Voicing Voluntary Childlessness

stud ies in contemporar y women’s writing

‘At times defiant or doubtful, humorous or melancholic, the texts presented in this book provide us with a new paradigm for the study of the volatile yet rarely explored topic of childlessness.’ – Professor Mireille Rosello, University of Amsterdam

The decision to reject motherhood is the subject of several key works of literature in French since the new millennium. This book looks at first-person accounts of voluntary childlessness by women writing in French. The book explores how women narrate their decision not to mother, the issues that they face in doing so and the narrative techniques that they employ to justify their stories. It asks how these authors challenge stereotypes of the childless woman by claiming their own identity in narrative, publicly proclaiming their right to choose and writing a femininity that is not connected to motherhood. Using feminist, sociological and psychoanalytic theories to interrogate nonmothering, this work is the first book-length study of narratives that counter this long-standing taboo. It brings together authors who stake out a new terrain, creating a textual space in which to take ownership of their childlessness and call for new understandings of female identity beyond maternity. Natalie Edwards is Senior Lecturer in French Studies and a member of the Fay Gale Centre for Research on Gender at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She holds a PhD from Northwestern University and specializes in contemporary French and Francophone literature, autobiography, gender studies and visual culture. She is the author of Shifting Subjects: Plural Subjectivity in Contemporary Francophone Women’s Autobiography (2011) and co-editor most recently of Framing French Culture: Photography and the Visual Arts (2015).

Voicing Voluntary Childlessness

‘Without a doubt, Natalie Edwards’ study constitutes an important contribution to the field of literary motherhood studies by drawing our attention to a voice that is too often overlooked.’ – Dr Julie Rodgers, Maynooth University

Natalie Edwards

‘Voicing Voluntary Childlessness is a compelling, beautifully written and timely study of what it means to reject motherhood. Through careful analysis of the form and content of recent French-language literary works, Edwards shows how long-standing expectations of women, as well as the assumptions underlying them, are being challenged.’ – Professor Karin Schwerdtner, University of Western Ontario

Natalie Edwards

Voicing Voluntary Childlessness Narratives of Non-Mothering in French

ISBN 978-3-0343-1809-9

www.peterlang.com

PETER LANG

stud ies in contemporar y women’s writing

‘At times defiant or doubtful, humorous or melancholic, the texts presented in this book provide us with a new paradigm for the study of the volatile yet rarely explored topic of childlessness.’ – Professor Mireille Rosello, University of Amsterdam

The decision to reject motherhood is the subject of several key works of literature in French since the new millennium. This book looks at first-person accounts of voluntary childlessness by women writing in French. The book explores how women narrate their decision not to mother, the issues that they face in doing so and the narrative techniques that they employ to justify their stories. It asks how these authors challenge stereotypes of the childless woman by claiming their own identity in narrative, publicly proclaiming their right to choose and writing a femininity that is not connected to motherhood. Using feminist, sociological and psychoanalytic theories to interrogate nonmothering, this work is the first book-length study of narratives that counter this long-standing taboo. It brings together authors who stake out a new terrain, creating a textual space in which to take ownership of their childlessness and call for new understandings of female identity beyond maternity. Natalie Edwards is Senior Lecturer in French Studies and a member of the Fay Gale Centre for Research on Gender at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She holds a PhD from Northwestern University and specializes in contemporary French and Francophone literature, autobiography, gender studies and visual culture. She is the author of Shifting Subjects: Plural Subjectivity in Contemporary Francophone Women’s Autobiography (2011) and co-editor most recently of Framing French Culture: Photography and the Visual Arts (2015).

www.peterlang.com


‘Without a doubt, Natalie Edwards’ study constitutes an important contribution to the field of literary motherhood studies by drawing our attention to a voice that is too often overlooked.’ – Dr Julie Rodgers, Maynooth University

Natalie Edwards

‘Voicing Voluntary Childlessness is a compelling, beautifully written and timely study of what it means to reject motherhood. Through careful analysis of the form and content of recent French-language literary works, Edwards shows how long-standing expectations of women, as well as the assumptions underlying them, are being challenged.’ – Professor Karin Schwerdtner, University of Western Ontario

Natalie Edwards

Voicing Voluntary Childlessness Narratives of Non-Mothering in French

PETER LANG


Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing Series Editor gill rye Director, Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing, Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London

Volume 3

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

Voicing Voluntary Childlessness Narratives of Non-Mothering in French Natalie Edwards

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Natalie, Edwards, 1977- author. Title: Voicing voluntary childlessness : narratives of non-mothering in French / Edwards Natalie. Description: 1 Edition. | New York : Peter Lang, 2016. | Series: Studies in contemporary women’s writing ; Volume 3 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015034792 | ISBN 9783034318099 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Childlessness--France. | Women--Psychology. Classification: LCC HQ755.8 .N3778 2016 | DDC 306.87--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015034792 Cover picture: ‘Effe’ © Eddi Milkovitsch. ISSN 2235-4123 ISBN 978-3-0343-1809-9 (print) ISBN 978-3-0353-0795-5 (eBook) © Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2016 Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland [email protected], www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed.

Contents

Acknowledgementsvii Introduction1 Part I Perspectives on Voluntary Childlessness

17

Chapter 1

Theorising Voluntary Childlessness

19

Chapter 2

Psychoanalysing Voluntary Childlessness

47

Part II Expressions of Voluntary Childlessness

73

Chapter 3

Linda Lê’s Epistolary Innovation: À l’enfant que je n’aurai pas

75

Chapter 4

Jane Sautière’s Autofictional Explorations: Nullipare

103

Chapter 5

The Struggle of Personal Criticism: Lucie Joubert’s L’Envers du landau

129

Chapter 6

The Ageing Voluntarily Childless Woman: Madeleine Chapsal’s La Femme sans

157

Conclusion187 Bibliography193 Index207

Acknowledgements

This book is the result of a ten-year labour and many individuals have assisted in its maturation. I hope that they have all felt my gratitude. This book was conceived in Park Slope, Brooklyn, my home for seven years and the fabled birthplace of the babyccino and the yummy mummy. I am grateful to the neighbourhood and its inhabitants for inspiration, encouragement and an inexhaustible supply of material. I should like to thank my closest colleagues while in New York, Eloïse Brezault and Anne Schotter, for their camaraderie and support, both as I began the project and as I transitioned from one hemisphere to another. The writing of this book began in earnest as I moved to Australia and found a warm welcome in my new home. Jean Fornasiero and John WestSooby made an enormous difference in my life by employing me at the University of Adelaide. Their generous, thoughtful mentoring has been a constant source of support in the years since. Peter Poiana has been a model of kindness since my first day on campus and Ben McCann’s infectious enthusiasm and friendship always lift my spirits. Amy Hubbell’s companionship has been very precious to me, both in the US and in our new home. I thank the University of Adelaide for the research leave in which this book was completed and the Faculty of Arts for the research grants that enabled the preliminary field trips. Also on an Australian theme, I thank Liverpool University Press for granting me permission to include sections of ‘Deliberately Barren: The Rejection of Motherhood in Contemporary French Women’s Writing’, which appeared in 52.1 (2014) of the Australian Journal of French Studies. Much of this book was written in London, while I was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, part of the School of Advanced Study. I gratefully acknowledge the resources made available to me during my stay. I am indebted to Gill Rye at the IMLR’s Centre for Contemporary Women’s Writing for her support and for her model of

viii Acknowledgements

commitment to our field of research. The seminar that she organised, in addition to the talks organised for me by the IMLR, were invaluable to me as I was nearing the end of this project. I should like to thank particularly Adalgisa Giorgio, who has influenced my ideas since I was eighteen years old. King Cornelius and Princess Angela of the Elephant and Castle were a fitting feline complement to my writing retreat. I am most grateful to Laurel Plapp and the editorial team at Peter Lang for assistance throughout the publication process. Finally, I thank my parents Dawn and John, brothers Neil and Robert and father-in-law Ron Hogarth for their support of my restlessness and ensuing absences. Most of all, I thank my similarly nomadic travelling companion, the other half of this Francophile academic couple. Thank you, Chris.

Introduction

‘Deliberately barren’ was how Australian Senator Bill Heffernan chose to label the Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard in 2007.1 Heffernan justified his description of the woman who subsequently became Australia’s first female Prime Minister by stating, ‘I won’t walk away from that […] If you’re a leader, you’ve got to understand your community. One of the great understandings in a community is family, and the relationship between mums, dads and a bucket of nappies’.2 Heffernan was eventually forced to apologise by the Prime Minister John Howard, whose initial reaction was that ‘people say funny things all the time’.3 Yet, Heffernan suffered no further consequences for what many will view as an appalling intrusion into a woman’s private life.4 After all, the adjective ‘barren’ has been used over centuries to refer to sterile or castrated animals, to trees or plants without seed, to land producing no vegetation or to mentally or intellectually deficient individuals.5 It is highly offensive either to use such derogatory language to describe a woman in public office, or to claim the right to comment upon any woman’s fertility. Denigrating a woman on the basis of her choices over her own reproduction is troubling in the twenty-

1 2 3 4

5

‘Heffernan apologises over Gillard remark’, The Age (Melbourne), 2 May 2007, accessed 27 February 2015. ‘Heffernan apologises over Gillard remark’. ‘Heffernan apologises over Gillard remark’. Unfortunately, such personal attacks on Gillard continued unabated, which led her to accuse the then opposition leader Tony Abbott of ‘misogyny’ in a parliamentary speech made 9 October 2012. As a small but significant mark of progress, the ensuing debate led Australia’s most prominent reference guide, the Macquarie Dictionary, to change its definition of this word. ‘barren, adj. and n.’, OED Online, accessed 17 May 2015.

2 Introduction

first century, several decades after the legalisation of contraception and abortion awarded these choices in law in most Western countries. What is more troubling is that the man who made this comment – and the system that condoned it – finds that it is acceptable to criticise a woman publicly for choosing not to reproduce, which is revelatory of persistent attitudes towards women and maternity. This book argues that women are increasingly proving that it is time to change such attitudes and the assumptions about female identity that underpin them. The rejection of motherhood has become the subject of several works of literature since the new millennium. Voicing Voluntary Childlessness engages with this important change by gathering together first-person accounts of childlessness published in French in the twentyfirst century. It explores how women narrate their decision not to mother, the issues that they face in doing so and the narrative techniques that they employ to justify their stories. It asks how these texts challenge stereotypes of the childless woman by claiming their own identity in narrative, by publicly proclaiming their right to choose and by writing a femininity that is not connected to motherhood. It considers how women are stigmatised, denigrated or discriminated against as a result of their decision and how they voice their resistance to such treatment. It therefore explores what it means to reject motherhood in contemporary France through the voices of women themselves. The specifically French focus emanates from the fact that the recent appearance of literary expressions of childlessness constitutes a particularly innovative move. Voicing one’s decision not to mother is considered to be taboo in many cultural contexts but France represents a very specific case. As discussed below, fertility rates in France have consistently been the highest in Europe and the country’s strong Catholic heritage has laid the foundations of cultural values towards mothering and childrearing. The decision to remain childless has, therefore, been less common among French women than among many of their European counterparts. The choice to portray this decision in literary works thus signals an important break with traditional cultural and literary mores. Women’s writing in French has long been celebrated for its iconoclastic rejection of social and literary traditions and its insistence on representing the material reality

Introduction

3

of women’s lived experience. The appearance of literary representation of childlessness is an important strand of this burgeoning field and the voices of those who experiment with it offer a variety of new insights into women’s non-normative identities, life choices and experiences. In this way, Voicing Voluntary Childlessness engages in a wider phenomenon in recent women’s writing. In the 1990s, a new wave of women writers achieved prominence for their provocative, unsettling and often iconoclastic writing.6 These include authors such as Christine Angot, Paule Constant, Marie Darrieussecq, Virginie Despentes, Linda Lê, Catherine Millet, Marie Nimier and Marie Redonnet. Issues that these writers broach include, for example, female sexuality, the body, rape, pornography, abortion, eating disorders and death. Alongside such themes, a radical questioning of motherhood is notably present within their work. As Gill Rye demonstrates in her magisterial work Narratives of Mothering: Women’s Writing in Contemporary France, which echoes throughout Voicing Voluntary Childlessness, many of these authors challenge, critique or reinvent discourses of motherhood.7 These authors thus point to the inadequacies, lacunae or inappropriateness of current theories and practices of motherhood and question these in their narratives. Building on and yet developing in different directions from this, the writers in Voicing Voluntary Childlessness issue a further set of challenges to prevailing ideas. By narrating the choice not to mother, they stake out a new terrain, creating a new textual space in which to take ownership of their childlessness and to call for new approaches to female identity beyond maternity.

6

7

For more discussion on this new generation of writers, see, for example, Gill Rye and Michael Worton, eds, Women’s Writing in Contemporary France: New Writers, New Literatures in the 1990s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); Shirley Jordan, Contemporary French Women’s Writing: Women’s Visions, Women’s Voices, Women’s Lives (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004); or Nathalie Morello and Catherine Rodgers, eds, Nouvelles écrivaines: nouvelles voix? (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002). Gill Rye, Narratives of Mothering: Women’s Writing in Contemporary France (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2009).

4 Introduction

Such a new approach is becoming more necessary, it appears, since voluntary childlessness is becoming an increasingly popular choice, in France as in many Western countries. Statistics on the proportion of voluntarily childless women are difficult to obtain, since information such as census data and population surveys do not distinguish between voluntary and involuntary childlessness. Nevertheless, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s study in 2007 found that 20.6 per cent of women in France aged 40 to 44 were childless, higher than in countries such as Australia (13 per cent) and Spain (18.1 per cent), but lower than in the United Kingdom (25 per cent) and Germany (33.6 per cent).8 While infertility rates may also be increasing, it is clear that voluntary childlessness is on the rise, as many women are planning a life without motherhood. Although still relatively unusual, the choice to remain childless is therefore common to an increasing section of the population. This is borne out by evidence in popular culture. Discussion of voluntary childlessness is to be found in sources such as popular media, social networks, popular psychology texts and journalism. Much of this movement began in the US, where ideas such as a ‘childfree’ lifestyle have been an important subculture since the late 1980s. Social networking groups now exist, such as ‘No Kidding!’, which was founded in Vancouver in 1984 by a childless man and which has spread to many other countries.9 Popular works such as Laura Stott’s Two is Enough: A Couple’s Guide to Living Childless by Choice, Nicki Defago’s Childfree and Loving It! and Eleanore Well’s The Spinsterlicious Life: Twenty Life Lessons for Living Happily Single and Child-free all point to the increasingly popular choice to remain childless.10 Meghan Daum’s more serious exploration of childlessness by writers and academics, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers 8 ‘Childlessness’, OECD Family database, 1 July 2010, accessed 10 March 2015. 9 For more information on this association and its ‘Founding Non-Father Emeritus’, see accessed 12 April 2015. 10 Laura Stott, Two is Enough: A Couple’s Guide to Living Childless by Choice (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2009). Nicki Defago, Childfree and Loving It! (Cleveland, Ohio: Matrix Digital Publishing, 2007). Eleanore Well, The Spinsterlicious Life: Twenty Life Lessons

Introduction

5

on the Decision Not to Have Kids, has justifiably caught the attention of a variety of news sources, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde and The Huffington Post.11 Further examples abound in journalism. Time Magazine famously ran an issue devoted to voluntary childlessness in August 2013, showing on its front cover a young couple hedonistically relaxing on a beach with the headline, ‘The Childfree Life: When Having it All Means Not Having Children’.12 In the French context, such exploration is more recent yet nonetheless present. Works such as Corinne Maier’s No Kid: Quarante raisons de ne pas avoir d’enfant [No Kid: Forty Reasons Not to Have Children], Emilie Devienne’s Être femme sans être mère: le choix de ne pas avoir d’enfant [Being a Woman Without Being a Mother: The Choice Not to Have Children] and the highly comedic graphic text by Véronique Cazot and Madeleine Martin Et toi, quand est-ce que tu t’y mets? Celle qui ne voulait pas d’enfant [And You, When Will You Get Around to It? The Woman Who Did Not Want Children] interrogate childlessness in popular, accessible form.13 Colombe Schneck’s 2014 documentary ‘Femmes sans enfants, femmes suspectes’ [Women without Children: Suspicious Women] in 2014 for the French television channel Arte aims to confront ‘one of the last taboos’.14 In this work, Schneck amasses testimonies by voluntarily childless French women in order to show that, ‘society judges these childless women severely,

11 12 13

14

for Living Happily Single and Child-free (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012). Meghan Daum, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids (New York: Picador, 2015). Lauren Sandler, ‘The Childfree Life: When Having it All Means Not Having Children’, Time Magazine, 12 August 2013. Corinne Maier, No Kid: Quarante raisons pour ne pas avoir d’enfant (Paris: Michelon, 2007). Emilie Devienne, Être femme sans être mère: le choix de ne pas avoir d’enfant (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2007). Véronique Cazot and Madeleine Martin, Et toi, quand est-ce que tu t’y mets? Celle qui ne voulait pas d’enfant (Paris: Fluide Glacial, 2011). Colombe Schneck, ‘Femmes sans enfants, femmes suspectes’, Arte accessed 18 May 2015. All translations are my own unless otherwise stated.

6 Introduction

easily accusing them of selfishness, narcissism and various neuroses’.15 As further examples, the French public television channel TF1 produced a short documentary for a primetime evening news slot, ‘Avoir un enfant? Ces Français qui disent non’ [Having Children? The French Who Say No] in February 2014 and the radio station RTL broadcast a radio programme entitled ‘Ces femmes qui ne veulent pas devenir mères’ [These Women Who Do Not Want to Become Mothers] in March 2015.16 A blog launched in December 2013, ‘Femme sans enfant’ [Woman without Children], serves as an online resource to both voluntarily and involuntarily childless women and, although not as expansive or organised as the group No Kidding!, provides a platform for French women to voice their identity beyond maternity.17 Also revelatory of this increased attention to the phenomenon of voluntary childlessness is the invention of a variety of terms with which to name it. Expressions that have developed include voluntarily childless, intentionally childless, childless by choice, unchilded, non-mother, without child and childfree. It is unfortunate that so many of these expressions insist upon a lack; the suffix less, the prefixes non and un and the conjunction without are all predicated upon something mixing and proclaim the non-normativity of this choice. Childfree, however, is no less problematic. This term appeared in the US in the 1970s as an alternative to such negative labels and was intended as a way of asserting the choice of autonomous individuals who decided not to adhere to the societal convention of reproducing.18 Nevertheless, it also carries the potential to 15 16

17 18

‘Femmes sans enfants, femmes suspectes’. ‘Avoir un enfant? Ces Français qui disent non’, TF1, 12 February 2014, accessed 18 May 2015. Céline Collonge, ‘Ces femmes qui ne veulent pas devenir mères’, RTL, 6 March 2016, accessed 18 May 2015. ‘Femme sans enfant’, accessed 21 May 2015. Margaret Movius, ‘Voluntary Childlessness, the Ultimate Decision’, The Family Coordinator 25/1 (1976), 57–63.

Introduction

7

aggravate tension between the childless and the child-bearing majority. Part of the stigma to which the voluntarily childless have been subjected is due to real or perceived accusations from parents that those without children cast judgement upon their lifestyles. In view of this, the label ‘childfree’, despite its originally good intentions, may be greeted as superior, smug or glib. One of the main aims of this study is to advance the notion of the normativity of childlessness and of the need for a more sensitive and nuanced approach to female identity as a consequence. It is difficult to imagine how this will be achieved if suspicion, envy or rivalry between parents and non-parents fosters. Therefore, this book uses the term voluntarily childless to emphasise that this is a choice, that this choice is a personal one and that it is not intended as a facile, superior judgement on anyone else’s lifestyle.

Historicising Voluntary Childlessness As these references from literature, journalism and popular culture above testify, non-mothering – just like mothering – is a historically specific construct. In France, it is even more important to historicise the phenomenon of voluntary childlessness due to the primacy of the family in French culture. Indeed, France has, and has had for many years, one of the highest fertility rates in Europe. As demographer Ron Lesthaeghe remarks in a study of European fertility, ‘for the economy Germany is the strong man of Europe, but when it comes to demography France is our fecund woman’.19 Despite a relatively short period of decline in the 1980s and 1990s, French women have constantly produced an average of over two children. In many years, French and Irish women have jointly topped the fertility charts, and

19

Quoted in Anne Chemin, ‘How Gender Equality is Helping France to Higher Fertility Rates’, The Guardian Weekly, 27 March 2015, 30–1, 30.

8 Introduction

in 2014, the French fertility rate was exactly 2.0 children per woman.20 The decision not to mother is therefore a particularly uncommon one in France; according to the most recent study by the Institut national d’études démographiques [National Institute for Demographic Study], 4.3 per cent of French women declare that they do not have children and do not want them in the future.21 It is worth pausing to elucidate the reasons for France’s fertility record in order to better understand the socio-historical frame in which women are beginning to voice their voluntary childlessness. When General de Gaulle pled for ‘twelve million beautiful babies in twelve years’ after France was decimated in the Second World War, concern for the French population was nothing new. Fear of depopulation was evident in discourse from the end of the nineteenth century and continued through the first half of the twentieth.22 Given the imperial past, this was clearly connected to the risk of degeneracy of the race and the moral decline of the nation state; the maternal role clearly has a crucial function in protecting the motherland in every respect. Throughout the twentieth century, France has developed a series of pronatalist policies that ensure that the fertility rates cited above are not purely coincidental. In 1920, for example, the Médaille de la famille [Family Medal] was created. Women who had given birth to several healthy and legitimate children were awarded medals: bronze for five to seven children, silver for eight to ten and gold for over ten. A Monument aux mères [Monument to Mothers] was unveiled in Paris in 1938. In 1946, the French government introduced a series of measures to offer tax relief and other economic benefits to families on 20 ‘Fécondité totale, fécondité selon le groupe d’âges de la mère et âge moyen des mères à l’accouchement’, INSEE: Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques accessed 21 May 2015. 21 Charlotte Debest, Magali Mazuy and the Fecond research team, ‘Rester sans enfant: un choix de vie à contre-courant’, Population & Sociétés: bulletin mensuel d’information de l’Institut national d’études démographiques 508 (2014), accessed 21 May 2015. 22 Alison S. Fell, Liberty, Equality, Maternity in Beauvoir, Leduc and Ernaux (Oxford: Legenda, 2003), 43.

Introduction

9

the basis of their number of children. Increasing participation by women in the labour force in the 1960s was greeted by further policies to assist working families, to the extent that, as Claire Duchen argues, mothers who stayed at home were considered to be enjoying a luxury that society could not afford.23 In the 1970s and 1980s, a number of laws regarding professional equality were enacted, most notably the congé parental [parental leave] that enabled both men and women to take paid leave up to two years after the birth of a child. France has therefore taken a double-pronged approach to addressing concerns over fertility rates: a suite of comparatively generous economic incentives to support families with children, regardless of conjugal situation, and a legal framework that promotes gender equality in the workplace. The consequences of this approach include relatively well organised childcare facilities, greater flexibility for women at work and higher remuneration for working parents; in 2015, the state allocations, which are not dependent upon income, are 129.35 Euros per month for two children, 295.05 Euros for three, 460.77 Euros for four and a supplementary 162.78 Euros for each additional child, plus increases as the children reach eleven and sixteen years old.24 It will be noted that single-child families do not benefit from this scheme (although they benefit from a series of others) since the pronatalist policy is clearly predicated upon encouraging women to produce the magical two children necessary to maintain the population. The legacy of Catholicism is evidently a large part of the tapestry of values that underpin such policies. Julia Kristeva, in her seminal work on motherhood ‘Stabat Mater’, underlines that the cult of the Virgin Mary is firmly entrenched in France and has a lasting impact upon practices of mothering.25 Such a claim is hard to refute, given France’s Catholic heritage and the ensuing religious symbols that pervade villages, towns and cities. Such values and such pronatalist policies have rendered motherhood a norm Claire Duchen, Women’s Rights and Women’s Lives in France 1944–68 (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 117. 24 ‘Aides de la caisse d’allocations familiales’, 1 April 2014, accessed 21 May 2015. 25 Julia Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, in Histoires d’amour (Paris: Denoël, 1983), 295–327. 23

10 Introduction

in France to an extent that is rare among Western nations. It is within – and, indeed, in opposition to – this cultural framework that narratives of voluntary childlessness must be read. The choice to remain childless is a greater taboo in France than in many other European nations, and thus the choice to narrate such a choice presents a number of difficulties. It should be pointed out, however, that a lack of desire for children is not a new phenomenon. One may imagine that women in the past who did not experience a desire for motherhood may have been drawn to alternative lifestyles, such as becoming spinsters, nuns or nannies, for example. Yet, each of these examples carries specifically negative or problematic overtones. As a result, these choices remain largely hidden, and these women’s stories and identities remain unheard. Instead, the late twentieth century constitutes the first time in which women could exert control over their fertility through legal access to contraception. But, as this section shows, this development, and the narratives of voluntary childlessness that result from it, carry the weight of considerable socio-historical baggage in France. After all, women have been mothers for around 200,000 years, but have only been able to choose between children and childlessness for approximately fifty. Voicing Voluntary Childlessness Before turning to the specific content of this book, it is worth noting what it does not cover. First, Voicing Voluntary Childlessness does not include discussion of the painful situation of involuntary childlessness. Narratives of such trauma are also starting to appear in France, such as Laurence Boccolini’s Puisque les cigognes ont perdu mon adresse [Since the Storks Have Lost My Address], Frédérique Vincent’s La Promesse du mois [The Promise of the Month] or male author Jean-Paul Carminati’s Descendance [Descendants].26 Similarly, a small number of narratives of medically assisted

26 Laurence Boccolini, Puisque les cigognes ont perdu mon adresse (Paris: Plon, 2008). Frédérique Vincent, La Promesse du mois (Paris: Publibook, 2013). Jean-Paul Carminati, Descendance (Paris: J.C. Lattès, 2006).

Introduction

11

and nonmedicalised artificial insemination have been published, such as Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam’s narrative of surrogacy for a homosexual male couple, Une fille du feu [A Daughter of Fire], or Eliane Girard’s narrative of lesbian motherhood Mais qui va garder le chat? [But Who Will Keep the Cat?].27 Such narratives deserve sustained critical attention for the ways in which they allow authors to recount the trauma of non-motherhood and explore the contours of changed female identity in light of medical progress in this area. Yet, they are beyond the scope of this book, which aims to gather narratives of those who are childless by choice. Moreover, it is not about women who have had and lost children, as Elaine Tuttle Hansen explores in Mother Without Child: Contemporary Fiction and the Crisis of Motherhood; Hansen shows that mothers are increasingly portrayed in literature without their children due to death, professional obligation, loss of custody or by a loosened connection in contemporary society between mothers and their children, for example.28 Likewise, Voicing Voluntary Childlessness is not about women who have performed actions such as infanticide, surrogacy or abortion – not that I wish to equate these actions in any way – in order not to mother. Instead, this book contrasts the voices of women who express a lack of desire to enter into motherhood and focuses on their long-overlooked and unheard stories. The final category of literary works that are not included in this study are those that present an author or narrator’s voluntary childlessness as the backdrop to a narrative that foregrounds other aspects of her identity. Josyane Savigneau’s Point de côté [A Stitch in My Side] is a lucid, poetic and intimate account of her final period as the editor of Le Monde littéraire, for example.29 Savigneau alludes to her choice to remain childless and the stigmatisation she suffered as a result in her professional situation, yet her focus lies elsewhere: her apparently brutal exit from her managerial role due to a male conspiracy. In a similar way, Cécile Wajsbrot’s L’Hydre de Lerne 27 Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam, Une fille du feu (Paris: P.O.L., 2008). Eliane Girard, Mais qui va garder le chat? (Paris: J.C. Lattès, 2005). 28 Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Mother Without Child: Contemporary Fiction and the Crisis of Motherhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 29 Josyane Savigneau, Point de côté (Paris: Stock, 2008).

12 Introduction

[Hydra of Lerna] is a poignant partially autobiographical text that alludes to the author’s Polish Jewish roots and recounts in grim detail the demise of the narrator’s father and aunt through Alzheimer’s disease.30 While the narrator mentions her voluntary childlessness, which appears to be linked to the family’s traumatic history and the difficulties of memory, ancestry and legacy, the text’s focus is not the childlessness but the family trauma and the lasting effects of the Holocaust. In this way, Voicing Voluntary Childlessness brings together works that are predicated specifically upon a sustained representation and discussion of voluntary childlessness, and of its ensuing effects upon female identity. Turning to the chapters themselves, Voicing Voluntary Childlessness is divided into two parts. Part I, ‘Perspectives on Voluntary Childlessness’, outlines the theoretical premises and methodological approach of the study. Chapter 1 discusses theories of motherhood in the mid- to late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This at once provides a backdrop to the discourses from which theories of voluntary childlessness have developed and complicates some of the theoretical positions of contemporary discussions over motherhood. The chapter then discusses approaches to understanding the increased phenomenon of voluntary childlessness, comparing the work of sociologists in Anglo-American contexts with studies conducted in France. Chapter 2 examines psychoanalytic approaches to childlessness. These are separated from the sociological research discussed in Chapter 1 for two reasons. First, psychoanalytic criticism has been inextricable from French feminist thinking, as feminists in the 1970s took a specifically psychoanalytic approach to questions of the female body, desire and sexuality. Particular attention should therefore be paid to psychoanalytic theories in France, and it will be clear that, by contrast to other countries, more work has been done in this domain in psychoanalysis than in sociology. Second, since the choice to remain childless raises questions over a woman’s body and psyche, psychoanalytic approaches to childlessness address many of the stereotypes, accusations and lacunae left by sociological interviews: questions of selfishness, of one’s relationship with one’s mother, of one’s 30 Cécile Wajsbrot, L’Hydre de Lerne (Paris: Denoël, 2011).

Introduction

13

connection to one’s body and of one’s development, for example. In addition to literary criticism, therefore, Voicing Voluntary Childlessness draws on and dialogues with a range of theoretical perspectives, including sociology, psychology, history, philosophy and feminism. Following the discussion of theoretical discourses of voluntary childlessness, Part II is devoted to examples of literary texts in which first-person narrators voice their own experience of rejecting motherhood. Each chapter rests upon an analysis of a single text that engages with this topic in particularly innovative ways. Each of the texts may be labelled as ‘life-writing’ but all stage a play with the genre of autobiography. As is now established, the term ‘autobiography’ is something of a misnomer, since ‘autos’, ‘bios’ and ‘graphia’ are all problematic terms that defy unitary identity construction.31 Many of the female authors in the ‘new generation’ mentioned above have experimented with the limits of autobiography, casting doubt upon its capacity to render female subjectivity in narrative and pushing the practice of life writing in new directions. Most of the authors who feature in this book are similarly engaged in this process. As we shall see, they create texts that are innovative both in form and content; on one level, they represent voluntary childlessness in nuanced, insightful ways, and on another, they develop narrative techniques that generate new practices of life writing. Three of the four chapters engage specifically with this literary innovation, arguing that the authors each manipulate a specific sub-genre of autobiography to create a new form for their female identity beyond reproduction. Throughout, I therefore use the terms life writing and self-narrative to refer to their work. Chapter 3 examines Linda Lê’s work À l’enfant que je n’aurai pas [To The Child that I Will Not Have].32 This writer has achieved fame for her subtle, evocative texts, many of which contain oblique references to her homeland of Vietnam. Just as Lê cautions against a facile connection between her 31

32

For more on the non-unitary nature of autobiography, particularly as practised by women, see Natalie Edwards, Shifting Subjects: Plural Subjectivity in Contemporary Francophone Women’s Autobiography (Newark: DE, University of Delaware Press, 2011). Linda Lê, À l’enfant que je n’aurai pas (Paris: NiL, 2011).

14 Introduction

narratives and her native Vietnam, she also warns against interpreting her narratives as overt self-representations. Her oeuvre could therefore perhaps best be characterised by the term récit de soi [narrative of self ] than by the label of autobiography. The text selected for this study furthers her récit de soi through a manipulation of the epistolary genre. I show that this mode of self-writing is especially associated with femininity due to its many female practitioners in its heyday of the eighteenth century. By examining Lê’s unnamed narrator’s letter to the phantom child that she will never have, I argue that Lê manipulates the epistolary genre to write a new version of female identity that does not depend upon maternity. The fourth chapter examines the work of another writer who is not French by origin. Jane Sautière is originally from Iran and has a multilingual background, yet chooses to write in French after having spent most of her life in France. She writes of her lack of desire to mother in Nullipare [Nullipara].33 By contrast to Lê, Sautière is a relatively new writer, having written only three single-authored works to date. Nonetheless, her writing shows a similar commitment to exploring the boundaries of self-representation in narrative as well as the experience of a life without motherhood. Whereas Lê manipulates epistolary narrative in À l’enfant que je n’aurai pas, the sub-genre of autobiography that Sautière targets in Nullipare is autofiction. I thus read her crafted representation of voluntary childlessness through the lens of theories of autofictional narrative, arguing that this mode of writing affords her the possibility of exploring her decision through literature. Whereas Lê’s narrator is clear about her decision and the reasons for it, Sautière is far less so, as her play with autofiction demonstrates. Chapter 5 analyses the work of Lucie Joubert, a similarly non-French author. Joubert is from Quebec and, although she is bilingual, chooses to write in the French language. As I explain in the introduction to the chapter, I include this text because it engages directly with French texts on this topic and will exert an important influence over French discourse. Joubert is also an academic, working in the area of women’s writing and feminist thought. Her text, L’Envers du landau: Regard extérieur sur la maternité et 33

Jane Sautière, Nullipare (Paris: Gallimard, 2008).

Introduction

15

ses débordements [The Other Side of the Baby Carriage: An External View on Maternity and its Excesses], is a fascinating mix of autobiographical and academic writing which I interpret as an example of personal criticism, or autocritography.34 This is an important mode of writing for feminist scholarship, since it signals the possibility for women and other minorities in academia to combine personal and academic prose that at once legitimises their place in the academy and critiques its practices of inclusion. I argue that Joubert’s work shows a careful consideration of the place of the childless woman in academia, and that her use of personal criticism is a metaphor for the voice of the voluntarily childless: constantly having to justify their choice, while all the while anticipating the backlash against it. The book closes with an examination of a portrayal of ageing as a childless woman. This chapter is the only one that discusses an author whose national background is exclusively French. Madeleine Chapsal has forged a successful career as a writer of popular fiction and as a literary journalist. At the age of seventy-six, she turned to autobiography with La Femme sans [The Woman Without].35 In this text, she narrates her identity as a childless woman, looking back over her life to portray the ways in which she has reflected upon her decision. In so doing, she directly challenges many of the stereotypes associated with the older childless woman, several of which are used as ammunition against those contemplating childlessness while still fertile. Chapsal’s text differs from the others studied in this book in that it is does not purport to be a highly crafted literary work. Chapsal’s style is at times poetic as she portrays a confessional, intimate self in narrative. Yet, it does not constitute the play with literary genre staged by the others; while the first three chapters frame the analysis within the specific generic innovation performed by each writer, therefore, this last one locates the main interest of La Femme sans in the content of Chapsal’s narrative of ageing. In this way, Voicing Voluntary Childlessness aims to compare the voices of a variety of female authors who are all united by their will to take

34 Lucie Joubert, L’Envers du landau: Regard extérieur sur la maternité et ses débordements (Montreal: Triptyques, 2005). 35 Madeleine Chapsal, La Femme sans (Paris: Fayard, 2001).

16 Introduction

ownership of their childless identity and to create a textual space to explore this through literature. As I have highlighted in this outline, a thread that runs throughout this book is the transnational and translingual character of most of the authors it discusses. Interestingly, however, this is not an aspect upon which they focus in their narratives. Sautière, for example, mentions that she lost her mother tongue and her homeland, but proceeds to give a series of different reasons for her decision not to mother. Lê, in a different manner, does not locate her narrator’s story in any identifiable place and does not mention her family’s national or linguistic background. In this way, their international backgrounds cannot be a coincidence yet, as they show themselves, it is not the sole reason for their choice to remain childless or their decision to narrate it in literature. Their choice is therefore certainly not presented as the result of a painful or negative situation: that they wish to avoid passing on a traumatic family narrative or an in-between, unreconciled identity to a future generation, for example. As will become clear, they do not locate the source of their childlessness as a loss, a lack or a trauma, but in a positive choice that they have made for their own lives after sustained reflection on its consequences. Instead, their international character may be a result of the fact that voicing one’s voluntary childlessness is still somewhat taboo in contemporary France. In view of the legacy of Catholicism and the pronatalist policies outlined above, the prevalence in this study of writers who grew up elsewhere and relocated to France in late childhood or early adulthood may point to the persistent difficulty of narrating a lack of desire for motherhood among French women. This study initially aimed to find narratives of voluntary childlessness by French women authors from a range of races, ethnicities, socio-economic classes and sexual orientation; sadly, although the writers studied in this book are diverse, such narratives are as yet uncommon. Hopefully, the new generation of French female writers alluded to above, who are willing to tackle issues such as sexuality, rape and violence within their work, will also broach this topic over time. After all, the authors whose work forms the basis for the analyses in this book carve out new narrative forms to encapsulate new forms of female identity and, taken together, perform a radical rethinking of the connection between femininity and maternity.

part i Perspectives on Voluntary Childlessness

Chapter 1


For reasons both inside and beyond the women’s movement, feminists were better able in the long run to attend to mother’s voices than they were able to imagine a full and deeply meaningful life without m otherhood, without children. –Ann Snitow

Motherhood is a divisive issue. It is one of the central concerns of twentieth-century feminist theory, but also one of the most polarising. From accusations of slavery to exaltations of fulfilment, motherhood has often been a source of conflict among feminist critics. In this chapter, I examine theories of motherhood in order to position theories of non-motherhood within and alongside them. First, I briefly survey the main currents of theoretical approaches to motherhood within mid- to late twentieth-century feminist thought. I then examine current theories of motherhood, since it is against this backdrop that the authors whose works are studied in this book are writing. Lastly, the focus of this chapter is theoretical understandings of voluntary childlessness, as an indicator of current research in this field and as a means through which to better appreciate the analyses that follow.

