Table Of ContentRebelles et criminelles chez
les écrivaines d’expression française
FAUX TITRE
386
Etudes de langue et littérature françaises
publiées sous la direction de
Keith Busby, †M.J. Freeman,
Sjef Houppermans et Paul Pelckmans
Rebelles et criminelles chez
les écrivaines d’expression française
Sous la direction de
Frédérique Chevillot et Colette Trout
AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2013
Illustration couverture : Franz von Stuck, Judith et Holopherne, 1926,
Staatliches Museum Schwerin, Allemagne.
Photographie : © Erich Lessing/Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archive,
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ISBN: 978-90-420-3654-3
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Table des matières
Preface 7
Paula Ruth Gilbert
Introduction 11
Frédérique Chevillot et Colette Trout
I. La lente rébellion des femmes à travers les siècles
Crime is in the Eye of the Beholder: Rebellion and Decriminal-
ization in Marguerite Queen de Navarre’s Heptaméron 29
Grace Morgan Armstrong
Female Playwrights and their filles rebelles in 17th-Century France 45
Theresa Varney Kennedy
« Elénore n’est-elle pas un monstre qu’il faudrait étouffer ? »
ou une impossible criminelle au XVIIIe siècle 63
Edwige Besle-Amaducci
Pérégrinations d’une paria de Flora Tristan : novelogue
d’une rebelle visionnaire et militante 75
S. Pascale Vergereau-Dewey
Ensorceleuse, empoisonneuse et graphomane : Marcelle 95
Tinayre lisant Marie Cappelle Lafarge
Elisabeth-Christine Muelsch
II. La résistance des femmes aux violences
coloniales et postcoloniales
Rebelles, prostituées et meurtrières dans les romans
d’Ananda Devi 115
Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy
Le Double meurtrier chez Sabrina Kherbiche 129
Joëlle Vitiello
Rebel Without a Cause? Female Brutality and Criminality in
Leïla Marouane’s Le Châtiment des hypocrites 147
Siobhan McIlvanney
Ventriloquie et esclavage : du mutisme à la violence chez
Marie-Célie Agnant et Fabienne Kanor 165
Eloise A. Brière
Crime and Punishment: Calixthe Beyala’s Manic Writing of
Femme nue, femme noire 183
Adrienne Angelo
III. Du récit du meurtre à l’écriture qui tue…
Female Violence as Social Power: Joyce Mansour’s
Surrealist Anti-Muse 201
Marylaura Papalas
Elisabeth : la Belle et la Bête de Kamouraska 217
Candice Nicolas
Abjection, altérité, violence : les méchantes filles de
Catherine Klein 229
France Grenaudier-Klijn
«Amo ergo neco » : les tueuses nothombiennes 245
Frédérique Chevillot
Une nécessaire rébellion féministe : de la violence au
féminin chez Virginie Despentes 265
Michèle A. Schaal
Preface
Paula Ruth Gilbert
GEORGEMASONUNIVERSITY
Researching and writing for many years on violent (and villainous,
rebellious, criminal, crudely sexual, pornographic, and murderous)
women – in both “reality” and artistic representation – for articles and
for my monograph, Violence and the Female Imagination: Quebec’s
Women Writers Re-frame Gender in North American Cultures,1 as
well as for my very popular advanced undergraduate course, “Women
Who Kill,” I was consistently both amused and disturbed by the reac-
tions of others when they first heard about my area of research. Many
people – and especially men – would “oh-so-cleverly” say something
like: “Oh, I had better be careful and not get on your bad side.” Others
would remark with the age-old “idée reçue”: “Violent women? But
there aren’t any, since women are maternal, gentle, and protective.” It
became tiresome after a short while, so I simply began to generalize
and said that I worked on issues of violence, gender, and narrative –
which, clearly, I do. Of course some people did appreciate the im-
portance of my area of research, and in fact a well-known “écrivaine
québécoise” insisted that I was “courageuse” to undertake this area of
critical inquiry. But even to have to say that this orientation of one’s
scholarly work is courageous underscores the persistent and deep-
seated beliefs on the part of most societies about gendered binaries
and their corresponding simplistic views of women. Women writers
know this and have long (and increasingly) showed us the way to de-
construct stereotypes, to explore and create the “realities” of women’s
lives, and to prove, in some sense, that women are as nuanced as men,
that all genders are multi-layered, and that all people are capable of
showing both compassion and aggression. These are important areas
of inquiry, and collections such as Rebelles et criminelles are crucial
in paving the way toward a deeper understanding of the historical and
1 Gilbert, Paula Ruth, Violence and the Female Imagination: Quebec’s Women
Writers Re-frame Gender in North American Cultures, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
U.P., 2006.
