A NEW MAN FOR THE NEW WOMAN?
Belle Epoque Literary Feminism and the French Marriage Plot
Readers of La Vie Heureuse were not happy with the ending to Colette Yver’s Princesses de science. In this 1907 novel, Yver told the story of the star medical intern Thérèse Herlinge, who early in the novel accepts an offer of marriage from the charming doctor Fernand Guéméné. Delighted, Fernand wonders aloud whether his future wife will regret the bright future that her career in medicine had promised. “But, I don’t have to give up medicine to be your wife!” Thérèse exclaims, astonished.1 And thus the trouble begins.
Thérèse and Fernand do manage to marry, her soaring career intact. But Thérèse quickly overshadows her husband’s accomplishments, becoming a highly pursued internist as he naively seeks a cure for cancer. Tensions are already running high when she becomes pregnant. He is thrilled, assuming she will now retire. Thérèse, however, is devastated by the prospect of giving up a career so crucial to her very sense of self. She does manage, at least for a while, to juggle both baby and career. Then, tragedy occurs: because Thérèse is unable to nurse while she is seeing patients, her nanny adds water to the baby’s milk, causing his sudden death. Anguished by this terrible loss, Thérèse still remains uncertain as to the proper balance of work and family, and struggles to find a role model in the women around her. Finally, with the threat of her husband’s imminent betrayal looming before her, Thérèse gives up her beloved medical career; her emotionally wounded husband “broken, heartsick,” would be her last patient.
Readers of La Vie Heureuse would have none of it.
Who says a woman cannot manage an ambitious career while maintaining a satisfying family life, asked writer Camille Marbo in a two-page editorial that appeared in the magazine a few months after the book’s publication. Holding up none other than Marie Curie and her impeccable ménage as an example, Marbo insisted that women could and did achieve such things, with regularity, and all while remaining perfectly feminine, or, as she put it, femme tout court.2 The next issue of La Vie Heureuse contained Yver’s reply, where she justified her novelistic choices, arguing that while there was no reason why women should not be doctors, such a demanding field was simply incompatible with a happy marriage, for either spouse. This response by the novel’s author, however, was already but one voice in an ever-expanding discussion. Following Yver’s piece, the magazine invited readers to participate in one of its many opinion surveys, polling male readers (presumably relatives of the magazine’s lectrices) on the possibility of marital harmony with a female professional. “Men, would you marry a woman who works?” a boldfaced headline demanded. Thousands answered, and the discussion continued, far beyond the parameters of Yver’s finely circumscribed plot.
Belle Epoque literary feminism found its most powerful and fully realized voice in the relay between Femina, La Vie Heureuse and their surrounding network of fictional texts. The magazines shaped the way that certain popular women’s novels were read in the 1900s, and the novels in turn offered a more open forum for pursuing the kinds of discussions launched within the magazines. Yver’s richly recounted novel, which was awarded the Prix Vie Heureuse in 1907, was part of a far-reaching discussion surrounding the redefinition of marriage during the Belle Epoque. The possibility of modernizing marriage was of particular concern to the femme moderne, as a new, updated model of marriage would provide a way to safely hinge the modern woman to traditional family structures, even as her particular role within them evolved substantially. In this chapter, I will consider novels by Marcelle Tinayre and Louise Marie Compain alongside Yver’s work.3 We will see that the discussions of modern marriage that circled from the magazines into these novels and back again reveal a rather coherent set of identifications and concerns shared by large numbers of women readers. These ideas challenged conventional gender norms in ways that do not conform to traditional categories for recognizing feminist expression during this time period, but, I argue, were perhaps as crucial to shifting social norms in the Belle Epoque as any proposed legal reforms. Moreover, the particular relationship of women’s novels to the magazines that responded to and debated them helps us to further define the crucial discursive space of Belle Epoque literary feminism, which extended beyond the physical pages of Femina and La Vie Heureuse in productive and fascinating ways.