20

Chapter 1

Motherhood in Feminist Theory Simone de Beauvoir famously pointed to women’s ‘slavery to reproduction’ in Le Deuxième Sexe [The Second Sex] to call attention to the way in which motherhood was organised as a patriarchal structure.1 Beauvoir’s argument concerned motherhood as an institution and as a regulated practice with stringent expectations and limitations on women’s freedom, not mothers themselves or their choice to reproduce. Beauvoir claimed to be unable to envisage a way for women to have children and a career, which is a battle that is still being fought decades later. Her chapter entitled ‘La Mère’ [The Mother] in the second volume of Le Deuxième Sexe was read by some as a veritable assault upon motherhood and earned Beauvoir some vitriolic critique.2 However, her argument is rooted in a historical situation in which women are unable both to be mothers and to exert freedom and independence over their lives. Beauvoir was careful to underscore that this could change if social parameters were to alter; she points out that ‘in a properly organised society where children would be largely taken in charge by the community and the mother cared for and helped, maternity would not be wholly incompatible with careers for women’.3 The passivity and submission that she viewed in mothers was therefore less a result of their personalities or innate behaviour and more a consequence of their oppression within a patriarchal system. Beauvoir’s controversial, and apparently negative, view of motherhood attracted sympathisers and dissenters. Several decades later, during the heyday of French feminism in the 1970s, feminist theory still appeared polarised on the issue of motherhood. On the one hand, some feminist thinkers embraced motherhood as a site of power for women. Annie Leclerc in the best-selling Parole de femme [A Woman’s Word], for example, celebrated

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (London: Johnathan Cape, 1953), 142. 2 For more on this, see Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 3 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 502.

1


21

motherhood as a source of creativity, insisting upon the corporeal experience and the pleasures of pregnancy, birth and breast-feeding: ‘birth is an amazing delight, not a mire of abject suffering’, for example.4 She goes so far as to suggest that the power accorded to women by their ability to reproduce is a source of jealousy for men. (It should be noted, however, that although Leclerc’s approach to motherhood is significantly different to that of Beauvoir, Leclerc also views practices of motherhood as rooted in patriarchal oppression, so it would be a mistake to place the two thinkers on opposite ends of a spectrum.) During the same time period, a number of Anglo-American feminists also aligned themselves somewhat in opposition to Beauvoir’s theorisation of maternity in order to celebrate, and even to glorify, motherhood. Adrienne Rich’s hugely influential Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution is a lyrical evocation of motherhood and the mother–daughter relationship, insisting, as does Leclerc, on the corporeal aspects of maternity.5 The crux of Rich’s theory lies, as the subtitle of her book suggests, in her distinction between the institution of motherhood and contemporary practices of it and she argues that women have the potential to free themselves from such patriarchal patterns. On the other hand, certain feminist thinkers followed Beauvoir’s arguments concerning the patriarchal oppression of women through motherhood more stringently. In her history of theories of motherhood in France, Sabine Fortino isolates the period from 1970 to 1975 as ‘that of the theory of motherhood as slavery and […] the utopia of the immediate emancipation of women’.6 The group Féministes Révolutionnaires [Revolutionary Feminists], for example, published a work entitled Maternité esclave [Slave Motherhood] in 1975 in which they denounce motherhood as the ‘sacrifice of our lives to those of future generations, [a] Great Wall of China to

4 5 6

Annie Leclerc, Parole de femme (Paris: Grasset, 1974). Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (London: Virago, 1977). Sabine Fortino, ‘De filles en mères. La seconde vague du féminisme et la maternité’, Clio. Histoire‚ femmes et sociétés 5 (1997) accessed 14 April 2015.

22

Chapter 1

rebuild’.7 Sociologist and materialist feminist Christine Delphy, part of the Questions féministes [Feminist Questions] journal alongside thinkers such as Monique Wittig, also viewed reproduction as part of the root of women’s oppression. Delphy rejects a tendency that she sees, both in general discourse and in the work of other feminist thinkers, of viewing women as inherently tied to their reproductive function; she proclaims ‘the tendency to base women’s rights upon their specificity’ and ‘the tendency to base this specificity on their particular reproductive function’.8 Such echoes of Beauvoir’s notion of motherhood as slavery are also discernible in American feminism. Shulamith Firestone went so far as to call for the abolition of pregnancy in The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Revolution, since she theorised women as a ‘sex class’ whose oppression was rooted in their biological function of reproduction.9 Firestone advocated ‘the freeing of women from the tyranny of reproduction by every means possible, and the diffusion of the child-rearing role to the society as a whole, men as well as women’.10 By ‘every means possible’, she meant revolutionary ideas such as reproductive technology to reduce women’s reliance upon men to conceive and community organisations to assist with childrearing, thereby removing the burden of mothering from women and engaging men more equally in the process. Frequently overlooked in her theory is her insistence that the oppression of women is linked to the oppression of children; far from a child-hater, then, she aimed to address inequality for children and mothers alike.11 Such feminist theories of motherhood leave very little room for the rejection of it.12 Between thinkers who were celebrating motherhood as a Collectif Féministes Révolutionnaires, Maternité esclave (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1975), 13. 8 Christine Delphy, L’Ennemi principal 2: Penser le genre (Paris: Syllepse, 2001), 91–119, 93. 9 Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Revolution (New York: Morrow, 1970). 10 Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Revolution, 193. 11 For more on this, see Mandy Merck and Stella Sandford, eds, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 12 This discussion of motherhood in feminist theory is kept to a minimum since the focus of this chapter is non-motherhood. For more on theories of motherhood, see 7


23

bodily, creative experience and those who viewed it as a constraining arm of patriarchy, the notion of voluntary childlessness was largely left aside. This is of course to be expected for two reasons. First, the main aim of feminist theory at this historical juncture was for women to gain control over their own fertility through obtaining free, legal access to contraception and abortion. Second, feminist theorists were for the first time engaged in theorising the oppression at root in their contemporary cultures, which were modelled upon a heterosexual family unit with children. This is not to say that childlessness was not at all present in these theorisations. For example, Delphy is careful not to overlook childless women, cautioning against the ways in which the celebration of motherhood marginalises those who choose not to enter into it.13 Adrienne Rich also emphasises in On Lies, Secrets and Silence that childless women exist and need to be better understood: Historically, cross-culturally, a woman’s status as child-bearer has been the test of her womanhood. Through motherhood, every woman has been defined from outside of herself: mother, matriarch, matron, spinster, barren, old maid – listen to the history of emotional timber that hangs about each of these words. Even by default motherhood has been an enforced identity for women, while the phrases ‘childless man’ and ‘nonfather’ sound absurd and irrelevant to us.14

In addition to such references to the choice to remain childless within theoretical texts, a small strand of feminists who clamoured for childlessness is also discernible. In the influential volume Les Femmes s’entêtent [Women Remain Obstinate] (1975), the collective wrote: ‘we do not wish to call for a strike in reproduction, either as a tactic or as an aim […] but to explicate sufficiently the threat by emphasising the legitimacy of not having children’.15 They mention the choice to remain childless as a defence against the ‘threat’ of motherhood, therefore. Fortino discusses the militant action of certain feminists who were for example, Rye, Narratives of Mothering: Women’s Writing in Contemporary France or Fell, Liberty, Equality, Maternity in Beauvoir, Leduc and Ernaux. Psychoanalytic theories of motherhood and non-motherhood are discussed in the following chapter. 13 Christine Delphy ‘Mother’s Union?’ Trouble and Strife 24 (1992), 12–19. 14 Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence (London: Virago, 1978), 261. 15 Collectif, Les Femmes s’entêtent (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 177–8.

24

Chapter 1

in their twenties and childless during this period and finds that those who had children were, in their words, made to feel marginalised.16 She mentions the example of Magali, who states in an interview with Fortino, ‘I had a kid at the time, it wasn’t fashionable … The Movement reappropriated motherhood around 1976, around the end. But in the beginning (1970), motherhood wasn’t the feminists’ thing … Five years later, all the girls wanted kids, they were all crazy about them’.17 In this way, the rejection of motherhood was present in some feminist ideologies but not in a way that promotes understanding, tolerance and respect for those who choose to remain childless, or that encourages progress for mothers and childless women together; after all, just as much feminist theory is predicated upon the fact that women have to find harmony with men in order to achieve liberation, so do childless women and mothers have to live together in society. Despite these examples of references to voluntary childlessness within feminist theory, none of these theorists interrogated childlessness, voluntary or involuntary, in any sustained way. Indeed, the foundations were there for greater attention to childlessness, but, as Magali’s memories in the citation above suggest, the celebration of motherhood that then took precedence reversed this progress rapidly.

Late Twentieth- and Early Twenty-First-Century Maternal Ideologies Literary scholar Julie Rodgers warns that ‘recent research in the domain of motherhood has revealed that the achievements of second-wave feminists are slowly being eroded’.18 Indeed, a large amount of research into discourses

16 17 18

Fortino, ‘De filles en mères. La seconde vague du féminisme et la maternité’, n.p. Fortino, ‘De filles en mères. La seconde vague du féminisme et la maternité’, n.p. Julie Rodgers, ‘Contesting the Mommy Myth: Un heureux événement (Eliette Abécassis) as Maternal Counternarrative’, Irish Journal of French Studies 12 (2012), 43–64, 44.


25

of motherhood in the Western world points to a regression that entails rigid expectations of maternal behaviour. This is especially prevalent in North America, where a number of commentators highlight the disempowering nature of much contemporary discussion of motherhood. Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels, for example, argue that a ‘new momism’ has developed that claims to celebrate motherhood but instead ‘promulgate[s] standards of perfection that are beyond your reach’.19 Diane Negra also perceives ‘a trend that posits motherhood as salvation’ in contemporary society as women are pressured into a constraining model of motherhood as a natural state of womanhood.20 Influential Canadian feminist Andrea O’Reilly isolates what she views as ‘the master narrative of motherhood’, drawing a distinction between ‘motherhood’ as a patriarchal construct and ‘mothering’ as a term that foregrounds women’s experience.21 She notes that much has been written by feminist scholars and activists to call attention to oppressive models of motherhood but claims that much remains to be done to achieve the goal of empowering mothers themselves. In the French context, attention to and critique of such a discourse is also beginning to be heard. Fortino finds that since the mid-1970s discourse has moved ‘from denunciation to celebration’.22 Controversial feminist critic Elisabeth Badinter is one of the principle voices who have interrogated this trend. In Le Conflit: La femme et la mère [The Conflict: Woman and Mother], she posits that between 1980 and 2010, ‘over the last three decades, almost without our noticing, there has been a revolution in our idea of motherhood. This revolution was silent, prompting no outcry or debate, even though its goal was momentous: to put motherhood back at the very heart of women’s lives’.23 For Badinter, the economic crisis that Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels, The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women (New York: Free Press, 2004), 6. 20 Diane Negra, What a Girl Wants? Fantasizing the Reclamation of the Self in Postfeminism (New York: Routledge, 2008), 29. 21 Andrea O’Reilly, ed., Feminist Mothering (New York: SUNY Press, 2008), 4. 22 Fortino, ‘De filles en mères. La seconde vague du féminisme et la maternité’, n.p. 23 Elisabeth Badinter, The Conflict: Woman and Mother, trans. Adriana Hunter (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2011), 3. 19

26

Chapter 1

struck Europe in the 1980s was the first of a series of events that impeded the move towards sexual equality, forcing many women back into the home, halting progress towards equal wages, and engendering a backlash against the progress accomplished by feminist movements. From this instability was born what she calls ‘the dominant maternalist ideology’, which insists that motherhood is a natural process, replete with the fetishisation of drug free birth, breast feeding and cloth nappies, for example. Any deviation from this pattern is met with consternation, she claims, by the medical profession, by other mothers, and by society at large. Such socio-cultural attitudes have long been a point of interrogation for Badinter, who cast doubt upon the idea of the maternal instinct in her 1980 work L’Amour en plus [The Myth of Motherhood].24 In this text, she examines attitudes towards maternity as expressed by French women from the seventeenth century to the present. Discovering, for example, that the majority of women living in urban spaces in the seventeenth century gave their infants to a nurse and only saw them several years later, she casts doubt upon the idea of an innate, biological process that may be termed an instinct. Maternal love may exist, she argues, but the notion of an instinct common to all females is disproved by the fact that so many children, today and throughout history, have been abandoned, killed, traumatised or neglected by their mothers. If no universal behaviour among mothers is discernible, she asks: How then can one avoid concluding, even if it seems cruel, that mother love is only a feeling and, as such, it is essentially conditional, contingent on many different factors? The feeling may exist or may not exist; appear and disappear; reveal itself as strong or weak; be focused on one child or lavished on many. Everything depends on the mother, on her story and our History. No, there is no universal law in this matter, which transcends natural determinism. Mother love cannot be taken for granted. When it exists, it is an additional advantage, an extra, something thrown into the bargain struck by the lucky ones among us.25

24 Elisabeth Badinter, L’Amour en plus: Histoire de l’amour maternel (XVII-XX siècle) (Paris: Flammarion, 1980). The Myth of Motherhood: An Historical View of the Maternal Instinct, trans. Roger DeGaris (London: Souvenir Press, 1981). 25 Badinter, The Myth of Motherhood, 327.


27

Badinter’s work highlights the ways in which a discourse of ‘nature’ forces a facile, unquestioned connection between woman and motherhood and hints that the childless woman is supremely unnatural. By interrogating the history of mothering, Badinter attempts to set current ideas of mothering into historical context in order to show that these are not simply biological processes that have developed naturally within us. Instead, she demonstrates that motherhood is a historically specific formulation and that it is discursively constructed. Yvonne Knibiehler’s body of work performs a similar function. Published in 1980, the same year as Badinter’s L’Amour en plus, Knibiehler and Catherine Fouquet’s L’Histoire des mères du moyen âge à nos jours [The History of Mothers from the Middle Ages to the Present] traced the history of understandings of motherhood through several centuries, amassing an exhaustive list of convincing evidence.26 Knibiehler and Fouquet isolate four distinct discourses to which this history has given rise: religious, political, medical and ideological. They thus point to influences such as the Catholic Church, Napoleon’s Civil Code and the advancement of medical technology upon how French society has viewed motherhood. As Knibiehler resumes in the opening of the abridged version of this text for the Que sais-je series, ‘Perhaps the reason why mothers and motherhood do not come out from the shadows is because the production of children has always been, and remains, an exercise of power; the control over female fertility is the site par excellence of the domination of one sex over the other’.27 In her more recent work, she also takes a similar stance to that of Badinter and the Anglo-American feminists cited above who see a problematic ideology at work in current discourses over motherhood. Yet Knibiehler is more optimistic in her outlook. In La Révolution maternelle depuis 1945 [The Maternal Revolution Since 1945], for example, she argues that the post-war years have given rise to three loosely grouped ‘generations’ of women. The first, the baby-boomers, forged a

Yvonne Knibiehler and Catherine Fouquet, L’Histoire des mères du Moyen Âge à nos jours (Paris: Montalba, 1980). 27 Yvonne Knibiehler, Histoire des mères et de la maternité en Occident, Que sais-je? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), 5. 26

28

Chapter 1

connection between maternity and citizenship based upon independence and autonomy, and a refusal to stay at home. The second, which she calls ‘the generation of refusal’ were not refusing motherhood but rather a forced connection between female sexuality and motherhood ‘governed by men serving the species and the Nation state’.28 The third and final grouping is what she terms ‘the generation of desire’, in which women are attempting to combine their desire for children with their desire for autonomy and are calling for new forms of relationships with their children, with men, and with each other. Some of these find expression in her edited volume with Gérard Neyrand, Maternité et parentalité [Maternity and Parentality], which interrogates different approaches to childrearing, beyond a strict connection between child and biological parent, and beyond a pattern of maternity and paternity that forges a clearly gendered role for each parent. Such interventions by feminist historians and sociologists therefore attest to the different notions of motherhood over centuries, to the problems inherent in a facile association between nature and maternity and to the way in which motherhood has become a more, not less, pressing issue for the twenty-first century.

Theorising the Rejection of Motherhood This discussion of theories of motherhood demonstrates that a particular narrative of femininity and maternity has been celebrated for the last thirty to forty years. It is therefore within this discursive environment that voluntarily childless women are now beginning to express their experiences. In the remainder of this chapter, I focus upon research into non-mothering in order to chart the terrain in which the literary authors whose work is examined in this study are writing. While a range of studies of voluntary childlessness has now taken place, this research began in North America 28

Yvonne Knibiehler, La Révolution maternelle depuis 1945 (Paris, Perrin, 1997), 155.


29

and has been slow to spread elsewhere. As we shall see, researchers have now interrogated the choice to remain childless in Sweden, Australia, Iceland, the UK, Italy and many other nations, but early studies emanated from and studied the culture of the United States. This section thus concentrates upon this research and draws parallels with the French context where possible. Only a very small number of articles and two book-length studies of voluntarily childless women have appeared in France, both by sociologists: Maya Paltineau’s Femmes sans enfants: Enquête sur le refus de maternité des femmes de trente à cinquante ans [Women without Children: A Study of the Rejection of Motherhood by Women from 30 to 50 Years of Age], a study of voluntarily childless women, and Charlotte Debest’s Le Choix d’une vie sans enfant [Choosing a Life without Children], a study of both men and women.29 As this suggests, although there now exist some recent autobiographical accounts, literary analyses and medical and psychological studies, the majority of the research into childlessness has been carried out within the discipline of sociology.30 Canadian sociologist Jean Veevers was thus one of the earliest researchers in this domain when, in 1973, she wrote ‘Voluntary Childlessness: A Neglected Area of Family Study’.31 In this important article, she chides her colleagues by stating, ‘instead of researching with equal enthusiasm all questions which are theoretically interesting, they choose to focus the most extensive research on those questions which are congruent with the 29 Maya Paltineau, Femmes sans enfants: Enquête sur le refus de maternité des femmes de trente à cinquante ans (Saarbrücken: Editions universitaires européennes, 2011). Charlotte Debest, Le Choix d’une vie sans enfant (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015). 30 Examples of the few studies that exist in other domains from this time are, in psychology, Sharon K. Houseknecht, ‘Timing and the Decision to Remain Voluntarily Childless: Evidence for Continuous Socialization’, Psychology of Women Quarterly 4 (1979), 81–96 and Nancy Felipe Russo, ‘Overview: Sex Roles, Fertility and the Motherhood Mandate’, Psychology of Women Quarterly 4 (1979), 7–15.; in biology, Larry Barnett and Richard MacDonald, ‘A Study of the Membership of the National Organization for Non-Parents’, Social Biology 23 (1976), 297–310. 31 Jean E. Veevers, ‘Voluntary Childlessness: A Neglected Area of Family Study’, The Family Coordinator 22/2 (1973), 199–205, 199.

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dominant norms, and which are supportive of their own value preferences’.32 The study of voluntary childlessness, she argues, had been avoided due to ‘selective inattention’, an oversight that she aimed to begin to correct with this article and her book-length study Childless by Choice in 1980.33 In this work, Veevers argues that voluntary childlessness was already becoming increasingly prevalent but that stereotypes of the childless were particularly entrenched in the areas of morality, responsibility, marriage, sexuality and normalcy.34 Several studies appeared in the 1980s, including book-length studies such as Kate Harper’s The Childfree Alternative and Barbara M. Hawkins’s Women Without Children: How to Live Your Choice and articles such as ‘Single Women, Voluntary Childlessness and Perceptions about Life and Marriage’ and ‘A Comparison of Intentional Parents and Intentionally Childless Couples’.35 Such research gained momentum in the 1990s, appearing in such journals as American Demographics, the Family Policy Studies Centre (UK) and the Journal of Religious Research. Yet it was not until the 2000s that voluntary childlessness became an area of significant research in the social sciences, propelled perhaps by Elinor Burkett’s landmark 2000 work, The Baby Boon: How Family-Friendly America Cheats the Childless.36 In this overview of theories of non-mothering, I discuss this field of research by dividing it into what I view as its four main components: demographic research into who remains childless, explanations given for voluntary childlessness, the ways in which childless women subvert stereotypes associated with them, and the impact of childlessness on individual identity, specifically gendered identity. 32 Veevers, ‘Voluntary Childlessness: A Neglected Area of Family Study’, 199. 33 Jean E. Veevers, Childless by Choice (Toronto: Butterworths, 1980). 34 Veevers, Childless by Choice, 4. 35 Kate Harper, The Childfree Alternative (Brattleboro: The Stephen Greene Press, 1980). Barbara M. Hawkins, Women Without Children: How to Live Your Choice (Saratoga: R&E Publishers, 1984). Victor J. Callan, ‘Single Women, Voluntary Childlessness and Perceptions about Life and Marriage’, Journal of Biosocial Science 18/04 (1986), 479–87. Harold Feldman, ‘A Comparison of Intentional Parents and Intentionally Childless Couples’, Journal of Marriage and the Family 43/3 (1981), 593–600. 36 Elinor Burkett, The Baby Boon: How Family-Friendly America Cheats the Childless (New York: Free Press, 2000).


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Demographics As Gilla Shapiro discerns, the question of who decides to remain childless is ‘one of the oldest and most enduring debates’ in this field.37 Earlier studies in particular, although not exclusively, were concerned with identifying the demographic information of those who did not mother and, as a corollary, isolating the predictors of this choice. Many studies cite race as a factor, arguing that white, European American women are statistically more likely to choose childlessness. Jane Lawler Dye shows, for example, that African American and Hispanic women have more children and have them earlier than European American women, and that the latter are more likely not to reproduce.38 Maura Kelly notes that the reasons for this racial difference have not been explored and that research in this area is much needed in order to understand the ways in which women of colour may experience non-desire for children differently.39 Social class – although it is not often designated as such, especially by the American studies – also recurs in much of the research into childless demographics. Socioeconomic status, levels of education and professional situation/ambition are a factor in many of the research findings.40 Women who have attained higher levels of education are more likely to postpone childbearing or to decide against it, according to Cardell Jacobson and Tim Heaton and to Joyce Abma et al, although two studies from the 1990s

Gilla Shapiro, ‘Voluntary Childlessness: A Critical Review of the Literature’, Studies in the Maternal 6/1 (2014), 1–15, 2. 38 Jane Lawler Dye, ‘Fertility of American Women: 2006’, Current Population Reports (2008), 20–558. 39 Maura Kelly, ‘Women’s Voluntary Childlessness: A Radical Rejection of Motherhood?’, Women’s Studies Quarterly 37/3–4 (2009), 157–72, 161. 40 Joyce C. Abma, Anjani Chandra, William D. Mosher, Linda S. Peterson and Linda J. Piccinino, ‘Fertility, Family Planning, and Women’s Health: New Data from the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth’, Vital and Health Statistics, 23/19 (1997), 1–114. Renske Keizer, Pearl A. Dykstra and Miranda D. Jansen, ‘Pathways into Childlessness: Evidence of Gendered Life Course Dynamics’, Journal of Biosocial Science 40/6 (2008), 863–78. 37

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question this.41 Turning to economic factors, women with professional or managerial positions are also less likely to reproduce, according to Amara Bachu and Diane Crispell.42 Some women in studies conducted by Debarun Majumdar and Marsha Somers mention professional ambition as a factor in their decision not to mother and Kelly raises the issue of ‘opportunity costs’ for women who risk more disruption to their career paths through having children than do men.43 Nevertheless, such findings are questioned by Fiona McAllister and Lynda Clarke in the British context, who argue that ‘quality of life’ issues, such as freedom from responsibility and the ability to retire early, are more important to their interviewees than professional success.44 Personality type and personal beliefs/attitudes are factors highlighted by much of the research. Several of the early studies even found that women who choose not to mother are more ‘masculine’ and less conventional

41

Joyce C. Abma, Anjani Chandra, William D. Mosher, Linda S. Peterson and Linda J. Piccinino, ‘Fertility, Family Planning, and Women’s Health: New Data from the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth’. Cardell K. Jacobson and Tim B. Heaton, ‘Voluntary Childlessness Among American Men and Women in the Late 1980s’, Social Biology 38 (1991), 79–93. The two studies that question this are Tim B. Heaton, Cardell K. Jacobson and Kimberlee Holland, ‘Persistence and Change in Decisions to Remain Childless’, Journal of Marriage and the Family 61/2 (1999), 531–9 and Vijaya Krishnan, ‘Religious Homogamy and Voluntary Childlessness in Canada’, Sociological Perspectives 36/1 (1993), 83–93. 42 Amara Bachu, ‘Is Childlessness among American Women on the Rise?’, Population Division, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Working Paper 37 (1999). accessed 28 April 2015. Diane Crispell, ‘Planning No Family, Now or Ever’, American Demographics 15 (1993), 23–4. 43 Debarun Majumdar, ‘Choosing Childlessness: Intentions of Voluntary Childlessness in the United States’, Michigan Sociological Review 18 (2004), 108–35. Marsha D. Somers, ‘A Comparison of Voluntarily Childfree Adults and Parents’, Journal of Marriage and the Family 55/3 (1993), 643–50. Maura Kelly, ‘Women’s Voluntary Childlessness: A Radical Rejection of Motherhood?’, Women’s Studies Quarterly 37/3–4 (2009), 157–72. 44 Fiona McAllister and Lynda Clarke, ‘A Study of Childlessness in Britain’ Family Policy Studies Centre, Joseph Rowntree Foundation (1998), accessed 28 April 2015.


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regarding gender roles than women with children.45 Since then, several studies have found that childless women hold more egalitarian views than their own mothers and that couples without children have more progressive attitudes towards gender roles.46 A lack of religious belief has also been isolated by many studies as a contributing factor.47 The absence of a long-term relationship is a further element determining childlessness in many of the studies.48 While this would hardly have been surprising several years ago, the provision of reproductive technology and alternative relationships translates to a greater choice over fertility to all women, not just to those in relationships. Mardy Ireland notes that some women feel ambivalent about having children and could decide to reproduce but do not due to the absence of a partner.49 For couples who are childless, the research suggests that the decision is most often a joint one but some studies indicate that women are the major force in making the choice. Interestingly, Somers found that happy marriages may also be a predictor of childlessness, since marital satisfaction was found to be higher in childless couples than in parents.50 Kelly notes, however, that these studies 45 Kristine M. Baber and Albert S. Dreyer, ‘Gender-Role Orientations in Older Child-free and Expectant Couples’, Sex Roles 14/9–10 (1986), 501–12. Susan Bram, ‘Voluntarily Childless Women: Traditional or Nontraditional?’, Sex Roles 10/3–4 (1984), 195–206. 46 Joyce C. Abma and Gladys M. Martinez, ‘Childlessness Among Older Women in the United States: Trends and Profiles’, Journal of Marriage and Family 68/4 (2006), 1045–56. Carolyn Morell, Unwomanly Conduct: The Challenges of Intentional Childlessness (New York: Routledge, 1994). 47 Ione Y. DeOllos and Carolyn A. Kapinus, ‘Aging Childless Individuals and Couples: Suggestions for New Directions in Research’, Sociological Inquiry 72 (2002), 72–80. William D. Mosher, David P. Johnson and Marjorie C. Horn, ‘Religion and Fertility in the United States: The Importance of Marriage Patterns and Hispanic Origin’, Demography 23/3 (1986), 367–79. 48 See, for example, Abma and Martinez, ‘Childlessness Among Older Women in the United States: Trends and Profiles’ and Jacobson and Heaton, ‘Voluntary Childlessness Among American Men and Women in the Late 1980s’. 49 Mardy S. Ireland, Reconceiving Women: Separating Motherhood from Female Identity (New York: Guilford, 1993). 50 Marsha D. Somers, ‘A Comparison of Voluntarily Childfree Adults and Parents’.

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focus almost exclusively on heterosexual women and that this bias needs to be addressed in further research.51 In the French context, the two book-length studies of voluntarily childless women in France, Paltineau’s and Debest’s, suggest broadly the same factors as the studies discussed here but with some notable additions. It is interesting to note that neither of these two works refers to research into voluntary childlessness in the Anglophone world, despite the numerous studies mentioned above. Instead, the influence of this largely AngloAmerican research on these French studies appears to be minimal, which leads to some different findings. First, this research highlights that the symbolic value of the family is of less importance to voluntarily childless women; Paltineau’s research suggests that ‘women without children have a particular vision of the family as a social institution. They have all taken a distance from their own families and view the family structure with scepticism.52 Interestingly, given the influence of the Catholic Church on family and marital values, Paltineau discovered no pattern between relationship status and voluntary childlessness, since the women she interviewed were found to have a variety of relationships with men, and to have different approaches to those relationships. Likewise, Debest shows that half of voluntarily childless men and women in France are in long-term relationships and that only two thirds of those who are not in long-term relationships isolate this as a factor that contributes to their decision. She also discerns a ‘distancing of oneself from the traditional couple’ among the voluntarily childless, ‘whose guiding principles seem to be personal development and freedom’.53 The only factor that Paltineau isolates as a common trait among the voluntarily childless women in her study is, surprisingly perhaps, their reluctance to talk to their partners about their lack of desire for children.54 51 Kelly, ‘Women’s Voluntary Childlessness: A Radical Rejection of Motherhood?’, 162. 52 Paltineau, Femmes sans enfants: Enquête sur le refus de maternité des femmes de trente à cinquante ans, 79. 53 Debest, Le Choix d’une vie sans enfant, 48, 51. 54 Paltineau, Femmes sans enfants: Enquête sur le refus de maternité des femmes de trente à cinquante ans, 81.


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In polar opposition to the American studies that isolate professional situation as a factor, Paltineau’s study discerns no connection between labour force participation and voluntary childlessness. Two particularly salient elements of her findings are worthy of mention here; first, the professional positions of the childless women interviewed were ‘more often unstable and precarious and […] they associate this lack of stability with their non-desire for children’.55 Several interviewees claimed that their work was either insufficiently stable or insufficiently paid to permit them the financial freedom to start a family. Second, nearly all of the women interviewed work with children. While this may be a coincidence, Paltineau suggests that ‘this choice, whether it is perceived to be a choice or not, is not insignificant’.56 Debest’s study finds that the voluntarily childless in France have higher levels of education and are more likely to be employed in high-level positions, but also cautions against a facile connection between childlessness and professional ambition. She shows that seventy per cent of her interviewees follow a professional path that she terms ‘non-linear’; these individuals had taken career breaks, had changed their profession or had retrained, for example, rather than adhering to one, unitary path to professional success. Such indicators point to individuals who feel more able to make independent, autonomous choices in their personal and professional lives and who are enabled by their family and relationship statuses to do so. Explanations The second central theme that may be discerned in research into voluntarily childless women is the explanations for their choice. In most studies conducted, researchers interviewed a sample of women about their demographic situation to isolate the factors that may predict childlessness, as

55 Paltineau, Femmes sans enfants: Enquête sur le refus de maternité des femmes de trente à cinquante ans, 85. 56 Paltineau, Femmes sans enfants: Enquête sur le refus de maternité des femmes de trente à cinquante ans, 86.

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discussed above, and interrogated them upon their explanations of their choice. As Amy Blackstone and Mahala Dyer Stewart identify, these include both macro-level social developments, such as women’s participation in the workforce and the influence of feminist thought, and micro-level ideas such as women’s individual desire for independence.57 One of the earliest researchers into childlessness, Sharon Houseknecht, found in a major study in 1987 that the main reason advanced by voluntarily childless women was ‘freedom from childcare responsibility and greater opportunity for self- fulfillment and spontaneous mobility’.58 Houseknecht reports that 79 per cent of women mentioned this as a major factor in their decision. Such an explanation recurs in many studies, including more recent reports, such as by Gillespie in 2003 and by Carmichael and Whittaker in 2007.59 Women mention frequently that their choice not to reproduce affords them more independence in their personal lives, more opportunities in their professional lives and fewer constraints upon their relationships, particularly with their partners. While notions of freedom are undoubtedly significant, Shapiro adds an important note of caution to this debate. She argues that, ‘the central focus on “freedom” as a motivating factor is problematic because […] the rhetoric has been used as ammunition for an attack on voluntarily childless women as “selfish”, where in fact, a sizeable minority of women do not have children for – or at least portray their decision to be

57 58

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Amy Blackstone and Mahala Dyer Stewart, ‘Choosing to be Childfree: Research on the Decision not to Parent’, Sociology School Faculty Scholarship Paper 5. accessed April 15 2015. Houseknecht’s early work includes ‘Childlessness and Marital Adjustment’, Journal of Marriage and the Family 41 (1979), 259–65. The study referred to here appeared in Sharon K. Houseknecht, ‘Voluntary Childlessness’, in Marvin B. Sussman and Suzanne K. Steinmetz, eds, Handbook of Marriage and the Family (New York: Plenum Press, 1987), 369–95, 377. Rosemary Gillespie, ‘Childfree and Feminine: Understanding the Gender Identity of Voluntarily Childless Women’, Gender & Society 17 (2003), 122–36. Gordon Carmichael and Andrea Whittaker, ‘Choice and Circumstance: Qualitative Insights into Contemporary Childlessness in Australia’, European Journal of Population 23/2 (2007), 111–43.


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due to – altruistic reasons’.60 Shapiro’s point is well taken; an emphasis on freedom may signal the positive impact of feminist thought and progress in women’s lived experience, but may also inadvertently reinforce negative stereotypes of the childless woman as selfish, hedonistic or narcissistic. Freedom as an explanation for voluntary childlessness is the subject of an important study by Helen Peterson, who interrogates this phenomenon in the Swedish context. Asking her voluntarily childless participants to articulate what they mean by ‘freedom’, Peterson finds that their explanations fall into two categories. The first is a positive discourse of freedom that emphasises the individual’s agency over their everyday lives and becomes part of a deeper narrative of identity. The second is a more negative understanding of the term, based upon freedom from the ‘risk’ of having children; these women see motherhood as dangerous insofar as it purportedly involves being shackled into a role and imposes limitations upon one’s freedom. Peterson concludes that ‘freedom is not a gender neutral category but a typical characteristic of masculinity’ and that ‘the stereotype about selfishness is based on an understanding of independence, autonomy and freedom as utterly unfeminine characteristics, needs and behaviors’.61 The notion of gendered expectations of behaviour, and Shapiro’s reference to altruistic reasons, point to another recurrent element among the explanations for voluntary childlessness: the notion that it would be irresponsible towards oneself, towards a child or towards the Earth to reproduce. Several studies show that women advance concerns for the environment and the future of the planet, including the risks of overpopulation, as reasons for choosing childlessness. Some studies also underscore voluntarily childless women’s reluctance to reproduce due to their perceived inability to be a good parent; whether for reasons of physical or mental health, socio-economic status or life stage, women frequently mention their lack of belief in their ability to mother well as a major part of their explanation.62

60 Shapiro, ‘Voluntary Childlessness: A Critical Review of the Literature’, 6. 61 Helen Peterson, ‘Fifty Shades of Freedom: Voluntary Childlessness as Women’s Ultimate Liberation’, Women’s Studies International Forum (2014), 1–10, 8. 62 Kelly, ‘Women’s Voluntary Childlessness: A Radical Rejection of Motherhood?’, 196.

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A common factor in all of these explanations is a rejection of the stereotype of selfishness that can be levelled against the voluntarily childless and the hint that individuals who have children without confronting such ideas – especially those that may affect their ability to parent effectively – could be more equally accurately labelled as selfish. Importantly, Houseknecht pointed out in 1987 that women often explain their choice using ‘an acceptable vocabulary of motives previously established by the historical epoch and the social structure in which one lives’.63 Hopefully the choice to use what may be referred to loosely as ‘socially acceptable reasons’ is a result of the long-standing taboo of voicing voluntary childlessness. The freer expression of such non-desire may change the terms in which it takes place. Several explanations occur more infrequently in research studies but are no less significant. Some women state a discomfort with the experience of pregnancy and childbirth, for example. Others cite financial advantages, especially given the rising costs of medical facilities, schooling and tertiary education. In opposition, perhaps, to the predilection for socially acceptable explanations outlined above is that some women testify in interviews to a general dislike of children. Gillespie notes that this explanation is relatively rare, since most respondents emphasise their close relationships with other people’s children.64 It is also important to recognise that voluntarily childless women often give different explanations for their choice as the course of their life changes. Moreover, their desire or non-desire may also fluctuate. Gayle Letherby and Catherine Williams, for example, underscore the fallacy of the stereotype that all childless women have decided definitively not to become mothers and highlight instead the ambivalence that some women experience.65 In the French context, the explanations advanced by participants in Paltineau’s and Debest’s investigations show slight differences from those outlined above. Their respondents also mention freedom from time constraints, responsibilities and, in Debest’s study, the duty to protect 63 Houseknecht, ‘Voluntary Childlessness’, 376. 64 Gillespie, ‘Childfree and Feminine: Understanding the Gender Identity of Voluntarily Childless Women’. 65 Gayle Letherby and Catherine Williams, ‘Non-Motherhood: Ambivalent Autobiographies’, Feminist Studies 25/3 (1999), 719–28, 720.


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others. Debest’s participants show a greater concern for what she calls ‘existential responsibility’: the act of bringing into the world an individual who did not choose to be born.66 She also isolates a reluctance to educate children and a disdain for those who enter into parenthood without having reflected upon the necessary lifestyle changes that it engenders. Paltineau discerns a greater repulsion to pregnancy, as all of the participants in her study mentioned this and in terms which lead Paltineau to conclude that ‘pregnancy is approached as an almost paranormal state’.67 Some participants in Paltineau’s interviews declared themselves ‘childlike women’ and spoke of their ‘little girl side’ that discourages them from procreating.68 A general dislike for children is also more prevalent in Paltineau’s study, which suggests that women may feel more comfortable voicing such a feeling now than they did in the time of Houseknecht’s study. Paltineau also notes that participants in her study give explanations for their choice that identify them as ‘more open in their outlook’ and that, connected to this, ‘spontaneity plays a greater role in their lives’.69 Such motivations thus point to a desire for freedom from what appears to the interviewees in both studies to be a constraining lifestyle and model of parenting in France. Subversion of Stereotypes As Blackstone and Stewart show, ‘by and large, early studies tended to frame voluntary childlessness as a form of deviance’.70 Myra Hird indicates that such studies may even serve to reinforce stereotypes of voluntary

66 Debest, Le Choix d’une vie sans enfant, 131. 67 Paltineau, Femmes sans enfants: Enquête sur le refus de maternité des femmes de trente à cinquante ans, 84. 68 Paltineau, Femmes sans enfants: Enquête sur le refus de maternité des femmes de trente à cinquante ans, 84. 69 Paltineau, Femmes sans enfants: Enquête sur le refus de maternité des femmes de trente à cinquante ans, 96. 70 Blackstone and Stewart, ‘Choosing to be Childfree: Research on the Decision not to Parent’, 2.

