THE MODERN HEROINE IN FRENCH FICTION I LOUISE MAUNSELL FIELD F there are any traditions which have taken firm root in the trammelled condition of French fiction and the intellectual brilliancy and extreme modernity of the French woman. For many years even before the opening of the Victorian periodEnglish authors have bewailed their own hampered state as compared with the liberty of their Gallic brethren. American writers joined in that plaint practically as soon as they began to exist at all, while memories of the many notable women whose personalities have affected the history, not merely of their own, but of other countries as well, mingle with recollections of George Sand and of newspaper articles regarding Mme. Curie to produce in the mind of the general reader a sort of take-it-forgranted impression that the Parisienne must be always well in the lead-must express the "dernier cri" in ideas as in gowns. Are not the very words feminine and feminist, as used in connection with what is known as the Woman Movement, of French origin? Surely, therefore, the twentieth century French novelist, inheritor from a long line of writers blessed with perfect liberty and devoted to the study of "la femme," must provide the finest and truest examples of the modern heroine to be found in all literature, far excelling, of course, any which the unfortunate, prudery-shackled English or American author has ever been able to create. Tradition and fact, however, are seldom if ever synonymous, and a search through a few dozen volumes of contemporary French fiction enforces the unexpected, perhaps reluctant conclusion that these recent novels are confined as to subject within surprisingly narrow limits, mastered and controlled by one practically all-pervading obsession-that of sex. It has often been said that Anglo-Saxon fiction was and is thrall to Edwin and Angelina: this was once in great part true, but those bonds are being rapidly broken-if indeed they have not already been thrown on the dust heap-and the released novelist is taking all humanity and its every problem for his province, finding his realm circumscribed only by his own abilities and not by any extraneous command of "Thus far and no farther." Latter-day attempts to impose the old standards meet not merely with failure but with ridicule. The freedom which Balzac employed and demonstrated so superbly is his to use-if he can. But the years which have seen the relegation of Edwin and Angelina to their proper and comparatively unimportant place have also witnessed the enthroning of Eugène and Delphine. If the progress of the former couple toward the point where, as the inimitable Mrs. Elton once expressed it, "Hymen's saffron robe might be put on " for their benefit, is no longer of supreme and unrivalled interest, the liaison of the latter occupies a position more prominent than ever, though it develops in much the same old way. Their appointments are now made over the telephone and they go to and fro in automobiles, that is all. With the alteration of a few phrases the average French novel of to-day might easily be accepted as having been written a quarter of a century and more ago; the change has been one of restriction, not expansion. Balzac swept over the whole possible territory, as it existed in his day; a dozen moderns combined are apparently unable to do the same for their own. Nevertheless, a new kind of heroine has been added to the three types which were formerly the only ones to be found, broadly speaking, in French fiction. These three were, first, the betrayed but devoted wife, modelled more or less after the pattern of the Baroness Hulot; second, the married woman faithful to a single lover; third, the intrigante, faithful to no one. The intruder who now disputes the leading rôle with them has certain qualities in common with her who is known to English and American stories as the modern heroine: she is clever, welleducated, and self-supporting; she is nearly always suffragist and feminist-yet because of that sex-obsession, the differences are greater than the resemblances. The one is a human being all the time and a female part of the time; the other is a female all of the time, but a female of a species not entirely human. When a French author introduces a woman who, thanks to her own exertions, is economically independent, it is usually with an air half of apology, half of bravado. Here, he tacitly declares, is a most extraordinary creature, a disagreeable phenomenon to be examined with attention and dismissed with rejoicing an excrescence upon the body politic, not a natural healthy growth. The three types of heroine who so long dominated and indeed still dominate the average French novel had one great interest and one only-"l'amour." They might and often did have a taste for art or music or poetry; such things were useful and pleasant adjuncts to the one great vocation, embellishing their lives in much the same way as various "elegant accomplishments" did those of Jane Austen's eminently proper, husbandawaiting young ladies. This new type, however, this strange and fearsome creature whose appearance in the world and rapid increase has compelled an attempt to reproduce her, even though it be inaccurately, in fiction, must necessarily have other, extrinsic interests. And it is amusing and rather pathetic to see in what a hesitating, handle-it-only-with-the-tongs manner these interests are usually treated: the sigh of relief with which the author returns