The Marriage Crisis
By the end of the nineteenth century, the institution of marriage was widely considered to be “in crisis,”4 a situation stirred up in large part by the Naquet laws of 1884 through which divorce was reinstated, injecting a measure of choice into an institution which had long left unhappy wives with few options.5 Because the Naquet laws allowed divorce only under particular conditions, they almost immediately elicited calls for further reform. Writers and feminists began seeking to make divorce easier for women on the heels of the legislation, gaining momentum and visibility especially in the early 1900s; frequent public opinion surveys on the topic began to appear in the press, and numerous plays were produced, eliciting widespread debate.6
Femina and La Vie Heureuse, on the contrary, were highly—and, more to the point, visibly—invested in promoting marriage, even as they recognized women’s changing roles. They devoted numerous articles to discussing the future of the institution, which Femina described in 1903 as being under violent attack “during this time when pitiless moralists probe the wounds already gnawing away at the ancient institution.”7 Although divorce was a topic of great interest, it did not dominate the discussion. Indeed, the magazines seemed more concerned with imagining a modern relationship between husband and wife. The one-hundred-year anniversary of the Civil Code in March 1904 contributed to this sense, particularly as the government set up numerous extraparliamentary committees to consider its reform.8 In an editorial entitled “Should the Code be Modernized?” La Vie Heureuse commented on the vast social changes of the past century that resulted in a very different notion of marriage than what the writers of the Code had envisioned. The article described modern wives as “associates, equals, sometimes true geniuses,” who deserved the rights they had been denied.9 Despite this seeming openness to reform and the very modern notion of the wife as an equal, the article went on to conclude that reforming the code would be too difficult, given its importance in sheltering family and property, and the risk, quite simply, of making things worse.10 The commentaries offered in Femina echo this double stance. In response to playwright Paul Hervieu’s proposal that a mutual obligation of “amour” be added to the infamous Article 213, which mandated that women obey their husbands in exchange for their husbands’ protection, Femina polled several prominent women intellectuals, including Marcelle Tinayre and Daniel Lesueur.11 Everyone agreed that love was critical to successful marriage. But the women were far more ambivalent about what Lesueur described as its unnecessary legal codification, or “cristallisation légale.”12 Meditating on the distinction between sentimentality and the law, Tinayre affirmed that love should never be codified; to do so would be naïve. The article concluded that as long as love itself remained “undefinable,” any law would be impossible.13
And yet, despite both magazines’ resistance to fighting for explicit legal change, it would be a mistake to ignore the contribution of Belle Epoque literary feminism to marital reform, in the context of promoting a radical shift in the relationship between husband and wife. Much of the magazines’ work was focused precisely on that kind of change, as they advocated for new kinds of women—modern, independent, freethinking, professional—to inhabit traditionally feminine roles as wives and mothers. La Vie Heureuse’s editors said as much in the mission statement that introduced their opening issue. Speaking of their publication, they promised to “show everyone that a more intelligent, active woman is also a better mother and a vital, charming and strong link to the family.” The domestic sphere, rather than the public sphere, was the target of some of their most important work, a fact which helps explain both the resistance to any “cristallisation légale” as well as why much of this work remains unrecognized in its feminist import.
While featuring women in all sorts of new venues, both magazines never ceased to remind readers that marriage was healthy (“Marriage Prolongs Life,” La Vie Heureuse, April 1904) and necessary (“At What Age Should One Marry?” Femina, December 15, 1905).14 To this end, both magazines were filled with images of happy modern couples. Femina’s series “Ménages célèbres” and La Vie Heureuse’s “Ménages d’artistes” charted the seamless relationships between talented pairs living the dream of egalitarian partnership. Feature stories documented their travels; photographs fetishized their shared workspace at home.15 Through these articles, a new conjugal ideal was vividly promoted, capitalizing on the smooth, appealing veneer of celebrity culture, as famous couples were held up as exemplars of modern marriage. A perfect marriage became one of the featured celebrity’s many accomplishments, as well as an opportunity to offer an updated definition of the institution. A 1904 Femina piece entitled “Ménages de poètes,” for example, described the harmonious arrangements of several married poets at the heart of the literary Tout Paris, including Monsieur and Madame Catulle Mendès, Monsieur and Madame Henri Régnier (also known by her pseudonym Gérard d’Houville), and Monsieur and Madame Edmond Rostand (Fig. 5.1). The femme moderne, declared the article, has beautifully transformed and updated the traditional role of muse: “Not satisfied with simply inspiring the poet, she also wanted to imitate him [by becoming one].” Out of this mimicry, the article announced, a new kind of marital arrangement had emerged that was in itself a kind of art: these “exquisite couples” were “living poems of calm, simplicity, concord and harmony.”16 The article emphasized the reciprocity and interdependence of these couples at every turn, and was accompanied by photographs of the collaborating poets that affirmed this sense of absolute balance and partnership.