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childlessness by positing motherhood as a norm and childlessness as a deviation from this.71 More recently, particularly in the 2000s, research has moved away from a focus on the predictors of and the explanation for childlessness and has instead asked questions related more directly to its consequences. Chancey and Dumais’s study of stigmatisation of the voluntarily childless concludes that ‘stereotypes of the childfree held by the general population have been fairly consistent since the late 1970s, and they tend to be largely negative’.72 A number of researchers are engaged in studies that aim implicitly to offer correctives to these assumptions by portraying a different perspective on the voluntarily childless. Perhaps the most obvious stereotype levelled at those who choose not to have children is, as mentioned above, that of selfishness. Veevers in the 1970s and more recently Park and Gemma Carey, Melissa Graham, Julia Shelley and Ann Taket have all found that childless women are often considered hedonistic, irresponsible, individualistic and immature.73 They are also viewed as less natural, less nurturing and less emotionally connected to others, often because they are assumed to be more interested in their careers and their financial advancement. Likewise, they are suspected of a more narcissistic approach to relationships and of higher promiscuity. Predictably perhaps, some women in interviews acknowledge their selfishness (albeit often in a critical way, such as ‘I’m very free to come and go as I please, a bit selfish I suppose in a way’) whereas others proclaim that parenting is ultimately a selfish choice.74 Burkett goes so far as to argue in The Baby Boon that the voluntarily childless are suspected of cheating society and 71

Myra J. Hird, ‘Vacant Wombs: Feminist challenges to Psychoanalytic Theories of Childless Women’, Feminist Review 75 (2003), 5–19. 72 Laurie Chancey and Susan A. Dumais, ‘Voluntary Childlessness in Marriage and Family Textbooks, 1950–2000’, Journal of Family History 34/2 (2009), 206–23, 208. 73 Gemma Carey, Melissa Graham, Julia Shelley and Ann Taket, ‘Discourse, Power and Exclusion: The Experiences of Childless Women’, in Ann Taket, Beth R. Crisp, Annemarie Nevill, Greer Lamaro, Melissa Graham, and Sarah Barter-Godfrey, eds, Theorizing Social Exclusion (New York: Routledge, 2009), 127–33. Kristen Park, ‘Stigma Management among the Voluntarily Childless’, Sociological Perspectives 45/1 (2002), 21–45. Veevers, ‘Voluntary Childlessness: A Neglected Area of Family Study’. 74 McAllister and Clarke, Choosing Childlessness, n.p.


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becoming a burden to the system, especially as they age.75 Interestingly, Mueller and Yoder interrogated women with children regarding their opinions of childless women and found that they viewed the childless as having unhappy and unrewarding lives.76 As Mueller and Yoder’s study suggests, one of the major stereotypes of the voluntarily childless is that there is something wrong with them. This can stem from physical, emotional or mental issues; they may be perceived as maladjusted, abnormal, unhappily married or insufficiently developed to reproduce. To view this from another angle, Shapiro even discerns ‘an agenda to problematize voluntary childlessness as detrimental to a woman’s emotional and physical health in order to “control” her body’.77 Such a discourse of persuasion is also at the root of another major stereotype: that women who claim not to want children will do so eventually. Campbell and Gillespie both cite evidence of women who have requested sterilisation and who have been refused by doctors who expected them to change their minds.78 Linked to this notion of women as insufficiently equipped to make decisions and accept the consequences of them is the suspicion of regret. The voluntarily childless often complain in research studies that others have suggested that they will one day be regretful and, in keeping with the pattern I discern here, researchers are calling attention to this stereotype and problematising its validity. They point to the higher scores of ‘well-being’ among childless people compared to parents, for example.79 They also question the category of regret itself. Carolyn Morell, for instance, argues that her interviewees did not experience regret but a more 75 Burkett, The Baby Boon: How Family-Friendly America Cheats the Childless. 76 Karla Ann Mueller and Janice D. Yoder, ‘Gender Norms for Family Size, Employment, and Occupation: Are There Personal Costs for Violating Them?’, Sex Roles 36/3–4 (1997), 207–20. 77 Shapiro, ‘Voluntary Childlessness: A Critical Review of the Literature’, 8. 78 Annily Campbell, Childfree and Sterilized: Women’s Decisions and Medical Responses (London: Cassell, 2000). Gillespie, ‘Childfree and Feminine: Understanding the Gender Identity of Voluntarily Childless Women’. 79 Sherryl Jeffries and Candace Konnert, ‘Regret and Psychological Well-Being Among Voluntarily and Involuntarily Childless Women and Mothers’, International Journal of Aging and Human Development 54/2 (2002), 89–106.

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philosophical engagement with the course of their lives; they felt ‘“wistful” feelings, or unsettling “rumblings”, or “twinges” of doubt, or “passing thoughts” about the road not taken’.80 Rather than finding themselves in a position of disempowerment due to their decision, these women are instead presented as reflective upon their life experience, as we shall see in the literary expressions studied in this book. One of the most interesting elements of recent studies of voluntary childlessness is how researchers are uncovering strategies that women use to transform, deflect or rebuff these stereotypes. In her review of this literature, Kelly discerns six strategies offered by interviewees in research studies to combat stereotypical accusations.81 First, she finds that they engage in what she terms ‘passing’: a way of avoiding the issue by suggesting that they may have children in the future, leading interlocutors to believe that their desire for children is alive and well but has not yet been realised. Second is ‘identity substitution’, according to which women who are voluntarily childless lead others to believe that they are childless due to infertility. The dishonesty inherent in these two strategies is concerning and will hopefully be remedied by greater acceptance of expressions of non-desire in the future. The remaining strategies point towards such a movement, since they range from candid to aggressive. The third strategy is the ‘condemning of the condemnors’, as women claim their decision is unselfish compared to the selfish act of parents. Fourth, women aim to ‘redefine the situation’ by engaging ideas about motherhood and the perceived need for all women to enter into it. Fifth is the use of humour, such as one woman who deflected the awkwardness of the question by replying: ‘Oh yes, we had kids but we sold them so we could travel’.82 Finally, some proclaim openly that they have no maternal instinct as a justification for their lack of desire. Turning to the situation in France, Paltineau and Debest concur with the Anglo-American research to suggest that, at the present time, the stereotypes to which voluntarily childless women are subjected are numerous.

80 Morell, Unwomanly Conduct: The Challenges of Intentional Childlessness, 100. 81 Kelly, ‘Women’s Voluntary Childlessness: A Radical Rejection of Motherhood?’, 168. 82 Morell, Unwomanly Conduct: The Challenges of Intentional Childlessness, 57.


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These studies argue that voluntarily childless women are assumed to be unable to maintain long-term relationships with men, to have difficult relationships with their families, to be obsessed with work, to dislike all children, to have questionable morals, to be frivolous, to feel a gap in their lives which they need to fill with replacement activities, and to reject all forms of mothering. Debest in particular highlights that French women are accused of dubious values and sexual practices. She quotes women who affirm, for example, that ‘after a while, you pass for a slut’ and she argues that ‘refusing to be a mother amounts to permitting oneself an exclusively non-reproductive, uncontrollable sexuality that is beyond gender norms’.83 Such representations of voluntary childlessness are troubling, especially given the specifically sexual character of stereotyping in France that is found in these studies. Sadly, it appears that France may be lagging behind several other countries in terms of the acceptability of the choice not to mother, which makes the need for circulation of narratives such as those studied in this book all the more pressing. Gendered Identity In addition to the subversion of stereotypes, another recent trend that can be discerned in studies of voluntarily childless women is the questioning of assumptions surrounding female identity. The title of Myra Hird and Kimberly Abshoff ’s 2000 article ‘Women Without Children: A Contradiction in Terms?’ succinctly summarises this development.84 Especially at a time at which discourse over motherhood is reaching problematic levels, these researchers suggest that it is imperative to rethink the connection between femininity and maternity. Kelly shows that many voluntarily childless women feel stereotyped as unfeminine, although this is more common in those who are involuntarily

83 Debest, Le Choix d’une vie sans enfant, 105, 106. 84 Myra J. Hird and Kimberly Abshoff, ‘Women Without Children: A Contradiction in Terms?’, Journal of Comparative Family Studies 31/3 (2000), 347–66.

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childless.85 Most women in her study who had chosen not to mother report that they refuse such categorisation and feel no less feminine than women with children. Gillespie’s important 2003 study surveyed twentyfive women specifically on their understanding of their gendered identity, probing how they experience the relationship between their non-mothering and their female identity.86 Based upon interviews with women from across social groups in the early twenty-first century, Gillespie’s study finds that a new grouping of women has emerged: those who establish voluntary childlessness as ‘a more radical rejection or push away from motherhood as a normative female gender marker’.87 Gillespie quotes women who state that they have a different understanding of femininity to that experienced by mothers and who resist the hegemonic ideas of femininity that have been reinforced by pronatalist discourse. She claims that, in this way, voluntarily childless women ‘reflect a radical departure from hegemonic understandings that to be a woman is inextricably bound to motherhood’ and argues that the increasing numbers of women who choose not to mother will establish a new model of female identity that does not rest upon reproduction. More recent nation-specific studies have taken up Gillespie’s call for the rethinking of voluntarily childless women’s gendered identity. In the Australian context, Stephanie Rich, Ann Taket, Melissa Graham and Julia Shelley studied a sample of childless women and found them to be critical of current models of femininity.88 These women claimed to feel undervalued, invisible and misunderstood, and to be perceived as unnatural or unwomanly by the pronatalist society in which they lived. Nevertheless, the women reported that they identify as female or feminine and develop

85 Kelly, ‘Women’s Voluntary Childlessness: A Radical Rejection of Motherhood?’, 167. 86 Gillespie, ‘Childfree and Feminine: Understanding the Gender Identity of Voluntarily Childless Women’. 87 Gillespie, ‘Childfree and Feminine: Understanding the Gender Identity of Voluntarily Childless Women’, 133. 88 Stephanie Rich, Ann Taket, Melissa Graham and Julia Shelley, ‘“Unnatural”, “Unwomanly”, “Uncreditable” and “Undervalued”: The Significance of Being a Childless Woman in Australian Society’, Gender Issues 28/4 (2011), 226–47.


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a position ‘affirming the naturalness of their childlessness’.89 In Sweden, Peterson and Kristina Engwall carried out two studies of women who identify as childfree, stating as their premise that the body has been largely overlooked in research into the voluntarily childless.90 By asking their participants specifically to address questions over their bodies and their female identity in relation to their childlessness, Peterson and Engwall find that ‘voluntary childlessness can be understood as an embodied experience and that the body plays an important part in a discursively constituted childfree identity’.91 The participants invariably identified the sources of their non- desire for children as interior, located within their bodies. They contrasted this with the experiences of women who long for children and claimed to understand that this innate, biological desire emanates from within these women’s bodies too; in their own cases, however, they express no sensation of a biological clock and instead express what Peterson and Engwall term ‘silent bodies’. Importantly, although their bodies did not ‘speak’ to them about a desire for children, most were reluctant to undergo sterilisation in case the ‘conversation’ with their bodies changed over time.92 The risk of such conclusions is that they risk falling into biological essentialism, since they posit nature as the source of a woman’s biological destiny. Yet, as Peterson and Engwall argue, this study has important implications for the gendered identity of the voluntarily childless: The notion of the ‘silent body’ reflects women’s essentialist desires but also their embodied resistance to ‘nature’. The naturally childfree position allows the childfree women to recognize and accept the biological reproductive urge simultaneously as they refuse it and detach themselves from it. […] The naturally childfree position

89 Rich, Taket, Graham and Shelley, ‘“Unnatural”, “Unwomanly”, “Uncreditable” and “Undervalued”: The Significance of Being a Childless Woman in Australian Society’, 243. 90 Helen Peterson and Kristina Engwall, ‘Silent Bodies: Childfree Women’s Gendered and Embodied Experiences’, European Journal of Women’s Studies 20 (2013), 376–89. 91 Peterson and Engwall, ‘Silent Bodies: Childfree Women’s Gendered and Embodied Experiences’, 379. 92 Peterson and Engwall, ‘Silent Bodies: Childfree Women’s Gendered and Embodied Experiences’, 386.

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Chapter 1 and the ‘silent body’ have transformative power to contest the meanings attached to womanhood and could increase freedom for women to experience womanhood in a variety of ways.93

Such research augurs new attention to the ways in which female identity and non-mothering may coalesce, to which this book aims to contribute by demonstrating the individual, self-reflexive accounts of identity produced by contemporary women authors. These women authors’ identity formations find little resonance in research carried out in France, however. Neither Debest nor Paltineau refer to the research discussed here, nor do they discuss their participants’ experience of femininity, femaleness or womanhood; this is less a criticism of their work and more a result of the state of research into this area within France. Both do, however, discuss the stereotypes surrounding the voluntarily childless in France and go to significant lengths to chart the stigmatisation that they experience as a consequence. In such a pronatalist society in which women rarely express the non-desire for children, these studies thus point to an important lacuna in understandings of female identity. One may hope that studies like those carried out in Australia and Sweden may also extend to France and may lead to alternative identity formations in the future. It is also to be hoped that progress will be made in the understanding of voluntarily childless women’s identities through France’s strong tradition of psychoanalytic enquiry, to which I now turn.

93

Peterson and Engwall, ‘Silent Bodies: Childfree Women’s Gendered and Embodied Experiences’, 387.

Chapter 2


It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it. –Sigmund Freud

This chapter builds upon the theoretical arguments of the preceding chapter by discussing specifically psychoanalytic theories of voluntary childlessness. The reasons for this particular attention to psychoanalysis are threefold. First, as the previous chapter shows, most of the research into voluntary childlessness to date is in the area of sociology, which has a specific disciplinary framework. The questions posed by psychoanalysts are of a different nature and refer to a different disciplinary history. Specifically, feminist psychoanalysts in the realm of voluntary childlessness build upon and contest Freud’s theories of female sexuality and the Oedipus complex, which I explicate in this chapter before discussing their ideas. Second, France has a specific psychoanalytic tradition. This is largely due to the influence of Jacques Lacan and his re-readings of Freud, which began as public lectures in the early 1950s and which exerted a profound influence on intellectuals in France in the 1960s and 1970s. Feminist intellectuals were among these, and French feminism in the 1970s developed a specifically psychoanalytic character. Many feminist scholars working in France write with this background of psychoanalytic approaches to sex and gender, and, as we shall see, this has influenced those working in the area of voluntary childlessness. Thirdly, the works of psychoanalytic feminists in France provide an alternative entry point into the voicing of voluntary childlessness. As opposed to the sociological works discussed in Chapter 1, which interpret surveys and interview data and present them as part of

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structured arguments, the psychoanalytic feminists usually include their full interviews with voluntarily childless women. In this way, their texts offer further examples of the tapestry of reflections by voluntarily childless women in the first-person. This chapter therefore aims to present psychoanalytic theories of voluntary childlessness from Freud to the present day and to locate the terms of feminist psychoanalytic debate in this area. It also aims to give voice to the voluntarily childless women who form the subjects of the psychoanalysis. Overall, the aim of Part I, comprising the sociological, feminist and psychoanalytic theories of Chapters 1 and 2, provides a historical and contemporary backdrop to the individual case studies of Part II. In this chapter, I look at the place – or lack of place – of the voluntarily childless woman in Freudian psychoanalysis before examining more recent theories by feminist psychoanalysts. Freud’s view of normal individual social development draws an enforced connection between women and reproduction; according to Freud’s theory, a woman cannot develop normally if she escapes maternity. Feminist opposition to the bias in Freud’s arguments is now well known, since scholars such as Juliet Mitchell, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Karen Horney have long pointed to how his theories on the Oedipus complex concentrate upon an idea of normal development that is fairly straightforward for the male yet far more problematic for the female. The place of the voluntarily childless woman in Freudian psychoanalysis is even more problematic than that of a ‘normal’ woman. Involuntarily childless women have been the subject of many studies in psychoanalysis, such as by Jane Haynes and Juliet Miller, Joan RaphaelLeff and Dinora Pines.1 Yet, as Sheila O’Sullivan states, little attention has been paid by psychoanalysis to the experience of voluntary childlessness 1

Jane Haynes and Juliet Miller, eds, Inconceivable Conceptions: Psychological Aspects of Infertility and Reproductive Technology (Hove and New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2003). Joan Raphael-Leff, ‘The Casket and the Key: Thoughts on Gender and Generativity’, in Joan Raphael-Leff and Rosine J. Perelberg, eds, Female Experience: Three Generations of British Women Psychoanalysts on Work with Women (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 237–25. Dinora Pines, A Woman’s Unconscious Use of Her Body (London: Virago, 1993).


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and, especially when compared to the more frequent studies in the area of sociology, this appears to be a veritable lacuna in psychoanalytic theory.2 Following this discussion of the voluntary childlessness in the history of psychoanalysis, this chapter concentrates on two examples of psychoanalytic approaches to voluntary childlessness in France. The focus of this chapter is a comparison of Isabelle Tilmant’s Ces femmes qui n’ont pas d’enfants: La Découverte d’une autre fécondité [Women Who Do Not Have Children: The Discovery of Another Fecundity] and Edith Vallée’s Pas d’enfant, dit-elle: les refus de la maternité [No Children, She Says: The Refusal of Maternity] as feminist interrogations into the rejection of motherhood according to a psychoanalytic framework.3

The Tragedy of Childlessness in Freudian Development Freud did not interrogate voluntary childlessness in any overt manner. The reason for this is that his theory of female development is based upon the connection between womanhood and reproduction, and this may be a further reason why these two notions are so closely linked in current discourse. Indeed, much of Freud’s writings on female development are based upon what he viewed as women’s unconscious desire for a child. In his seminal 1931 essay Female Sexuality, Freud argues that whereas boys’ development occurs almost spontaneously, girls go through a longer pre-Oedipal stage in which they must accept their lack of a penis and understand that their 2

3

Sheila O’Sullivan, ‘The Inextricable Link Between Motherhood and Femininity – Has Psychoanalysis Perpetuated This View?’ Contemporary Psychotherapy 4/2 (2012) accessed 15 March 2015. Isabelle Tilmant, Ces femmes qui n’ont pas d’enfants: la découverte d’une autre fécondité (Brussels: De Boeck, 2010) ; and Edith Vallée, Pas d’enfant, dit-elle: les refus de la maternité (Paris: Imago, 2005). Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses after the quotation.

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genital zone is centred not on the clitoris but on the vagina.4 The girl’s penis envy will lead her to turn away from the mother and towards the father, the owner of the penis. Resolution to the pre-Oedipal stage may take place in any of three ways: The first leads to a general revulsion from sexuality. The little girl, frightened by the comparison with boys, grows dissatisfied with her clitoris, and gives up her phallic activity and with it her sexuality in general as well as a good part of her masculinity in other fields. The second line leads her to cling with defiant self-assertiveness to her threatened masculinity. She clings to the hope of becoming a man (getting a penis). The third path leads to the final normal female attitude, in which she takes her father as her object and so finds a way to the feminine form of the Oedipus complex.5

The first way, then, is for the girl to renounce her sexuality through the fear that comparison with boys arouses in her. The second is for her to maintain her desire for a penis, which leads to a masculinity complex. Only in the final way does she succeed in normal development, by embracing her father, the possessor of the penis. She forsakes her mother and wishes for a baby from her father to compensate for her own lack of a penis. In Freud’s model, then, normality is equated with motherhood; the girl achieves normal development by accepting her biological function as the core of her identity and desires a child to replace a lack (that is, of the penis). Reproduction is thus the aim of the normal woman, who has developed in a heterosexual framework and who will transfer her desire from her father to a man with whom she will reproduce, and who has moved the site of her genital zone from clitoris to vagina to aid this reproductive process. The woman who chooses to overlook her biological function by privileging either of the first two options is therefore anything but normal. She has either renounced her sexuality through fear or she clings to her clitoris in her desire for a penis. In this theory, the woman who chooses not to mother is not just abnormal but irrevocably deviant; she has failed to follow 4 5

Sigmund Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XXI, trans. James Strachey with Anna Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1931), 229–30. Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’, 229.


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normal development and is thus socially unequipped, mal-adjusted and unnatural. By refusing the ‘nature’ of her biological function, she renders herself unable to access full adult status. The woman who refuses motherhood is thus to be suspected of incomplete development, persistent lack or unresolved issues. As Hird summarises, ‘childless women are inferentially excluded from adulthood. The presumptions that parenthood is instinctual, founded on human physiology (rather than a product of stringent institutional control, pro-natalist policy and ideological presumptions about gender, the body and sexuality) pathologises women who choose not to have children’.6 One may easily see the ways in which Freudian theory has impacted upon attitudes towards motherhood in the twentieth century, as the connection between maternity and femininity is ingrained as an essential element of ‘normality’. Fortunately, feminist psychoanalytic theory challenges the interpretation of key concepts of Freudian theory and these interventions have important implications for the voluntarily childless woman.

Representations of Childlessness Post-Freud During the period in which he was writing, one of the most outspoken critics of Freud’s work was Karen Horney. Although she adhered to Freud’s models in many ways, her work on female development deviated from his teaching significantly. Her essays amassed in the 1967 collection Feminine Psychology show her rejection of the assumption that women should be defined in relation to men and question penis envy as the root of female development.7 Contrary to Freud’s claim, she advanced that penis envy, where it exists, is a result of the girl’s desire for the status of the male, not

6 7

Hird, ‘Vacant Wombs: Feminist Challenges to Psychoanalytic Theories of Childless Women’, 9. Karen Horney, Feminine Psychology (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1967).

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for his penis. In this sense, the desire for the penis was more concerned with a desire for freedom. By contrast, Horney questioned male development through her concept of ‘womb envy’; according to this theory, males are driven to success through their envy of women’s ability to reproduce. Horney’s theory is thus based upon a rejection of biology as destiny, which could open up possibilities for greater understanding of the voluntarily childless female subject. Nevertheless, Horney also argued that women derive their identities in large part from their roles as mothers and wrote of women who had overcome their penis envy through their wish for a child. Much psychoanalytic theory of this time is predicated upon parenthood as a necessary part of normal development. More recently, however, several theorists have proposed alternatives to Freud’s model of female development and specifically to the supposed requirement of parenthood in order for a woman to achieve emotional maturity. A sample of these are summarised in the text of the proceedings of the Annual Meeting of American Psychoanalytic Association in 1974, prepared by Henri Parens and published as ‘Parenthood as a Developmental Phase’.8 According to Parens’ narrative, Irwin Marcus opened the discussion by referring to recent trends in women’s professional activity and decisions over children, mentioning that some couples are ‘quite vocal about not desiring children at all, refer to themselves as “childfree”, not “childless”, and see their situation as a liberation not a lack’.9 He asked, ‘can adult maturity exist without motivating one toward parenthood? Does the absence of such motivation imply earlier personality disturbances, with the resultant inhibition of these maturational forces? Are there developmental aspects to marriage that must be studied separately from parenthood?’ and questions the ‘reliance on the psychosexual model for formulations of personality development’.10 Attention was thus accorded to the choice to remain childless – even using the expression ‘childfree’ – within psychoanalytic theory from the

8 9 10

Henri Parens, ‘Parenthood as a Developmental Phase’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 23 (1975), 154–65. Parens, ‘Parenthood as a Developmental Phase’, 155. Parens, ‘Parenthood as a Developmental Phase’, 155.


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id-1970s. Many of the papers presented appear, however, to align themselm ves with the notion of the necessity of parenthood for normal psychological development. Judith Kestenberg, for example, argued that the wish for a child is discernible among children under two of both sexes; although she claims that both girls and boys exhibit a specifically maternal instinct, there is no deviation in her theory from ‘the nature of these impulses’.11 William Thomas Moore theorised maternal behaviour as distinct from maternal desire, suggesting that biological instinct did not eventuate in consistent forms of behaviour in parents. His conclusion suggests a question over ‘whether there is an innate drive toward p arenthood’ but leaves that question unanswered.12 Therese Benedek’s concluding intervention begins with the premise that ‘we know that pregnancy is a very specific phase in every woman’s life’ and proceeds to question the stages of development but within the framework of motherhood as a universal female experience.13 In accordance with these findings, O’Sullivan points to the centrality of the mother in psychoanalytic theory, arguing that childless women have had little or no place in its interrogations. She notes in particular that even psychoanalysts who take an identifiably feminist approach to human development, such as Nancy Chodorow and Juliet Mitchell, still assumed that all women would be mothers.14 French psychoanalytic feminist theory came far closer to discussing voluntary childlessness. French feminist theorists famously critiqued Lacan, and Freud through him, for his insistence on a mode of development that placed the male at the centre and the female as deviant from this. Such feminist theorists hold that the self is constructed through discourse rather than through biological and psychological patterns, and that language needs 11 12 13 14

Pavens, ‘Parenthood as a Developmental Phase’, 157. Pavens, ‘Parenthood as a Developmental Phase’, 161. Pavens, ‘Parenthood as a Developmental Phase’, 161–2. O’Sullivan, ‘The Inextricable Link Between Motherhood and Femininity – Has Psychoanalysis Perpetuated This View?’, n.p. The texts on which O’Sullivan bases this argument are Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1978); and Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing and Women (New York: Pantheon, 1974).

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to be adapted in order to address gender discrimination. Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva are most often associated with this form of criticism and, although their problematic connection with the term ‘French feminism’ is well known, they provide a snapshot of the place of the childless woman within psychoanalytic theory. Cixous in ‘Le Rire de la méduse’ [The Laugh of the Medusa] argues that women are trapped in a phallogocentric system that is based upon myths of female identity.15 She points to the exclusion of women from the cultural imaginary through a binary logic that prevents the development of female subjectivity. In order to rectify this error, she famously proposed ‘écriture féminine’ [feminine writing]; women must write their bodies, their sexuality and their desire in order to achieve liberation, she argued. Fell highlights that this form of writing is ‘inextricably bound up with women’s unconscious relation to the maternal’16 since Cixous’s theory is closely associated with the pre-Oedipal phase and includes repeated references to motherhood, such as ‘there is always within her at least a little of that good mother’s milk. She writes in white ink’.17 In La Venue à l’écriture [Coming to Writing], Cixous even likens writing to giving birth, which, as we shall see, many of the writers studied in this book refute.18 While Cixous writes in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa, ‘Either you want a kid or you don’t – that’s your business’ and her analyses point to the need for women to assume their individual and unique identities to liberate themselves, motherhood is a clear tenet of her theory.19 Irigaray, by contrast, takes a different approach to the question of women’s psychoanalytic conditioning. Her objective in works such as Et l’une ne bouge pas comme l’autre [And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other] is to expose the way in which the Lacanian symbolic order consigns women

15 Hélène Cixous, ‘Le Rire de la méduse’, L’Arc 61 (1975), 39–54. 16 Fell, Liberty, Equality, Maternity in Beauvoir, Leduc and Ernaux, 25. 17 Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1/4 (1976), 875–93, 881. 18 Hélène Cixous, Annie Leclerc and Madeleine Gagnon, La Venue à l’écriture (Paris: U.G.E, 1977). 19 Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, 890, emphasis in original.


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to inferiority.20 She emphasises the difficulties experienced by women in separating from their mothers as a consequence of this. She argues that ‘mother–daughter relationships in patrilineal societies are subordinate to relations between men’ and calls for other patterns of mother–daughter relationships to counter this.21 Irigaray’s theory of female development is thus a radical departure from Freudian analysis, since it supposes a rethinking of the paradigms of psychoanalysis in order to correct its denigration of the female. In proclaiming the need for a re-thinking of the role of the maternal function in psychoanalysis and of the model that connects femininity to maternity, Irigaray opens up possibilities for voluntary childlessness, although she does not present this phenomenon overtly in her work. Hird argues convincingly, however, that the universal aspect of Irigaray’s theory, that is her essentialist notion of ‘parler femme’ [womanspeak] that claims to be relevant to all women, is problematic for the childless woman. Hird shows that Irigaray’s essentialism leads to definitional problems. She summarises that, for Irigaray, ‘female sexuality is plural, emanating from vagina, uterus, breasts and so on. So we have a set of body organs and surfaces from which women’s essence originates’.22 Hird asks whether individuals who do not have or have not used these organs and surfaces may also be defined as women: ‘What if these individuals were combined into one individual: a person without children or the experience of pregnancy, without inner labia, clitoris or breasts. Is this person a woman?’.23 Hird thus finds that, by failing to define woman in a way that resists anatomy and the biological function of reproduction, Irigaray’s theory has little to offer for an understanding of the voluntarily childless.

20 Luce Irigaray, Et l’une ne bouge pas comme l’autre (Paris: Minuit, 1979). Irigaray, ‘And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other’, trans. Hélène V. Wenzel, Signs 7/1 (1981), 60–7. 21 Luce Irigaray, Je, tu, nous (Paris: Grasset, 1990), 19. 22 Hird, ‘Vacant Wombs: Feminist Challenges to Psychoanalytic Theories of Childless Women’, 13. 23 Hird, ‘Vacant Wombs: Feminist Challenges to Psychoanalytic Theories of Childless Women’, 13.

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Kristeva’s theorisations constitute a radical approach to the identity and function of the mother. The relationship between the mother and the child is a crucial component of her theory of the semiotic; her critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis is based upon this element of child development, which occurs in the pre-Oedipal stage prior to the acquisition of language and the consequential access to the symbolic. This stage is marked by indistinct boundaries between mother and child, hence the semiotic must be repressed for the child to separate from the mother and enter the realm of the symbolic. As Fell summarises, ‘maternity is thus the site of the semiotic and the precondition of the symbolic; mothers function, at least in Western Christian culture, as guarantors of and threats to the stability of the social subject’.24 Kristeva thus gives considerable power to the figure of the mother who holds the potential to threaten and to destabilise the social order. Furthermore, she points to the individual experiences of mothers in her essay ‘Stabat Mater’, in which she juxtaposes two texts, one theoretical and one autobiographical. In the theoretical, she argues that traditional, patriarchal understandings of motherhood in Western cultures underscores the inferior role accorded to women. She advances that the pervasive power of the cult of the Virgin Mary has led to delimiting constructions of maternity and that such representations are still difficult to reject. Yet she questions whether this power is as strong as it once was and calls for a new formulation to replace that of the Virgin Mary. In the autobiographical piece, Kristeva writes of her own experience of childbirth and of her ‘childhood regained […] an opaque dream that holds me fast in my mother’s bed and propels him, a son […] Alone: she, I and he’.25 In this sense, she underscores the individual experience of motherhood and avoids the essentialism of which other theorists, including Cixous and Irigaray, have been accused. Indeed, Kristeva’s theory is more historically grounded as she pays attention to the ways in which motherhood has been constructed in discourse over time. She is well known for her rejection of

24 Fell, Liberty, Equality, Maternity in Beauvoir, Leduc and Ernaux, 28. 25 Julia Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, tr. Arthur Goldhammer, Poetics Today 6/1–2 (1985), 133–52, 142.


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the term ‘woman’ as an essentialising category and extends this thinking to the essentialising of the mother. As such, although the figure of the mother permeates her theory, her work is far more open to the experiences of individual women and individual mothers. Such attention to individual desire and experience suggests the potential for a greater understanding of non-mothers, although she does not go far as to broach this topic overtly. The interrogation of childlessness was not to become a topic of investigation in psychoanalytic theory in any substantial way until the 1990s. Psychotherapist Rozsika Parker’s landmark Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence (1995, republished in 2010) is highly critical of the facile link made between female development and reproduction within psychoanalysis.26 Parker complains that, in the western world, women live ‘within a culture which represents the postnatal mother-child social relationship as if it replicated the intrauterine state of antenatal union’.27 Such an approach may augur greater attention to the choice to remain childlessness within psychoanalysis. Similarly, Hird has recently called for inquiry into the position of childless women within psychoanalysis, and in a radical way. She points to Judith Butler’s theory of gender as a transformative performance and suggests that childless women may embody exactly this notion. They perform, Hird suggests, a refusal of several fundamental notions of gender identity and, crucially, they disrupt the logic according to which women’s identity is based upon their opposition to that of men; ‘If male gender identity is founded on the negation of a female gender identity (that of woman-mother) then childless women threaten the stability of male gender identity’.28 Leading on from this, Hird cautions against the way in which many recent studies of childlessness are rooted in a politics of inclusion. She suggests that attempts to include childless women in the group of women, that is to say trying to forge a notion of femininity that does not depend upon reproduction, is potentially hazardous. On one 26 Rozsika Parker, Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence (London: Virago Press, 2010). 27 Parker, Torn in Two, 43–4. 28 Hird, ‘Vacant Wombs: Feminist Challenges to Psychoanalytic Theories of Childless Women’, 15.

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level, she points out that any politics of inclusion risks handing power to the includer rather than to the included or the excluded. On another level, she suggests that ‘if childless women offer a radical possibility, it is surely not to be found in a politics of inclusion, but rather precisely in our positioning as deviant, outside the categories of “woman” and “man”. That is, if there is a radical potential, it is in the destabilizing of the ontological status of gender’.29 Such an intervention points to the possibilities of future progress on the place of childless women in contemporary culture. As yet, however, such aspirations remain at the level of optimistic will for future change. As O’Sullivan states, the challenging of the inferiority of women and particularly the overlooking of childless women will be a long process that cannot be divorced from the history of psychoanalytic, and especially Freudian, theories of normal development; she contends that ‘it is inevitable that psychotherapists in contemporary British society cannot avoid internalising the negative social attitudes towards childless women because these attitudes are part of the socio-cultural and political milieu in which we all live. The psychoanalytic literature, therefore, continues to reflect an inextricable link between motherhood and femininity’.30 Given the history of psychoanalysis and the Freudian normal development described above, it is perhaps unsurprising that psychoanalytic theory has not yet grappled in any substantial way with the phenomenon of childlessness. It is important to historicise the situation, since only in recent decades have women been awarded these choices through access to contraception; while this book argues that a lack of desire for children is not a new development, the freedom to choose and the expression of this choice certainly are, so cultural and scholarly attention to childlessness is inevitably recent. In addition, the mother is evidently such a crucial part of infant and child development that psychoanalysis has to be based upon her role to some extent. Parts of this bias are completely understandable,

29

Hird, ‘Vacant Wombs: Feminist Challenges to Psychoanalytic Theories of Childless Women’, 16. 30 O’Sullivan, ‘The Inextricable link between motherhood and femininity – has psychoanalysis perpetuated this view?’


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therefore, but interventions such as Hird’s and O’Sullivan’s testify to the disruptive potential of childless women to theoretical assumptions within psychoanalysis. In the remainder of this chapter, I compare two twentyfirst-century psychoanalytic works that perform such a movement.

Psychoanalytic Studies of the Voluntarily Childless A number of psychoanalysts in France have published results of their clinical work on the topic of mothering and many of these concentrate on problematic experiences of it. Jacques André and Catherine Chabert’s Désirs d’enfant [Desires for Children] focuses on the negative consequences of changing expectations of women and of mothering in contemporary culture, arguing that ‘political freedom is joyful, psychic freedom is harrowing. It is not enough to “have” a child; one must also desire it’.31 François Duparc and Martine Pichon discuss the psychological damage inflicted on women by the pressure associated with the pervasive discourses on mothering. Pichon reports that mothers in analysis frequently state simply that ‘everything is fine and nothing is fine, I don’t understand’ since the gaps between their experience of motherhood and maternal expectations are powerfully destabilising.32 Sophie Marinopoulos in Dans l’intime des mères [In Mother’s Intimate Lives] and with Israël Nisand in Elles accouchent et ne sont pas enceintes [They Give Birth but Are not Pregnant] writes of mothers who have ignored, neglected, abandoned or killed their children.33 Marinopoulos historicises these incidents, claiming that Western societies show a conscious 31 32 33

Jacques André and Catherine Chabert, eds, Désirs d’enfant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009), 12. François Duparc and Martine Pichon, eds, Les Nouvelles maternités au creux du divan (Paris: In Press, 2009), 192. Sophie Marinopoulos, Dans l’intime des mères (Paris: Fayard, 2005). Sophie Marinopoulos and Israël Nisand, Elles accouchent et ne sont pas enceintes (Paris: Les Liens qui libérent, 2011).

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desire to ignore the problems associated with motherhood by subsuming them within ‘these false debates on the maternal instinct, this myth of the good mother, that we bring out like a joker or a talisman when things are going badly’.34 Instead, she claims, ‘mothers suffer and do not say so. This is no revelation and each time period has constructed its own silence around this issue, confining an element of humanity to a universe without words’.35 Psychoanalytic approaches to voluntarily childless women remain relatively rare; as Geneviève Serre, Valérie Plard, Raphaël Riand and MarieRose Moro highlight.36 Examples of psychoanalytic studies include Nicole Stryckman’s 1993 work that interpreted the refusal of motherhood as a refusal of femininity and Caroline Eliacheff and Nathalie Heinich’s 2002 study that argued that voluntarily childless women had problematic relationships with their mothers.37 More recently, two book-length studies by practising psychoanalysts take voluntarily childless women as their subjects. Vallée’s Pas d’enfant, dit-elle : les refus de la maternité, published in 2005, represents thirty years of clinical work with voluntarily childless women. The author, a practising psychoanalyst, carried out a first study in the mid-1970s, interviewing thirty women, twenty-five of whom were pre-menopausal. She then carried out a further study in the early 2000s, interviewing a different group of ten women, five of whom were still biologically able to reproduce. In Pas d’enfant, she selects six interviews from the earlier group and four from the latter. She transcribes key elements of her interviews, thus allowing the women to speak in their own voices about their experiences of non-mothering, and offers a comparative analysis of these. Slightly later, in 2010, Tilmant’s Ces femmes qui n’ont pas d’enfant:

34 Marinopoulos, Dans l’intime des mères, 34. 35 Marinopoulos, Dans l’intime des mères, 14. 36 Geneviève Serre, Valérie Plard, Raphaël Riand and Marie-Rose Moro, ‘Refus d’enfant: une autre voie du désir? Neuropsychiatrie de l’enfance et de l’adolescence 56 (2008), 9–14. 37 Nicole Stryckman, ‘Désir d’enfant’, Le Bulletin Freudien 21 (1993), 87–104. Caroline Eliacheff and Nathalie Heinich, Mères-filles: une relation à trois (Paris: Albin Michel, 2002); this is a study of a range of mother–daughter relationships and includes a section devoted to voluntary childlessness.


