"The Hysteric's Revenge" considers fin-de-siecle French women
writers in the context of prevailing cultural anxieties about
female intellect. During the years that overlap between the
fin-de-siecle and the Belle Epoque, women began to write in record
numbers, due to a number of factors including educational reforms
and demographic shifts. This trend terrified many male literary
critics, who described it as the "crisis of women's writing" in a
series of efforts to circumscribe the perceived problem. Such
critics frequently linked women's writing to sexual depravity.
According to popular medical theories, the fragile confluence of
the female mind and body might steer the woman writer towards
illicit sexual behavior when she exercised her intellect.
This book argues, however, that the fear of sexual abandon--though
real--veiled an even more insidious fear: that women might be
capable of intellectual equality with men and thus pose a threat to
the most basic structures of French patriarchal society. In
demonstrating the pervasiveness of this anxiety through analysis of
nineteenth-century medical texts, literary criticism, and fiction,
"The Hysteric's Revenge" brings into relief a critical relationship
between the female mind and body that is essential to understanding
the discursive position of the turn-of-the-century woman
writer.
The novels presented here confront this mind/body problem through a
wide variety of styles and genres that challenge conventional
fin-de-siecle notions of femininity. From the compelling
autobiography of Liane de Pougy--one of Paris's most renowned
courtesans--to Colette's frank discussions of female pleasure in
one of her early novels, to the violent creativity of Rachilde's
androgynous heroine, Mesch demonstrates how both canonical and
non-canonical writers promoted women's intellectual authority
through the development of a sexual counter-discourse. In engaging
the relationship between women's minds and bodies, these novels
challenge the conclusions of a century of doctors who sought to
prove a physiological basis for female intellectual inferiority. At
the same time, they point the way towards later French feminists
who sought to subvert patriarchal structures through literary
explorations of sexuality.
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