Central to the redefinition of marriage promoted by these set pieces was a vision for a new kind of wife, at once modern and traditional, one for whom equality did not conflict with requisite devotion and selflessness. An article from La Vie Heureuse’s very first issue offers this description:
Neither queen nor slave, in our time [a wife] keeps in her heart all the reasons to devote and sacrifice herself that have been developed little by little over time. But she inhabits them with a new dignity. As her husband’s associate, reciprocal love is the very bond of this relationship.17
Femina’s description of the modern wife is striking for its similarity. The magazine often celebrated women for their exemplary embrace of their role as “associate,” emphasizing the husband’s obligation to treat his wife as a respected partner during this time when “women are becoming equal to men.” Despite this equality, women were not meant to “act like men” in their marriages, but rather, to be the “complement to the man to whom they are tied.”18
Figure 5.1 “Poet Households,” featuring Monsieur and Madame Edmond Rostand, Monsieur and Madame Catulle Mendès, and Monsieur and Madame Auguste Dorchain, in Femina (June 15, 1904).
Experiments in Feminist Marriage
If, through their emphasis on famous couples, the magazines risked presenting modern marriage as an ideal only available to the happy few, popular women’s fiction offered a way to test the fantasy, as well as a terrain through which to explore the challenges a couple might face in attempting to assume a more modern partnership.
One concern that male writers mentioned repeatedly within Femina was that while new generations of young, educated bourgeois women were steadily reimagining their conjugal roles, scoffing at the antiquated structures specified by the Civil Code, their spouses were not nearly as quick to relinquish their legally grounded authority. In his Lettres à Françoise mariée, which appeared in serial form in Femina in 1908, novelist Marcel Prévost commented on this discrepancy, explaining to young Françoise that while women were known to giggle at the obligatory recitation of Article 213 in civil wedding ceremonies, husbands “find a clear advantage in the regime of Napoleonic law.”19
Tinayre and fellow novelist Louise Marie Compain address this difference between modern, bourgeois men’s and women’s expectations in their novels, in which they try to imagine not just what a feminist marriage might look like but how a modern couple might achieve such a feat.20 Like the social experiments conducted in Zola’s novels not long before, these writers worked through the challenge of updating modern marriage by staging the process through which these changes might happen, as individual men and women (or temperaments, as Zola would say), from different backgrounds (or milieus, in Zola’s terms) were confronted with shifting expectations.21 What happens, for example, when an open-minded young man who has written a feminist treatise on women workers falls in love with an independent woman who challenges all his preconceived ideas about feminism and femininity? What happens when two earnest, well-meaning intellectuals try to balance career and family? In Compain’s 1903 L’un vers l’autre and Tinayre’s 1905 La rebelle, one can clearly see the continuation of discussions regarding marital roles already under way in the magazines, as well as fictional responses to questions that the magazines had not yet explicitly posed.
L’un vers l’autre, published in 1903, was Compain’s first and most successful novel. After the publication of its sequel L’opprobre in 1905, she devoted her energies more exclusively to the feminist movement, serving as a founding member of l’ Union française pour le suffrage des femmes, writing extensively on the rights of women workers and publishing regularly in the feminist newspaper La Française.22 Little is known about Compain’s personal life, which she kept extremely private; her husband is thought to have committed suicide after being accused by his mother-in-law of causing the stillbirth of their only child.23 Tinayre, on the other hand, became something of a celebrity following the publication of her breakthrough novel La maison du péché in 1900, which received widespread critical acclaim. Though she wrote dozens of novels on a variety of subjects, we know that she identified personally with La rebelle and its subject matter.24
Both Tinayre’s and Compain’s novels are feminist fables, distinct for the nature both of their conflict and for their happy endings, which hinge on the male partner’s claiming the woman’s feminist sensibilities as his own. In their shared revision of the British courtship plot, they bring their couples together quickly, only to discover an obstacle to their continued union: the man’s patriarchal prejudices.25 Both Tinayre and Compain construct their male protagonists as exceptional and promising figures, such that their failure to satisfy their partners is somewhat unexpected. In Compain’s L’un vers l’autre, we are quickly introduced to the handsome, sensitive and thoughtful Henri, who, upon graduating from the École Normale, “hardly thought of marrying” until he met Laure, whose “mind equaled her beauty.”26 With all the promise of the best sentimental hero, he readily gives himself over to the passion he had once rejected. As Henri gazes into Laure’s adoring eyes, he appreciates all the qualities that an avid reader of the women’s press would presumably want her husband to seek in a spouse: unpretentious beauty, maternal instincts, and vibrant intelligence.