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La découverte d’une autre fécondité is the result of ten years of interviews that the author, also a practising psychoanalyst, amassed with voluntarily childless analysands. The group of interviewees in Tilmant’s record is larger and they are often cited in conversation with each other, yet their narratives still appear in the first-person throughout Tilmant’s analysis. Both works are thus predicated upon the voicing of non-mothering and they analyse this increasing phenomenon within its socio-historical context. As we shall see, both are intent upon going beyond the reasons that may underscore the choice to remain childless, as is the case in much research of a sociological nature in this area discussed in the previous chapter. Instead, they advance the importance of the expression of voluntary childlessness, not just for the women who have taken this decision, but also for their partners, their family members and their society. By comparing the voices of the voluntarily childless in psychoanalytic interviews for the first time, these two texts posit a variety of ways to understand women who choose to remain childless, pointing to the positive and negative consequences of their choice and confronting stereotypes that have long been associated with them. Reasons for Childlessness Both writers give voice to a variety of reasons for which their subjects have refused motherhood and proceed to analyse these differently. ‘They give so many reasons to not bring children into the world!’, writes Vallée in the opening to her discussion of the reasons for childlessness among her interviewees (40). I group these reasons into six main categories. First are the women who feel a desire for newness, to have ‘a bag always ready’ (40) for new adventures, and who realise that children would prevent such a lifestyle. There are also those who have full timetables, including professional ambition, a full lifestyle of events, meetings and social engagements that do not permit the time constraints of motherhood. Third are those who claim to feel concern for threats in the contemporary world, such as violence, racism and unemployment, and who consequently feel reluctant to bring a child into this situation. Some exhibit desire for anarchistic rebellion from

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the established order and resist what they see as the conventional choice of raising a family. Fifth are those who feel the weight of responsibility for bringing an individual into the world and who would rather avoid the long-term commitment of childrearing. Lastly, several women mention the problems associated with finding a potential father: one woman asks ironically, ‘do you know any men who could be good fathers, kind and faithful to their wives, attentive, intelligent, rich while you’re at it, young, handsome and willing to share the childcare?’ (41). Yet Vallée makes a crucial observation about all of the reasons that she hears from her analysands: ‘none of these explanations allow us to really understand the decision not to have children […] I found no display of the ultimate reason: no wish, no desire for children’ (41). This is an important point and one that resonates throughout this book: many women simply experience no desire to have children but feel obliged to have a reason or a list of reasons to explain this. Vallée calls this ‘the non-desire for children’ (42) and hints that only when society accepts this simple lack of desire will voluntarily childless women achieve an alternative and valid subjectivity. Tilmant in her study applies psychoanalytic enquiry to women who have not had children through choice, through infertility or through having waited to have children and subsequently discovering that it is no longer possible. Tilmant underscores the importance of this last group, refusing to subsume these women within those who experience infertility since, she claims, their suffering is misunderstood and the ‘mourning’ (18) that they undergo is unique. Concerning those who choose not to have children, I also discern six main reasons announced to her in clinical interviews. The first is ‘le célibat’ [living as a single person]. This may appear strange but, as Tilmant argues, this term has evolved to take on a different significance. She highlights that women may wait longer until forming stable relationships, that separation and divorce lead to periods of single life and that the distinction between ‘le célibat choisi’ [living alone by choice] and ‘le célibat subi’ [living alone by force of circumstance] is often indistinct (21). Second, women with professional ambition may elect not to have children in order to devote time to their careers or also, in a more nuanced argument, because they feel unable to reconcile ‘the devoted mother’ with ‘the autonomous woman’ (23). A third reason is the change in roles between


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men and women and the consequences of this upon the choice to reproduce. Tilmant argues that changes in family composition, the tendency for both partners to work and the greater distance between them and their family members has led to couples having fewer children or none at all. She also isolates the place awarded to the child in contemporary society as a factor that contributes to women’s decisions. She highlights ‘the unprecedented investment in children’ (25) and suggests that this affects the number of children a woman will have, if any at all. Fifth is that relationships are, she claims, ‘taken more seriously, but are also more fragile’ (28). She explains that ‘the couple […] is considered to be the site of personal fulfilment and of the construction of identity’ (28) but simultaneously, models of happiness encourage people not to stay in unfulfilling relationships. In addition, people cohabit more often and separation and divorce are more common, and these changes all affect the way in which women plan not to have children. The sixth reason that Tilmant isolates is what she calls ‘construction-deconstruction-reconstruction’ (29). She elucidates this concept thus: ‘the characteristics of our present society are reflected in this frenetic rhythm of change […] In a general way, our reference points are very rapidly lost and repositioned elsewhere’ (29). Greater isolation and changes in family networks are part of this movement, Tilmant argues, and all of these factors necessarily impact upon women’s choices regarding their fertility. Like Vallée, Tilmant also points to the simple lack of desire for a child but, significantly, she distinguishes between ‘the desire for a child’ and ‘the project of a child’, by which she means that women can wish for a child as a romantic longing but that this is different to planning to raise a child. Whereas many women experience both together, she states, many feel the first without the second and many feel neither. In response to the reasons that women give in their interviews, Vallée and Tilmant both offer psychoanalytic analyses of the women’s choice to remain childless. Vallée’s comparison of the women in the 1970s and the 2000s leads her to uncover differences between the explanations given in the two timeframes, but the psychoanalytic experience is, in her argument, unchanged. The psychoanalysis of non-mothering is, she claims, always linked to the woman’s own mother: ‘not having a child means, first of all, being different from one’s mother. This choice calls women’s identities

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into question and elucidates the space that exists between femininity and maternity. It separates the two dimensions. What is demonstrated, this space, concerns all women […] By not being mothers like their own mothers were, these women are able to find themselves’ (166–7). In this way, Vallée claims that a woman cannot reflect upon the subject of her own maternity without referring to the image of her own mother. She underscores, as does Kristeva in ‘Stabat Mater’, that the birth of a child forges a proximity between a woman and her own mother. In Vallée’s argument, this occurs to the extent that men are removed from this process and birth becomes a passage between one woman and another, but she highlights that this is not a natural process that is desired by all women. In the case of women who choose not to reproduce, the image of the mother leads to two possible eventualities. In the first possibility, the mother is associated with danger, and this danger can manifest itself in a generalised fear of midwives, nurses and sometimes all medical personnel. Vallée discerns such an impulse in several of her interviewees, some of whom were interviewed in the 1970s and some in the 2000s. Her interview with Astrid appears as an example of this impulse, as Astrid viewed her mother’s pregnancy with her sister as a source of fear. She remembers that, ‘I had never seen a pregnant woman. I saw my mother balloon. My [paternal] grandmother said that my mother was ill, that she had gone to the hospital. I prayed to God’. Some time later, she visited her mother in the hospital and was shocked to see that ‘my mother was no longer a balloon, she was in good health. God had answered my prayers’ (115). Although she evidently understood the situation in subsequent years and mentions that she accepted her sister after an initial period of tension, she also understood that ‘childbirth causes immense pain’ (115). Turning to the second eventuality, Vallée advances that a woman who feels that she has been idolised by her own mother will sometimes be reluctant to relinquish this influential position. She writes that ‘in order to find ourselves, the process of life has to exert a death: killing in oneself the marvellous child, the witness of this other that surpasses us’ (48). In order for the cherished child to become an independent adult, she must overcome the status of the ‘marvellous child’ that she has been in the eyes of the mother, thereby foregoing her special place in the mother’s perspective.


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Concurrently, according to Vallée’s theory, the mother also solidifies her own role by idolising her daughter and the daughter may feel reluctant to alter this for fear of disappointing her mother. The daughter thus decides not to reproduce in order for her mother to continue in this role. Vallée explains this phenomenon thus: ‘thus some women, through deciding not to bring a child into the world, may attempt to make themselves a marvellously eternal child, responding to the secret desire of their mothers: that their daughters keep them as mothers forever, just as Mary is perpetuated as a mother by the divine child’ (51). Catherine, for example, remembers her father as absent and her mother as a formidable character – ‘everybody feared her, except me’ (57) – whom only she could handle; if Catherine’s role changed by her becoming a mother herself, her own mother’s precarious position would be rendered unsustainable. Brigitte also recounts her mother’s difficulties, as she suffered from a variety of physical and health problems – ‘she would get up in the morning and vomit. She would say, “telephone my office”’ (70) – and relied upon her daughter to support her, leading Brigitte to question whether her mother could cope if her own role in the relationship were to alter. Vallée’s theory, that the root of the voluntary childless woman’s choice is to be found in her relationship with her mother, is also to be found in Tilmant’s analysis, but the latter encapsulates a broader range of explanations. Tilmant’s theory is based upon an individual, tolerant approach to motherhood that rejects the Freudian concept that all ‘normal’ women will want to become mothers sooner or later: ‘Concerning the choice not to mother, one will often hear that women are repressing their desire. What is this about? […] It is essential to move beyond this reductive perspective since all sorts of cases present themselves’ (48). In my reading of Tilmant’s theory in Ces femmes qui n’ont pas d’enfant, there are five possible psychoanalytic explanations for voluntary childlessness in women. First, she posits that the non-desire for a child may be a defence. Certain women in interviews with her have suggested that their decision is not oriented toward the future but to a traumatic past. Interviewee Viviane, for example, is quoted as having stated that the numerous children in her family led her to feel that ‘I’ve had too many children to digest’ (50) and another, Marianne, speaks of her pain following her mother’s death during her childhood. From such trauma

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linked to the figure of the mother, Tilmant argues, ‘it transpires that the daughter feels that having a child is psychically dangerous’ (50) and her lack of desire emanates from a fear that a child could potentially destabilise her. Tilmant’s second theory is, ironically, that women may feel no desire to reproduce in order to conform to parental expectations. This is similar to Vallée’s theory of women wishing to retain their position as the ‘marvellous child’ in order to solidify their mother’s identity. Although Tilmant makes the valid but controversial point that ‘most women have children through traditionalism, without having thought about it, because that is what was done by their families and the people around them’ (51), she also discerns a group that inherited from their mothers a lack of desire to change their situations by becoming mothers themselves. She cites the testimony of Esméralda, who comments ‘my daughter pleases me immensely by not making me a grandmother’ and that, more acutely, ‘it is out of the question for my daughter to make the same mistakes as me and my mother. This is the main battle of my life and I want to win it. […] I would really like her to do everything that I have not been able to do myself ’ (51). Esméralda’s daughter, having grown up around such messages, shows no desire for children of her own. Tilmant argues that this daughter, along with another example of a voluntarily childless woman with a similar maternal influence, ‘do not want to disappoint their mothers, and certainly feel advantages to staying in an entwined relationship with them’ (51). Linked to this primordial role accorded to the mother is what I interpret as the crux of Tilmant’s theory of why some women experience no maternal desire: a lack of identification with the mother. According to Tilmant’s examples, this can occur in one of two ways. In the first, the woman identifies with her mother as a woman, rather than as a mother. This is to say that the daughter considers her mother to be another kind of female role model, so that the two form a link that is not based on the daily activity of mothering: ‘she may have identified with her in other ways than as a mother. She then dreams of a more innovative life than the daily life of a mother’ (60). One interviewee claims to wish to emulate her mother in her professional activity; she considered her mother ‘fantastic’ (60) as a child and entered the same profession as her, stating that ‘I did not have a child, but that did not seem to me to be the most important thing for happiness


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as a woman’ (60). In the second way of failing to identify with the mother, the daughter may observe very early in her life that her mother is unfulfilled and may equate this with the experience of motherhood. In many cases, such individuals will build a network of identifications with another person or persons, such as a father, aunt, uncle or friend. Tilmant cites an interviewee who contrasts her ‘erased’ mother to her father, a figure in public life, with whom she felt a more tangible connection. Another woman remembers that, as a child, she identified not with her mother but with her single aunt, recounting that she was ‘fascinated by her free thinking’ (61) and aimed to emulate the independent lifestyle of this alternative role model. Just as does Vallée, therefore, Tilmant isolates the mother as the source of the daughter’s lack of desire, but also goes beyond this figure to locate the psychoanalytic explanation beyond the family unit. The fourth theory that I isolate for the lack of desire for children in Tilmant’s text is the woman’s relationship with the society around her. She may have been influenced by a social discourse that approves of pregnancy within certain age limits, for example, such as the standard French ideal of between twenty-nine and thirty-five years old, she claims. Societal reactions to women who become pregnant outside of this norm, particularly earlier, may affect others. In this way, Tilmant argues, although society generally disseminates a positive view of mothering, ‘the perspective of society pushes women undeniably towards non-mothering’ (52) to the extent that a woman’s ‘desire for a child is then negated and she cannot express it’ (52). In another facet to this connection between maternity and culture, Tilmant also points to women whose non-desire for children can be linked to their fundamental opposition to society. Their will to subvert the social norms that they view around them, particularly perhaps those concerning maternity, lead to a defiance that manifests itself in a lack of desire to mother. Tilmant explains that this standpoint may often appear as aggressive and intolerant: ‘their way of envisaging life should become the new norm to follow. They have zero tolerance for other lifestyles that appear destructive to them’ (52). Tilmant quite correctly, yet not judgementally, links this contestatory standpoint to the development of the label ‘childfree’, as discussed in the introduction. The fifth and final psychological explanation for non-desire is similar to the second part of Vallée’s theorisation. This is the desire to be unique:

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‘the caricatured situation of wanting to maintain the position of a child indefinitely […] If a woman has been raised as a “king child”, spoiled or mollycoddled, she will perhaps not want to become a mother; she prefers to remain as a child herself since she finds great pleasure in this situation’ (53). The difference between this theory and that of Vallée is that in the latter, the child is more concerned with maintaining the mother’s position, whereas in Tilmant’s she is more concerned for her own situation. As is stated unashamedly by the interviewee Priscilla, who states, ‘I like being the centre of attention, I’ve always been so and I have no intention of losing my privileges’ (53), this woman becomes the stereotypically egotistical individual whose privileged upbringing denies her empathy with others, including children. Tilmant cautions, however, that ‘it is this representation that is often invoked to criticise women who do not want children. But it must be understand that this case, which certainly exists, is however (at least up until now) the least common’ (53). Normalising and Universalising Non-Desire Tilmant’s and Vallée’s theories thus present the non-desire for a child as part of a completely valid and normal development. Whereas Freud’s theory had no place for the absence of desire for reproduction among normal women, these twenty-first-century feminist psychoanalysts theorise childlessness as no less worthy than maternal desire. Although some of their theories emanate from what may be perceived as a lack – the lack of identification with the mother, the fear of medical professionals or the absence of parental expectations, for example – this hardly signifies that the women who exhibit this non-desire are somehow lacking, traumatised, incomplete or undeveloped. Instead, Tilmant and Vallée both bring together examples of women who are personally and/or professionally successful, who are in a range of positive relationships and who clearly state that their lives are fulfilling. They include teachers, lecturers, writers, a farmer, an IT professional, a marketing manager, a biologist, a hairdresser and a social worker, for example, and their relationship statuses vary from being in short to long-term heterosexual or homosexual relationships to living alone. Many


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mention their social lives, their professional accomplishments and their hobbies as sources of fulfilment in their lives and, taken together, they present alternative models to the stereotype of the woman who rejects motherhood simply to advance her career. None mention regret of the past or fear for the future and none appear to be living with debilitating psychological issues that prevent entry into adulthood. The women on whom Tilmant and Vallée base their theories are of varying ages and thus speak from the positions of both before and after the menopause. They also give different generational appreciations. Especially in Vallée’s case, the text is predicated upon women from different decades who express their experiences of the non-desire for children. In this way, the analyses that they develop on the basis of these interviews present a theory that is to a large extent ahistorical. Both authors mention the importance of socio-historical factors, such as women’s place in the workforce, the availability of contraception and the place of the Catholic Church in family life. Tilmant in particular pays attention in her opening chapter to the sexual revolution of 1968 and the ways in which this opened up new lifestyle options to women, including the choice not to procreate. Yet, their psychoanalytic approach is based upon models of development that are largely consistent over time. They therefore break out of the limitations imposed upon normal female development by Freudian models and open up the possibility of viewing a non-desire for children as something that predates the late twentieth century, when it was first openly expressed. Indeed, it appears according to these theories that a non-desire for children is a common aspect of development for many women and that this does not depend upon the historical period in which they live, whether they have access to contraception or whether their family situation awarded them the possibility to control their own fertility. According to these theories, therefore, the possibility of such non-desire approaches something universal. Those who did not feel desire for children during times in which contraception was not a possibility would either have had to submit to the possibility of becoming mothers if they were in heterosexual relationships or would have had to have avoided the possibility by, for example, remaining unmarried or entering a convent. Such psychoanalytic theories will also attract critique, as they have done in many schools of critical thought. First among these must be that

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such theories downplay childlessness as an active choice; they present voluntary childlessness as the result of an unconscious lack of desire rather than as a decision. The disadvantage of psychoanalytic approaches such as these is that they do not privilege the agency that many women may feel in making an active choice not to procreate. As Vallée suggests, these choices may not be active choices but may instead be explanations for a simple lack of desire that is rooted not in the conscious mind but in the unconscious. Furthermore, theories that tend towards universalism will always be open to the charge of essentialism, as much psychoanalytic feminism has been. Although Tilmant and Vallée include in their studies heterosexual and homosexual women and women of different social classes, educational backgrounds and family formations, their theories may fit less neatly with women of different races, ethnicities and nationalities, for example. The risk of such theoretical approaches is that they produce single, fixed narratives that exist beyond the realm of the material realities in which many women live. Nonetheless, the power of these two interventions is that they undeniably counter an array of stereotypes associated with childless women and they present the non-desire for children as an equally normal and valid phenomenon in female development. They posit a view of motherhood that is not simply ‘natural’ or ‘biological’ and insist upon a distinction between a maternal instinct and maternal desire; they imply that a woman may desire a child or not due to events and processes that take place during her early development, and that desire for a child is something that only some women feel. Consequently, they advance the idea that the maternal instinct is a fiction; in this theory, the notion of an instinct to procreate that is comparable to that exhibited by animals and birds is not only biologically implausible but psychologically impossible. These theories thus go further than ‘woman-blaming’ or ‘mother-blaming’ by proposing foundations to the lack of desire that are beyond women’s control. They also do so by citing individual women themselves, allowing them the textual space in which to voice their own experiences and reducing the charge of ahistorical, essentialist universalism. In this way, they finally posit a theory that refuses motherhood as a norm and non-motherhood as deviant and open the possibility of interpreting the non-desire for motherhood as a


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valid, equal and unavoidable feature of womanhood that society will sooner or later have to accept. In light of the historical and contemporary backdrop to voluntary childlessness that Part I has sketched, let us now turn to the individual texts in which women create a textual space in which to voice their individual experiences.

part ii Expressions of Voluntary Childlessness

Chapter 3


Mother love is a sacred concept in our culture and, like all things sacred, it has a mythology of its own. –Peg Streep, Mean Mothers

In À l’enfant que je n’aurai pas [To the Child I Will Never Have], Lê’s narrator writes a letter to her phantom child in which she explains her reasons for not wanting to become a mother.1 This text strikes a note of departure in Lê’s corpus, which consists largely of longer fictional pieces. She has achieved fame for her novels and short stories, beginning with Un si tendre vampire [Such a Tender Vampire] published in 1987, when she was just twenty-three years old. Her lyrical prose has garnered the attention of literary critics who praise her subtle evocations of psychological and emotional states. Her writing has won a series of prizes, including the Prix Fénéon (1997), the Prix Wepler (2010) and the Prix Renaudot Poche (2011), and has been nominated for the Goncourt. She is also one of the few writers from Vietnam who write in French, thus her texts uncover aspects of the former colony and engage in debates over the signification of la Francophonie in a post-colonial era. Lê refutes any assertion that her

1 Lê, À l’enfant que je n’aurai pas. Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses after the quotation.

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writing is representative of Vietnamese culture, however.2 Instead, her highly metaphorical work is concerned with delving into the psychological aspects of human experience. As Sabine Loucif resumes, ‘from book to book, from novel to essay, is woven a literary aesthetic founded on the author’s relationship with the limits of language and the imaginary, as a literary shaping of the relationship between the self and the limits of being’ (503). Many of Lê’s texts are first-person narratives but she plays with the limits of autobiography and claims to feel discomfort with the genre.3 In À l’enfant que je n’aurai pas, the narrative voice is similarly ambiguous, as an unnamed narrator writes to an imagined addressee, casting doubt over the sender and the recipient, the source and the object, of this epistolary interrogation. This epistolary text is part of a series published by NiL, the cleverly titled ‘Les Affranchis’, directed by Claire Debru.4 The preface to each text explains: When everything has been said and it is impossible to turn the page, writing to the other person becomes the only way out. But putting this into practice is risky. Thus, after writing Letter to My Father, Kafka preferred to put it away in a drawer. Writing one letter, just one, is to give a full stop, to free oneself from an old story. The ‘Les Affranchis’ collection therefore asks this of its authors: ‘Write the letter that you have never written’.

With this remit, the press has solicited a number of epistolary texts from celebrated and newer authors, including Annie Ernaux’s letter to the sister who died before she was born, L’Autre fille [The Other Daughter], and Anne Goscinny’s Le Bruit des clefs [The Sound of Keys], written to her father Raymond, the author of Le Petit Nicolas [Nicholas], who died when she was nine years old. The fact that Lê elects the space of the epistolary 2 3 4

Tess Do underlines that Lê insists upon calling herself ‘un écrivain français’ in ‘Between Salvation and Damnation: Metaphors in Linda Lê’, French Cultural Studies 15/2 (2004), 142–57, 142. Catherine Argand, ‘Entretien avec Linda Lê’, Lire 274 (1999), 28–34. ‘Les Affranchis’ has two meanings: stamped, as in a letter, and liberated or emancipated.


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text to explore narratives of non-mothering is intriguing, especially since this author’s oeuvre performs an interrogation of established literary genres and, in particular, of first-person narration. In this chapter, I read À l’enfant que je n’aurai pas in terms of its subversion of the epistolary genre, both in content and in form. I first sketch the history of this genre and its designation as a specifically female mode of writing, then I analyse how Lê’s text departs from these norms to establish an innovative approach to voicing voluntary childlessness. I ask how Lê manipulates the female epistolary voice in À l’enfant que je n’aurai pas in terms of how it has been defined by readers and writers, how she responds to expectations that readers have of female-authored epistolary voices, how she challenges the parameters set for female expression in epistolary form and how she questions notions of textuality, sexuality and female subjectivity within this traditionally female genre.

Female Epistolarity The epistolary novel has long been associated with female authors and it has historically offered complex representations of femininity, female subjectivity and female sexuality. The familiar letter came to be regarded as a literary form in the sixteenth century and was soon considered to be particularly suited to the female voice. Kathryn Jensen resumes how La Bruyère in the seventeenth century asserted the superiority of female authors over their male counterparts in this genre and theorised this distinction as rooted in female nature. Female disposition, he claimed, lends itself to emotion and thus the woman author has a natural propensity to spill her emotions onto the page. Men are also able to accomplish this, according to La Bruyère, and their advantage is that they make fewer mistakes in their language and style, but male nature makes the process longer and more arduous. Jensen interrogates this position, pointing not only to its evident sexism but also to the ways in which male theorists and male editors of collections and instruction manuals contrived to maintain their dominance over women

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by consigning them to the epistolary space.5 Solidifying themselves as the theorists and editors of the genre, these men’s ‘advocacy of feminine epistolarity subordinated it to masculine literary pursuits’.6 Moreover, their connection of female emotion with amorous letters created ‘models of “female” suffering and victimization [that] reinforce an ideology of an emotional femininity that correlates to masculine sexual supremacy’.7 In the eighteenth century, the Golden Age of the epistolary genre, both male and female writers practised this form of writing. Texts such as Montesquieu’s Les Lettres persanes [The Persian Letters], Choderlos de Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses [Dangerous Liaisons] and Rousseau’s Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse [Julie, or The New Heloise] testify to the popularity of epistolary narrative, and writers such as Françoise de Graffigny, Marie Jeanne Riccoboni, Germaine de Staël, Isabelle de Charrière, Cornélie Vasse, Sophie Cottin, Adélaïde de Souza and Anne Louise Elie de Beaumont all found popularity in literary salons. What is particularly interesting about this Golden Age of epistolarity is its transvestism. Although many epistolary works of the time were published anonymously, due primarily to the conflict between perceived exhibitionism and the traditional female virtues of modesty and self-effacement, it became increasingly popular for men to write epistolary works in which they imitated women’s voices. As Elizabeth Goldsmith points out, three of the most successful writers of the period, Laclos, Rousseau and Richardson, each perfected this.8 Such cross-gender narration is evident in works written in both French and English in this period and thus its male practitioners profited from the popularity of the

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Kathryn Jensen, ‘Male Models of Feminine Epistolarity; or How to Write Like a Woman in Seventeenth-Century France’, in Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, ed., Writing The Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 25–45. Jensen, ‘Male Models of Feminine Epistolarity; or How to Write Like a Woman in Seventeenth-Century France’, 28–9. Jensen, ‘Male Models of Feminine Epistolarity; or How to Write Like a Woman in Seventeenth-Century France’, 36. Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, ed., Writing The Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988).


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genre for commercial ends. Nevertheless, also discernible during this period are cases in which male authors manipulated the genre to portray subtly homosexual characters and to critique sociosexual ideology.9 Goldsmith argues that, as a consequence of this phenomenon of the imitation of female voices by male authors, ‘any study of the female voice in epistolary literature, then, must examine male ideas of what it means to write as a woman, along with the writings of real women’.10 Such questions are especially pertinent to the study of late twentieth-century and twenty-first-century texts, at which time there appears to be a curious preponderance of epistolary narrative by women. In Anglophone writing, texts such as Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale both use the epistolary genre to call attention to gender discrimination and to advance cautionary messages regarding the isolation and confinement of women. Kylie Cardell and Jane Haggis’s volume To The Letter amasses examples of letter writing from an array of Anglophone areas, highlighting the continued presence of the genre in South Africa, Australia and Britain.11 In the Francophone context, Geneviève de Viveiros, Margot Irvine and Karin Schwerdtner demonstrate the continued popularity of the genre in Risques et regrets: Les dangers de l’écriture épistolaire [Risks and Regrets: The Dangers of Epistolary Writing].12 Pointing to instances of misunderstanding, to the representation of delicate topics, to untimely arrival or to letters being read by the wrong person, for example, the authors highlight the ways in which the complexities of this genre have been appropriated by twenty-first-century

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10 11 12

See for example Julia Epstein’s ‘Fanny’s Fanny: Epistolarity, Eroticism, and the Transsexual Text’, in which she shows how Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, written by a male author in the voice of a female narrator, conveys a homosexual male voice. Julia Epstein, ‘Fanny’s Fanny: Epistolarity, Eroticism, and the Transsexual Text’, in Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, ed., Writing The Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 135–53. Goldsmith, ed., Writing The Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature, vii. Kylie Cardell and Jane Haggis, To The Letter, Special edition, Life Writing 8/2 (2011). Geneviève de Viveiros, Margot Irvine and Karin Schwerdtner, Risques et regrets: Les dangers de l’écriture épistolaire (Montréal: Nota bene, 2015).

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authors such as Amélie Nothomb, Emmanuel Carrère and Sophie Calle. Moreover, Rosemary Courville further highlights how ‘epistolary narrative has re-emerged in the works of marginalized authors from various linguistic and national backgrounds […] [as] contemporary authors create texts that maintain the intimate feel of earlier novels while also changing the genre to demonstrate their knowledge of trauma, exile, and psychoanalysis’.13 Such textual and visual experimentation with or on the basis of the epistolary form is testament to its rich potential for literary innovation and to its capacity for problematising understandings of first-person narrative, especially in an era of technological advancement and increasingly mediatised identities. Significantly, it is also a vehicle for problematising understandings of gendered identity and the everyday reality of female lived experience. Such texts offer a glimpse into the daily lives of its practitioners, especially during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, since this form of writing was so widely practised; girls with a little education were able to write in the genre as well as courtly women who were active in salon culture and aspiring femmes de lettres. Goldsmith writes that her study of female- authored epistolary narratives brought her to the surprising realisation that ‘the female voice in the epistolary tradition has been a history of restrictions or failed interactions. The one genre with which women have been persistently connected has specialised in narrowing the range of possible inflections for feminine expression’.14 This is undeniably the case, since even texts that critique the position of women or of groups of women, such as The Color Purple, underline the confinement to which they have been traditionally subjected. Nonetheless, such texts similarly underscore both the literary innovation and social critique evident in the work of female epistolarians. Joan Hinde Stewart’s Gynographs, for example, highlights narrative techniques such as 13

Rosemary Courville, ‘Melancholic Epistolarity: Letters And Traumatic Exile In The Novels Of Three Francophone Women’. PhD thesis, Lousiana State University, Baton Rouge, 2013, v. 14 Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, ed., Writing The Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature, xii.


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fragmentation and ellipses that enable women authors to convey coded messages about such topics as marriage, maternity and female destiny within their letters.15 Elizabeth Cook in Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters examines epistolary novels that question the gendering of the separation of public and private space as male and female respectively.16 Goldsmith’s volume also attests to the ideological critique of its practitioners, examining the ways in which women authors in French and English across centuries have used the genre as a site of resistance to socio-cultural norms. In this chapter, I examine Lê’s À l’enfant que je n’aurai pas as an example of this very female genre that portrays the confinement of women and that is predicated upon the expression of subtle yet sustained ideological critique. Given that the female epistolary text has long been linked with women’s expression of love, passion and emotional concerns, it is all the more fascinating that Lê uses it to recount her narrator’s rejection of mothering. Lê previously experimented with the epistolary form in her 1999 work Lettre morte [Dead Letter].17 Written following the death of the author’s father, this proclaims itself to be a letter by its title but its form is closer to that of a novel. Its unnamed narrator recounts a monologue on the subject of her father’s recent death to her friend Sirius. This letter, if it can be named as such, is written to an implied addressee who is dead, therefore, as opposed to a phantom addressee who will never be alive. In this chapter, I examine the ways in which Lê furthers her manipulation of the epistolary genre by writing to this phantom addressee. I first analyse the ways in which she constructs a narrative voice that casts doubt upon the identity of the narrator and that portrays her choice to remain childless as reasoned, resolute and responsible. I then study the ways in which her narrative departs from standards of the epistolary genre in terms of thematic content, inscribing a voluntarily childless woman’s 15 16 17

Joan Hinde Stewart, Gynographs: French Novels by Women of the Late Eighteenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). Elizabeth H. Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). Linda Lê, Lettre morte (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1999).

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identity beyond the negative stereotypes discussed in Part I. I finally examine the function of the phantom addressee and the way in which this narrative strategy forces the reader to enter into the narrative of this intimate expression of the choice to remain childless.

Challenging the Female Epistolary Voice The title of Lê’s work appears to be an allusion to Italian author Oriana Fallaci’s seminal 1975 work Lettera a un bambino mai nato [Letter to a Child Never Born], in which the narrator writes a letter to the foetus she is considering aborting.18 Fallaci’s text was taken up as a feminist call for better understanding of women’s experience of maternity and of the fertility choices available to them. This epistolary text is intimate in the extreme, a particularly daring move in 1970s Italy, as the young narrator writes of her reflections on her situation and of her emotions as, having decided not to abort, she subsequently suffers a miscarriage. Lê’s apparent choice to refer to this earlier epistolary text inscribes her in a series of women who have used the genre to make pointed critiques of the limitations upon women’s lived experience and is in itself an interesting counterbalance; writing about abortion was risky in the 1970s, but not until the 2010s may a woman dare to publish her lack of desire to mother. This apparent intertext raises a further question: why is the word letter missing in Lê’s title, as the Lettera a un bambino of Fallaci’s title becomes simply À l’enfant? By excising the word letter from this letter, Lê appears to distance herself in some measure from Fallaci’s text, hinting that her text has important resonance with the earlier work but that it will depart from it in significant ways. Likewise, the removal of the letter hints that she intends to depart from the epistolary genre itself in similarly important ways.

18

Oriana Fallaci, Lettera a un bambino mai nato (Rome: Rizzoli, 1975).


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The narrative voice at once strikes a note of confession and intimacy. This is not a series of letters that together form an epistolary novel; it is instead one long letter with no chapter breaks that reads as a stream of consciousness. The first word, significantly, is ‘toi’ [you]: ‘toi, l’enfant que je n’aurai pas, je me demande quels traits auraient été les tiens si je t’avais donné le jour’ [you, the child that I will not have, I wonder what traits would have been yours had I given birth to you] (7). She repeatedly addresses her thoughts to the child, using the pronoun ‘tu’ [you], to the extent that the reader may feel that s/he is party to something to which s/he should not be reading. Lê immediately places the reader in the place of the trespasser in somebody else’s intimate confession. This is the first of the techniques that Lê develops to strike a chord of uneasiness in the reader. She plays with the idea of the cloistered female, isolated and removed from society as the young epistolarian writers of centuries gone by would have been. As we shall see, she proceeds to give an account of the female letter writer that is far from confined, hesitant or remote. Perhaps the most innovative aspect of Lê’s manipulation of the narrative voice in the epistolary genre is the doubt that she casts over the identity of the sender (and of the recipient, as we shall see). The ‘I’ of this letter is characteristically indistinct – characteristically since Lê has long played with first-person narrative and autofiction. Indeed, in a recent interview concerning the evolution of her work, she claims that her writing has evolved to become ‘more fictional, less linked to autobiography’.19 Certain aspects of this text conform to pieces of information known of the author’s life. For example, the narrator has three sisters, she has a difficult relationship with her mother and shows disappointment at her distant relationship with her father. Three of the four sisters in Lê’s family have chosen to remain childless and, when questioned in an interview over whether this may have been linked to their experiences with their own mother, Lê answered ‘yes,

19

Gillian Ni Cheallaigh, ‘La “lectrice” douce, écrivaine mortifère: Rencontre avec Linda Lê’, 1–7, accessed 11 February, 2015, 2.

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certainly’.20 In a more recent interview, she claims in relation to the narrator of À l’enfant que je n’aurai pas that ‘the narrator could be perceived as my double’.21 Yet, she is insistent that the narrator and herself are distinct, and that although the text may be a confession, ‘this is not MY confession’.22 Many of her texts, such as In Memoriam (2009) and Lettre morte, contain portrayals of events that correspond to Lê’s own life, but she always infuses these with doubt. She elaborates, ‘écrire, dès lors, me permet de faire la part du feu, de rassembler mes moi épars, mais aussi, par l’invention de personnages fictifs, d’explorer les abysses. C’est pourquoi j’ai une certaine méfiance à l’égard de l’autobiographie, j’ai besoin de mettre une distance entre ma vie telle qu’elle est, avec ses aléas, et les récits que j’élabore’ [Writing, now, allows me to cut my losses, to bring together my separate ‘I’s, but also, through the invention of fictional characters, to explore the abysses. That is why I have a certain mistrust towards autobiography. I need to put a distance between my life as it is, with all its vagaries, and the narratives that I elaborate].23 It is significant that in À l’enfant que je n’aurai pas, there is only one geographical marker: the Hôpital Sainte Anne, the location of an episode that will be discussed below. This episode is thus identified as having occurred in Paris, yet the rest of the text defies any geographically location, either in France or in Vietnam. Similarly, none of the characters are named, which further prevents any attribution of Vietnamese or of French identity. In this text, then, Lê consciously plays at the interface between revelation and concealment as the narrative voice strikes many notes of proximity to what is known about her, but mitigates against any lazy reading by establishing multiple entry points into interpreting her narrator’s identity. A further play with the narrative voice of epistolary fiction is to be found in Lê’s use of embedded narration. The narrator uses the figure of her former partner, named only as S, as a vehicle for her explanations for her voluntary 20 Cheallaigh, ‘La “lectrice” douce, écrivaine mortifère: Rencontre avec Linda Lê’, 3. 21 Karin Schwerdtner, ‘Linda Lê: Risquer le tout pour le tout’, Contemporary French & Francophone Studies 17/3 (2013), 309–17, 315. 22 Cheallaigh, ‘La “lectrice” douce, écrivaine mortifère: Rencontre avec Linda Lê’, 6. 23 Sabine Loucif, ‘Entretien avec Linda Lê’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 13/4 (2009), 503–8, 504.


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childlessness. S is identified early in the text as the ex-partner with whom the narrator had a five-year relationship and who ‘disait avoir la fibre paternelle’ [said he had a paternal instinct] (7). One of the most striking narrative strategies in this text is the way in which the narrator writes her own monologue to her addressee, the phantom child, yet interrupts this frequently with S’s embedded narration. Quoting him implicitly within her narration, she writes, for example, ‘mon immaturité est à l’origine de ma résolution de rester stérile: j’ai peur d’endosser les conséquences d’une sublimation de mes instincts mortifères, de ne plus être gouvernée par Thanatos qui m’entraîne vers un confortable néant’ [my immaturity is at the root of my resolution to remain sterile; I am afraid of assuming the consequences of the sublimation of my fatal instinct, of being no longer governed by Thanatos, leading me towards a comfortable nothingness] (10). The hyperbolic language of this citation highlights how ridiculous she finds his assertions, but she simultaneously quotes and rebuffs S’s argument. By representing his voice in her text, the narrator can then argue against him, which she does with considerable sobriety and candour; rather than responding with fear, derision or dismissiveness, she assertively claims that ‘je répugnais à être coulée dans le même moule que la plupart’ [I recoiled from the idea of being cast in the same mould as the majority] (11), that she did not believe in the importance of ancestry nor of descendants, that she cherished her solitude and that ultimately ‘mon introversion m’inclinait à la froideur, toute effusion me paraissait grotesque, les caresses, les hypocoristiques, les débordements de tendresse étaient à proscrire’ [my introverted nature made me inclined to coldness. All effusion appeared grotesque to me, and caresses, hypocoristics and excessive tenderness were to be banned] (11–12). There are certain personalities, she implies, that are better suited to parenting, and she is not ashamed to conclude that hers is not among these. The way in which the point of view changes to incorporate that of a different character allows the narrator to solidify her control over this monologue while providing a balanced and reasoned argument in defence of her decision. Furthermore, S’s voice is frequently quoted in the imperfect tense, which introduces a further element of Lê’s play with narrative voice in this text. This tense is the continuous past that is used to render the narration of states and of repeated acts, as opposed to the narration of isolated events and actions in the simple past (passé simple) or the perfect tense (passé composé).

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In this manner, the reader hears S accuse the narrator of how she used to be, how she repeated the same behaviours and how she has always been trapped within a cycle of stasis; rather than facing reality as a responsible adult, he insinuates, she lives in a cloistered past with an infantile attitude towards life. This is juxtaposed with a different tense employed by the narrator. Much of the text is written in the conditional perfect, as the narrator imagines what her life would have been like and forces herself to assess the consequences of her decision; she writes, for example, ‘la grossesse m’aurait débarrassée de ma cyclothymie, l’allaitement m’aurait familiarisée avec des rituels sans complication, la mise en sommeil de mes épures pendant le maternage aurait donné un coup de fouet à mon inspiration’ [pregnancy would supposedly have rid me of my mood disorder, breastfeeding would have made me learn rituals, putting my writing drafts to bed while mothering would have given a spark to my inspiration] (37). She underscores that there may have been many benefits to her, including health benefits, psychological benefits and even relationship benefits, since her partner was enamoured of the idea of fatherhood. Yet, this should not be mistaken as a sign of reticence or regret. A tentative tone is clearly not the same as an indecisive one, as Lê’s narrator aptly demonstrates by proceeding to give an extended reflection on the reasons why she chooses not to mother. In this way, the narrative voice is far from the intimate, timid voice of readerly expectations of previous centuries and instead gives a magisterial account of the childless woman’s reflections. S’s assertions about her attitudes and behaviour in the imperfect tense appear simplistic both in form and content alongside her own exploratory, reasoned voice. Far from the female epistolarians of previous centuries, whose work was frequently published unsigned as a nod to the social prescription that women should maintain modesty and propriety, Lê writes a forceful ‘I’ that confronts the reasons and the consequences of the decision not to mother and that also out argues the male voice that frequently interrupts it. This constitutes an interesting play of temporalities; the interrupting voice narrates a repetitive past, the writer of the letter-monologue narrates what would have been and Lê is of course engaged in writing about the future and how that future will not eventuate in an ascendance. Lê’s work thus constitutes a highly crafted manipulation of the narrative voice within epistolary narrative. She displaces the identity of the writing self, she


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creates a voice that avows its losses and sacrifices while avoiding pathos or tentativeness and she uses frequent interruptions by another (male) point of view as a means of conveying her arguments. If the reader’s expectation were a modest, unassuming or self-effacing female voice, Lê’s text resolutely defies this. Moreover, her interplay of the male and female identities approaches a reversal of the transvestism apparent in previous uses of the genre; whereas male writers frequently imitated female voices, in Lê’s text a female writer manipulates a male voice for her own ends. And her own ends, as we shall see, are to proclaim a female identity that is not shackled to conventional expectations.

