"In order to write" said Simone de Beauvoir, "the first essential
condition is that reality can no longer be taken for granted." She
and four other French women writers of the second half of the
twentieth century2;Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Monique
Wittig, and Maryse Conde2;illustrate that producing autobiography
is like performing a tightrope act on the slippery line between
fact and fiction.
"Autobiographical Tightropes" emphasizes the tension in the works
of these major writers as they move in and out of "experience" and
"literature," violating the neat boundaries between genres and
confusing the distinctions between remembering and creating.
Focusing on selected works, Leah D. Hewitt for the first time
anywhere explores the connections among the authors. In doing so
she shows how contemporary women's autobiography in France links
with feminist issues, literary tradition and trends, and postmodern
theories of writing.
In light of these theories Hewitt offers a new reading of de
Beauvoir's memoirs and reveals how her attempt to represent the
past faithfully is undone by irony, by literary and "feminine"
detours. Other analysts of Nathalie Sarraute's writing have dwelt
mainly on formal considerations of the New Novel, but Hewitt
exposes a repressed, forbidden feminine aspect in her literary
innovations. Unlike Sarraute, Duras cannot be connected with just
one literary movement, political stance, style, or kind of feminism
because her writing, largely autobiographical, is marked by
chameleon like transformations. The chapters on Wittig and Conde
show how, within the bounds of feminism, lesbians and women of
color challenge the individualistic premises ofautobiography.
Hewitt demonstrates that, despite vast differences among these five
writers, all of them reveal in their autobiographical works the
self's need of a fictive other.
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