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Les Œuvres Bâtardes: Gender, Sexuality, and Scandal in Nineteenth-Century French Women’s Writing Across Genres

Abstract

Les Œuvres Bâtardes: Gender, Sexuality, and Scandal in Nineteenth-Century French Women’s Writing offers an interdisciplinary consideration of three women of letters in nineteenth-century France. This study maps the novels of George Sand, the journalistic writing of Delphine de Girardin, and the poetry of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore in an exploration of the ways in which three very different authors push thematic and formal boundaries in their efforts to explore the nexus of gender and sexuality by engaging with or challenging their perceived social roles. Sand, Girardin, and Desbordes-Valmore employ varied techniques to negotiate legitimacy and inclusion in an environment that is openly hostile to women writers. Beginning with an investigation into the controversy surrounding George Sand’s ill-received third novel Lélia, my analysis illustrates how questions of literary form, authorial gender, and women’s sexuality are closely intertwined in the nineteenth-century French cultural landscape. I then examine Delphine de Girardin’s journalistic feuilleton, the Courrier de Paris, demonstrating how Girardin’s genre crossing and gender bending encourage us to question the relationship between gender and conceptions of modernity. Finally, turning to the works of the sole woman poète maudit, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, I interrogate the relationship between gender and poetry in the nineteenth century, revealing how the poet’s unique manner of performing femininity complicate her position in the French literary canon.

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