Challenging Female Epistolary Thematics Lê’s text is predicated upon a narrative voice that defies the traditional readerly expectations of the female epistolarian and simultaneously confronts the conventional thematics of the genre. If female-authored epistolary texts were first greeted favourably due to their portrayal of young women’s everyday lives, supplemented by tales of amorous relations, passion, emotion, and often victimisation and betrayal at the hands of a lover, the choice to use the genre to attest to a lack of maternal feeling is in and of itself an interesting subversion. The female nature theorised by La Bruyère as the basis for women’s superiority in the genre is clearly at odds with Lê’s usage of it, since her narrator’s monologue not only proclaims her myriad reasons for her seemingly unconventional female nature but answers the arguments of her male opponent with aplomb. Goldsmith refers to the stereotypical yet immensely popular ‘female letter of suffering and victimization’ that offered a representation of women as naïve believers in the amorous performance of male suitors, only to find themselves abandoned and pouring their languor into letters.24 Lê deftly opposes such a thematic, 24 Goldsmith, ed., Writing The Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature, viii.

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indirectly critiquing the easy association made between women’s writing and love letters, to which Linda Kauffman points in Discourses of Desire.25 If early female epistolary writers found that they had to adopt the myths of a feminine destiny as created by men, Lê’s text takes a radically different approach to the representation of female subjectivity in epistolary narrative. The narrator’s relationship with her partner S is portrayed as far from a love match and closer to a story of disintegration. Kate Averis discerns that in Lê’s work ‘sexual relationships, and indeed personal relationships more generally, are characterized by their mutually destructive nature’.26 From the very first page, Lê presents S as distant, infantile and hostile, claiming that he refused to listen to her reasoning over her lack of desire to mother and that he never fully explained his own desire to father. Recounting their mutual incompatibility on the issue, she claims ‘j’avais avec S. de longues conversations et de brèves disputes d’où il ressortait toujours que j’avais tort de persister à ne pas me perpétuer’ [I had long conversations and brief arguments with S, from which it always transpired that I was wrong to persist in not perpetuating myself ] (7). Moments of understanding, love or passion between the two are entirely absent from the narrative and, as the letter progresses, references to S become steadily more infrequent. Wherever he surfaces, his behaviour is juxtaposed with that of the narrator, who demonstrates research, reasoning and reflection on the topic of parenting, whereas S is described as somebody who ‘voulait un enfant comme un gamin veut un jouet’ [wanted a child like a kid wants a toy] (32). Instead, despite the negative aspects of her present life as she portrays it, Lê’s narrator pens a letter not of passionate, romantic love but more one of love of her life and of her self. She proclaims not just her reluctance but her resistance to destabilising the existence that she currently leads. Not only is this a story of lack of love, insofar as the narrator explains her disinterest in maternal love, it is also a story of the end of romantic love precisely on the

25 26

Linda S. Kauffman, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). Kate Averis, Exile and Nomadism in French and Hispanic Women’s Writing (London: Legenda, 2014), 139.


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basis of this woman’s lack of desire for children. This relationship strikes a point of departure from the ‘mutually destructive’ relationships that Averis correctly pinpoints in Lê’s work, then; the relationship is destroyed, yet the destruction is not mutual because the narrator finds herself in a far stronger position at its ending. The relationship with S has clearly disintegrated, and beyond the reader’s notice since the narrator’s monologue shows that she wishes to discuss topics that are more interesting than the man of which she has just rid herself. Lê’s narrator is similarly unromantic in her portrayals of other characters. Very few others enter her monologue, which is obsessively about her and the phantom child. The stream of consciousness does, however, allude to the narrator’s mother and, briefly, to childhood memories of her sisters. The figure of the mother is a particularly interesting one, especially read in the context of a genre that has traditionally been predicated upon female modesty, manners and propriety. As we have seen, both Tilmant and Vallée, in their psychoanalytic explorations of voluntary childlessness, note the frequency with which their interviewees refer to their own mothers in their justifications for not becoming mothers themselves, whether these relationships were positive or negative. In À l’enfant que je n’aurai pas, Lê’s narrator presents her relationship with her mother as particularly traumatic. One of four daughters, she claims to have grown up with a passive, silent father and an overbearing, bullying mother. The mother instils a regime in the household, insisting upon rigid table manners, styles of dress and language, and forbidding corrupting books, all forms of poetry, contact with boys and even exposing skin by walking barefoot on the beach. The daughters together refer to her as ‘Big Mother’ in a reference to the all-knowing, all-seeing Orwellian presence, yet the mother is not just an observing figure but a cruel, destructive one too; she beat her daughter violently for having received a love letter, would comment viciously upon her physical appearance and would make her feel ugly and unmariable. ‘Big Mother a détruit le peu d’assurance que j’avais’ [Big Mother destroyed the little confidence I had], she writes, and she understands implicitly that ‘je suis pour elle l’exemple même de l’insuccès’ [I am for her the very example of failure] (26). Lê’s narrator goes beyond the figure of the mother, mentioning a grandmother who had ‘pâti de la misogynie’ [suffered from

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misogyny] (23) as further evidence of both the oppression suffered by her female forbearers and of the rampant traditionalism they had developed. Such examples of cruelty, bullying and repression may well have discouraged the daughter from becoming a mother herself, since she remembers that ‘déjà, à l’époque, je me jurais de ne jamais être mère, pour ne pas donner à mes enfants l’éducation que j’avais reçue’ [already at that time, I swore to myself that I would never become a mother so as not to give to my children the education that I had received] (18). Yet this is not a facile, childlike rejection of something of which one had a negative appreciation during one’s childhood; rather, the author identifies her early misgivings and proceeds to explore the more reasoned explanation that she has developed during adulthood. She does not blame her mother or grandmother for her adult decision, but presents their examples as further evidence of her choice. Lê herself has insisted that this character should not be interpreted as a depiction of her own mother, even suggesting that her own mother lives 200 kilometres from her and it would be ‘coarse’ to evoke her.27 This mother is instead part of a series of malicious, cruel mothers in Lê’s work who often appear juxtaposed with feeble, dominated fathers. In this work, such a harsh representation of a mother–daughter relationship is striking within a female epistolary text, shunning the conventional tropes of the genre and insisting upon a defiant, rebellious tone that is at odds with the modesty of many of its proponents. Furthermore, every single relationship experienced by this narrator is shot through with hostility, aggression or discomfort. It is noteworthy that many writers studied in this book describe other mothers whom they have known in a way that refutes the stereotypes of the quintessentially happy, natural earth mother who finds ultimate fulfilment in her child. Lê’s text performs a similar movement by painting a thumbnail sketch of one particular mother, a fellow patient at the Hôpital Sainte Anne, the formidable Parisian psychiatric hospital. Institutionalised for some weeks, the narrator makes the acquaintance of a woman who is silent, enclosed and seemingly cut off from the world. As Lily Chiu pinpoints in relation 27

Cheallaigh, ‘La “lectrice” douce, écrivaine mortifère: Rencontre avec Linda Lê’, 6.


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to Lê’s oeuvre, this author continues to ‘shock and traumatize us, not only through the presentation of her texts […] but also through the characters she fills them with: decaying corpses, eerie mannequins, vampires, and combusting ghosts, to name but a few’.28 This character is similarly disturbing. The narrator soon learns that the unnamed woman had a stillborn child and that her grief plunged her into a depression so severe that she barely ate for several months. In her most troubled moments, this non-mother describes the baby and talks about what they have been doing together during the day in a delirium that is only ended by tranquilisers quickly administered by the staff.29 She refuses to see her husband, who attempts to visit every day, and appears resolute on retreating from the world, as though this non-mother had no place with a non-child. While this case may be an extreme one, the narrative highlights that childrearing can go awry, that tragedy is always a possibility and that the repercussions of such trauma may be long lasting. The interruption of the monologue to describe this character strikes a chord of discomfort as the reader is forced to acknowledge that the everyday lives of women who write letters is far from an aristocratic eighteenth-century idyll. This is corroborated by the fact to which the episode with this mother hints: that the narrator has been engaged in a long battle with psychiatric illness and has spent several periods in the Hôpital Sainte-Anne. She admits that ‘au bout de quelques semaines, durant lesquelles, harcelée par des accusateurs, je ne songeais qu’à me noyer dans la Seine, je fus prise en main par les psychiatres de Sainte-Anne’ [after several weeks during which, harassed by accusers, all I could think about was drowning myself in the Seine, I was taken in charge by the psychiatrists of Sainte-Anne] (57). Lê has referred 28 Lily V. Chiu, ‘‘‘An Open Wound on a Smooth Skin”: (Post)colonialism and the Melancholic Performance of Trauma in the Works of Linda Lê’, Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 21 (2009) accessed 21 January 2015. 29 This character bears a close resemblance to one of the characters in Voix (Voices), which is also set partially in a psychiatric hospital. A number of patients voice their suffering throughout this text in the disturbing style to which Chiu alludes. Linda Lê, Voix: une crise (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1998).

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to her own stay at this hospital, part of which she fictionalised in Conte de l’amour bifrons [A Tale of Bifrons’ Love], and has admitted to bouts of delirium similar to those experienced by the protagonist of In Memoriam.30 In À l’enfant que je n’aurai pas, the narrator links her mental state to her lack of desire for children, hinting that it would be irresponsible of her to inflict her instability on a child. She writes to the phantom child: ‘moi qui ai la cervelle si peu équilibrée, qui suis souvent submergée par des angoisses infondées, peut-être t’aurais-je infecté, tu aurais été un instable, sans communauté d’intérêts avec les gens sensés’ [I have such an unstable brain and am so often submerged by unfounded anxiety that I would perhaps have infected you, you would have been unstable and without any community of reasonable people] (25–6). Lê’s text hereby directly tackles the charge of selfishness or irresponsibility levelled at the voluntarily childless. In a particularly poignant passage, in response to S’s accusation that she is making excuses for her behaviour, ‘comme si c’était une faute de n’avoir pas donné la vie’ [as if I were at fault not to have given birth] (25), she asks the non-child directly: ‘et toi, m’aurais-tu condamnée parce que j’aurais atermoyé, ne cédant que de guerre lasse, sous la pression exercée par S? Aurais-tu tendu l’oreille lorsque je t’aurais dépeint mon affolement à l’idée d’être en couches? T’aurais-je infligé ces rabâchages ou aurais-je gardé le silence sur mes valses hésitations? Aurais-je su travestir en enthousiasmes désordonnés mes contradictions?’ [And you, would you have condemned me because I’d delayed having you, conceding, battle weary, under S’s pressure? Would you have listened carefully when I described to you my horror at the idea of giving birth? Would I have inflicted these stories on you over and over again, or would I have kept my hesitation silent? Would I have known how to disguise my contradictions as disorganised enthusiasm?] (25). As she questions the child over the consequences of her inevitable failure to mother successfully, her implication is that it would have been egotistical on her part to have had a child. She candidly admits to her failings, including psychological issues that would have affected her ability to

30 Linda Lê, Conte de l’amour bifrons (Paris: Editions Christian Bourgois, 2005) and In Memoriam (Paris: Editions Christian Bourgois, 2007).


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parent effectively and reliably, and asks rhetorically how this would have affected the child. Her choice is not ill thought out, impulsive or selfish, but is an act of responsibility towards this phantom human being. This narrator is thus unashamed to write openly of her shortcomings, and in the case of her mental illness, of a shortcoming that is still highly stigmatised by society. This intimate, confessional letter is striking in its candour and thus departs radically from the ideals of feminine behaviour and its representation as extolled by the early male theorists of the genre. This may be a confession, as the epistolary text normally is, but this is not a modest, self-effacing or self-deprecating one; instead, its confession is reasoned, assertive and brutally direct. Finally, the thematics of this epistolary confession are rooted in a lyrical but exhaustive list of reasons for voluntary childlessness. This text is not a one-sided celebration of the rejection of motherhood, but a searching exploration of the reasoning behind such a decision, including the avowal of loss as well as of gain. This text is thus a meditation upon the narrator’s reasons for rejecting motherhood, pointing to the disadvantages as well as to the benefits of her choice. Lê’s narrator is aware of the loss that accompanies the rejection of motherhood and her text, as a direct address to the child that she will never have, is also predicated upon an avowal of this loss. The narrator claims to have researched reasons for and against having children, copying quotes and ideas from philosophers, writers and theorists for S to ponder. The very long list of reasons for the choice are psychological, familial, ecological, ethical and historical and anything but superficial, selfish and irresponsible; instead, Lê’s text testifies to a responsible outlook that takes into account even the most intimate weaknesses of character that may influence a child negatively. The text thus strikes a tone of rebellion and rejection but within a very reasoned and researched list of arguments against having children, and within a tentative exploration of what the narrator’s life would have been like had she made a different decision. The thematics of this epistolary innovation thus stand in stark contrast to those of the traditional form of the genre as practised by female authors. As the critics discussed above have theorised in relation to other contemporary epistolary works, this example of a female-authored confessional letter introduces new forms of ideological critique. Far from a love story with

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elements of passion and emotion, Lê’s narrator presents the remnants of a dysfunctional romantic episode and a subtle yet convincing self-love; this narrator is comfortable with herself and her life and will make sacrifices to protect them. Lê similarly refuses any conventional plot of female victimisation or suffering, as her narrator proclaims herself as the dominant force in her doomed relationship and eschews self-pity in her painful relationship with her mother and father. The way in which female authors have manipulated the genre to introduce subtle ideological critique is also rebutted, since there is nothing subtle about Lê’s intervention. The narrator’s direct response to S’s arguments in favour of having children is a forthright, reasoned and unsubtle evocation of her position. She thus undoes stereotypes of the indecisive female who will be easily swayed by a domineering man and proclaims a belief in her own way of life regardless of whether that is at odds with that of the majority. Overall, the thematics of this letter reject a female destiny tied to motherhood and open up new possibilities for imagining life without children – as she tells her non-child very directly.

Challenging the Identity of the Addressee The indistinct identity of the narrative voice, the sender of this twentyfirst-century epistolary experiment, plus the letter’s rejection of the tone of the traditional female-authored epistolary text, thus signal its rupture with many of the tenets of the genre. Perhaps Lê’s most prominent innovation, though, is the doubt that she casts over the identity of the letter’s addressee. Lê’s choice to write to an imagined, phantom being, acknowledging that he could have existed but admitting that he never will, is intriguing. A particularly salient element of this intrigue is the he of this statement; Lê is clear throughout the text that the non-child to whom the narrator is writing is male. This is striking, considering that this author has a history of challenging notions of female subjectivity in her work, that the narrator is female, that she is clearly concerned about a notion of female identity shackled to maternity and that she has a strongly female family. When questioned about


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the reason for this, Lê succinctly responded, ‘because, as the narrator says, in her adolescence, she hated her femininity’.31 It is certainly true that the narrator is disparaging about her female body, taping her growing breasts and feeling repelled by her menstruation, so it is reasonable to portray her as uncomfortable with the idea of producing another female being. Yet such an argument does not appear readily convincing. Cheallaigh reads the gender of the child as related to the myth of Antigone, a recurrent figure in Lê’s works and to whom she has frequently referred in interviews; in this tale, a mother knowingly sacrifices her life and the unborn male child that she is carrying.32 Another intertextual possibility could be the apparent reference contained in the title of the work: the gender of the unborn child of Fallaci’s work was, according to the title of the work, a bambino, a male. Given the importance accorded to the male child in Italian culture, Fallaci’s record of a protagonist considering aborting an unborn son was especially provocative. By referring to this earlier work, Lê underscores her protagonist’s rejection of several aspects of conventional understandings of femininity: not only does she reject motherhood, but she rejects the notion of nurturing a son, of gaining ascendance, of engendering a male to support and provide for her, of being adored or even preferred by the male child and of sacrificing herself for the sake of her male heir. Several scholars of Lê’s work have examined the indistinct identity of this male non-child. Alexandra Kurmann suggests that the existence of this letter creates the illusion that the child had once lived and Cheallaigh similarly contends that the unborn son is ‘composed at the very moment he is proleptically de-composed’.33 These assertions are certainly well founded, since the text stands as a site of possibility, a textual remnant of a life that 31 32 33

Cheallaigh, ‘La “lectrice” douce, écrivaine mortifère: Rencontre avec Linda Lê’, 6. Cheallaigh, Gillian Ni, ‘Voyelles mutilées, consonnes aux jambages arrachés: Linda Lê’s Compulsive Tracing, Erasing, and Re-Tracing Fragments of the Self in Writing’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 18/4 (2014), 438–6. Alexandra Kurmann, ‘Internal Dialogue as a Means of Collective Conflict Resolution in Linda Lê’s Exile Writing’, Essays in French Literature and Culture 53 (forthcoming 2016). Cheallaigh, ‘Voyelles mutilées, consonnes aux jambages arrachés: Linda Lê’s Compulsive Tracing, Erasing, and Re-Tracing Fragments of the Self in Writing’, 439.

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could have been and an enduring metaphor for existence. Yet, one could take the complete opposite view: that Lê effectively consigns the non-child to oblivion, to permanent occlusion, or to the space of never existing, through emphasising that this is a child whom the narrator ‘will never have’. There is a finality in Lê’s text that proclaims that the phantom child will never exist, either in reality or through literary creation. Indeed, À l’enfant only exists because the phantom child does not. There is no description of this phantom, no imagined picture of what he would have looked like or what his personality would have been. This non-character is not even awarded the status of a character, therefore, as the only character that this non- mother writes is herself. She insists, furthermore, that she lacks nothing that a child could bring her and that she is in no measure trying to fill a gap created by the absence of a child. In a particularly salient example, Lê even disparages the stereotype of replacing babies with books within this work, confronting the link between writing and childbearing as creative, imaginative enterprises that produce forms that outlive their creator. The narrator comments, ‘je ne serai pas des fileurs de métaphores qui comparent l’acte d’écrire à une parturition, le mûrissement d’une ébauche à la maturation d’un fœtus. […] La mise au jour d’une fiction n’équivaut pas à l’éclosion en soi d’un germe de vie’ [I will not invent metaphors that compare the act of writing to a pregnancy, the maturation of a draft to the development of a foetus. […] Bringing a work of fiction to light is not equivalent to holding within oneself the seed of a life] (44–5). It is apt that an author who is so intent on tackling the difficulties associated with being childless, on confessing to the feelings of loss and on probing the reasons in a way that defies stereotypes, should stake out a different territory for herself. Writing is not a substitution, a replacement or an alternative, she hints, and assuming such a facile link may be offensive both to a writer and to a mother. The fact that the identity of this male non-child is indistinct also invites the reader to question to whom it is really written. Writing to somebody who has died would be more understandable; indeed, Ernaux did this in L’Autre fille, her text of the same series by the NiL publishing house.34 Writing to 34 Annie Ernaux, L’Autre fille (Paris: NiL, 2011).


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somebody who has not lived – and who furthermore will never live – provokes a different set of questions. One may wonder why Lê did not write to her mother, the source of so much discomfort, according to her interviews; although she has also written of her reluctance to portray her mother in her work, Lê has also stated that her mother has never read any of her texts, so may not even read a published letter addressed to her. Indeed, this is a further connection between Lê and the narrator, who is also an author and who writes that Big Mother has never read her work. Michael Sheringham identifies autobiography as a negotiation with otherness, including the author’s negotiation with her/his textual identity, with her/his acquaintances, and with the otherness staged in existing texts of life writing.35 The ethics of expressing one’s others within one’s work is a quandary for autobiographers, whose work necessarily blurs the distinction between the private and the public self. In this case, À l’enfant que je n’aurai pas is at once a justification made by a woman of her decision not to have children, and an accusation that her own mother is partially responsible; a reader may reasonably wonder whether this constitutes a thinly veiled response to the author’s mother to her lack of descendants. Similarly, a reader may wonder whether this letter’s real, living addressee could be a current or former partner, as hinted by the character of S; a justification of the narrator’s reasons for her choice and its eventual destruction of their relationship, often explained directly to S, could be read as a response to a real-life partner who questions the author over her choice. In a recent interview, Lê also hints that this could have been written to her father: ‘In reality, even though I didn’t think about a reader until the death of my father [in 1995], I felt that I always had him in mind when I was writing. I was writing to him in some way, even though he didn’t read French’.36 The creation of an indistinct, imaginary recipient thus invites the reader into the text, to ponder the motivations of this author whose work is so compelling and to look for commonalities between writer and narrator.

Michael Sheringham, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires. Rousseau to Perec (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 36 Karin Schwerdtner, ‘Linda Lê: Risquer le tout pour le tout’, Contemporary French & Francophone Studies 17/3 (2013), 309–17, 315. 35

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Such an intersection between writer and narrator occurs as the letter reaches its conclusion. The tone of the letter changes markedly in the final pages, as the mediation becomes less self-reflective and more didactic. In this final section, Lê hints at another addressee. The narrator’s advancement is not merely individual but also collective, she states, as she writes to her non-child in the final paragraph ‘tu n’es pas l’unique destinataire, car je m’adresse aussi à toutes celles qui se sont dispensées de se conformer aux lois de la nature’ [you are not the only addressee, since I am also writing to all those who have exempted themselves from the laws of nature] (65). Although Lê states that she is not a feminist, the narrator here claims to write to a community of woman who experience a similar disinterest in confining models of femininity. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, Lê’s narrator performs a similar movement to that of many life writing texts on this subject. By joining her story to the stories of others, the narrator underlines the silence that persists in this domain and offers another model of female identity. The narrator’s letter to her non-child ends with her avowal of having gained in life as a result of imagining this phantom being; ‘je te dois de m’être surmontée, de n’être plus tout uniment cette imprécatrice tirant à boulets rouges sur mes prochains […] tu m’éveilles à la pluralité des sensations, tu me libères de mes inhibitions’ [due to you, I have overcome my difficulties, I am no longer that witch who is malicious to her loved ones […] you awaken me to the plurality of sensations, you liberate me from my inhibitions] (64–5). The narrative of loss and absence thus reaches a positive conclusion as the presence of this non-presence, the image of the child that will not be, is a source of comfort and stability to the reflective non-mother. She thus appears to write with an awareness of the ideological discourses on maternity discussed in Chapter 1 and to hope that the record of her individual reflections will become something akin to an autobiographical manifesto.37 The fact that she does so within an

37 Badinter, Le Conflit: La femme et la mère, and O’Reilly, Feminist Mothering. Sidonie Smith theorises the autobiographical manifesto as a self-reflexive mode of writing that centres upon the power of writing ‘I’ to destabilise networks of power, to rethink accepted formulations of identity and to question overtly hierarchies of oppression.


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epistolary text shows her literary innovation in addition to her progressive exploration of female identity. In addition to joining the narrator’s experience to that of a collective, Lê’s use of the phantom addressee also forces the reader to question her/his role and responsibility in the act of reading. The reader is made very aware by the constant references to ‘tu’, the phantom child, that s/he is resolutely not the addressee of this intimate letter. Throughout this text, the reader is confronted with the notion of trespass, as s/he is reading an extremely intimate text with avowals of mental illness, shame, guilt, sexuality and the uneasy characters that are recurrent in Lê’s work. This letter could be interpreted as a meditation on childlessness that writes the non-child into life, then, but could also be interpreted as a particular element of Lê’s epistolary experiment: a narrative strategy that functions as a vehicle for questioning the place of the reader in the epistolary genre. Works of this genre have often cast doubt over the identity, position and narrative function of the addressee; letters can be misinterpreted, wrongly addressed, intercepted or destroyed, as occurs in many of the most celebrated examples of epistolary narrative. In such examples, the reader reads letters from and to the characters and is privy to more information than the characters themselves. This privileged situation gives insider knowledge of the plot and places the reader in a superior, all-knowing position. In À l’enfant que je n’aurai pas, Lê inverts this movement; rather than being in a superior position, the reader is in an uncomfortable, unknowing position. In this way, Lê’s text shows that reading letters can be uncomfortable yet pushes the reader to confront the reasons for this. Any reader who knows Lê’s personal situation will suspect parallels between the author and the narrator, yet Lê’s technique of framing that suspicion within a letter in which the reader is trespassing forces us to realise our own readerly desires. Amid the current fetishisation over the private lives of the famous, the reader may be tempted to want to know and understand the private desires of the author. Yet, Lê is sure to make us uncomfortable as we do so, aware of the trespass that we are

Sidonie Smith, ‘The Autobiographical Manifesto: Identities, Temporalities, Politics’, Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 14/2 (1991), 186–212.

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committing. She appears to be tempting the reader to make assumptions about her identity yet simultaneously cautioning us against doing so. The letter thus becomes a push and pull between revelation and concealment in a highly orchestrated game that is designed to question why and how we engage with intimacy. Ultimately, perhaps this letter makes the reader feel like an intruder because that is exactly what we are. Reading such intimate, confessional writing could be deemed inappropriate or unnecessary; maybe we should not be reading this explanation of a woman’s decision not to mother because it should be sufficiently respected and understood for her not to need to express it. By doing so, Lê forces us to give credibility to a woman who has made this personal choice whilst proclaiming that it is nobody’s business but her own.

Concluding Thoughts Lê’s text thus stands as a significant response to the many women who have previously engaged in the epistolary genre. Her text is at once a piece of subtle ideological critique, as she tentatively explores arguments for and against procreating, and is highly innovative in its form. By crafting a narrative voice that is ambiguous yet resolute and which refutes the male voice that interrupts it, this twenty-first-century epistolary text proclaims a defiance of literary and social mores. By introducing thematics that resist facile connections between female authors and a poetics of love, romance, betrayal and victimisation, the text forges a different model of feminine identity that resists conventional lifestyle choices and shows that these do not lead to lack, suffering or regret. Finally, by configuring an indistinct destinee, this text casts doubt upon the practice of reading epistolary fiction now, and especially upon reading female intimacy. Lê adds a further dimension to the careful consideration of autobiography and fiction in which she has been engaged throughout her career. In À l’enfant que je n’aurai pas, she broadens this to a reflection on the figure of the voluntarily childless woman, staking out a textual space for a female identity beyond


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reproduction. In so doing, she performs a masterful re-appropriation of a genre that predates the novel and simultaneously confronts a longstanding taboo. I now turn to a writer who re-appropriates a much more recent genre to voice voluntary childlessness. In a similar way to Lê, Sautière writes an extended reflection on the reasons for and against mothering, yet the resolute tone of Lê’s work is replaced by a doubtful, questioning style that highlights different facets of the experience of voluntary childlessness.

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People who want children are all alike. People who don’t want children don’t want them in their own ways. —Meghan Daum

Sautière’s Nullipare, this author’s second book, recounts the narrator’s experience of being named ‘nullipare’, nulliparous or childless, by a medical professional, and her ensuing reflection upon her decision not to mother.1 Originally from Iran, Sautière writes snapshots of her past in a series of vignettes that each point to the myriad reasons behind the decision not to become a mother. As the author of three texts – Fragments d’un lieu commun [Fragments of a Common Place] (2003), Nullipare and Dressing [Dressing Room] (2013) – Sautière is a relatively new name on the French literary scene.2 Yet, her future seems promising. Her first work won the Prix Rhône-Alpes and the Prix Lettres Frontière and her texts are published by Verticales, which was owned by Seuil before its acquisition by Gallimard, and which has published works by authors such as François Bégaudeau, Chloé Delaume and 2014 Goncourt winner Lydie Salvayre. Her delicate, crafted writing is comprised of self-reflexive vignettes that render snapshots of her life and of the lives of others in a

1 Sautière, Nullipare. Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses after the quotation. 2 Jane Sautière, Dressing (Verticales/Gallimard, 2013). Jane Sautière, Fragments d’un lieu commun (Paris: Verticales/Le Seuil, 2003). Prior to her three single-authored texts, she co-wrote a detective novel with Jean-Marie Dutey: Zones d’ombre (Paris: Gallimard, 1998).

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highly descriptive, poetic and evocative style. She writes memories and reflections in a seemingly disjointed manner, leaving gaps that create a tone of nostalgia, loss or mystery. Nullipare, recounted by an unnamed narrator and referring to an unnamed character, is commonly referred to as a work of autofiction in critical literature. In this chapter, I examine the autofictional in Sautière’s text, looking to the ways in which she manipulates and disrupts this genre to create a portrayal of voluntary childlessness that insists upon tentative yet thorough reflection. I first survey current debates surrounding autofiction, then discuss how Sautière’s text enters into dialogue with these. The label ‘autofiction’ continues to resist definition or consensus. A comparatively new term, it has turned from a fashionable, popular designation to something more divisive and even derided. Serge Doubrovsky famously invented the label, inscribing it on the book jacket of his 1977 work Fils [Son].3 The inspiration for his innovative use of the autobiographical form was clearly Philippe Lejeune’s taxonomy of 1975; in Le Pacte autobiographique [The Autobiographical Pact], Lejeune not only set forth the pact of narrator/character/author but also tabulated the distinctions between genres.4 In his writings and interviews on the topic of autofiction, Doubrovksy claims to support the triptych of the nominal identification of narrator, character and author, but departs from Lejeune’s theorisation by questioning the place of the truth. Whereas Lejeune claimed that autobiographical writing is distinct from fiction due to its truthful intention, Doubrovsky resists simple truth claims. He claims that the appearance of fiction in autobiography is nothing new and inscribes himself in a long line of autobiographers who have fictionalised parts of their narrative. Doubrovsky’s distinction is that, in his texts, the non-referential elements are directly signalled.5 Several literary critics have engaged with Doubrovsky 3 4 5

Serge Doubrovksy, Fils (Paris: Galilée, 1977). Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975). He also claims in interviews to consider the sub-genre as a potentially democratising invention, allowing those who are not part of the elite, or whose writing does not conform to its codified rules, to write self-reflective work. He writes, ‘access to autobiography, this pantheon of dead men, is forbidden to me. Okay. But I can


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over the categorisation of this sub-genre. Vincent Colonna, for example, took issue with Doubrovsky’s form of autofiction in Autofiction et Autres Mythomanies Littéraires [Autofiction and Other Literary Mythomanias].6 Whereas Doubrovsky views autofiction as a means of arriving at a deeper understanding of the self, Colonna employs the term to designate texts that write a different version of a self; autofiction, then, is just another form of the autobiographical novel. By contrast, Philippe Gasparini in Est-il je? Roman Autobiographique et autofiction [Is He I? Autobiographical Novel and Autofiction] (2004) emphasises the fictional in autofiction.7 Importantly, he finds that it is unnecessary to identify the author, narrator and protagonist as the same name. Instead, he proposes that there are many ways that the relationship between author and character can be established. For Gasparini, autofiction should aim for vraisemblance by pushing the fictional element to its limits and insisting on the distinction between the author’s life and her/his narrative of it. The form was the source of much innovation in the 1980s and early 1990s, as both new and established writers experimented with it: Annie Ernaux, Hervé Guibert, Christine Angot, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Catherine Cusset, for example. Importantly, perhaps due to the democratic nature identified by Doubrovsky, writers from minorities also started to practise the genre.8 Such popularity has not arisen without polemic, however. Although the sub-genre has been a source of innovation and even liberation to many authors, it has also attracted vehement critique. Marie Darrieussecq, for example, wrote an article in Poétique [Poetics]

6 7 8

enter it by fraud. I can gate crash, thanks to fiction, under the cover of a novel’, Serge Doubrovksy, Le Livre brisé (Paris: Grasset, 1989), 256. Vincent Colonna, Autofiction et Autres Mythomanies Littéraires (Paris: Tristram, 2004). Philippe Gasparini, Est-il Je – Roman autobiographique et autofiction (Paris: Seuil, 2004). See for example Shirley Jordan, ‘Autofiction in the Feminine’, French Studies 67/1 (2012), 76–84 and Arnaud Genon’s interview with M’hamed Dahi, ‘L’autofiction dans la littérature maghrébine’, accessed 14 February, 2015.

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entitled ‘L’autofiction, un genre pas sérieux’ [Autofiction, a Genre that is not Serious] in which she claims that autofiction is comprised of two contradictory impulses: ‘autofiction is an assertion that proclaims itself to be feigned and at the same time serious’.9 According to Darrieussecq, the reader of autofiction is faced with partially factual and partially fictional elements that are impossible to distinguish. While this could be considered as the genre’s strength and as a corrective to any naïve approach to autobiography, it also creates a mistrust that could be viewed negatively. More recently Christine Angot, who was dubbed ‘the queen of autofiction’ by the website of the Ministère de la Culture [Ministry of Culture] was found guilty of ‘atteinte à la vie privée’ [an attack on an individual’s private life] and fined 40,000 Euros over one of her texts, Les Petits [The Little Ones].10 As I have argued elsewhere, this judgement could be viewed as a judgement of autofiction itself, due to comments made by both the prosecution and defence related to the sub-genre.11 Autofiction thus finds itself in an awkward place, yet will hopefully be recouped as part of a continuum of literary innovation. For Elizabeth Jones, the promise of autofiction lies in the manner in which it brings dominant socio-critical developments to bear upon first-person narrative. She states that: autofiction thus represents a way of acknowledging the constructed nature of selfhood, particularly those selfhoods which have undergone the twentieth-century experience of psychoanalysis. Rather than stuffing narratives with wordy explanations of contexts and situations in their full and impossible detail, Doubrovsky’s autofictions

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Marie Darrieussecq, ‘L’autofiction, un genre pas sérieux’, Poétique 107 (1996), 369–80, 377. Christine Angot, Les Petits (Paris: Flammarion, 2011). Edwards, Natalie, ‘Autofiction in the Dock: The Case of Christine Angot’, in Adrienne Angelo and Erika Fülöp, eds, Protean Selves: First-Person Voices in Twenty-First Century French and Francophone Narratives (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2014), 68–81. Other writers of autofiction have also been found guilty of ‘atteinte à la vie privée’ in a recent spate of legal actions: Lionel Duroy for Colères, for example, and Marcela Iacub for Belle et bête, in which she represents her affair with Dominique Strauss Kahn.


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simply acknowledge the impossibility of memory and allow themselves the luxury of sketching an imaginary framework through which a truth can be told.12

Such an approach to selfhood is one of the hallmarks of Sautière’s writing, which is based upon flawed memory, doubt and incompleteness, the questioning of the truth and unclear identifications between author and narrator. Literary critic Pauline Vachaud includes her in a group of writers who show an ethical engagement with language by writing fragmented, polyphonic texts ‘that listen to the voices of the world and, particularly, the silent voices of the excluded’.13 Vachaud points to ‘the allegorical fragment’ that Sautière develops in her first text, Fragments d’un lieu commun (2003), a record of her work in a prison that consists of one hundred vignettes that incorporate the voices of inmates and colleagues.14 Vachaud underscores that Sautière’s writing is not fictional and proposes instead the label ‘testimonial narrative of literary value’.15 In Nullipare, this author furthers her play with first-person narrative. Literary critic Anne-Martine Parent calls this text simply ‘an autobiographical narrative’ and both she and gender theorist and psychoanalyst Laurie Laufer read the narrator’s voice as a direct transposal of that of the author, whereas Le Magazine Littéraire refers to it as an autofiction.16 In this chapter, I read Nullipare as a provocative experiment with the sub-genre of autofiction that results in a highly 12 13 14 15 16

Elizabeth H. Jones, ‘Autofiction: A Brief History of a Neologism’, in Richard Bradford, ed., Life Writing: Essays on Autobiography, Biography and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 174–84, 180. Pauline Vachaud, ‘D’une ‘poéthique’ contemporaine, ou comment ne pas répondre à l’air du temps’, L’Esprit Créateur 50/3 (2010), 99–115, 109. Vachaud, ‘D’une ‘poéthique’ contemporaine, ou comment ne pas répondre à l’air du temps’, 104. Vachaud, ‘D’une ‘poéthique’ contemporaine, ou comment ne pas répondre à l’air du temps’, 105. Anne-Martine Parent, ‘Héritages mortifères: Rupture dans/de la filiation chez Ying Chen et Jane Sautière’, Temps Zéro, Revue d’étude des écritures contemporaines 5 (2012) accessed 6 March 2013. Laurie Laufer, ‘Biopolitique du corps féminin. À propos de … Nullipare de Jane Sautière’, L’Évolution psychiatrique 76 (2011), 142–9. Philippe Lefait, ‘Nullipare’, Le Magazine littéraire 484 (2009), 25.

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innovative form of representing voluntary childlessness. I first analyse the blurring of the identities of author and narrator in this highly intimate text. I then examine the ways in which the narrative voice inscribes doubt into this work by insisting on its incomplete, non-unitary formation. I finally study the fragmented, vignette style that creates this doubtful narrative through gaps, ambiguities and a refusal to explain the narrator’s lack of desire for motherhood.