It is hard to imagine a more auspicious partnership; yet Tinayre’s La rebelle far surpasses Compain’s tale in the feminist courtship fantasy of Josanne Valentin and Noël Delysle: she is a struggling, independent-minded young widow making ends meet by writing for Le Monde Féminin; he is the author of the feminist treatise La Travailleuse. Long before meeting him, Josanne encounters Noël’s book while browsing a bookstore on a rainy day, where she reads of “the female rebel” who, the author sympathetically explains, acts not in defiance of morals but rather in search of “the right to think, to act, to love whomever she pleases, this right that men had always taken for themselves, and always refused her.”27 Josanne of course immediately recognizes herself in this figure. “Who is this man who remains unblinded by prejudice?” she asks, smitten (15). They finally meet after an exchange of letters following her review of his book and proceed, thoughtfully yet passionately, toward becoming lovers.
Despite these promising beginnings, in the second phase of both novels, the couples face intense conflict over the terms of their relationships. While Noël and Josanne fall quickly in love, Noël is plagued by the existence of Claude, Josanne’s son through her previous lover, the child being an eternal reminder of Josanne’s sexual past.28 As it turns out, the author of La Travailleuse is limited by a feminism that was, as he admits, “a bit theoretical” (167). Henri, on the other hand, balks when his wife seems to privilege career satisfaction over family, leading to her departure. Both authors then stage a complex psychological process through which feminist values become personalized, allowing the man to reorient his entire sense of familial structures according to this new feminist perspective.29 In the process, a new feminism emerges: one explicitly set in opposition to the organized feminist movement referenced in both texts; one allowing a balance between female independence and conventional heterosexual roles; and, importantly, one defined by male participation.30
Beyond the New Woman
Both Noël and Henri are blinded, albeit only temporarily, by received ideas about the women of their generation and the limits of existing frameworks through which to analyze these ideas. Indeed, as the couples in both texts attempt to work past patriarchal prejudices, they also work to move past the rigid categories through which resistance to gender norms had been defined for them. With no accepted term through which to describe the apolitical stance of the femme moderne, Tinayre’s and Compain’s characters struggle independently to reconcile what appear to be competing ideologies: French marriage, as dictated by the Civil Code, presents itself as a betrayal of core feminist values; the feminist, on the other hand, is presumed to have shed her femininity.
Tinayre’s Noël, for example, is puzzled by Josanne’s conventional femininity. “You are so womanly!” he exclaims, noting her love for jewelry and home decor. In response, Josanne chastises him for expecting to see “the new woman” (notably the French says “la nouvelle femme” and not “la femme nouvelle”) and then being surprised to discover “the eternal woman.”31 The lack of appropriate terminology, however, only seems to reflect the lack of consistent ideology, as women struggle to find a balance between equality and convention, new roles and old habits. Josanne is troubled by the modern professional women she meets, whom she describes as “the female elite, the ‘liberated ones,’ ‘the rebels’” (130)—(and not les femmes nouvelles). While in their places of work these women are fiercely competitive, they also inevitably succumb to “romantic servitude” in their personal lives. Indeed, despite all their gains in the public sphere, on the home front “the old order re-establishes itself,” complains Josanne, and these women are no different from their mothers (130). As much as she criticizes them, however, Josanne sees herself caught in the same contradiction, split between these two ways of being: “There were in her two women: the one from ‘on high’—proud, valiant, the rebel who wanted to be liberated and healed and to live in chaste solitude; and the other, inferior, subjugated, who still, in her blood and in her nerves, held on to the ancient poison, the need for tears and caresses, the morbid taste of the sufferings of love” (134).
Describing Josanne in this way, Tinayre pits independence explicitly against love, making the latter eventuality sound like a failure of will and strength. She also makes clear the feeling that the feminist movement left no room for love or for traditional gender roles. Mademoiselle Bon, Josanne’s friend and mentor at Le Monde Féminin, never married and frequently invites Josanne to meetings of the Fraternité française: “a small feminist association, socialist and revolutionary, where fat mustachioed women and scrawny enlightened ones heroically called themselves ‘citizens’” (132). Josanne is admonished by one of their members for her libertine ways. Tinayre’s caricature of these mannish women and their dedication to political causes echoes the disdain for organized feminism announced in Femina’s mission statement. Tinayre searches here to articulate a different kind of feminism where love and liberation are both possible. Immediately considered a roman à clef despite Tinayre’s denial that it corresponded to any particular individuals, La rebelle rings of another kind of truth: her portrayal of Josanne’s confusion offers a rare glimpse of the kinds of questions facing Belle Epoque readers of the women’s press who sought to identify their modern femininity in a less ideologically rigid positioning than the feminist movement seemed to offer.