to that side of his heroine's existence which is traditional and familiar to him, the side absorbed by "l'amour "—illicit, of course is perfectly audible. For the French writer is seldom happy when he strays far from that field of sexual relations in which he has for centuries been at liberty to roam as he would, analyzing its every weed and flower with a freedom to which his Anglo-Saxon confrère has only recently attained with some trouble and a good deal of noise, a freedom which has resulted in some remarkable triumphs of skill and accuracy. It is in this erstwhile freedom which has imperceptibly evolved into a tacit compulsion that a reason may be found for one of the essential differences which separate the modern heroine of French fiction from her English or American sister; while the former frequently adopts or strives to adopt the man's standard of morality—the French novel-hero's, be it understood-the latter endeavors to induce the man to accept hers, not without success. And this is a difference which affects the mental attitude, not only of the heroine herself, but of all those surrounding her. Never for a moment is the "femme émancipée " a real comrade to her mas culine co-workers; always she is either victor or vanquished in the unceasing battle of sex. "Man and woman's friendship," says Leonard Merrick in The Position of Peggy, "is the one true and safe foundation for their love ": it is upon this foundation that the one heroine often, though not always, builds; to the other it is nearly if not quite unknown. The clever, cynical. Anna Pékarskine, an excellent example of this type, chooses as her amant en titre" a stupid man, that she may not run any risk of imperilling her liberty by caring for him too much; an idea as representative in its way as the general expectation in the office where Marcelle Tinayre's "Rebelle" worked when Noël Delysle came so often to see her-expectation not of a wedding, though there was nothing to prevent that culmination, which in the end actually did take place, but of a liaison. And yet this very "Rebelle" is one of the few sympathetically portrayed upper-class working-women in French fiction. A journalist, with in the beginning a querulous invalid husband as well as a child to support, she is provided with the excuse for working which seems to be absolutely necessary from the French novelist's point of view; that a heroine should pursue any occupation apart from those which he or shel-loves to describe as the "charming ones of women "-shopping, dressing and visiting is apparently a very distasteful pill for him to swallow. "Thou shalt be idle" is the command he wishes her to obey first, last, and all the time. Earning money is not, he thinks, conducive to elegance; work for work's sake, the desire for some worth-while employment, is incomprehensible. When old she may be permitted to devote herself to "bonnes œuvres,' but only after the years or some exceptionally tragic loss have made "l'amour" forevermore impossible. Which for one of the thriftiest nation on earth, the nation of the "bonne bourgeoise," in all things her husband's partner, seems rather out of character. And then one suddenly finds oneself remembering the oftrepeated declarations of Frenchmen that the novels of their nation do not represent it truly, and beginning to ask a little shyly whether French fiction is not in fact as convention-ridden as Anglo-Saxon ever was, though by conventions of a very dif ferent kind. That liberty to describe in detail what the English or American writer was obliged entirely to avoid or indicate only by a series of asterisks, to give a minute and particularized account of certain emotional phases which to them were taboo, that liberty once so envied has developed into a coercion. An over-stimulated interest in one set of problems has crystallized fiction into the eternal triangle and its allied shapes, often beautifully clear, exquisite in color and perfect in form, but somewhat monotonous. Of course this crystallization is not and never has been complete; every now and then a writer frees himself, temporarily at least, from the prevailing sex-obsession and produces such a book as, for instance, L'Incendie; rules without exceptions are rare. Generally speaking, however, French fiction has concentrated upon the one subject until such concentration has become a convention as powerful in its way as that now obsolete one which obliged Thackeray to preface Pendennis with an apology which was also a protest. But now comes the twentieth century woman to shatter this convention as she has already shattered so many, insisting upon her right to occupy herself, if she so pleases, with things other than "l'amour et la famille," demanding her place in fiction as in real life. Into the Anglo-Saxon novel she has come gracefully, as a natural development, and with her has at last arrived the beneficent, long-coveted liberty to discuss and analyze subjects once forbidden, which though at first productive of a good deal of wordy warfare is now fast becoming a matter of course. Will her advent signalize the emancipation of the French novel too from its conventions, add freshness, variety, a broader human as distinct from a sexual interest, to its already attained clarity of style and admirable form? Certainly she promises to be even more of an iconoclast in French than she has been in English and American novels, this forceful, very much alive and impossible to ignore "Modern Heroine." |