Autofictional Vraisemblance The first word of Nullipare is ‘je’ [I] and the short section that acts as its preface is highly intimate in tone. During a breast cancer screening examination, the professional but distant nurse and radiographer who speak to the narrator in the impersonal form label her as ‘nullipare’ [nulliparous] on the form that they are completing. Previously unaware of the term, the narrator writes ‘le mot me frappe, me blesse, me suit dans ma journée, comme les toutes petites coupures qu’on se fait avec une feuille de papier, qui saignent beaucoup, et qui nous gênent au-delà du vraisemblable’ [the word strikes me, injures me, follows me throughout my day, like a paper cut that bleeds and hurts more than one would imagine] (12). Sautière’s text thus begins with an intimate, confessional admission of her feelings of loss and solitude. The medical establishment is at once presented as cold, distant and more interested in labelling patients than listening to or understanding them; as Laufer writes, ‘her choice, her desire, are not heard or even listened to. They can only become, according to the logic of performative medical violence, psychological suffering’.17 From the outset, the narrator strikes

17

Laufer, ‘Biopolitique du corps féminin. À propos de … Nullipare de Jane Sautière’, 147. Laufer convincingly argues that such a labelling is part of a medical discourse that insists upon normalisation and the utility of the human body. Using Foucault’s notion of biopolitics in La Volonté de savoir (The Will to Know), she reads this label


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a particular tone of intimacy with the reader, awarding her/him glimpses into private events and into the private thoughts that these arouse in her. The opening image of a mammography is striking and will likely resonate with many women, particularly those of over child-bearing age. It is all the more ironic that she recounts a ‘mammography’ in this meditation on the refusal of motherhood. Furthermore, this reference to a potentially fatal disease, breast cancer, coupled with the metaphor of the cut, bleeding finger are the first of several metaphors that present nature as dangerous and destructive. Such warnings of the body as a source of pain, danger and death emphasise the narrator’s fragility, thus forging a more intimate bond between reader and narrator, and also prefigure the tragic tale of her family: as shall be discussed in further detail below, her mother’s first husband and two children had both died of tuberculosis before the narrator was born. The intimate, confessional tone of this narrative voice thus draws the reader into this tale and invites her/him to suspend disbelief and read this text as self-reflexive, revelatory to some degree of the author’s identity. Accordingly, this intimate first-person narrative voice proceeds to convey an array of information that corresponds to established facts about Sautière’s life. As we have seen, whereas Doubrovksy claims that autofiction is predicated upon the tripartite identification of author, narrator and character according to the terms of Lejeune’s pact, Gasparini dispenses with this idea. Instead, he argues that identification between character and author can be determined in a number of ways. In Nullipare, the narrator is an author, she is recently post-menopausal (Sautière was 56 years old at the time of publication), she was born in Tehran, she worked in the prison system, she is voluntarily childless and she has moved through a succession of countries and cities. Such details are corroborated by information known about the author and, moreover, the narrator insists upon this correspondence in the opening pages. When the narrator is described as ‘nullipare’, she first hears ‘nulle’ [useless] and equates it with ‘nulle part’ [nowhere] and the idea of

as revelatory of a neoliberal biopolitics that uses ‘le discours du Maître’ (the Master’s discourse) in order to ‘determine the speaking subject as a pure object-gadget, nothing more than an instrument of its power’ (148).

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lack of belonging, writing ‘une femme de nulle part […] je me demande s’il existe un mot semblable pour designer un homme qui n’aurait pas d’enfant’ [a woman from nowhere […] I wonder whether there is a similar word to designate a man who does not have children] (13). Faced with the adjective ‘nullipare’, the narrator immediately connects this lack with her lack of origins. She writes firstly of the loss of her homeland, having been born in Tehran and having since lived in several different countries. She lists the places that she has lived, including cities in Iran, France, Cambodia and Lebanon, including snippets of information about each place: ‘La Garonne-Colombe, l’arbre avait grandi’ [The Garonne-Colombe area, the tree had grown] (18) for example. She describes them in terms of a static image that she recalls about each one, creating a melancholic tone and encouraging sympathy for this solitary woman who has suffered from a lack of belonging for as long as she can remember. Throughout, Sautière’s autofictional narrative voice implies that this is revelatory of the author’s own painful situation. Yet, as I show here, she draws parallels between her identity and that of the narrator but uses autofiction to cast doubt over her identity as a voluntarily childless woman.

Voicing Doubt One of the main narrative techniques discernible in Sautière’s work is the way in which she manipulates the narrative voice to inscribe doubt into her text. She never names her narrator, thus leaving questions over the reference to her own identity. Instead, she peppers her text with motifs of uncertainty and instability. Her representation of the loss of her mother tongue is the prime example of this. The melancholic tone of the vignettes reflects the multiple sites of loss that the narrator experiences, not just of her homeland and place of origin but also of her first language; her nourrice [nurse], whom she calls her ‘mère d’adoption’ [adoptive mother] (26) spoke Farsi to her and she states that ‘c’est sans doute dans la perte de cette langue que je persiste à ne pas me consoler d’elle’ [it must be due to the loss of this language that I


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still cannot console myself for her loss] (26). The label ‘nullipare’ thus leads to a realisation of loss on several levels, from geographical to ancestral to linguistic. As an example of the effect that this has upon her, the narrator recounts having met an Iranian artist at the Venice biennale and regrets being unable to speak to her in her native tongue. She writes, ‘évidemment je commence par lui dire que I am born in Téhéran, you know, and when I lost my nurse, I don’t want to speak any more farsi. C’est court une vie quand on a peu de mots. Oh, what a sad story, me dit-elle, et les larmes, inattendues, me montent aux yeux. Not so sad story, I become to write cause this story’ [Obviously I start by telling her I am born in Teheran, you know, and when I lost my nurse, I don’t want to speak any more Farsi. Life is short when you have few words. Oh, what a sad story, she says, and tears, unexpectedly, come to my eyes. Not so sad story, I become to write cause this story] (29). This sudden multilingual narration, the fact of discussing a lost language (Farsi) in another language (English) through the language of the narration (French) hints at the instability of the narrator’s voice and of her writing position; her voice could have been very different had she not lost her first language and the self-narrative that would have eventuated would have varied considerably from the one that she constructs in Nullipare. This plurivocal, multilingual narrative voice thus increases the doubt of this autofictional text, reminding the reader that there is again no stable, complete, unitary identity discernible to this writing subject. Significantly, furthermore, the narrator hints in this passage that, although she experienced this disappearance of a language as a loss, she has transformed this loss into a positive eventuality: the loss of language is the source of her writing. She firstly insists that this loss is not a source of stasis or negativity, thus subverting any assumption that her text is a lament on the negative consequences of a mobile, childless lifestyle. Second, Sautière hints that her writing is not the result of her childlessness; she is clear that she is not writing to compensate for not having children, as we shall see in more detail below. As is evident in the multilingual citation above, this narrative voice usually narrates the vignettes in the present tense. Doubrovsky isolates this as one of the hallmarks of autofiction; in an interview with Michel Contat contends that ‘what makes autofiction is a very precise fact: everything is written in the present tense. And that is an absolute fiction. […] This kind

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of presence of the present is, I believe, the very signature of autofiction. When one reads an autobiographical narrative, it is in the past tense’.18 Sautière follows a similar pattern to that stipulated by Doubrovsky, inscribing most of her vignettes in the present tense with occasional incursions into the imperfect tense to recount repeated actions that took place in the past, such as her behaviour during a period of psychological difficulty (87). As a consequence, Sautière’s text emphasises that it is created, that it is an artifice that is connected to an identity, but only loosely. The immediacy of the narrative voice also resonates with the reader, who is further drawn into this intimate text; the present tense eliminates the temporal gap between the event and its written record, conveying the intimate thoughts of the narrator as though she were experiencing them in the present time, as we are reading them. Yet the reader is also aware, as Doubrovsky indicates through the expression ‘that is an absolute fiction’, that one cannot trust or blindly believe this narrator or this author; the present tense serves as a metaphor for the way in which her memory recalls the isolated images and vignettes, which is necessarily incomplete, unstructured and incorrectly ordered. Doubt is therefore pervasive in this text as Sautière is clearly intent on emphasising the unknowable in terms of her self and her story. One of the rare instances in which the narrator breaks from the present tense has a particular significance. In this vignette, the narrator reiterates the reasons that she has given for not becoming a mother in the past and comments upon how these have changed over the course of her adulthood. She writes that she would at first state ‘j’aurais été une mauvaise mère’ [I would have been a bad mother] (62). Then she would respond, ‘j’aurais été une excellente mère de schizophrène’ [I would have been an excellent mother to a schizophrenic] (63) and later ‘je n’aurais jamais pu supporter une grossesse, quelque chose qui pousse en moi, quelle horreur!’ [I would never have been able to endure a pregnancy, something growing me, how horrible!] (63). Finally, she settles with ‘j’ai dit ensuite qu’étant moi-même très folle, il ne fallait pas que j’enfante’ [Then I said that my own madness meant that I shouldn’t have a child] (63). It is interesting to note that, as we 18

Michel Contat, Portraits et rencontres (Genève: Editions Zoé, 2005), 231–64.


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have seen in À l’enfant que je n’aurai pas, this narrator also imagines herself as a mother and uses the conditional perfect to express how she perhaps would have been had she taken a different decision. She clearly feels obliged to have an answer, a public response to the question that the reader does not hear in the text but that is often asked of voluntarily childless women; a woman who decides to bring a life into the world is rarely called upon to justify her choice, whereas a woman who decides not to is. As shown in Chapter 1, stigma is something of which childless women frequently complain in research interviews, both in Anglo-American and French research studies. What is striking in Sautière’s case is that her public answer has become an open admission of her perceived inability to mother responsibly and she is not afraid to admit it; the narrator writes candidly of the anorexia and psychological trauma from which she suffered in young adulthood and hints that such afflictions would have prevented her from mothering responsibly. This therefore constitutes a further similarity to Lê’s text, in which the narrator also deflects the charges of selfishness and narcissism by admitting to psychological issues that would have impacted upon her phantom child. In Sautière’s work, such a rupture in the narrative, by employing a tense that stands out from the rest of the text, highlights this passage that constitutes an important element of the protagonist’s narrative of childlessness. She indicates that her decision has long-standing implications that reach far into her past and that are not simply fragmented, fleeting or incomplete reflections. Moreover, it testifies to the fact that she has spoken with a different ‘I’ over time; the ‘I’ that she used as a young woman who claimed she would be a bad mother is not the same as the ‘I’ who stated that she should not procreate due to her own madness. In this way, the narrator emphasises that her identity is not static or unmuted and that there is a difference between her narrating ‘I’ and her narrated ‘I’s. Although she has moved out of the present tense of autofiction, she does so in a way that increases the instability of her identity in narrative. Sautière thus inscribes this text with a series of strategies that serve to create doubt over the narrative voice. By representing how she has lost a language, how her identity is narrated through several different languages, how her narrative is incomplete through her use of the present tense narration and how her ‘I’ has changed over time, this narrative voice points to the instabilities and inconsistencies of the identity that it is inscribing.

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Vignettes of Doubt The form of this autofictional account, the fragmented vignettes that each allude to facets of the narrator’s life in a disjointed, disconnected way, further the doubt that forms the fabric of this text. Disjointed narrative characterised by fragmented text and even fragmented sentences is a leitmotif of autofiction as practitioners of this mode of writing resist any complete, cohesive or unified portrayal of identity. Writers of autofiction such as Christine Angot, Hervé Guibert and Catherine Cusset are well known for their experimentation with this component of the sub-genre. Sautière developed this narrative technique in her first text, Fragments d’un lieu commun, in which she writes of memories of her work in the prison system, often imitating the voices of prisoners and colleagues with whom she worked. She describes this technique thus: Le fragment s’est imposé d’emblée. Il fallait ce blanc entre ces mots compacts, il fallait un moment de vide et de silence. Je ne pouvais pas écrire autrement. Je ne sais pas bien encore ce que signifie pour moi cette forme. Instinctivement je l’oppose à la compacité du monde que je raconte. Mais c’est aussi l’espace du lecteur, là où je ne suis plus que dans le silence. Un silence que j’espère partager tout autant avec le lecteur que l’écriture elle-même. […] Mais les fragments sont aussi une possibilité de croiser des choses, de travailler dans les intersections, de nouer des fils. Ils sont du séparé lié.19 [The fragment imposed itself immediately. A blank was necessary between those compact words, a moment of emptiness and silence. I could not write any other way. I do not yet know what this form means to me. Instinctively, I oppose it to the density of the world that I recount. But it is also the space of the reader, where I am in silence. A silence that I hope to share with the reader as much as with the writing itself. […] But the fragments also create the possibility of crossing between things, of working in the intersections, of tying threads together. They are linked separations.]

19

Littérature contemporaine sur Internet, ‘Jane Sautière: Fragmentation d’un lieu commun, entretien inédit, des extraits, deux lectures’, accessed 15 February 2015, n.p.


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This fragmented, vignette style could perhaps be connected to the author’s name; this information is unknown, but one may suspect that ‘Sautière’ is a pseudonym, since it is very rare and it appears to be a derivative of the verb ‘sauter’, which translates to jump, jump over, skip or leap. In Nullipare, Sautière extends her use of this vignette form to represent her reasons for not becoming a mother. Some of the vignettes are four pages long but most are one or two pages, and several are just a short paragraph. As Sautière indicates in this citation, such a form imposes gaps between the vignettes, creating considerable blank space that breaks the narrative and signals a rupture in the narrator’s thoughts or memories. Not only does this insist upon the incomplete, flawed nature of identity and memory, but these gaps invite the reader to enter the text. At these points, the narrator moves to the side and the reader’s active interpretation of the silences is necessitated. Since the topic of these vignettes is her decision not to have children, this use of the fragmented vignettes invites the reader to question her decision. We are not sure to what extent she is sure of her decision, whether she regrets it, or what all of her reasons are for it. She gives us snapshots that give an ambiguous view of her decision and we are invited to ponder the gaps between them. In addition to increasing the doubt inherent in this text, this technique also points to a potential breakdown in language. The large gaps, the fragmented sentences and the expansive white spaces could be considered as revelatory of the fact that voluntary childlessness is still somewhat taboo in contemporary society. The language with which to voice one’s lack of desire for children is therefore difficult to find; after all, as is one of the central questions that this book poses, how does one write about non-mothering without writing about mothering? Sautière’s text brings this question to the fore through the experiences of the narrator’s mother. Several vignettes are devoted to this story, which is a poignant element of her text. No less significant is the fact that the narrator’s father is never mentioned and thus constitutes another lacuna in her narrative. Interestingly, the mother’s story only appears in the second section of Nullipare; in the first, which accounts for nearly a third of the text, the main topic of the text is the narrator’s multiple sites of loss. The narrator is clear that the mother’s tale is not the premise of her text, therefore. Instead, Nullipare is resolutely about her and her story, pointing to several

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reasons why she chose not to have children and avoiding the assumption that it was simply because of her mother. Sautière explains that her mother had married a man who had been diagnosed with tuberculosis at a time at which this was incurable and gave birth to two children who were ‘promis à la mort’ [destined to die] (47). Sautière herself is the result of a later husband, ‘née de cette peine, de cette hésitation ultime’ [born of this struggle, of this ultimate hesitation] (47). The correlation between birth and death is clear, and one understands that Sautière has been raised with the notion of child rearing as a source not just of sacrifice or difficulty but of tragedy and loss. Parent interprets the reason for Sautière’s decision not to procreate as ‘the necessity to put an end to this unhealthy, deathly filiation’.20 This is certainly partially the case, as the narrator is made brutally aware of the fact that giving birth equates to risking death, both for oneself and for the child to whom one gives life, and she clearly decides that it is safer not to take the chance. Although she does not write of her feelings towards her mother, apart from avowing her hatred of her while a young woman and of nursing her in her final days, she clearly feels a guilt and a duty towards her, writing that for some time she resolved to ‘rester fille pour que ma mère ait toujours une fille. Comme si, moi-même, devenue mère, j’aurais cessé d’être sa fille’ [remain a girl so that my mother would always have a daughter. As if by becoming a mother myself, I would have stopped being her daughter] (111). This is a striking evocation of the psychoanalytic theories proposed by both Tilmant and Vallée discussed in Chapter 2: that some women experience a lack of desire for children of their own in order to maintain their relationship with their mother and to solidify their mother’s identity. Yet, this is hardly the only reason for Sautière’s choice; she recounts her family history then moves beyond it to recount a variety of reasons that she has articulated in adulthood. One of the most striking qualities of Sautière’s text is her desire to reflect upon her past, to narrate her mother’s experience as an element of her own narrative and to record both the advantages and the disadvantages of her childlessness. Laufer argues that the result of the

20 Parent, ‘Héritages mortifères: Rupture dans/de la filiation chez Ying Chen et Jane Sautière’.


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normalising discourse of which ‘nullipare’ is part is that ‘this woman is going to have to find the reasons for her choice’ and that Sautière feels ‘the obligation to psychologise her choice […]. She makes of her life an explanation for her absence of a child, daughter of a mother in mourning, with dead children. Thus is born the psychologising discourse on practices, thus is normalisation sketched].21 It is true that this author appears to want to explore the reasons for her childlessness and feels acutely that she is part of an abnormal minority due to her status. Yet she also refuses to give an explanation by using the sub-genre of autofiction to create doubt over her reasons. These are many, the reader infers, and they are ambiguous and overlapping. The figure of the mother functions as a partial explanation of her daughter’s childlessness, but the text advances several other reasons and all within a narrative of doubt. And all the while, these reasons are presented within a tale that is partly fictionalised; the reader does not know when the autobiography takes precedence and when the text become fictional, as Sautière’s brand of autofiction hints that both fact and fiction are present but creates fluid, indistinct boundaries between them. Sautière thus subsumes the story of her mother within other elements of her story and among other reasons for her childlessness. Again, the pervasive mood of the text is the doubt that she feels over the source of her choice and how she should recount it. The narrator even alludes to the doubt of her narrative and of her decision not to mother in a particularly direct vignette. She writes: Pourquoi dire cela: ‘je sais’, alors que rien n’a été comme cela, rien n’a été su, ou révélé, ou limpide, ou lumineux un jour, tandis que les jours de chaos auraient été opaques de savoirs et sombres. Non, je n’ai rien su ‘un jour.’ J’ai, au fil du temps, créé mon histoire, donné une continuité aux faits et aux épreuves surmontées, constitué un récit, tandis que la houle, le chaos dont je suis issue reste préhistorique, sans rapport à une histoire, à un continuum. (90) [Why say that: ‘I know’, when nothing was like that, nothing was known, or revealed, or lucid, or illuminated one day, as opposed to days of chaos that were opaquely unclear

21

Laufer, ‘Biopolitique du corps féminin. À propos de … Nullipare de Jane Sautière’, 147–8.

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Chapter 4 and dark. No, I didn’t know anything ‘one day’. Over time, I created my story, gave a continuity to the facts and to the challenges that I overcame, constructed a narrative, while the turbulence, the chaos that I come from remains part of prehistory, with no relationship to a story, to a continuum.]

Here, then, she alludes to the narrative of her autofictional self, to the way in which she does not know herself and does not experience the kind of self-knowledge to which truth claims in autobiography may have alluded in times past. For Doubrovsky, such incursions into the text that draw attention to the fictional elements of the narrative are the hallmark of the sub-genre. In this citation, Sautière further insists upon the lack of truthful, reliable narration by creating a disjuncture between her own life and that of her mother. Although she underscores that her mother’s tale affects the way in which she configures her relationship towards mothering, she claims that this history is part of ‘prehistory’, far removed from her own life and choices. She highlights that this history created a chaos from which she has developed a narrative, but that this narrative is necessarily incomplete. Moreover, she is clear that there was no single moment of truth or revelation when she realised that she did not want children. Instead, she presents this as a gradual process that is rooted in self-invention – ‘j’ai, au fil du temps, créé mon histoire’ [I have, over time, created my story] – rather than in any specific moment of rejection of mothering. At the end of this short, pithy vignette she simply states, ‘j’ai inventé ma vie, comme tous’ [I have invented my life, as we all do] (90). The fragments, and particularly the gaps between the fragments, thus point to a lack of certainty – not over her decision not to mother, but over the reasons for her lack of desire to do so. Sautière is clearly intent on probing this doubt, however. In a vignette that describes the narrator’s doubtful attitude towards mothering over time, the narrator writes openly of the feelings of loss that she experiences at not having had a child. She admits that she had been tempted to become a mother in the past, specifically when she was in one particular relationship. Her reason, however, is presented as wanting to please the man, not as wanting a child. She explains, ‘j’avais, à cette époque, arrêté toute contraception et j’étais très amoureuse. Rien n’avait été formulé d’un désir d’enfant, ni par lui, ni par moi, ni même silencieusement dans un désir à peine construit.


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J’étais dans le vide d’un passage à l’acte’ [I had, at that time, stopped all contraception and I was very much in love. Nothing had been formulated about wanting a child, neither by him nor by me, nor even silently in a partly constructed desire. I was acting without thinking] (105). She represents this as akin to sleepwalking, rather than making a conclusive decision, but interrogates this attitude in the present. For example, remembering an encounter with a five-year-old girl called Anna who fell from her bike and approached the narrator for help, she writes: Est-ce que quelque chose me manque? Je suis tellement liée à ce manque que je ne sais plus. Oui, je peux imaginer une petite fille, Anna, bien sûr Anna, mienne, qui voudrait une mappemonde pour son anniversaire … Je pourrai rêver longuement. Je ne le fais pas. Non pas pour économiser une souffrance, ou pour éviter d’agiter en vain un rêve démonétisé. Je ne le fais pas parce que toutes mes rêveries sont cramées. (71) [Am I lacking something? I am so linked to this lack that I no longer know. Yes, I can imagine a little girl, Anna, of course Anna, mine, who would want a globe for her birthday … I could dream at length. But I don’t. Not to save myself from suffering, or to avoid pointlessly revisiting a dream of deprivation. I don’t dream because my dreams are burnt out.]

The loss that she feels is tangible in this passage but this is not presented as regret; something that could have been simply is not. In case the reader were in any doubt, however, Sautière writes pointedly of her ‘refus de la maternité’ [refusal of motherhood] (62) in an admission that her childlessness is purely voluntary. What she is most clear about it is that she does not know the full explanation for her choice not to mother. Indeed, she is clear throughout that the loss in her life is multiple, that it would not be remedied by a child, and that a child would in no way fill the gaps that lie in her history and identity. Part of the doubt that the narrator experiences over the rationale for her decision stems from these gaps in her history and the racial identity behind them. She writes, for example, about how she returned to France as an eighteen-year-old student but found it ‘un pays qui s’est insensiblement transformé’ [a country that had imperceptibly transformed] (86). She feels a stranger due to her ethnic identity, her time spent abroad and to the unfamiliarity of her surroundings, especially faced with the ‘étrangeté d’un pays

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que j’étais censée ressentir comme mien’ [foreignness of a country that I was supposed to feel as my own] (87). She recounts the psychological anguish that she experienced here and which resurfaced periodically later in her life. In particular, the narrator is candid about the anorexia that plagued her in early life, writing that, ‘il fallait que je ne mange pas, il fallait qu’il y ait du vide, il fallait que ce vide soit un désir, il fallait que la faim s’installe, il fallait que j’aie faim pour me sentir vivre, il fallait que je sois vide pour que je vive’ [I had to not eat, I had to have an emptiness, this emptiness had to be a desire, hunger had to settle in, I had to be hungry to feel alive, I had to be empty to be alive] (95). In this vignette, in which she alludes to her suffering in France, the narrator links this directly to her mother’s story, imagining that her mother’s two dead children are sitting on her shoulder like ‘deux anges vampires’ [two vampire angels] (87–8). The children who succumbed to tuberculosis are thus presented as demons who follow her and who lead her into psychological illness, and this occurs primarily in France. In this way, Sautière links her ethnicity and her status as a foreigner in France to her lack of desire for children. One could even speculate that Iran may function psychologically as a lost motherland that she can neither regain nor replace elsewhere. Sautière refuses, however, to plug the gaps of her identity or her narrative by providing any such explanation. The autofictional framework of this text thus furthers Sautière’s literary experiment. This sub-genre emphasises incompleteness as opposed to developed, completed memories, and the strategies that Sautière develops in her manipulation of it – short vignettes of incomplete, isolated memories – create further doubt over the reasons behind this choice of voluntary childlessness. Similarly, Sautière constantly refuses any clear, complete and unambiguous representation of her childlessness. She insists, for example, that although her choice not to mother is purely voluntary, she has experienced maternal feelings in different circumstances. She writes of how she experiences something akin to maternal emotions with her dying mother, in a role reversal that positions her as the mother figure and the degenerating mother as the helpless child. As the mother became senile and reverted to speaking her native Breton, the narrator became ‘sa fille, mais aussi sa mère […] la mère d’une enfant au bord de la mort’ [her daughter, but also her mother […] the mother of a child on the brink of death] (92–3). Far from


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embodying the stereotypical traits of the unsentimental, unnatural woman, therefore, the narrator writes of the tenderness and charity that she displays in the face of her mother’s demise. Similarly, and more explicitly, she writes of her maternal feelings towards the prisoners with whom she works: ‘ces détenus devenaient des enfants qu’il ne fallait pas que je prenne dans mes bras, qu’il ne fallait pas quitter des yeux au risque de les perdre […] ceux-là, du maternel, comme nous tous, ils ont en besoin. Mais la mère, ils en ont peur’ [those inmates became children that I was not allowed to hold in my arms, that I couldn’t take my eyes off for fear of losing […] they, like all of us, need something maternal. But a mother, they’re afraid of that] (76). The relationships that she develops with these inmates suggest that she is anything but a cold, unfeeling woman who is psychologically or physiologically deficient. Despite such maternal experiences, she remains resolute in her desire not to mother. In addition to claiming her own maternal role in other relationships, the narrator includes vignettes of other mothers whom she has known, undoing the stereotypes of the quintessentially happy, natural earth mother who finds ultimate fulfilment in her child. In this way she creates a metaphor of doubt over maternal experience itself. These other mothers figure only as snapshots in the text, rather than as fully-fledged characters. Indeed, the narrator is the only character in this work, the mother being the only other identity that approaches the status of a character. This first-person monologue, then, revolves around the narrator to the exclusion of anybody else, which increases the intimate, confessional tone of the text and the relationship between writer and reader. The other mothers are thus mentioned as an aside, akin to examples in her train of thought. One such example is the woman living next door to the narrator, who has recently had a child and who is confined to her home space. The narrator is struck by the similarities between them and writes of how she imagines them both standing at the window looking out at the rain at the same time, waiting for a man to return to divert them from the baby/book to which their days are devoted. She imagines the woman’s life as she hears sounds through the walls and wonders about the effects of solitude upon her. She comments, ‘parfois je l’imagine très heureuse, entièrement prise par la disparition de soi’ [sometimes I imagine her very happy, entirely comfortable with the

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disappearance of the self ] (40) in a phrase that hints that sacrifice is inherent to parenthood and that there is no shame in rejecting this. Furthermore, in a vignette introduced by the line ‘il y a ce qu’on me dit’ [there are things that people say to me] (53), the narrator lists things that she has heard other mothers say about their children. This long paragraph consists of a litany of complaints by women, running on from each other with no punctuation like the desperate words of a breathless, exasperated individual. Beginning ‘tu as de la chance, oui, de la chance de ne pas en avoir’ [you’re lucky, really, lucky not to have any], the paragraph includes phrases such as ‘j’ai l’impression d’être une matonne […] j’ai honte d’aller voir les profs […] je sais pas s’il n’est pas homo […] j’ai tout le temps peur qu’il aille en taule’ [I feel like I’m a prison warden […] I’m ashamed to go and see the teachers … He might be gay … I’m always afraid he’ll be thrown in jail] (53). The following page simply reads ‘il y a ce qu’on me dit au bout de très longtemps d’amitié et de silence. Je n’aime pas mes enfants. Je regrette de les avoir eus. Ce sont des secrets de pierre tombale’ [there are things people I’ve known for a very long time have said to me. I don’t like my children. I regret having had them. Those are secrets you take to the grave] (55). Sautière in this way seems intent on portraying motherhood beyond stereotypical discourses and does so by citing mothers themselves. Suffering, regretful or desperate mothers may not be celebrated in society, but are nonetheless strikingly present. Psychologist Barbara Almond in The Monster Within, for example, writes that ‘it is amazing how much of a taboo the negative side of mothering carries in our culture, especially at this time’.22 I have argued elsewhere that infanticide has recently been the subject of a number of literary and cinematic works as commentators are calling attention to the way in which current discourses of motherhood obscure the suffering mother figure.23 In Sautière’s case, the vignettes of other mothers cast doubt over the credibility of discourses that promote 22 Barbara Almond, The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), xiii. 23 Natalie Edwards, ‘Obliged to Sympathise: Infanticide in Il y a longtemps que je t’aime and A perdre la raison’, Australian Journal of French Studies 52/2 (2015), 174–87 and ‘Babykillers: Véronique Olmi and Laurence Tardieu on Motherhood’, in Amaleena


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natural fulfillment through childrearing and show that a positive experience of motherhood is far from assured. Overall, the vignettes become an accumulation of tales of doubt: doubt over the consequences of her mother’s story for her identity, over her ethnic identity and relationship to France, over her psychological state, prompted by her eating disorder, over her observations of maternal experience, and over the solidity of her self-narrative. This fragmented style belies a fragmented identity that is not feeble, incomplete or damaged, but is rather aware of the impossibility of self-knowledge and manipulates the sub-genre of autofiction to reflect this. Sautière’s search for the reasons for her lack of desire for children leads her to amass an extensive list of reasons in a highly intimate narrative that is ultimately inconclusive. In this way, her narrative corresponds closely to the psychoanalytic theories discussed in Chapter 2; a woman may explain her choice not to mother in many ways, but the root of this is a simple non-desire.

Concluding Thoughts As the vignettes come to an end, the narrator gives a positive conclusion to this record of sustained reflection over her childlessness. It is significant that the narrator admits to her experience of loss before moving to the more positive reflections that contribute to her decision. Sautière is clearly concerned to avoid a simplistic, glib celebration of this choice and thus insists upon what her narrator has lost before turning to what she has gained. She writes that there is ‘un stéréotype de l’heureux événement comme il y a un stéréotype de l’infertilité’ [a stereotype of the happy event [childbirth] just like there is a stereotype of infertility] (52), hinting that both clichés, that of the perfect birth and that of the sterile woman, are purely mythical. Damlé and Gill Rye, eds, Women’s Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Life as Literature (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 98–110.

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She thus refuses any stereotype of the unfulfilled, incomplete woman; she insists instead that she chooses to travel, socialise, write and work freely. In this way, she engages with the notion of freedom associated with the voluntarily childless woman in an innovative way. As shown in Chapter 1, research has problematised the notion of freedom for the voluntarily childless, since it can be revelatory of persistent negative stereotypes and associated with a seemingly negative representation of mothering. In this text, Sautière writes a very individual account of freedom, insisting upon her narrator’s need to exercise her freedom over her reproduction as a result of her family history, her personal and professional life, her frequent movement and lack of belonging, and her psychological wellbeing. This is not merely a lament, therefore, since the narrator underscores that she finds positive aspects to motherhood, yet she also points to its disadvantages for her own story. Motherhood is not the same experience for everybody, she indicates, and for her it would be fraught with difficulties and would not fill the lacunae in her narrative of identity. Although she feels discomfort as she notices the aging of her post-menopausal body, she hints that she has come to terms with her choice and its effects upon her identity, her body and her psyche, stating at the book’s close that ‘je m’aime pour moimême et ce n’est pas rien’ [I love me for me and that’s not nothing] (140). In some ways, therefore, the act of writing her doubt over the reasons for her choice and over her narrative of self appears to have been a cathartic exercise for this narrator, who began her reflection with the painful recollection of being named ‘nullipare’ [nulliparous]. She is clear, however, that this catharsis emanates from her sustained reflection, not from using a literary creation as a replacement for a child. Sautière writes that ‘le geste d’écrire […] on pense à gestation’ [the act of writing […] one thinks of gestation] (43) but is quick to dispel any notion that writing is a replacement or an alternative to child rearing. She states that ‘ce n’est pas parce que je n’ai pas eu d’enfant que j’écris mais c’est avec cet élément-là parmi d’autres […] pas de substitution, un livre pour un enfant, à sa place. Je sens lorsque j’écris que ce qui se passe n’est pas ‘à la place de’, il n’y a pas de monnaie d’échange [I don’t write because I have not had a child, but with that element among others […] no substitution, a book for a child, in its place. When I write, I feel that what is happening is not ‘in place of ’, there is no exchange] (41–3).


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We have seen that Lê makes the same distinction, as she too is concerned by the idea of a facile connection between writing a book and giving birth. A further similarity to Lê’s text lies in the way in which Sautière imagines the child that she would have had. Psychoanalyst Tilmant, as shown in Chapter 2, claims that women always have a precise image of their child in their minds, whether they experience desire for a child or not. It is all the more striking, therefore, that Lê and Sautière both write of how their lives would have been had they chosen to reproduce. Sautière explains: Oui, le deuil de ce qui n’a pas eu lieu, être mère, est un processus particulier. Nullipare, part nulle. Je suis avec en moi l’enfant que je n’ai pas eu, une place vide et peuplée. Se tient en moi un enfant émouvant, patient, curieux, en exploration du monde, apeuré et audacieux. Un enfant qui n’est pas moi, qui n’est pas mon enfance. […] Ce n’est pas que je régresse, c’est le petit, la petite, qui déborde en moi qui m’agit. Il me ressemble terriblement, presque trop, mais ce n’est pas moi. ET ce n’est pas non plus un autre. C’est l’enfant non fait, non advenu. (50) [The mourning for what has not happened, becoming a mother, is a specific process. Nulliparous, useless. I exist with a child that I have not had inside me, a crowded and empty place. There is within me a moving, patient, curious child, exploring the world, frightened and courageous. A child who is not me, who is not my childhood. […] It’s not that I’m regressing, it’s the little one spilling over inside me who is moving me. S/he looks terribly like me, almost too much so, but s/he is not me. AND is not anybody else either. It’s the un-made child, the non-occurrence.]

Like Lê, therefore, Sautière acknowledges the image of a phantom-child, yet, also like Lê, she uses this as a vehicle to distinguish herself from this phantom being and to establish that it will never exist, here designating it as a ‘non advenu’ [non-occurrence].

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Moreover, this phantom being functions as the motor of an exploration of her choice and of an awareness that this reflection pertains not only to her but to a community of women in this historical period. As the text draws to a conclusion, she states, ‘il ne s’agit pas d’un pamphlet féministe. Je parle d’une condition, la mienne, femme, et d’une histoire, la mienne, celle de ma famille, de ces femmes qui ont cessé de vouloir donner au monde des enfants, extenuées d’Histoire’ [this is not a feminist pamphlet. I’m talking about a condition, mine, as a woman, and of a history, mine, that of my family and that of those women who have stopped wanting to give children to the world, women who are exhausted by History] (126). In this way, Sautière associates herself with others who are similarly unsure of how to justify their choice, how to create an alternative narrative of self and how to voice their non-desire. By rendering a fragmented, doubtful record of her voluntary childlessness, she provides a model with which many may feel able to identify. Overall, then, Nullipare is predicated upon the doubt that the narrator experiences over her narrative of non-mothering. Sautière’s autofictional narrative voice casts doubt upon the validity of her memories and identity, and her fragmented narration points to the uncertainty and instability of her story. Her use of the vignette style of autofiction serves to emphasise her lack of a stable narrative for the reasons for her childlessness and to insist that a full articulation of her choice is impossible. What the narrator is clear about is that she has never really wanted to be a mother. She is sure of her refusal but does not necessarily have a neat, coherent explanation for it; as she comments in one vignette, ‘A quoi bon chercher les pourquois?’ [what is the point of searching for the reasons?] (67). In contrast to Lê, who amasses many reasons for her choice, Sautière claims that she does not know them all. She points to an absence of maternal feeling and states that a portion of this lies in her family history, but much of it lies elsewhere too, such as in her lack of belonging and her loss of language. But she resists psychologising this or viewing it as a sign of weakness or as a source of regret. The frequent metaphors of nature in this text hint that there are many forms of feminine nature and that there are indeed many forms of non-maternal feminine nature. And her text proclaims that here is nothing wrong with this. Nullipare indicates that voluntarily childless women should not feel


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compelled to explain themselves in logical argument in accordance with any normalising discourse. Likewise, it hints that there are all sorts of reasons not to have children and that each voluntarily childless woman’s motives will vary. In Nullipare, Sautière proclaims that her own nature is allusive and inexplicable to her and that it does not correspond to a complete or coherent narrative. Her autofictional experiment thus shows that doubt and uncertainty may pervade one’s self-narrative but that there are very good reasons to assert one’s doubt. I now turn to an author who doubts neither her choice nor her narrative of it, but who instead doubts the reactions that it will garner. From Lê’s epistolary narrative and Sautière’s autoficitional experiment, I move to a writer who manipulates another sub-genre of autobiography, that of personal criticism or autocritography, to find innovative ways to voice her voluntary childlessness.

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When you talk of not wanting children, it is impossible to avoid sounding defensive, like you’re trying to prove the questionable beauty of a selfish and too-tidy existence. It is hard to come across as anything other than brittle, rigid, controlling, against life itself. –Courtney Hodell

This chapter strikes a note of departure from the proceeding analyses on two counts. First is its generic categorisation. Voicing Voluntary Childlessness focuses on literary forms of life writing but this chapter discusses a work that does not conform strictly to this literary mode of autobiography. The explosion of memoir in recent decades has engendered a proliferation of modes of writing self-narrative and led to various literary and non-literary sub-genres of life writing. The non-literary autobiography to which I turn my attention in this chapter is more akin to an essay: a text that rests between sociological research, cultural studies analysis, psychoanalytic argument and autobiography. Second is its site of origin; this text is not written by a French author but by a Francophone Canadian. Nevertheless, I have decided to include it in this study for two reasons. First, its theoretical paradigm is wide ranging but is often situated in French contexts, discussing the work of Badinter, Serre, Knibiehler, Iacub, Groult and Agacinski, for example.1 Second, although the author makes several references to the 1

These texts include Badinter, L’Amour en plus; Geneviève Serre, ‘Les femmes sans ombre ou la dette impossible, le choix de ne pas être mère’, L’Autre 3/2 (2002), 247–56; Yvonne Knibiehler, ed., Maternité, affaire privée, affaire publique (Paris: Bayard, 2001); Marcela Iacub, L’Empire du ventre: Une autre histoire de la maternité (Paris: Fayard,

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culture of Quebec, the project tends towards a universal exploration of the representation of motherhood beyond any specific national culture. This text is an important piece of research into voluntary childlessness that will have a significant impact on debates globally, and notably in France due to the language in which it is written. Its author, Joubert, is a Québecoise academic based in the University of Ottawa. A specialist in Québécois women’s writing, Joubert studied literature in the Francophone Université du Québec and the Anglophone McGill University. She has published extensively on contemporary women authors, including two books on humour and irony, two edited collections and a series of articles and book chapters. In L’Envers du landau: Regard extérieur sur la maternité et ses débordements, this experienced academic writer breaks the mould of writing in which she has long been engaged.2 Instead, she broaches what would most adequately be encapsulated as ‘personal criticism’ or ‘autocritography’. This neologism was developed in the 1990s, the heyday of the memoir and of autobiographical criticism. The genre of life writing was under transformation during this time, as critics revised long held assumptions regarding the value of life writing, the ways in which minorities could access this genre for the first time and how such writing revealed both increasingly complex subject positions and long ignored lived experience. Simultaneously, many neologisms were proposed to reflect the wealth of understandings of what had previously been termed – and often derided – as merely ‘autobiography’: autogynography, autography, autobigraphy, autothanatography, autofiction, autopathology, for instance, in addition to more general descriptors such as life writing and self-narrative. These neologisms may well have been intended as attempts to reflect the diversity of this mode of writing and the diverse subject positions of those who practiced it, yet

2004); Benoîte Groult, Mon évasion (Paris: Grasset, 2008) and Sylviane Agacinski, La Politique des sexes (Paris: Seuil, 1998). 2 Joubert, L’Envers du landau: Regard extérieur sur la maternité et ses débordements. Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses after the quotation.