In Compain’s novel, circulating stereotypes about modern women are also invoked as blinding. During the heat of his breakup with Laure, Henri’s rant echoes the worst of the Belle Epoque antifeminist backlash. He tells his wife: “the woman who wants to be superior ends up losing the qualities that appeal most to men; she thereby loses her power without acquiring that of the opposite sex” (108). Compain channels here an authentic and widely circulating Belle Epoque idea of the femme nouvelle. By the end of the novel, however, Henri is able to distinguish between widely circulating ideas and the needs of the woman he truly loves. In a pivotal scene, Henri stands back while colleagues discuss a feminist speech one of them has just attended. One argues that women should pursue careers instead of men (husbands or lovers), while the other worries about the consequences for men of such behavior, which make women “ugly, sick, unfit for love” (295). Henri retreats, suddenly aware of the progression of his thinking. His realization, which leads to the rehabilitation of his marriage, turns on the recognition that feminism must afford women equality without forcing them to choose between work and love. This realization addresses the gaps on both sides of the feminist debate; it is explicitly posed as a third, as yet unarticulated term, an alternative to both feminism and its critics.
Love and the Law
In both novels the Civil Code itself is posed as an explicit barrier to women’s happiness. At the same time, both Tinayre’s and Compain’s happy resolutions are not a result of legal change, which remains elusive, but rather follow from the process of questioning and discussion around proposed reforms. L’un vers l’autre directly explores Article 213 and the gap between protection and obedience, exactly the gap that threatens to subsume the promising marriage between Henri and Laure. Laure had nervously brushed away her suspicions regarding the demands of the Code on the eve of her wedding. But when she becomes pregnant, Henri takes the liberty of resigning her position as schoolteacher without consulting her; all of this comes explicitly back to Article 213, which Henri invokes to justify his act: “I promised you aid and protection, he had told her one day, and you promised me obedience.” Laure rejects this and leaves Henri for several months, a difficult period during which he combats anger and depression. Finally, after a degrading encounter with a prostitute, he comes to the realization that just as he was meant to act as a protector for his wife, invoking the Code once again, she served a parallel function for him: “as a protector against all that is base; a guide towards all that is noble and pure” (299). He also comes to realize that Laure needs his support at home in entering a brutal work force, and that their marriage can sustain and nurture her in both the public and private sphere. This symmetry is the platform for their resolution and approximates the definition of modern marriage as an “association” of equals articulated in the women’s press: “this association of two minds, two hearts, two wills, each depending on the other, each one bringing their own qualities, and completing each other.”32
Compain’s novel ends with a fantasy of legal change, as the newly reunited happy couple dream of a day when “they will make laws that will prevent the oppression of wives, and arbitration will come between separated spouses, as between hostile nations” (309). Such a fantasy is voiced more explicitly in Tinayre’s novel, in Noël’s rewriting of the Civil Code in his feminist treatise. As he imagines it, “The terms of the conjugal contract will be changed such that women will be able to live without men’s help, raising children on their own. They will no longer ask for protection and will not promise obedience. And the husband will have to treat his wife as one equal to another—even better, as companion to fellow companion, friend to friend” (15). The resonance of Noël’s writing with the descriptions of modern marriage found in Femina and La Vie Heureuse is not surprising, given that, in the novel, Josanne reviews his treatise for Le Monde Féminin, a publication described explicitly as a rival to these magazines. La rebelle, in turn, would be reviewed and discussed in both Femina and La Vie Heureuse, where Tinayre was both a frequent contributor and media darling, featured in the adoring photo spreads we have already examined.33
This reflexive relationship between novels and magazines suggests why specific legal changes—the eschewed cristallisation légale—as much as they were an object of discussion—were not necessarily seen as essential to the process of modernizing marriage for Belle Epoque women readers. More immediately relevant, even on the most practical level, seem to be the discussions regarding such change that took place in novels like La rebelle (and the magazine depicted within it) but also continued in the pages of Femina and La Vie Heureuse. In both Tinayre’s and Compain’s novels, actual change is linked to open dialogue and the kind of questioning the magazines promoted: Henri and Noël shift their behavior and attitudes partly in response to conversations that they overhear. Ultimately, any legal change was imagined by both authors in a distant fictional future, one in which the Code might finally reflect the facts on the ground. But progressive couples need not wait around for new legislation. After all, as Noël wrote in his treatise, “Already there are many couples where the husband treats his wife as his associate, his confidant, a collaborator on his work, a devoted partner for all of his ambitions” (15). And glorious evidence of such couples was nowhere more evident than in the pages of Femina and La Vie Heureuse, where, the editors insisted with tantalizing photographic evidence, despite “current customs,” there are already numerous exemplary “associations” that have realized a “new and enviable ideal.”34 This all helps to explain the deeper significance of a Henriot cartoon that appeared in Femina in 1904. “The Civil Code?” asks a well-dressed woman in her home. “Here’s my husband’s. I made a piano bench out of it . . . to sit on” (Fig. 5.2). Behind the playfulness of this comic lies a serious commentary expressed in part through the very situation of this joke in Femina, where so many discussions of marriage reform were taking place—suggesting, then, the extent to which the pages of the Civil Code were secondary to the very pages women held in their hands.
