Marguerite Duras and Samuel Beckett, whom Best read and admired. Their efforts to develop new ways of writing were, in many ways, inspired by Modern writers such as Joyce and Woolf, as well as direct responses to nineteenth-century French realist novels such as those of Zola or Flaubert. I explored Best's use of this style in my book chapter “The Lesbian Body in Motion: Representations of Corporeality and Sexuality in the Novels of Mireille Best.”

6. See Manley et al. (2015).

7. The limitations of Rich's approach are well-described in the introduction to Kathryn R. Kent's study, Making Girls into Women.

8. While bisexuality can certainly be traced to ancient times in many cultures, the concept of “bisexuality” was not fully embraced, even by gay/lesbian activists and writers, until the 1990s. Unsurprisingly, Best does not use the term “bisexuelle” in her texts. Her characters, while expressing gender fluidity and characteristics of bisexuality, are usually framed in terms of hetero- and homosexuality. Nor does Best include any references to transmen or transwomen, despite the fact that the characters express a wish that Mila be a boy.

9. I am grateful to Dr. Kate Bonin for drawing my attention to a particularly resonant set of images found in both English and French love poems, such as “Sonnet XVI” by William Shakespeare: (“Sweet love, renew thy force; be it not said Thy edge should blunter be than appetite, Which but to-day by feeding is allay'd, To-morrow sharpen'd in his former might: So, love, be thou, although to-day thou fill Thy hungry eyes, even till they wink with fulness, To-morrow see again, and do not kill The spirit of love, with a perpetual dulness.”) or Pierre de Ronsard's ” Ô Doux Parler, dont l'Appât Doucereux” (“Ô doux parler, dont l'appât doucereux Nourrit encore la faim de ma mémoire, Ô front, d'Amour le Trophée et la gloire, Ô ris sucrés, ô baisers savoureux”; (“O sweet speech, whose honeyed lure Still nourishes the hunger of my memory, O brow, of Love the Trophy and the glory, O sugared laughs, o savory kisses").

10. This strategy of focusing on attraction to an individual rather than a group has been deployed by other French fiction writers, such Jocelyne François, for example in Les Bonheurs, and by theoreticians like Monique Wittig, for example in the essays gathered in The Straight Mind and Other Essays. In drawing attention to the particular, these authors force the reader to acknowledge the specificity of lesbian attraction and love, thereby drawing parallels to heterosexual love as configured throughout much literature and philosophy as love of an individual.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephanie Schechner

Stephanie Schechner is a Professor of French at Widener University, located in Chester, Pennsylvania. She has published extensively on Mireille Best, as well as on other French and Francophone women writers, including Jovette Marchessault, Colette, Nathalie Sarraute, Rachilde, Marguerite Duras, and Jocelyne François.