Women! Women! Women!
2/11/25 14:52![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sisterdiviniumI know I only keep recommending things in French when I pop around here with a link but what can I do when the subjects are so interesting and the discussions so good? So here, have one more, from the (Re)lire les classiques féministes series by France Culture:
Jennifer Tamas : "'Clélie' de Madeleine de Scudéry, c'est le refus d'être violée".
It's an interesting coincidence to have come across this right when stumbling upon some other interesting and somewhat related links. Madeleine de Scudéry is not exactly still read today, as the episode brings up, and it's probably not just because of how intimidating it can be to face a titan (Artamène might not be the subject of the podcast but it alone is made up of about 2 million words; Clélie, histoire romaine was published in ten volumes). Figurez-vous, here's a little wealth of 19th-century female novelists who were widely read back then, including Mary Brunton, "an almost exact contemporary of Jane Austen", and who are now largely neglected. Then, of course, there are authors who were unknown to me until now but which this handy thread about Naomi Mitchison posted by the Association for Scottish Literature, for example, helped shine a light on.
Now I am of course curious and shall proceed to cursing my tired eyes and my inability to read books on screens...
But to get back to the podcast, it was rather inspiring to know that Scudéry wrote a female character arguing against marriage. She pits the potential trouble it could bring against the merits of remaining free. Why is this remarkable? Because Clélie started to be published in 1654. Let that sink in. Being unmarried herself, of course some critics would lambast her by calling her a vieille fille, lol. Woman must not question the status quo, after all, eh?
And speaking of status quo, Jennifer Tamas' own ending notes on authors she doesn't like despite being a literature scholar were intriguing. Her dislike for L.F. Céline had me laughing in how her inability to be wowed by his style sets her apart from many of her peers. I also don't blame her for disliking Günter Grass based on a certain scene of sexual violence he wrote (to say nothing of underlying ideological elements...); I, for one, know I was forever repulsed by Ken Follett after The Pillars of the Earth for something similar in how it was minutely described -- you'd think the author enjoyed it and maybe he did.
Tamas jokes about wanting to vomit at the misogyny and, yeah, I sympathise... But, hey, thankfully there are tons of other books out there to go on exploring :)
Jennifer Tamas : "'Clélie' de Madeleine de Scudéry, c'est le refus d'être violée".
It's an interesting coincidence to have come across this right when stumbling upon some other interesting and somewhat related links. Madeleine de Scudéry is not exactly still read today, as the episode brings up, and it's probably not just because of how intimidating it can be to face a titan (Artamène might not be the subject of the podcast but it alone is made up of about 2 million words; Clélie, histoire romaine was published in ten volumes). Figurez-vous, here's a little wealth of 19th-century female novelists who were widely read back then, including Mary Brunton, "an almost exact contemporary of Jane Austen", and who are now largely neglected. Then, of course, there are authors who were unknown to me until now but which this handy thread about Naomi Mitchison posted by the Association for Scottish Literature, for example, helped shine a light on.
Now I am of course curious and shall proceed to cursing my tired eyes and my inability to read books on screens...
But to get back to the podcast, it was rather inspiring to know that Scudéry wrote a female character arguing against marriage. She pits the potential trouble it could bring against the merits of remaining free. Why is this remarkable? Because Clélie started to be published in 1654. Let that sink in. Being unmarried herself, of course some critics would lambast her by calling her a vieille fille, lol. Woman must not question the status quo, after all, eh?
And speaking of status quo, Jennifer Tamas' own ending notes on authors she doesn't like despite being a literature scholar were intriguing. Her dislike for L.F. Céline had me laughing in how her inability to be wowed by his style sets her apart from many of her peers. I also don't blame her for disliking Günter Grass based on a certain scene of sexual violence he wrote (to say nothing of underlying ideological elements...); I, for one, know I was forever repulsed by Ken Follett after The Pillars of the Earth for something similar in how it was minutely described -- you'd think the author enjoyed it and maybe he did.
Tamas jokes about wanting to vomit at the misogyny and, yeah, I sympathise... But, hey, thankfully there are tons of other books out there to go on exploring :)
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