Figure 5.2 “The Civil Code? Here’s my husband’s: I made a piano bench out of it . . . to sit on.” Henriot cartoon in Femina (December 1, 1904).
With their grueling emotional work done, Noël and Henri find their way back to their partners in sentimental happy endings that clinch these stories as feminist fantasy. Henri returns joyously to Laure, announcing: “I have shed all my prideful judgments and the bad influences of heredity, don’t you see that I am a new man?” Laure too is renewed and announces her realization that solitary independence is not a path to happiness, as she believes that women’s “true place is in the home, but we can’t live there unless we are honored.” As in the magazines, any tension between equality and conventionally gendered roles is elided in this ideal. As the feminist fable comes to an end, husband and wife are reunited as a glimpse of nothing less than a new, happier world order: Laure and Henri are described as “a chosen couple, founders of a new race”; with marriage revitalized, “humanity will finally be unified and blissful” (309–10).
Though certainly more modest, Tinayre’s novel is also a realization of a feminist fantasy of male transformation. Tinayre’s protagonist is named Noël after all, the name of Tinayre’s oldest son and thus perhaps of her own hope for the future, and his evolution dramatizes the cavernous gap between lofty feminist ideals and real lived experience. At the end of the novel, it seems hopeful that the chastened feminist author would now be better able to realize, in his own marriage, the changes in the marriage contract that he argued for in his own book.
Yet Tinayre’s resolution is also decidedly more complex than Com-pain’s, echoing the conservatism of Compain’s text without the seamless application of gender advances in the public sphere to those in private realms. By the end of the novel, Josanne has come to terms with her opposing internal forces, embracing both equality and a highly gendered difference. Contemplating Mademoiselle Bon’s warning that “as in the husband, in the lover there is a master” (301), Josanne reframes her feelings for Noël:
“My master! My dear master! [. . .] It’s our shared desire that I be your respected equal before the world, before your mind and your friendship. But the rebel in me rebelled against an unjust society, not against nature; she didn’t rebel against the eternal law of love” (304).
Coming not long after these startling declarations, the ending to Tinayre’s La rebelle has struck some modern readers as serving to undermine the subversive promise of the novel’s title. As the novel closes, Noël murmurs tenderly “my dear wife,” and Tinayre writes: “The victory was in love, which had not weakened, had not lost hope—in a love strong like life itself” (372). Josanne’s embrace of Noël as her master, however, must be understood in its proper context: as part of an effort to carve out a feminist stance beyond that of the organized feminist movement and the caricature of the femme nouvelle. “And that does not stop me from being feminist, from claiming my rights to freedom, justice and happiness,” she concludes, affirming her feminism while preserving a sexual space where traditional power structures dominate (306).
Here we are, then, in the contradictory ideological terrain of Belle Epoque literary feminism—a place where a self-declared feminist can also declare her partner to be her master, if this also means the possibility of reconciling love, marriage, feminism and femininity without having to choose between them. Moreover, for Tinayre it meant, as the editors of Femina and La Vie Heureuse knew best of all, making feminism palatable to a wider audience—not just of women but of the men who loved them. In a review of the novel that appeared in L’Illustration in March 1906, journalist Emile Berringer thanked Tinayre for having written it, noting that had a man criticized feminist rebellions in favor of love, he would not have been trusted. “But how nice this proof becomes when it’s a woman who writes it, and what a comfort these confessions offer to our threatened egos!”35
Because of the way in which discussions of marriage in women’s magazines and fiction directly promoted new behavior and attitudes during this marriage crisis, they should be seen as more than simply a reflection of or window onto social norms. Instead, I would argue, the magazines and their related novels had the potential to act directly upon these norms, in no small part by challenging some of the master narratives of French literature.36 Particularly in the nineteenth century, fictional women who steered from bourgeois norms were systematically punished, from Flaubert’s Emma Bovary to Zola’s Nana.37 French women writers were just as cynical as their male counterparts in this regard, creating compelling feminist heroines who were nonetheless almost always denied satisfying conclusions. Tinayre’s and Compain’s romantic happy endings, on the other hand, stand in stark opposition to so many of their independent-minded female literary forbears: their heroines do not retreat to solitude, as does Madame de Lafayette’s Princesse de Clèves (1678); or willingly choose spinsterhood, like Françoise de Graffigny’s Zilia (1741); or die a noble but lonely death, like Germaine de Staël’s Corinne (1805); or retire to a convent, like Claire de Duras’s Ourika (1823); or jump off a cliff, like George Sand’s Indiana (1832). And, perhaps more to the point, they are able to reconcile intellect and ambition with love and marriage, unlike Camille Pert’s Thérèse in Leur égale, the 1899 novel in which the young heroine fantasizes about a women’s magazine (aptly titled La Femme Moderne) which would offer a forum for exploring such a possibility while remaining separate from the politics of the feminist movement.38 Less than a decade after Pert’s novel, this sector of the women’s press had become a formidable reality whose serious consequences for literary and cultural history should not be underestimated.