8 PAULARUTHGILBERT
contemporary world around us, of the people who inhabit those
worlds, and particularly of the power of narrative to explain and offer
us the opportunity to review, reread, rethink, and revision our beliefs
and our ability to remake the world.
Deirdre Lashgari, in Violence, Silence, and Anger: Women’s Writ-
ing as Transgression,2 underscores several discourses crucial to the
understanding of women’s literary responses to violence: decentering;
refusing to conserve systems of binary opposition; celebrating a mul-
tiplicity of discourses and voices; exposing contradictions and dis-
crepancies; and crossing over, transgressing, and questioning the un-
known ground of the Other and the boundaries of the familiar. As I
have stated in my own book, however, are we “walking a fine line
between seeing the representation of these women as infantilized,
incapable of ‘real’ violent feelings and actions and the representation
of the ‘classic’ evil sister and stepmother, whore, Eve-like temptress,
serpent, nymph/vampire, and devouring mother? Are these violent
literary women ‘really’ violent or just a postmodern version of the
same old female in the male eye?” (4).
Although, as this volume clearly tells us, female protagonists have
been rebelling and have committed violent crimes for centuries and
throughout the world, violent and murdering women have increasingly
become “in,” with a spate of studies as of the late 20th century on
“tough girls,” “bad girls,” “wicked women,” “Sapphic slashers,” “evil
sisters,” “killer moms,” and “mean girls.” These females have even
been promoted as “new postfeminist icons,” ironically placing them in
a fight to win access to the (formerly all male) canon. But until recent-
ly, even real cases of violent women who murder, commit infanticide,
and become serial killers have underscored how simplistic the judg-
ments and public reactions have been: there have not even been devel-
oped any psychological profiles of female serial killers and of female
suicide bombers. Women just don’t commit acts like these unless they
are mad or bad, say the experts. Stereotypes about women (and about
men) that play into a binary view of both sex and gender and that do
not consider the causes, motives, contexts, and social and cultural
frameworks that better explain such female violence are, sadly, still
alive and widespread. In some sense, it has taken the work of those
2 Lashgari, Deirdre, Violence, Silence, and Anger: Women’s Writing as Transgres-
sion, Charlottesville: U.P. of Virginia, 1995.
PREFACE 9
“courageous” academics who have begun to study the complexities of
women, the complexities of their actions, and the complexities of the
reactions to their rebellions and crimes to open up that dominant struc-
ture and expose the “reality” of some women’s lives – ironically, often
through representation in literature, film, television, theatre, and the
visual and performing arts. The importance of such recent and serious
analyses cannot be understated.
This is why this collection of fine essays is so crucial to a broad
dialogue on women, violence, gender, and here, representations of
such individuals and their aggressive acts. It complements (and yet
stands out in its historical and geographical breadth) the research and
publications of scholars such as, Katherine Anne Ackley, Helen Birch,
Judith Butler, Anne Campbell, Phyllis Chesler, Lisa Duggan, Laurie
Girshik, Karen Halttunen, Judith Halberstam, Sherrie Inness, Ann
Jones3 – and, humbly, my own – among others. It extends the scope of
inquiry found in the recent collection, Representations of Murderous
Women in Literature, Theatre, Film and Television: Examining the
Patriarchal Presuppositions Behind the Treatment of Murderesses in
Fiction and Reality, edited by Juli Parker.4
3 Ackley, Katherine Anne, ed. Women and Violence in Literature: An Essay
Collection,New York: Garland, 1990; Birch, Helen, “Introduction,” Moving Targets:
Women, Murder and Representation, ed. Helen Birch, Berkeley: U. of California P.,
1994, 1-6; Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,”
New York: Routledge, 1993; Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New
York: Routledge, 1997; “The Force of Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and
Discursive Excess,” Differences 2.2 (1990): 105-21; Gender Trouble: Feminism and
the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1999; Campbell, Anne, The Girls in
the Gang, Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991; Men, Women, and Agression, New
York: Basic Books, 1993; Chesler, Phyllis, Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman, New
York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2001; Duggan, Lisa, Sapphic Slashers:
Sex, Violence, and American Modernity, Durham: Duke U.P., 2000; Girshick, Lori B.,
Woman-To-Woman Sexual Violence: Does She Call It Rape? Boston: Northeastern
U.P., 2002; Halttunen, Karen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic
Imagination, Cambridge: Harvard U.P., 1998; Halberstam, Judith, Skin Shows: Gothic
Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Durham: Duke U.P., 1995; Inness, Sherrie
A., Tough Girls: Women Warriors and Wonder Women in Popular Culture,
Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania P., 1999; Jones, Ann, Women Who Kill, New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980.
4 Parker, Juli, Representations of Murderous Women in Literature, Theatre, Film and
Television: Examining the Patriarchal Presuppositions Behind the Treatment of
Murderesses in Fiction and Reality, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon P., 2010.