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they also gave easy cause for complaint for those who resisted the supposed lack of literary quality of newer approaches to non-canonical literature. Autocritography is perhaps the neologism that has attracted the most rancour and the reason for this may well be that researchers themselves are so implicated in it, thus opening the door to the hierarchy, superiority and patriarchy that regularly surface within academia. The term was originally proposed by Henry Louis Gates Jr and was developed by Michael Awkward in Scenes of Instruction.3 This powerful book blends autobiographical reminiscence with literary criticism. Awkward structures the book around memories of a succession of commencement ceremonies, using these accounts as a springboard for exploring his developing passion for literature and enquiry while growing up as an African-American man in impoverished Philadelphia. He defines autocritography as ‘an account of individual, social, and institutional concerns that help to produce a scholar and, hence, his or her professional concerns’ and his implication is that this form of writing is strongly rooted in the socially excluded who struggle to find a voice for their own narrative, to pursue a different professional/ personal direction and to justify their choices.4 Such an implication resonated with many academics who did not fit the traditional model of the scholar: white, male, from an educated, wealthy background, speaking with the correct accent and having graduated from the correct schools and universities. Feminist critics in particular took up the term and explored its utility for justifying the ways in which their mode of literary criticism departed from the mainstream and answering the inevitable criticisms levelled at them as a consequence. As we shall see, Joubert uses this form of expression as a conscious act of feminist engagement, manipulating personal criticism as a means to enter in to a different dialogue with the maternal master narrative. The leading exponent of feminist autocritography, Nancy K. Miller, had already noted the increased propensity for academics in the 1980s and 1990s to include

Michael Awkward, Scenes of Instruction: A Memoir (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 4 Awkward, Scenes of Instruction: A Memoir, 7. 3

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comments related directly to their own lives in their academic writing and famously proposed the term ‘personal criticism’ in Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts.5 Pointing to an array of scholars who wrote such works in the 1980s, particularly those based in the US, Miller is careful to avoid celebration of the term.6 She recalls the difficulties with which her students approached such texts, pointing to the embarrassment that people may feel when reading personal statements among critical analysis and the risk of the charge of self-indulgence. She underscores that ‘at its worst, the autobiographical act in criticism can seem to belong to a scene of rhizomatic, networked, privileged selves who get to call each other (and themselves) by their first names in print: an institutionally authorized personalism’.7 Yet, she argues that personal criticism has the potential to destabilise paradigms, to unearth new voices and to enable a different approach to the development and application of critical theory. She invokes its origins as a response to criticism of feminist politics, both by conservative commentators and by individuals who raised issues of representation within it: writing personally and individually may be a means of escaping from the responsibility – assumed or presumed – of speaking on behalf of any group, be that racial, ethnic, national, religious or socio-economic, for example. She concludes ‘the personal in these texts is at odds with the hierarchies of the positional – working more like a relay between positions to create critical fluency. Constituted finally in a social performance, these autobiographical acts may produce a new repertory for an enlivening cultural criticism’.8 Nancy K. Miller, Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts (New York: Routledge, 1991). 6 Examples include Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, eds, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (New York: Women of Color Press, 1983); Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984) and bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1990). 7 Miller, Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts, 25. 8 Nancy K. Miller, Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts, 25. 5


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In this chapter, I propose to read Joubert’s L’Envers du landau as a work of personal criticism by a feminist scholar and author. In what follows, I shall develop arguments about Joubert’s usage of personal narrative in her academic criticism with a view to showing that her text is a feminist interrogation of voluntary childlessness that attacks the mechanisms of stigmatisation, while all the while presaging a backlash. Joubert’s text is defiant of societal and academic norms and uses personal criticism to open a textual space for confronting discrimination in a politically engaged, feminist act, and she uses her professional training to render her text acceptable to an academic audience. She thus manipulates the sub-genre with full knowledge of its advantages and its shortcomings. Among its advantages is the fact that personal criticism is rooted in a rhetoric of subversion of academic conventions that opens the field to non-traditional scholars who present different forms of subjectivity, as Joubert so admirably does. Richard Dellamora argues that ‘personal criticism needs to be recognized as one tactic among others in the strategic deployment of what Foucault terms “reverse” discourses, attempts to adapt existing discourses to resistant ends’.9 Personal criticism may not be a panacea, he hints, but should be recognised for its disruptive potential. Indeed, it enables the voices of the marginalised to intervene in debates from which they had been previously excluded and, as we shall see in Joubert’s example, permits scholars to broach topics that were previously considered taboo. Furthermore, as literary scholar Laurie McMillan argues, ‘personal criticism has the potential to inspire political action in its readers in two ways: through the author’s engagement in the subject matter and through connections forged between literary criticism and material conditions’.10 By the connections that she forges between lived experience and literary and cultural criticism, and by the way that she represents a lifestyle that has until recently been sidelined, one may hope that Joubert inspires exactly this kind of political action. 9 10

Mary Ann Caws, Richard Dellamora, Stephanie Sandler, Karl Kroeber, Thomas M. Greene, Norman Friedman, Richard Flores, Ruth Perry, David Simpson and Terry Caesar, ‘Problems with Personal Criticism’, PMLA 111/5 (1996), 1160–9, 1161. Laurie McMillan, ‘Telling a Critical Story: Alice Walker’s “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens”’, Journal of Modern Literature 28/1 (2004), 107–23, 109.

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As much as Joubert writes with the advantage of this defiant mode of criticism, she also pays attention to its shortcomings and potential pitfalls. Criticism of this new approach was quick to appear, as is exemplified by the forum section of PMLA entitled ‘Problems with Personal Criticism’ in 1996.11 Arguments levelled against personal criticism by commentators within the volume include self-indulgence, narcissism, the risk of reinforcing gendered dichotomies and the assumptions of identity politics, as proponents can be accused of speaking on behalf of a group. Daphne Patai writes that ‘I doubt that I am the only one who is weary of the “nouveau solipsism”’,12 showing a concern for how personal criticism could be confused with misplaced authority on the part of its proponents. In a similar position, Linda Kauffman summarises the personal critic’s risky position thus: ‘by insisting on the authority of my personal experience, I effectively muzzle dissent and muffle your investigation into my motives’.13 Here, then, I examine Joubert’s first-person account of voluntary childlessness through the lens of these interpretations of personal criticism. As we have seen from this background, writing a text of personal criticism engenders several risks; so does autobiography, of course, since the act of self-writing opens the writer to embarrassment, critique or narcissism. Yet an academic who chooses to write in this style is opening herself up to specific criticism. Moreover, an academic who chooses to write in this manner in the French language, which is known for its regulated style and its exacting standards for academic writing, is taking a considerable risk. Joubert’s scholarship is expansive and rich, yet she has not reached the stardom of many of those who have written texts of this nature. In this chapter, I interpret her risky text as an example of personal criticism to 11 12 13

Caws, Dellamora, Sandler, Kroeber, Greene, Friedman, Flores, Perry, Simpson and Caesar, ‘Problems with Personal Criticism’. Daphne Patai, ‘Point of View: Sick and Tired of Scholars’ Nouveau Solipsism’, Chronicle of Higher Education 23 February 1994, A52. Linda Kauffman, ‘The Long Goodbye: Against Personal Testimony, or An Infant Grifter Grows Up’, in Robin R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, eds, Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, 2nd edn (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 1155–71, 1156.


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analyse how she manipulates this sub-genre to inscribe a different approach to the representation of voluntary childlessness. I read Joubert’s work in terms of the tensions inherent in it, showing that she is aware of the risk that she is taking but takes certain measures to mitigate that risk, all the while insisting on the solidity of her decision not to mother.

Personal versus Criticism In this section, I show how, interpreted through the lens of personal criticism, one of the most striking qualities of Joubert’s text is its tension between autobiographical account and critical component. Joubert goes backward and forward between revelation and concealment as she discusses her childlessness and subsumes this within academic research. The text opens with a very intimate account: an introduction of three and a half pages that situates Joubert as the author/academic and elucidates her connection between her personal experience and the subject matter of her text: Il me manque un morceau. Je suis née, je vis et j’aurai vécu dépourvue de l’une des plus subtiles et mystérieuses parties de la mécanique féminine: l’envie de la maternité. Je n’ai pas d’enfant, n’en ai jamais voulu. […] Tous les matins, je touche du bois; tous les matins, je dis merci. Mais voilà: depuis quelque temps, tout autour de moi me signale une fissure dans ce tableau trop beau pour être vrai. […] Bref, j’ai l’impression de bien aller mais je suis dans un état épouvantable. (9) [A bit of me is missing. I was born, I am living and I will have lived deprived of one of the most subtle and mysterious parts of female mechanics: the desire for m otherhood. I do not have a child, have never wanted one. […] Every morning, I count myself lucky; every morning, I am grateful. But here we are: for some time, everything around me has been pointing to a crack in this picture that is too good to be true. […] In short, I am under the impression that I am fine but I am really in a terrible state.]

This text clearly places Joubert at centre stage, then, from its very beginning. The author uses the first-person ‘je’ [I] forcefully, as Warren Motte advises academics to do as a mark of honesty and direct linkage between

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self and analysis.14 Motte writes a passionate defense of the ‘I’ in academic writing, asking, ‘Why is it that we academics are discouraged from saying “I”? What are we trying to hide? What lurks within us and threatens to erupt, unloosed by this “I”? We are not dope fiends or outlaw bikers, utterly enslaved to our basest impulses. No. We are monkish folk for the most part, fully accustomed to keeping our ids in check’.15 Nevertheless, he distinguishes his desire for foregrounding the academic ‘I’ from encouraging personal criticism: ‘Allow me to stress that I am certainly not calling for a full-blown “personal criticism” here. I have no desire to speak about my innermost feelings, nor about my difficult relations with my next-door neighbor, nor about – heaven help us – my dogs’.16 The glib reference to personal criticism as a forum for divulging information about one’s pets demonstrates how easily such a style of writing can be derided. I shall argue that Joubert plays at the interface of this distinction between foregrounding her ‘I’ and divulging mundane details of her personal life. She mentions her personal life as the impetus for this text and identifies herself as a feminist scholar who has, she writes, ‘un amoureux formidable, d’excellents amis, une famille chaleureuse, une bonne santé, un métier que j’adore et dans lequel je réussis pas trop mal’ [a wonderful partner, excellent friends, a warm family, good health, a job that I love and in which I do quite well] (9). Yet, in the opening of the text, she ironically proclaims that outsiders must know her better than she does herself and that she is not – and never will be – able to surmount the lack in her life that is the result of her short-sighted decision. This introduction thus stakes out the terrain of the argument as personal, self-reflexive and confessional in its intimacy and the irony of Joubert’s style solidifies this. An important element of the self-revelation that she stages in this introduction is her explanation of her decision to write L’Envers du landau. As we have seen in other texts studied in Voicing Voluntary Childlessness,

14 Warren Motte, ‘I, me’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 18/2 (2014), 184–90. 15 Motte, ‘I, me’, 185. 16 Motte, ‘I, me’, 188.


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Joubert also links her own position to that of a collective of other women, claiming to investigate her own narrative as she simultaneously addresses a wider audience: J’ai écrit ce livre afin de déterminer, pour ma compréhension personnelle et pour celle des femmes qui se reconnaîtront peut-être dans ces pages, quelle insecte étrange je suis et quelle place je peux espérer occuper dans un économie qui prend appui sur les tables à langer. Je m’adresse aussi, par la bande, à toutes celles qui souffrent de ne pas avoir pu donner la vie. Leur expérience n’est en rien semblable à la mienne, certes, mais elles se heurtent aux mêmes contingences sociales: à mon irritation devant le ‘maternalisme frénétique’. (11) [I wrote this book in order to determine, for my own understanding and for that of women who will perhaps recognise themselves in these pages, what a strange creature I am and what place I can hope to occupy in an economy that gives such weight to baby-changing tables. I am also addressing, inadvertently, all those women who suffer from not being able to reproduce. Their experience is in no way similar to my own, certainly, but they run into the same social contingencies, into my irritation with ‘frenetic maternalism’.]

Joubert’s ironic tone is very much in evidence as she refers to herself as a strange creature compared to the natural majority but her will to intellectualise and rationalise a complex situation is also apparent. Her reference to the involuntary childless broadens the scope of her analysis, highlighting the limiting discourses over maternity in contemporary Western society as her main target. Even in her justification, the reader will note a nod to academic writing: the citation in the last line quoted above is from writer and journalist Savigneau’s work Point de côté, in which this writer agrees with commentators such as Badinter over current maternal ideology. Clearly Joubert is intent on justifying her argument by referring to another published account, anchoring her personal statement in firm terrain. Her final justification is her aim to ‘observer notre rapport à la maternité d’un point de vue différent, avec un œil à la fois critique et détaché. Il ne s’agit pas de célébrer la femme sans enfant ni de dénigrer la maternité’ [observe our relationship to motherhood from a different point of view, with both a critical and a detached eye. This is not about celebrating the woman without children or denigrating motherhood] (12). In this way, she clarifies that her intention is not to criticise those who have chosen to reproduce.

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Her awareness of the precariousness of her position and how she could engender a backlash is thus apparent from the very beginning and, as I shall argue here, this is the crux of her practice of personal criticism. Such an introduction may lead the reader to expect more revelation, more references to the texture of Joubert’s personal life and more personal anecdote, yet such content, although it resurfaces occasionally, quickly recedes. The tone of the personal elements of Joubert’s text ranges from playful to ironic to angry, but then moves back into scholarly argument. Whereas Miller writes a chapter entitled ‘My Father’s Penis’ in Getting Personal and Jane Tompkins writes of her bathroom breaks that interrupt her writing in ‘Me and My Shadow’, Joubert divulges comparatively little information about herself.17 At the end of the text, all that the reader knows about her is that she has a male partner with whom she is happy, that she is an academic, that she enjoys her social life and her work, that she values her teaching and her students very highly, and that she has suffered stigma from colleagues and friends as a result of her decision to remain childless. The reader knows nothing of her family, her past, her origins, her studies, her relationships, her formative experiences, the turning points in her life, her reasons for entering her chosen profession: the stuff of autobiography, in short. Whereas Awkward’s Scenes of Instruction, the founding text of autocritography, linked his origins and the self-narrative he forged of it with his profession and the way in which he performs his criticism, L’Envers du landau lays bear very little of its author’s personal story. Indeed, the research drives the argument of each of Joubert’s five chapters, rather than her personal narrative, which is made to fit around it. This is exemplified particularly in the first chapter of the text. ‘La Marginale’ [The Non-conformist] situates the essay within contemporary discourses over motherhood, pointing to the pressure to become mothers to which women are currently subjected. Joubert argues that non-mothering is a persistent taboo and she surveys the scare tactics perpetuated by society in order to

17 Miller, Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts. Jane Tompkins, ‘Me and My Shadow’, in Linda Kauffman, ed., Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 121–39.


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persuade women to procreate. She finds that women who are potentially deviant are encouraged to return to the correct path through arguments circulated in current discourse. Enumerating these as ‘épouvantail no 1, 2 et 3’ [threat number 1, 2 and 3], she argues that women are assailed with assurances that they will regret their decision, that they will be forced to endure solitude in old age, and that they will leave no traces of themselves after their deaths. Much of this section is written in conventional, academic style that comprises impersonal locutions such as ‘il faudra’ [it will be necessary to] and ‘il s’agit de’ [this concerns]. The author’s ‘je’ [I] occurs fleetingly but tellingly. Among her research on how ‘la non-mère, c’est l’indicible’ [the non-mother is the unsayable] (18), for example, she states ‘j’ai d’ailleurs été étonnée de la réaction des femmes sans enfant à qui j’ai parlé de mon projet: toutes se sont spontanément portées volontaires pour une éventuelle entrevue’ [I have, incidentally, been astonished by the reaction of childless women whom I have spoken to about my project: all of them have spontaneously declared themselves willing to be interviewed] (18). Furthermore, amid her discussion of how childless women often insist upon their maternal qualities, she writes that ‘je ne bénéficie pas d’une telle caution. A mon tour de dire: j’assume mon coming out. J’ajoute modestement ma réflexion à ces ouvrages qui comblent une lacune importante’ [I do not have such caution. It is my turn to say: I take responsibility for my coming out. I modestly add my reflection to those works that are filling an important lacuna] (19, emphasis in original). As is clear through these citations, Joubert’s ‘je’ [I] is direct and forceful, situating her experience as the impetus for the text and expressing her desire to confront an issue of importance to her and to others. Yet her ‘je’ [I] then takes backstage. Throughout the chapter, Joubert makes regular references to a range of published works, including sociological, anthropological, literary, psychoanalytic and economic. The end of this fourteen-page chapter shows sixty footnotes. Evidently the author has done an immense amount of academic work in order to write this book and the caustic, ironic tone of some of her sentences do not obfuscate this. Her reticence in staking out her position in this text is encapsulated by her comment: ‘Comment oser dire ces choses sans passer pour une workaholic rétroféministe finie?’ [How can one dare say these things without sounding

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like a washed-up retrofeminist workaholic?] (58). Joubert appears reluctant to be too forceful, too personal, or too autobiographical in this work; she is perhaps aware that writing about voluntary childlessness is risky enough, and that her work is guaranteed to engender some form of backlash, so she goes back and forth between writing her self and her research. Her voice as the writer of the text is clear throughout, judging by the way in which she organises her material and structures her argument, but her personal story is not. Thus this is a text that broaches several different genres but none conventionally; it is not written with the official academic style of the essay, the sociological or anthropological report, the literary or non- literary autobiography. Instead, its curious approach to personal criticism hints at a discomfort with what may be deemed to be excessive narcissism, self-revelation or personal connection with the research. In the following section, I examine the rare anecdotes that Joubert includes in order to show how she writes a forceful argument that attacks the stereotypes associated with voluntary childlessness, but how she does so in a way that continually presages the backlash that she anticipates.

The Place of Personal Anecdote In this section, I analyse the ways in which Joubert uses personal anecdotes strategically to counter arguments emanating from current discourses on maternity, all the while giving precedence to academic research and argumentation and giving few details of her personal life. Her crafted usage of her own experience, supplemented by her variously ironic, playful and angry tone, adds an important dimension to her argumentation throughout this text and renders L’Envers du landau a unique addition to the first-person literature on this topic. The five chapters of Joubert’s text centre the argument around sociological research into the experiences of voluntarily childless women, supplemented by references to literary texts, economic arguments and popular culture, such as the media and advertising. After a discussion of texts that


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testify to the delimiting discourses surrounding motherhood in Chapter 1, Joubert proceeds in Chapter 2 to discuss the interrelatedness of mother hood and femininity, to present the conflict between motherhood and work in Chapter 3, to analyse media discourses in Chapter 4 and to propose solutions to stigmatisation in her concluding chapter. Here, I examine one specific chapter in order to develop arguments concerning how she melds her personal story with her academic research. The usage of the personal anecdote is most expansive in the chapter on femininity, in which Joubert frequently refers to herself, not in a way that occludes her but puts herself centre stage. She even uses a personal anecdote to introduce the chapter, in a typically comedic tone. She recounts that a visiting European colleague asked her over the breakfast table ‘que signifie être une femme?’ [what does it mean to be a woman?] (31). The woman ‘était déjà toute coiffée, maquillée, parfumée très tôt le matin’ [had already done her hair and make-up and put on perfume very early in the morning] whereas Joubert appeared ‘en jeans, les cheveux en bataille, sur le point de beurrer ma toast avec une cuillère, tous les couteaux étant dans le lave-vaisselle’ [in jeans, my hair in a mess, about to butter my toast with a spoon since all the knives were in the dishwasher] (31). Such a glimpse into Joubert’s private life, with her characteristic humour, serves as the starting point for a reflection that leads to an academic discussion of femininity. Joubert proceeds to quote literary and sociological texts that explore the link between motherhood and femininity, such as by Devienne, Savigneau and Sautière, before linking her own identity as a non-mother to the notion of gendered identity theorised by Judith Butler.18 Butler argues in Gender Trouble that since identity is fixed according to concepts of sex and sexuality, people who engage with gender in a non-standard way fail to conform to the norms of intelligibility within a given culture. Joubert concludes that she is among these non-conformist individuals: ‘parce que je ne me conforme pas à la norme, je ne corresponds plus à l’image d’une

18

The texts quoted are Devienne, Être femme sans être mère: le choix de ne pas avoir d’enfant, Sautière, Nullipare, and Savigneau, Point de côté. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990).

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femme cohérente. Je ne me comporte pas comme prévu. Je suis une aberration ambulante’ [because I do not conform to the norm, I no longer correspond to the image of a coherent woman. I do not behave as expected. I am a walking aberration] (33, emphasis in original). Her forthright, ironic tone is therefore at the forefront of this section as she links her personal story to the academic criticism in which she is engaged, melding the two into an argument that identifies how she is inspired to enter into certain academic debates rather than others. Yet the chapter then becomes an interrogation of psychoanalytic approaches to childlessness, concentrating on interventions by Freud, Irigaray and Hird. Joubert does not disappear from this section – her presence is signalled by the inclusion of elements such as ‘l’inénarrable Freud’ [the outrageous Freud] (33) or ‘je savais déjà par Freud que j’étais en perpétuel état de manque; je sais maintenant que je suis encore bien plus mal emmanchée’ [I already knew from Freud that I was in a perpetual state of lack; I now know that I got off to an even worse start] (34) – but the academic argument takes precedence over the personal story. This is soon displaced, however, by another personal anecdote, which is again emblematic of Joubert’s comedic approach to a serious tale. Writing of how she was completing her doctoral thesis at the same time as her sister and sister-in-law were both expecting babies, she remarks: Trois grossesses fort différentes, dont l’une, sinon ectopique du moins utopique, pour ainsi dire, que j’ai soulignée en arrivant à Pâques à la maison familiale avec un oreiller sous la chandail et en me tenant les reins à deux mains. Le bébé se présente bien, ai-je dit, mais il me tient réveillée la nuit. […] Et alors que tous s’extasiaient sur les poupons, un jury scrutait attentivement les moindres travers de mon petit dernier. (36) [Three very different pregnancies, one of which, if not ectopic then at least utopian, so to speak, that I accentuated by arriving at Easter at the family home with a pillow under my jumper and with my hands on my hips. The baby is nearly here, I said, and it keeps me up at night. […] And while everybody was in raptures over the babies, a jury was attentively scrutinising every idiosyncrasy of my little one.]

Here, then, the personal returns in the form of an isolated memory from her own life that is clearly closely associated with the academic research under discussion and, the reader surmises, part of the author’s inspiration


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for it. It is significant that Joubert returns to a fundamental moment in her academic career as part of her argument, signposting a stage in her life that resonates with her professional enterprise. Nevertheless, whereas many practitioners of personal criticism build the story of their lives, or at least the sustained analysis of important moment in their lives, into their work, Joubert leaves this at the level of an anecdote. Michael Sheringham theorises the important of what he names ‘autobiographical moments’ in life writing, showing how authors isolate events that change the course of their lives and their ensuing narratives.19 Joubert’s text, however, refuses this performance; she mentions a crucial moment in her life, then does not extrapolate on it to form any kind of self portrait. Instead, she returns to an academic discussion, quoting sources such as Sylviane Agacinski, Beauvoir and Lorna Crozier on femininity and writing.20 Another anecdote shortly surfaces, that of her asking a childcare worker to quieten her charges while Joubert’s students were taking an examination, and the chapter returns to academic argument with discussion of the work of Delphy and Vallée.21 Joubert’s work thus performs an oscillation between personal and criticism, showing her discomfort with the former and preference for the latter. L’Envers du landau is in this way based upon a push and pull between isolated anecdotes and academic discussion that reveal little of the author herself. Consequently, Joubert’s voice is very apparent in this text but her personal narrative is not. Instead, she connects her story to her investigation Michael Sheringham, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires. Rousseau to Perec (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 20 These works are Sylviane Agacinski, La Politique des sexes (Paris: Seuil, 1998), Lorna Crozier, ‘A Woman Without’, in Lynne Van Luven, ed., Nobody’s Mother: Life Without Kids (Surrey: Touch Wood Press, 2006), 25–36, and an incident involving Beauvoir recounted in Ely Ben-Gal, ‘Le Castor en Israël. Feuillets épars’, Les Temps modernes 647–8 (2008); travelling in Israel, a woman asked Beauvoir, ‘“Madam, perhaps you write books because you have not had children?”. The response came like a slap: “Maybe you have children because you are not capable of writing books?”’] (72). 21 These works are Christine Delphy, ‘La Maternité occidentale contemporaine: le cadre du désir d’enfant’, in Francine Descarries and Christine Corbeil, eds, Espace et temps de la maternité (Montreal: Les Éditions du remue-ménage, 2002), 68–82, and Vallée, Pas d’enfant, dit-elle: Les refus de la maternité. 19

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since it is clearly so personal to her, but she is simultaneously concerned to pre-empt any criticism of her work. The text thus becomes an enactment of the difficulty of voicing voluntary childlessness and its consignment as a topic that is unworthy of academic interest.

Body of Evidence Closely linked to the way in which Joubert pre-empts criticism of her work is another striking feature of her text: the amount of evidence she produces to support her arguments. The first chapter, as discussed above, introduces the repeated marginalisation of childless women and the arguments found in the media and public discourse to encourage childless women to procreate. Joubert amasses considerable evidence to support her arguments and the chapter becomes an accumulation of citations that will challenge any reader who doubts the existence of such a stigma. It is in the fourth chapter, however, ‘La Perplexe’ [The Perplexed] in which Joubert collects an undeniable amount of evidence to solidify her claims. This is also the chapter that concentrates most squarely on Quebec. Joubert takes her inspiration from Marc Angenot, who carried out an experiment into social discourse by apparently reading everything that was published in France in the year 1889.22 He interprets the results of his research as a testament to which topics were being discussed and how they were presented in the discourse of the time. Joubert aims to do likewise by reading published works on maternity on Quebec, with the caveat that she cannot possibly read every newspaper, book or blog and that her results are necessarily ‘inévitablement impressionniste’ [unavoidably impressionistic] (70). Joubert thus begins very humbly, underscoring the limits of her work before she even presents it; contrary to the grandiose intentions and claims of 22

Marc Angenot, ‘Le discours social: problématique d’ensemble’, Cahiers de recherche sociologique 2/1 (1984), 19–44.


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Angenot, this careful female academic employs a cautious, tentative tone that belies the immense amount of research she has performed in order to write this section. Furthermore, as we shall see, she insists on using this case study to develop arguments that relate to the representation of maternity across many Western societies. Joubert’s sources in this chapter can be divided into three groupings: popular media, such as reality TV shows and celebrity gossip magazines; journalism and political commentary; and cultural sources such as literature and film. She thus compares a variety of materials from high to low culture and cuts across registers to show the ways in which motherhood is represented in similar ways throughout them. Her detailed synopses and frequent citations from these works form a barrage of evidence, some of which is so expansive that it becomes repetitive, but Joubert is evidently an experienced teacher who knows that it is rarely sufficient to present something only once. The personal anecdotes recede as her prose is concerned with convincing a reader of the stigmatisation she observes around her – and one surmises from the wealth of evidence that she presumes that her reader is arriving at the book in need of some convincing. As an example, she targets American women’s magazines that have recently shown a penchant for writing articles on celebrity adoptions, for photographing famous women with their infants and for displaying pregnant celebrities on their front covers. Although she states that ‘cela constitue en soi une révolution par rapport au temps où les stars cachaient soigneusement leur “état” de peur de perdre d’éventuels contrats’ [this in itself constitutes a revolution compared to when stars carefully hid their ‘state’ out of fear of losing potential contracts] (71), Joubert claims that this development is far from innocent. She views this as a mechanism for imposing upon women a model of femininity and female success. She interprets this insidious act thus: ‘en rendant la maternité glamour ou, si on n’en a pas les moyens, au moins cool, on réussit à convaincre les femmes qu’elles sont plus sexy dans leur rôle de mère, qu’elles peuvent être, elles aussi, une yummy mummy et qu’élever des enfants est la chose la plus facile du monde. La preuve: les stars en font à la demi-douzaine sans prendre un gramme!’ [By making motherhood glamorous, or for those who do not have the means, at least making it cool, women are successfully convinced that they are sexier in their role as mothers, that they too can

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be a yummy mummy and that raising children is the easiest thing in the world. The proof: the stars have tons of them without putting on a pound!] (71, emphasis in original). In keeping with her overall tone in the book, and in particular in this chapter, this passage contains two footnotes: to a work on motherhood by Marie-Julie Gagnon, who theorises fashionable representations of motherhood, and to a newspaper article explaining the trend of the ‘yummy mummy’ by Anne Kingston.23 Joubert’s ironic tone takes a light-hearted, comedic tone to a very serious issue, that of thinly veiled propaganda for a highly restricted form of femininity. If Joubert had selected one or two examples to justify her conclusions, her caustic conclusion may be less forceful, but the fact that she supplements it with ample research from a variety of sources across contemporary culture makes her point difficult to refute. The academic who mentions having had to struggle to convince her students of the need for feminist engagement, and her colleagues and peer reviewers of the appropriateness of feminist scholarship, clearly employs the same strategies here. Throughout, therefore, Joubert is concerned with prefiguring the backlash that she expects and performs clever rhetorical tricks coupled with immense amounts of research in order to anticipate this. Such a backlash is to be expected, perhaps, since this topic is a long- standing taboo and since many of Joubert’s arguments are confrontational. Throughout, her argument is that women are pressured into becoming mothers by a well oiled machine of cultural discourse that insists on four things: that childless women will never be fulfilled without children and that they will regret their choice in the long-term; that they will fail to conform to the established model of femininity or female success; that they will be stigmatised and treated unjustly in their professional lives; and that they will be accorded the status of deviant in a society in which popular culture propagates an image of stability, health and success through mothering. There are now several other first-person narratives that combine essay and personal reflection on the topic of non-mothering in French, such as

23

Marie-Julie Gagnon, Mama Cool: La mère parfaite n’existe pas! (Ile de la Jatte: Michel Lafon, 2009). Anne Kingston, ‘No Kids, No Griefs’, Maclean’s 10 August 2009, 38–41.


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Maier’s No Kid: Quarante raisons de ne pas avoir d’enfant [No Kid: Forty Reasons for Not Having Children] and Devienne’s Être femme sans être mère [Being a Woman Without Being a Mother] but these are light-hearted, journalistic accounts that are written to a non-specialist audience. These texts therefore present minimal research into the stigmatisation to which non-mothers are subjected and are not written in academic style. Due to their target readership, they contain a variety of comedic and sensationalist assertions, particularly in the case of Maier, who enumerates among her forty reasons ‘l’enfant, un pot de colle’ [children stick to you like glue] and ‘l’enfant, un tue-le-désir’ [children are desire-killers] and who advises her readers ‘un conseil, tant qu’à entretenir un parasite, prenez plutôt un gigolo’ [a piece of advice: rather than hosting a parasite, take a gigolo instead].24 Joubert, by contrast, is aware that she is writing for an academic audience – not as strictly academic as if she were writing the literary analyses on which she has based her career, but an academic audience nonetheless. Her careful research into areas that do not correspond to her field of specialisation – those of cultural studies and popular media, as well as sociology and psychology, as opposed to her training in literary studies – belies a will to convince her readership of her academic argument. She knows very well from her teaching and her scholarship that a convincing argument is based upon gathering evidence, carefully scrutinising it and interpreting it through thoughtful, balanced analysis. In this essay, she performs exactly this cycle, ensuring that her own voice is discernible as an author who takes ownership over her project and who feels a strong personal connection with it, but giving precedence to the scholarly apparatus expected from a critical audience. Given the patriarchal status of higher education – attested by the low rate of female leaders in academia (18 per cent in Australia, 14 per cent in the UK) and the low proportion of women in academic positions (12.7 per cent in Japan, 31 per cent in Denmark, 34.6 per cent in the UK, 35.9 per cent in the US) – it is probable that Joubert’s readership will require it.25

24 Maier, No Kid: Quarante raisons de ne pas avoir d’enfant, 118; 56; 155. 25 For complete data and analysis, including details of the institutions included in this study, see The Times Higher Education’s report Global Index 2013 accessed 12 March 2015. 26 Miller details these in relation to a course she taught, ‘The Subjects of Feminist Criticism’, in Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts, 6–7.


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writing. Instead, Joubert foregrounds her teaching and her feminist commitment, emphasising that she is speaking as part of a collective, some of whose ideas she is critiquing, but from within the feminist movement and as a strong believer in it. Joubert sets out in this section to confront some of the myths that have given rise to false assertions regarding the supposed disconnect between feminism and motherhood. In the section entitled ‘C’est la faute à Simone’ [It’s Simone’s Fault] (52), Joubert takes issue with some of the allegations made against Beauvoir for the place of motherhood within her criticism and for her reluctance to write of her own childlessness. It is worth pausing here to recap Beauvoir’s position on mothering. While it is true that Beauvoir equated motherhood with slavery, this was part of an economic argument; in Le Deuxième sexe, Beauvoir extolled the need for economic independence as a means of procuring the liberation of women. Furthermore, as shown in Chapter 1, she was critical of the mode of mothering she saw in contemporary society, not of mothering itself. Beauvoir wrote of the facile association made between women and maternity, claiming of childless women that ‘it is often said of a woman that she is coquettish, or amorous, or lesbian, or ambitious, “for lack of a child”’].27 Her implication is that the childless woman is considered as incomplete and unnatural. Instead, claimed Beauvoir, ‘that the child is the ultimate end for woman is an affirmation worthy of an advertising slogan’.28 Beauvoir’s aim, therefore, was to question the forced connection between nature and maternity as a means of liberating women from a constraining model of motherhood. To return to Joubert, she reminds us that ‘Simone de Beauvoir n’a jamais dit aux femmes de ne pas enfanter’ [Simone de Beauvoir never told women not to have children] (52). To the contrary, she and other feminists of her time called for different approaches to maternity and different policies to enable women to live freely. One such policy that Joubert raises is that of paid housework, of which she writes ‘ces idées rétrogrades font sourire aujourd’hui’ [those retrograde ideas make people smile nowadays] (54). She

27 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 565. 28 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 567.