The Intellectual Housewife
If Tinayre’s and Compain’s romantic happy endings signaled the creation of a new narrative trajectory for the independent French woman, this path was intimately linked to the possibility of imagining a male partner who would embrace her struggle. Men were crucial to Belle Epoque literary feminism and to the reimagining of marriage in the women’s press, where they authored many of the articles describing the new conjugal ideal.39 Another way to understand the optimism of these writers, then, was through their faith in men who could be true partners and supporters.
This is, in fact, what separated Josanne from Pert’s journalist protagonist Thérèse, whose suitor proves not to be up to the challenge of feminist marriage. It also explains Marbo’s vehement response to Colette Yver’s novel, which put little pressure on its male characters to rise to the challenge of meeting the modern woman’s changing needs. Marbo’s forceful editorial, playfully entitled “The Intellectual Housewife,” or “La Femme Intellectuelle au Foyer” (a play on the French term for housewife “la femme au foyer”), reads both as a manifesto for Belle Epoque literary feminism and as a rearticulation of the doxa of La Vie Heureuse as it was expressed in the magazine’s original mission statement. While the novel was about the viability of a marriage between two doctors, the essay addressed the effect of the expansion of women’s roles upon the domestic sphere; it offered a justification for an intelligent, engaged wife, and a continuation of the work Femina described in its first issue as the “widening of the hearth (foyer).” Marbo argued that working outside the home only increased a woman’s contribution to domestic life:”A woman who acquires a higher sense of life and of the moral strength of true workers, infinitely increases her value as a true woman. Her comfort with methodical reflection and her depth of knowledge make her more suited for day-to-day duties.”40
Not every woman was cut out to be a housewife, Marbo argued, citing Emma Bovary as one example. Such women should have other options. Remarkably, in this context, the question of whether women should work was not the point of contention. At issue was whether a working woman could also be a good wife and homemaker—and there was much at stake for the femme moderne in finding an answer in the affirmative.
Marbo’s article chastised Yver for what was seen as a roman à thèse, from the beginning hurtling towards the foregone conclusion that “woman can’t balance a job in the sciences with her duties as a wife.”41 She contrasted Yver’s unhappy couple with the vision of conjugal bliss promoted by Femina and La Vie Heureuse: that of marital collaboration. According to Marbo, a shared profession like that of Thérèse and Fernand was a promise of marital harmony (witness the happy Curie family) leading to the highest pleasures, as it prolonged “work in love and love in work” and neither suffered from this proximity. This aspect of Marbo’s critique built off the already well-established ideal introduced in the magazines’ series on exemplary celebrity ménages. A Femina article on “Ménages de savants” from 1904 had led off with none other than the Curies as an example.42
Marbo was visibly frustrated both by Yver’s presentation of Thérèse as a miserable homemaker and by the suggestion that such a fault was somehow linked to her career. It doesn’t actually take that much time to keep an ordered household, she argued, and if one is not good at such things this is certainly not a result of intellectual exertion or ambition. Thérèse and Fernand were simply a poor match. Finally, echoing Noël Delysle’s treatise and Louise-Marie Compain’s euphoric ending, Marbo’s essay concludes with a fantasy of male symmetry in a not-so-distant future: “Soon the day will come,” she promised, “when almost all men will want to find in their companions a bright, enlightened heart.” Like Compain, Tinayre and Pert, Marbo dreamt of a new man just over the horizon who would find a thinking, accomplished woman a welcome, desirable partner.
In her sobering response, Yver spoke exactly to this point. She did not deny female intellectual prowess or that there were women who were not cut out to be housewives. But she insisted on a definition of marriage based on female sacrifice. Could one imagine a woman doctor baking delicious petits plats for her husband, like Yver’s humble Dina, who renounces her medical career to marry? “She would not have time,” stated Yver. “And that is the essence of the whole novel.”43 Sacrifice, she wrote, might be a threat to female pride; but it was the only path to marital happiness, the only way to keep husbands happy.
Men, it seems, were the last frontier of Belle Epoque literary feminism, and it therefore made sense that the opinion survey following Yver’s novel was directed at them. The ability to imagine men as part of the conversation was the difference between a happy ending and a tragic one, in feminist terms. The answers to La Vie Heureuse’s survey suggest that many men had no issue with working wives and mothers—at least according to the editors’ executive summary. In contrast to other contexts, where a balance of opinion was carefully displayed, when it came to the possibility of balancing domestic and professional life in order to define modern marriage, La Vie Heureuse refused ambiguity. With excerpts from a dozen exemplary responses to their survey, the magazine claimed that by and large, their readers had recognized that “even the most elite work can be compatible with always watchful tenderness and the most humble attention to housework.”44
Writing Beyond the Belle Epoque Ending
Yver’s novel was certainly not the only piece of fiction to inspire extensive commentary and debate; hers is but one example of the way in which Femina and La Vie Heureuse served as an extension of the discursive frame of Belle Epoque novels, a way for readers to “write beyond the ending,” to take up Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s now classic notion.45 French readers, after all, had a long tradition of editorializing fictional texts after their publication: witness the debates surrounding Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves, or the alternative versions of Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une péruvienne, in which the heroine ends up happily married.46 Femina’s own 1904 article “Les Associées” had been introduced as a corrective to a 1902 novel, L’Associée, which had launched many discussions on the topic of modern marriage. Acknowledging that novel’s “pessimistic” ending, the article went on to propose an examination of famous couples as important counterpoints to the novel’s message; these couples offered examples of what collaborative marriage could be, even if such a phenomenon was not yet widespread.47 Nor was marital equality the only subject to elicit debate, although marriage in general did seem to dominate. In response to Daniel Lesueur’s La force du passé, Femina surveyed Jeanne Marni, Anna de Noailles and Juliette Adam on the conjugal compatibility of those holding traditional Christian beliefs with freethinkers, before opening up a survey to readers at large on the ending of that novel.48 In their literary criticism, then, the magazines presented a view of fiction as open and subject to interpretation.
Reading Belle Epoque novels through this dynamic, responsive, discursive network thus expands our sense of the fiction of this period, and just where it begins and ends. Without knowledge of the discussion elicited by her novel, it would be easy to read the fact that Yver was awarded the Prix Vie Heureuse for this novel teleologically: as a rejection of women’s ambitious efforts at career by a prize committee made up of so many regular contributors and media darlings. But with this context in mind, one can read it instead as an endorsement of the discussions that Yver elicited through her compelling portrayal of the difficult choices facing women. Throughout the novel, Thérèse scrutinizes the women around her for answers: should she model herself on the high-achieving female mentor who never married but has an active romantic life or the friend from medical school who gave it all up to become a devoted wife and mother? These alternative female paths are so realistically and sensitively portrayed that the reader is kept guessing as to what Thérèse’s own decision will be until the final pages of the novel.
Analogously, I would suggest, the significance of both Tinayre’s and Compain’s novels to the very identity of the femme moderne can be understood precisely in the tension between the title of Tinayre’s novel and her happy ending—which is the same apparent contradiction between her original title, Le coeur de Josanne, and the one she ultimately chose, La rebelle. As Noël and Josanne make their way back to each other, he tenderly refers to her as “my dear rebel.” She objects, explaining that she rebelled against moral injustice but not against love, and not against him. And yet, this is the title Tinayre ultimately gave her novel. If Tinayre showed her readers that it was possible to be both a rebel and a wife, then, her novel also vividly betrayed the fact that there was no widely accepted term, no single category for this kind of feminist stance outside of the women’s press; new woman, eternal woman, liberated woman, rebel, citizen—her protagonist faced off against all of these labels, no single one fitting the bill.
Through Josanne’s conflict, Tinayre dramatized the challenges of translating the complex and perhaps even contradictory stance of the femme moderne to a more general audience. In the next chapters, I will consider the relationship of the women’s press and its particular feminism to a more general reading public, and examine more broadly the way the magazines and their innovations were received by “mainstream” readers. In other words, what happened to the impeccable femme moderne when she stepped out of her highly circumscribed editorial context with so many of her pressing questions so effectively raised yet not fully answered?