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states her support for such a measure but ‘non sans une grande réserve’ [not without considerable reservations] (54): ‘en demeurant à la maison, et payée pour le faire, la mère devient donc l’incarnation de la félicité puisqu’elle se réalise pleinement; elle peut subvenir aux besoins de la famille … et laisser les emplois intéressants aux hommes, tel que souhaité par l’arrière-garde. Chacun à sa place, comme le veut la tradition’ [By staying at home, and being paid to do so, the mother becomes the incarnation of happiness since she can realise her full potential; she can fulfil the needs of her family … and leave the interesting jobs to the men, as the old-guard wishes. Each in the right place, just as tradition wants] (55). She thus advocates returning to policies developed in the past but with a cautionary approach, lest contemporary discourse over motherhood derails or distorts them. In this way, she draws a line from organised feminism to the present day, and the link between them is herself, her own experiences of living in a society in which motherhood is fetishised. She points to the way in which motherhood has become highly divisive, particularly among women and among feminists, showing that there has always been a push and pull between appreciating and critiquing maternity within feminist theory. Most importantly, she argues that feminism has never fully and adequately addressed the issue of motherhood, since it was linked so early with the notion of slavery and exploitation. As the history of theories of mothering in Chapter 1 shows, it is difficult to refute Joubert’s argument; two opposing forces have dominated feminist thought on this issue and only relatively recently have feminists such as Knibiehler, Badinter and O’Reilly interrogated changing practices of mothering over time in order to provide an alternative history. In this way, then, Joubert openly critiques a movement with which she feels a strong affinity and does so in order to point to the negative consequences of feminist theory for childless women as well as for mothers. Joubert argues provocatively that the result of this reluctance to tackle the issue of motherhood is a very specific problem: workplace arrangements for mothers and non-mothers alike. She regrets that ‘les féministes ellesmêmes s’affrontent sur la question. Pourtant, le projet de départ était tellement enivrant’ [feminists themselves clash over the question. Nevertheless, the initial project was so exhilarating] (55) and that the consequence is that mothers and non-mothers are grouped into unequal factions: ‘les mères


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rament pour tout faire en même temps, les non-mères les regardent aller, passent pour des “grasses dures”, veulent bien comprendre et aider, mais écopent et colmatent’ [mothers struggle to do everything at the same time, while the non-mothers watch them and seem to have it easy. They want to understand and help, but they lose out and they withdraw] (55). This fundamental conflict is emblematic of a deep-seated issue among women at work and one that pits women against each other. Joubert synthesises this ideological battle in a metaphor of the two corners of a boxing ring: in ‘le coin droit du ring de ce combat éternel’ [the right corner of the ring of this eternal combat] (56) are those who want to enable women to leave their children at a crèche ‘pour pouvoir s’épanouir aussi en dehors de la maison’ [in order to find fulfilment outside the home] (56) and in the opposing corner are those who promote maternity as the ultimate fulfilment of woman, ‘c’est-à-dire travailler, oui, peut-être, mais pas selon les termes de la culture masculine et sans perdre de vue, surtout, que la maternité est un pouvoir et la preuve de la spécificité féminine’ [that is to say, working, yes, perhaps, but not according to the terms of male culture and, especially, without losing sight of motherhood as the power and proof of female specificity] (56). Rather than gently sidestepping the issue of women juggling personal and professional responsibilities, Joubert writes from the perspective of the childless woman to advance a theory that motherhood is also fetishised in the workplace, and that this is detrimental to mothers and non-mothers alike. She complains that ‘il ne s’agit plus d’affirmer qu’on a le droit d’être femme au travail mais mère au travail’ [it is no longer a question of asserting that we have the right to be women at work, but mothers at work] (57, emphasis in original) and that women are often viewed as future mothers by employers. She resumes the crux of the problem thus: ‘on tient à avoir un emploi pour s’épanouir mais c’est la famille qui prime dans les priorités. Qu’est-ce dire? Que le travail n’est pas essentiel? […] Qu’on aura beau avoir le boulot du siècle, il ne sera jamais aussi captivant que la maison?’ [we hold to work as a means of finding fulfilment but the family takes precedence. What does this mean? That work is not essential? […] That one may well have the best job going, but it will never be as captivating as the home?] (58). She therefore argues that motherhood is sanctified in a way that is highly detrimental to mothers in their careers and she also

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asserts that non-mothers are stigmatised to the extent that their professional opportunities are restricted. The result of the unresolved problems associated with the rights of women in the workplace, especially during a time in which motherhood is reified, is that mother and non-mothers will be in perpetual conflict and both will lose out as a consequence. This very academic, theoretical chapter in which Joubert cites feminist theory, historical accounts and economic arguments ends with an example of the personal anecdotes with which she peppers her text. She writes that one may imagine that the situation is easier in a university setting ‘où l’on croit, à tort, que les femmes choisissent plus souvent de ne pas avoir d’enfant’ [where people believe, wrongly, that voluntary childlessness is more common] (61). While she points out that universities usually offer childcare services and that timetabling can ease female colleagues’ family duties, she adds three anecdotes drawn from her own experience as an academic woman that point to stigmatisation or even discrimination. The first recounts that she was interrupted giving a conference paper by a screaming baby whose mother refused to leave the room and who received a host of sympathetic looks from fellow audience members as the infant wailed through Joubert’s talk. The second recalls that her colleagues who are mothers use maternity leave as an explanation for career breaks but were horrified when she suggested that she use medical leave in the same way, offering no explanation beyond ‘parce que’ [because] (63). The third tells of how colleagues suggested to her that her professional record should be judged differently because she did not have children and was therefore privy to, as she interprets their intention, ‘une plage horaire qui, non consacrée aux enfants, peut être remplie, à la limite, par n’importe quoi’ [a time slot that is not devoted to children and which can therefore be filled, if necessary, by anything] (63). These three tales have two elements in common: the sidelining of a childless woman in the face of the power accorded to mothers through their cultural capital, and the acceptance of this by a silent majority of people – who, moreover, supposedly occupy the role of the most educated, most conscious and most astute cultural and intellectual commentators in society. As is the case in other chapters of L’Envers du landau, the research is again the motor that drives the direction of the text and the personal experience supports or nuances this, careful all the while not to call too much


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attention to the author or to devalue the academic merit of the text through creative expression. In this way, Joubert cleverly inserts into her argument experiences with which many academic women can relate but which are absolutely not discussed. Opponents may easily denigrate such experiences as the middle-class navel gazing of privileged, white, educated women who should be grateful for their positions, yet Joubert courageously persists in pointing to an inequality to which she and many others are subjected. It is certainly the case that academic women are affected by the fetishisation of motherhood in contemporary culture and this inevitably impacts upon their professional and personal experience. Joubert thus dares to critique the discourse that promotes motherhood as a norm even within university culture, with the full understanding that this will make her unpopular. Voluntarily childless academic women who engage in feminist activism on their campuses can find themselves in a difficult position; they are bound to protect the rights of their colleagues who are mothers but they must defend their own situations and those of their childless colleagues. Such an assertion – to defend one’s own situation – may appear to be selfish or to deny the specific difficulties inherent in being a mother in an academic environment, but Joubert insists that, although there is still much work to be done to advance the lived experience of mothers, this should not be at the expense of those who choose a different lifestyle. As she proves through the large amount of research that she has amassed, such discrimination is a reality and many people are content to collude with it. In this way, Joubert targets other women as some of the main opponents to equality for the voluntarily childless. It may be surprising to read that it is difficult to be a feminist, to engage in feminist activity, to be involved in feminist causes on campuses and in communities, and to have difficulty broaching one’s choice not to become a mother. Joubert shows here that the dominant discourse surrounding maternity has detracted from the theorisations of second wave feminism to the extent that even academic women can be stigmatised or discriminated against for the ‘privilege’ that their freedom apparently awards them. As Joubert summarises at the end of this chapter, she wonders what to say hypothetically if a female colleague complained to her that she could not attend her daughter’s school performance because she was presenting her work at a conference: ‘Assume? Ou:

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ta contribution à la recherche ne pouvait souffrir un désistement? Dans un cas comme dans l’autre, je me fais assurément une ennemie’ [Take responsibility for your choice? Or: your contribution to research would be hampered if you withdrew? In either case, I would definitely make myself an enemy] (64). This could be a perfect metaphor for this text, in which Joubert courageously broaches many arguments that stigmatise voluntarily childless women, but in which she is aware of the risks that she is taking. The push and pull between revelation of her personal life and the appropriate argument of academic writing belie an awareness of the enormity of the machine against which she is writing – which is pervasive across social spheres, even academic ones – and of the backlash that her text necessarily invites. To date, only one academic and one newspaper review of Joubert’s work have been published and neither writer – both female – is at all negative in her commentary.29 One may hope that Joubert’s rich, thorough research and argumentation will attract further attention; as Voicing Voluntary Childlessness aims to show, work on this topic may be overlooked since it may not be deemed sufficiently scholarly or literary, yet this is a misguided approach to theorising female identity in its myriad forms and it serves to solidify the insidious nature of the maternal master narrative.

Concluding Thoughts I have argued in this chapter that Joubert develops a crafted manipulation of the sub-genre of personal criticism to make provocative arguments about the stigmatisation and discrimination to which childless women

29 Micheline Dumont, ‘L’Envers du landau, regards extérieurs sur la maternité et ses débordements (review)’ Recherches Féministes 24/1 (2011), 210–12. Frédérique Doyon, ‘En avoir ou pas: Gare aux diktats actuels qui tendent à ériger la maternité en idéal féminin et social’, Le Devoir 6 March 2010 accessed 1 May 2015.


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are subjected. She bolsters her academic arguments with the weight of her own experience yet is wary of falling into self-reflexive reverie, narcissism or excessive revelation. Consequently, her text is emblematic of the difficult subject position of the voluntarily childless woman; she does not want to reveal too much about herself for fear of being accused of being obsessed with unimportant, insignificant issues, yet nor does she want to collude with the persistence of the taboo and the silence that it engenders. Joubert demonstrates that even as a highly educated woman who is engaged in academic activity, she is aware of the precarity of her position and feels the need to ward off the backlash against her arguments. She therefore accumulates vast amounts of scholarly research and evidence of stigmatisation in contemporary culture and only raises her own experience at disparate intervals in order to propel the text forward and sharpen its connections to lived experience. She shows that it is still deemed inappropriate to discuss such unimportant things as motherhood or personal matters in academic discourse, yet her text underscores the need for such discussion for mothers and non-mothers. Joubert thus adheres to the proponents of personal criticism who revealed elements of their personal lives within their academic writing, but in a highly restrictive way. Overall, she manipulates this sub-genre according to the feminist aims which were some of its earliest underpinnings; the expression of distinctive, individual female subject positions that do not claim to represent any specific group but that aim to express the connections between academic engagement and lived experience as a continuum that prove mutually beneficial. Joubert’s personal criticism thus stakes out a new terrain for female identity, both within academia and beyond it, by deftly sketching an important socio-cultural phenomenon and adding to it her personal experience: not in order to forge a complete or coherent self in narrative, but to call attention to the need for renewed understanding of the gendered identity of those who choose not to mother. The next chapter of Voicing Voluntary Childlessness extends this discussion of gendered identity by studying the first-person narrative of an ageing childless woman. The consequences for older women of the fetishisation of motherhood that Joubert researches so meticulously are presented in a lively, provocative manner by Chapsal in La Femme sans, to which I now turn.

Chapter 6

The Ageing Voluntarily Childless Woman: Madeleine Chapsal’s La Femme sans

And it was possible, too, that age could be her ally, turning her into somebody she didn’t know yet. She has seen the look on the faces of certain old people – marooned on islands of their own choosing, clear sighted, content. –Alice Munro

Literature has little time for the aged. Characters who are living the energy of childhood, the discoveries of adolescence, the adventures of early adulthood and the successes of approaching middle age have long taken centre stage. When older characters appear, they rarely represent ageing as a positive experience and are instead associated with loss of beauty, charm, wit, independence or faculties. Such is the position of the ageing individual, in society as well as in literature: subjected to negative stereotypes and consigned to invisibility. Joy Charnley in her work on ageing characters in literature emphasises how our response to the aged flows doubtless from the fact that spending time in the company of elderly people whose intellectual and bodily functions are diminished can be a sobering experience, and one which cannot fail to lead one to reflect on what it is to be old, how we ourselves will ‘be old’, and why this natural phenomenon, and inevitable consequence of failing to die sufficiently young, provokes such fear and rejection in contemporary Western societies.1

1

Joy Charnley, ‘Introduction: Representations of Age in European Literatures’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 47/2 (2011), 121–5, 121.

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In an attempt to counter the invisibility of elderly people in literature, literary critics have recently been turning their attention to the representation of ageing, especially feminist scholars who cast a critical eye on the portrayal of the older woman. While much has been written about girls and younger women, studies of ageing women constitute new critical terrain. Jean Anderson, for example, examines the presence of older women in short fiction, looking particularly at examples of older characters who occupy marginal positions in society and at the representation of grandmothers. She hints that it is regrettable that such characters are easier to find in short stories than in novels, which is revelatory of persistent snobbery towards the derided genre of short fiction, but uncovers representations that ‘go a long way towards breaking down the monolithic image of the old woman as decrepit, marginal and useless’.2 Barbara Frey Waxman proposes the genre of the Reifungsroman (novel of ripeness) to encompass works that, as opposed to the Bildungsroman that recount the journeys of younger characters, portray an older protagonist’s development; in these, Waxman argues, ‘narrators defiantly ‘name’ the old woman, her passions, her longings, joys, resentments, bodily and emotional hungers, and achievement of integrity’.3 Constance Rooke similarly suggests the Vollendungsroman (novel of completion) for those texts that show an older female protagonist looking back on the self with an awareness of impending death.4 The genre of autobiography presents a further conundrum to the question of ageing in literature. Although the autobiographer’s gaze is necessarily backward, as s/he remembers, selects and narrates events from the past from the perspective of age and experience, relatively few first-person

2

3 4

Jean Anderson, ‘Revisiting Simone de Beauvoir’s Monstrum: Old Women Protagonists in Short Stories by Contemporary French Women Writers (1990–2005)’, in Adalgisa Giorgio and Julia Waters, eds, Women Writers in Western Europe: Gender, Generation and Legacy (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), 347–61, 358. Barbara Frey Waxman, From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist Study of Ageing in Contemporary Literature (New York and London: Greenwood, 1990), 16. Constance Rooke, ‘Old Age in Contemporary Fiction: A New Paradigm of Hope’, in Thomas R. Cole, David D. Van Tassel and Robert Kastenbaum, eds, Handbook of the Humanities and Ageing (New York: Springer, 1992), 241–57.

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narratives deal directly with ageing. In English, writers such as Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing and Penelope Lively stand out as having all written self-narratives of the ageing process. In French, writers such as Nathalie Sarraute in Enfance [Childhood] and Hélène Cixous in Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage [Reveries of the Wild Woman] have written autobiographically of themselves as they were older, but have concentrated on their younger selves. The ageing writer Duras also focused upon a younger version of herself in L’Amant [The Lover], only pausing to mention in passing the ravages of age on her skin. Simone de Beauvoir wrote of the poverty and injustice suffered by the aged in La Vieillesse [Old Age] and of her mother’s ageing body in Une mort très douce [A Very Easy Death], but largely occluded representation of her ageing self in her life writing. The notable exception is Annie Ernaux, who has written an array of self-reflexive texts throughout her life, and has recently taken to writing her ageing self in works such as L’Usage de la photo [The Use of Photography] and Les Années [The Years]. In these works, she reflects upon her growing awareness of her mortality, her exclusion from groups of other women and her increasing vulnerability, for example. Nevertheless, Shirley Jordan has pointed to Ernaux’s reluctance to challenge prevailing modes of thinking of ageing, finding that these texts show ageing as ‘rooted in loss and decline’ and ‘a sombre rehearsal of the worst’.5 Christine Détrez and Anne Simon suggest that the new generation of French women writers will likely refuse the invisibility generally assigned to the aged and will continue their literary experimentation through representing the ageing female body and sexuality.6 One may hope, but such projected presence does little to fill the current absence. This chapter takes as its subject matter therefore a double invisibility: that of autobiographical narratives by and of ageing women, and that of voicing lack of desire for children from the perspective of an older women. If expressions of non-mothering are rare, expressions of non-mothering

5 6

Shirley Jordan, ‘Writing Age: Annie Ernaux’s Les Années’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 47/2 (2011), 138–49, 148. Christine Détrez and Anne Simon, A leur corps défendant: Les femmes à l’épreuve du nouvel ordre moral (Paris: Seuil, 2006).

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from ageing women are even more so. The notion of ageing as a voluntarily childless woman is subject to an array of stereotypes. As shown in the previous chapter, Joubert isolates this as one of the three ‘épouvantails’ [threats] discernible in contemporary discourse over mothering; without children, women will necessarily feel alone and regretful. Such is the topic of one of only two sociological studies that have been carried out in this area. Published in 1992, this study stakes its premise clearly in its title: ‘A Path Not Taken: A Cultural Analysis of Regrets and Childlessness in the Lives of Older Women’.7 Examining regret as a culturally constructed phenomenon, and noting the centrality of children, the family and motherhood in US culture, the researchers interviewed ninety childless American women aged sixty and over about their perspectives now that ‘the totality of life was being evaluated in an unrectifiable form’.8 No mention is made of whether the women interviewed were voluntarily or involuntarily childless. They came from a range of professional backgrounds, education levels and relationship statuses. Regardless, regret was found to be an experience common to all of them. Some women had felt regret more acutely earlier in their lives but stated that ‘as they aged they had come to terms with their painful feelings’.9 The researchers point out that some of the women critiqued prevailing socio-cultural attitudes, blaming culturally constructed notions of success and fulfilment for their unresolved regrets. Yet, the researchers group the women’s comments into categories such as ‘life-review issues’, in which they cite professional women testifying to having ‘missed something’ or to feeling ‘a sense of incompleteness’, and ‘dependency and caring’ in which they focus on the growing isolation and vulnerability of those who do not have children to

7 8 9

Baine B. Alexander, Robert L. Rubinstein, Marcene Goodman and Mark Luborsky, ‘A Path Not Taken: A Cultural Analysis of Regrets and Childlessness in the Lives of Older Women’, Gerontologist 32/5 (1992), 618–26. Alexander, Rubinstein, Goodman and Luborsky, ‘A Path Not Taken: A Cultural Analysis of Regrets and Childlessness in the Lives of Older Women’, 621. Alexander, Rubinstein, Goodman and Luborsky, ‘A Path Not Taken: A Cultural Analysis of Regrets and Childlessness in the Lives of Older Women’, 620.


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care for them.10 The study also found that many of the women felt regret at their lack of generational continuity and experienced social marginality that increased their isolation. Most interestingly, many interviewees were found to struggle with their ‘gender identity’, which the researchers explain thus: ‘in their own reflections on their lives, these women questioned who they were as well as their own values and fulfilment in life. They had a profound and unaddressed need to feel themselves to be whole people in a world that defined them as incomplete in an important way’.11 The researchers are thus careful to highlight the way in which these women’s feelings emanate from societal codes, but the premise of their project is clear: not whether older childless women feel regret, but when they do so most and why. A more recent study was carried out in 2006 by Abma and Martinez, who state as their premise that both research and popular media have focused on older childless women who desire, or have in the past desired, children.12 Rather than interviewing women regarding the reasons for their decision or its consequences, this research compared older American women who are voluntarily and involuntarily childless on the basis of education, work experience, religion, earnings, race and marital status. This study shows the prevalence of voluntary childlessness, finding that from 1982 to 2002, the voluntarily childless have been consistently higher in number than the involuntarily childless. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, they found that the voluntarily childless had accumulated more work experience and higher levels of education. As has been hinted by other studies, this research also found that the women sampled had similar religious affiliations in early life but that those who became nonreligious were far more likely to choose to remain childless. More interesting, perhaps, is that the older childless women were found to have ‘more egalitarian views than 10 Alexander, Rubinstein, Goodman and Luborsky, ‘A Path Not Taken: A Cultural Analysis of Regrets and Childlessness in the Lives of Older Women’, 620–1. 11 Alexander, Rubinstein, Goodman and Luborsky, ‘A Path Not Taken: A Cultural Analysis of Regrets and Childlessness in the Lives of Older Women’, 624. 12 Abma and Martinez, ‘Childlessness Among Older Women in the United States: Trends and Profiles’, 1045.

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their parents’.13 The researchers included questions relating to values, such as whether the women agreed with statements about women’s happiness, young boys’ and girls’ independence and the ability of men and women to make long-range plans. They discovered little distinction between voluntarily and involuntarily childless women on this score, but found much more egalitarian, progressive attitudes among older women. Given the larger amount of choice, the different lifestyles, career paths and attitudes of the older voluntarily childless in particular, they conclude that ‘perhaps the voluntarily childless are becoming increasingly composed of women who are satisfied with their situation rather than those feeling they have sacrificed for the sake of a career’.14 In this chapter, I examine an older childless woman who is resolutely satisfied with her situation, but who explores its consequences candidly. Madeleine Chapsal makes a particularly interesting contribution to the representation of childless women by writing autobiographically about her choice from the perspective of age; La Femme sans was published in 2001, when the author was seventy-six. Chapsal was already an established literary figure, having written over fifty novels and garnered considerable commercial success for her popular style of fiction. She has also authored poetry, essays, plays and testimonies, and several of her novels have been adapted for the screen. Her activity as a journalist is also notable; she contributed to the founding of L’Express in 1953 and was for nearly twenty years the magazine’s main literary interviewer. Several book-length collections of her interviews have been published and a Parisian bookseller has recently amassed her interviews and correspondence into a catalogue, La Madeleine des écrivains, that numbers seventy-two interviews with authors such as Truman Capote, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Elie Wiesel, Michel Tournier, Philippe Sollers and others.15 Linguistics 13

Abma and Martinez, ‘Childlessness Among Older Women in the United States: Trends and Profiles’, 1052. 14 Abma and Martinez, ‘Childlessness Among Older Women in the United States: Trends and Profiles’, 1055–6. 15 La Madeleine des écrivains: Archives de Madeleine Chapsal, Librairie Henri Vignes, accessed 20 April 2014.


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researchers David Martens and Christopher Meurée have examined her interview style, comparing it to those of Jacques Chancel and Bernard Pivot as these three figures have become what they call ‘notable figures in the media world’.16 They suggest that her success emanates from the way in which she manages to ‘question the role of the interviewer, as well as her status in regards to the two discursive spaces that the interview brings together’. By inverting the roles of interviewee and interviewer, using a tone marked by simplicity and humility, and by creating an intimacy not to be found in broadsheet newspaper interviews, Chapsal cemented her success and her reputation in the French literary scene.17 Chapsal’s autobiographical record of her childlessness in La Femme sans is a particularly interesting one.18 First, she writes from the perspective of an older woman looking back over the consequences of her childlessness throughout her life, paying special attention to the experience of ageing without children. Moreover, she writes of having never experienced the desire for a child and of having decided as a young adult to remain childless, and of the subsequent discovery that she was infertile due to illness. Her case thus straddles voluntary and involuntary childlessness, yet she is clear throughout that she has always chosen childlessness and makes only a few, passing references to her sterility. Chapsal’s writing may not be the lyrical, poetic evocations of Sautière or Lê. Indeed, her popular brand of fiction leads her name to be overlooked by critics. For example, literary critic Siobhan McIlvanney reviewing one of Chapsal’s most successful texts, Une femme heureuse, complains that its ‘narrative form […] displays as little subtlety as its content’, which ‘invokes Balzac’s description of the nauseous effect invoked by the reassuring content of the lisible [readable] 16

David Martens and Christophe Meurée, ‘L’intervieweur face au discours littéraire: stratégies de positionnement chez Madeleine Chapsal, Jacques Chancel et Bernard Pivot’, Argumentation et Analyse du Discours 12 (2014), 1–16, , accessed 21 April 2014, 2. 17 Martens and Meurée, ‘L’intervieweur face au discours littéraire: stratégies de positionnement chez Madeleine Chapsal, Jacques Chancel et Bernard Pivot’, 5. 18 Chapsal, La Femme sans. Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses after the quotation.

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text’.19 The narrative style of La Femme sans is similarly disappointing, since it is replete with rhetorical question marks, exclamation marks, repetition and redundancy. Nevertheless, this work deserves attention for its particular innovation, and contributes to the discovery of new literary voices whose ideas have not been widely circulated; this has long been a tenet of feminist scholarship and an ideal to which Voicing Voluntary Childlessness will hopefully contribute. Whereas the other chapters have read expressions of voluntary childlessness through the lens of the specific sub-genre of life-writing that they manipulate, arguing that these writers thus stake out new terrain for the inscription of female identity in narrative, this chapter takes a thematic approach; Chapsal’s text does not constitute a highly crafted literary experimentation with genre or theory, but is nonetheless unique in terms of its representation of the lived experience of the older voluntarily childless woman. The text is structured chronologically in the sense that the author narrates memories from different parts of her life from childhood to the present day. In vignette style, her short chapters centre on a specific memory that she recounts and analyses in terms of her growing understanding of her situation. The text thus reads like an exploration or a work in progress as the reader accompanies the writer on a voyage of self-discovery. In this chapter, I first analyse the way in which she presents the stigmatisation that she has experienced throughout her life, showing that her perspective as an older woman leads to a new understanding of this. I then examine her representation of the ways in which she has narrated her childlessness differently over the course of her life. My analysis then focuses upon her refusal of the stereotypical charges of solitude and regret that permeate current thinking about older childless women. I finish by analysing Chapsal’s proudly provocative evocations of her ageing, nulliparous body.

19

Siobhan McIlvanney, ‘Une Femme heureuse by Madeleine Chapsal (review)’, The French Review 70/1 (1996), 140–1, 141.


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A Lifetime of Stigma Chapsal takes as her starting point for her reflection a moment that she identifies as an epiphany, from which she understands that she had unwittingly suffered from stigmatisation due to her childlessness throughout her life. She recounts a conversation between herself and an unnamed woman who spoke to her in confidence of a particular consequence of her childlessness. Married for the second time to a man who had children and content with her choice to remain childless, the woman complained that her brother and sister were attempting to disinherit her. This conversation in itself is important, since it highlights the silence that exists even – or maybe especially – between women on the subject of childlessness. It also forces Chapsal’s realisation of the stigma that she had personally suffered. This sudden awareness of something of which she had never been fully aware changes her perspective on her childlessness and forces the realisation that her choice impacts on her life much more than she had expected or understood it to. She writes that ‘je percevais que quelque chose dans mon histoire n’allait pas, que certains événements se répétaient par trop, que mes efforts demeuraient vains’ [I could see that something in my story was not right, that the same things happened over and over again, that my efforts were in vain] (10) yet understands through the conversation with her acquaintance that the root of this was the discrimination that she suffered as a result of her childlessness. The unnamed woman explains her reasons for her choice but the narrator only recalls ‘une chose, qui était lumineuse, éclairante: on voulait la punir d’être une femme sans enfant!’ [one thing, which was crystal clear and illuminating: people wanted to punish her for being a childless woman!] (11, emphasis in original). Chapsal extrapolates on how this occasions a new understanding of her own trajectory, commenting: Or, n’est-ce pas mon cas? Et si je me suis si souvent sentie exclue, rejetée, niée et même insultée, n’est-ce pas aussi à cause de cela? Bien sûr, au tout début, personne ne s’est soucié du fait que je ne devenais pas mère – pas même mon mari, trop jeune et affairé pour se préoccuper d’avoir une descendance.

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Chapter 6 Mais, par la suite, que d’humiliations, de mises à l’écart cette absence d’enfant m’a values. (11) [Indeed, isn’t this my case? Isn’t it because of this that I have so often felt excluded, rejected, denied and even insulted? Of course, at the beginning, nobody was concerned about the fact that I was not having children – not even my husband, who was too young and too busy to worry about having descendants. But, since then, this absence of a child has caused me so many humiliations and led to me being side-lined so many times.]

Chapsal describes having quickly decided to transform this epiphany into a quest for a deeper understanding of her trajectory, her choice and its consequences. Claiming that ‘je tenais enfin une clé importante du mystère de ma propre vie’ [I finally held an important key to the mystery of my own life] (12), she concludes that, ‘il est temps, pour moi comme pour beaucoup d’autres femmes, d’avancer plus loin dans la connaissance d’un sujet féminin capital mais resté en quelque sorte tabou’ [it is time, for me and for many other women, to go further in our knowledge of a topic that is important to women but that has remained in some way taboo] (13). The text thus begins with a justification of the choice to represent the condition of the childless woman and to challenge the taboo that this represents. The autobiographical ‘I’ is intimate and confessional, rendering in lyrical prose the emotional and psychological difficulties from which the writer has suffered. The first-person narrative is therefore at once a highly personal individual account and also a call to a collective of childless women who are misunderstood, sidelined and/or discriminated against, often without their knowledge. A particularly poignant element of the account of stigma that Chapsal describes is the crux of the pain associated with her childlessness: the prejudice she has suffered from within her own family. While she extols the benefits of her choice and holds to the freedoms that this has awarded her, she has had to not only endure negative stereotypes from outsiders but also from those within her family. She writes poignantly of the way in which her brother and sister attempted to disinherit her due to lack of descendants.


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She quotes those who have made comments such as ‘cette femme hors la loi commune ne devrait pas y avoir droit! Ce qui vient de Papa et Maman doit revenir exclusivement à ceux de la lignée … Toi, tu n’a personne de notre sang à qui transmettre, tu dois de toi-même renoncer à ta part, fût-elle légale’ [this outlaw woman should not have any right to it! What comes from Mum and Dad must go exclusively to those in the lineage … You, you have nobody with our blood to transmit it to, so you should, of your own accord, renounce your part of it, even if it were legal] (74). The rift that the author has endured with her sister, who has both children and grandchildren, as a result of her insistence that she deserves an equal measure of the inheritance persists at the time of writing. Furthermore, she claims to have spoken to several other childless women who have experienced the same situation, beginning with the woman whose story she recounts in the preface as the source of the epiphany that led to the writing of La Femme sans. As a caution against assuming that she is exaggerating her plight, she urges the reader to ‘fouiller les annales de toutes les familles, les archives de tous les tribunaux, les dossiers de tous les cabinets d’affaires. Notaires, avocats, huissiers, antiquaires m’en ont raconté de toutes sortes, qui se résumaient à la même antienne: ou ça me revient, ou ça ne doit être à personne’ [search the annals of every family, the archives of every court, the files of every law firm. Solicitors, lawyers, bailiffs, antique dealers, have told me all sorts of things, which are all versions of the same refrain: either it comes back to me, or it must not go to anybody] (105). As this assertion hints, the stigmatisation to which she has been subjected due to her childlessness has gone beyond her immediate environment to involve many individuals, organisations and institutions. Here, I divide these into three groups: medical professionals, male partners, and other women. Chapsal presents the first, the medical profession, as harbouring significant damaging stereotypes of childless women. Far from a source of support, understanding or non-judgmental advice, the medical staff with whom she has had contact throughout her life are portrayed as prejudiced, patronising and manipulative. Just as is the case in Sautière’s text, Chapsal describes series of cold, clinical and disinterested medical professionals whom she consults. She begins her representation of doctors and nurses by recounting their attempts to ‘cure’ her of her infertility when she was a

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young woman. She describes how the gynaecologists of this period, most of whom were men, acted as ‘pères de substitution des femmes stériles’ [substitute fathers to sterile women] (53) and held their primary mission to be enabling all women to reproduce, regardless of individual biological circumstances or desires. Chapsal presents her choice to consult these specialists as an attempt to understand her body and her fertility so as to put an end to the pain that she frequently suffered. The specialists, however, completely misunderstood: ‘une femme sans enfant, à leurs yeux, était moins qu’une femme: la preuve vivante de leur échec! Ils n’avaient pas su la “guérir” de ce lamentable état et la rendre mère’ [a childless woman, in their eyes, was less than a woman: she was the living proof of their failure! They could not ‘cure’ her of this miserable state and make her a mother] (53). Rather than listen to the patient, they firstly acted according to their own prejudice and secondly showed more concern for their own success than for the woman’s right to make a choice over her own body. Furthermore, their behaviour was morally questionable on another level. The author remembers that: de nombreuses fois, et par d’éminents spécialistes, je m’entendis répondre: ‘Petite madame, vous êtes trop nerveuse, cela va s’arranger!’ (Et de me câliner après l’examen, ce qui n’allait jamais très loin, sans doute parce que la famille de mon mari était connue … Si je précise cela, c’est qu’il n’en va pas toujours ainsi pour certaines jeunes et jolies clientes en manque d’enfant). (54) [several times, I heard even eminent specialists say to me: ‘My dear, you are too nervous, it will work out!’ (And cuddle me after the examination, which never went very far, doubtless because my husband’s family was well known … I am recounting this because this is not always what happens to young, pretty, childless patients.)]

The doctors’ – in the plural since Chapsal insists that this is not an isolated incident – abuse of their position is clear, as they manipulate their female patients in more ways than one. The evident power relation of authoritative male doctor versus fragile female patient highlights the patriarchy inherent in the medical profession, the assumption that doctors know women’s minds better than they do themselves and the stigma to which the childless woman has traditionally been subjected at their hands. The series of analysts whom she consults over a period of years add to this


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patriarchal representation. Not one of them considers her childlessness as a matter worthy of discussion and thus her situation is never part of her analysis; significantly, she is careful to mention that all of the analysts are parents themselves (132). The representation of the stigma harboured by male doctors is widened in Chapsal’s text to include a variety of men with whom she has had relationships. Beginning with her ex-husband, whom Chapsal married at a young age and who also had no desire for children, the author compiles a list of male behaviour traits that denigrate the childless woman. One may suspect the critique of a former husband to be motivated by bitterness or resentment but the author claims to have ended the marriage herself and on amicable terms. Thus she was surprised when, in the year following their divorce, her ex-husband knocked on her door holding a bunch of flowers and announced that his new wife had given him a child. She recounts having subsequently entered into a succession of affairs that each ended at least in part due to her lack of desire for a child. She writes that ‘ce manque me plaçait forcément à part’ [this lack inevitably placed me apart] (81) and claims that this sentiment is not ‘excessif ’ [excessive] due to the number of times that this has been the apparent reason for the rupture. She is particularly critical of men who have viewed her as temporary amusement with no danger of an ensuing pregnancy. She writes that the childless woman ‘ne représente qu’un passe-temps dans l’esprit de tout homme doté d’une famille ou songeant à en fonder une. […] Il finit par ne voir en elle qu’une curiosité à ajouter à la collection des ses conquêtes … Pour avoir en quelque sorte tout connu quand le temps vient pour lui de songer sérieusement à s’établir’ [represents a mere pastime in the mind of every man who has a family or who would like one. […] He ends up seeing her as a curiosity to add to his collection of conquests … To have experienced everything, in a sense, when the time comes to think seriously about settling down] (77). Chapsal thus confronts the question of the likelihood of a voluntarily childless woman finding a life partner. Facing a woman who has made such a choice, many men, according to her text, are reluctant to enter into a commitment and instead consider the relationship as temporary. She gives a specific example of how her ‘situation d’à-peu-près-femme’ [situation of almost-woman] (81) led to the end of a

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seemingly successful relationship. In this example, the author recounts a four-year relationship with an unnamed man. She describes the relationship as particularly close and passionate, and explains changes to their lives that they both made in order to solidify their commitment. Both were resolute in their lack of desire for a child. Nevertheless, Chapsal was astonished to learn one day that he ‘venait de découvrir qu’il lui fallait des enfants – des enfants de lui! Qu’il ne pouvait plus continuer sans. C’était devenu impératif, vital’ [had just discovered that he needed children – children of his own! That he could not continue without them. It had become imperative, vital] (91). This is a striking reversal of the societal expectation with which most, if not all, voluntarily childless women are familiar: the assertion that they will, one day, realise that they want children after all. On one level, therefore, Chapsal highlights the negative consequences of her choice to remain childless, and on another she highlights the solidity of her decision compared to the fanciful decision made by a man. Yet, men are not the only people who cause the author to suffer for having chosen to remain childless. Chapsal is vehement about the treatment that she has received from other women, in particular mothers who appear jealous of the freedom that she enjoys. She claims that she tried harder to please than other women with children, by purchasing expensive birthday gifts or throwing lavish family parties, for instance. If she ever overlooked this duty, she states, she would be abandoned, especially by her female family members who would not invite her to subsequent gatherings. She remembers isolated incidents that show envy, resentment, or a lack of understanding from other women, such as when a cleaner insulted her for having so much space in her apartment while the cleaner had three children in her own small home. In an attempt at understanding, Chapsal suspects that many people are not aware of the distinction that they make between a mother and a childless woman or of the ensuing changes in their behaviour. Yet, she remembers others who would not say openly what they are thinking – that she deserved less consideration than a mother – but would persist in treating her differently, in small ways, such as placing her in a tiny room as an overnight guest or expecting her to perform certain tasks. She also remembers those who state their envy openly, in accusations or harsh comparisons. Summarising, Chapsal writes ‘le ‘toi, tu n’as pas d’enfant’


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signifie entre autres: tu n’as pas droit!’ [the ‘you, you have no children’ means, among other things: you do not have the right] (73) and suspects that ‘aurais-je été trois fois plus riche, totalement oisive, mais affublée d’enfant, j’aurais été respectable et respectée; en tout cas, laissée en paix’ [had I been three times richer, totally idle, but saddled with a child, I would have been respectable and respected, or in any case, left alone] (73). Overall, the most significant rancour that she has suffered emanates from women who fear those who are ‘free’. Chapsal claims to have suffered indignation, suspicion and reproach from women who find that she exhibits ‘un perpétuel et considérable danger’ [a perpetual and considerable danger] (60), not just to their marriages but also to their way of life. Chapsal claims to have understood that these women consider that the childless woman: n’a rien à invoquer qui la retienne chez elle ou l’oblige à y rentrer. […] En fait, une ‘femme sans’ est un personnage idéal pour la projection: on lui prête toutes les aventures qu’on s’interdit de vivre et même de fantasmer. ‘Celle-là, elle en a, de la chance: rien ne l’empêche de faire indéfiniment la fête. Moi, à sa place …’ Mais voilà, on n’est pas à sa place. (62) [has nothing to keep her at home or to oblige her to go back there. […] In fact, a ‘woman without’ is the ideal character for projection: people lend her all the adventures that they forbid themselves to live or to fantasise. ‘That one, she’s lucky: nothing is stopping her from partying all the time. Me, if I were in her position …’ But there it is: they are not in her position.]

According to the writer, the childless woman cannot therefore escape the stigma of her situation as a result of her supposedly free and uninhibited lifestyle and will always be a figure of suspicion to the women surrounding her. The most virulent danger in all of this, she concludes, is that childless women learn to conspire with the misguided and unjust system. She writes in reference to what transpired between her and her sister, for example,

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that ‘nous finîmes par nous retrouver au tribunal où mes défenseurs ne cessèrent de me demander pourquoi je n’avis pas réagi plus tôt. Pour la bonne et unique raison que, n’ayant pas d’enfant, je trouvais normal que ma sœur et sa progéniture reçoivent plus que moi’ [we ended up in court, where my defenders would not stop asking me why I had not reacted earlier. For the good reason that, since I didn’t have children, I found it normal that my sister and her offspring received more than me] (179). Having internalised societal expectations of the childless woman, she was thus unknowingly complicit with this victimisation. Part of this behaviour is rooted in historical mores, she hints; earlier in the text, for example, she remembers that her ex-father-in-law wrote to her to congratulate her on her ‘élégance’ [elegance] (49) during her divorce from his son, which she understood to be well intentioned but to also point up the way in which women were obliged to be docile and obedient women in certain times. Yet her text questions the extent to which this has changed, particularly in terms of the stereotypical older woman who is eager to please and unwilling to voice dissent. Chapsal thus rails against what she refers to as the ‘acceptation du châtiment’ [acceptance of the punishment] (51) of the childless women who learns to accept and even expect unjust treatment on the grounds of her decision. While her choice to remain childless is a source of freedom, reflection, enjoyment, passion and exploration, Chapsal is therefore at pains to underline the negative consequences that it has also wrought, and to highlight that these consequences are rooted in the stigma towards childless women that persist in contemporary society.

Changing Identity over Time One of the most interesting aspects of La Femme sans is the way in which Chapsal presents how her relationship to her childlessness has changed over the course of her life, beginning with memories of her childhood and early adulthood. Much of the text is written in the imperfect tense, as the author recounts how things used to be, emphasising the way women’s lives were


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restricted in previous times, such as before the legalisation of contraception and abortion. Yet she suddenly returns to the present tense – such as ‘je n’invente rien’ [I am inventing nothing] (105) – to remind the reader of her present, writing self and of the continued reflection that she develops. She thus transitions between a narrated self and a narrating self as she uses her autobiographical ‘I’ to survey the changed terrain of women’s selfhood and of the position of the voluntarily childless woman in particular. The text thus comprises snapshots of the image of the childless woman almost through the span of a lifetime. Whereas Sautière in Nullipare recounts that she has explained her choice not to mother in different ways at different times in her life, Chapsal thus gives an overview of the ways in which she has reflected upon her choice throughout her life; not only does her text provide a more lengthy explanation, therefore, but its confessional tone reflects Chapsal’s inner narrative rather than Sautière’s outward answer to an interlocutor who asks for justification. Chapsal claims that her reflections on her childlessness – or rather her initial lack of desire for children that later became a sustained reflection – began when she was very young. She recounts memories of her childhood in which she was already aware of her lack of interest in children. She remembers, for example, that ‘dans mon âge si tendre, et contrairement à mes petites camarades, je n’imaginais pas d’avoir des enfants pour mon propre compte’ [when I was very young, and unlike all of my friends, I did not image having my own children] (21). She writes of the female children whom she observed with infants, noticing their fascination and curiosity and how they would make ‘tout un cirque’ [a big performance] (22) if permitted contact with a baby. She claims to be unable to fathom the reasons why children would behave in such a manner: whether it was to initiate themselves into a future role, to mimic the adults around them or to wield power over such a weak creature, for instance. In any case, she concludes that ‘rien ne m’échappait de ce manège, qui ne me tentait pas’ [none of this merry-go-round escaped me and it did not tempt me] (22). In a vignette devoted to a memory of her adolescence, she remembers her first forays into writing. She recounts how she bought a notebook and wrote ‘tout ce qui venait à l’esprit’ [everything that came to mind] (26) and how she even wrote a page devoted to words, which she describes as ‘mon seul

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amour d’alors’ [my only love of the time] (26). Tellingly, she compares the words in her notebook to an infant, stating that ‘je prétendais les bercer sur mon cœur comme on fait d’un enfant. Oui, c’étaient les mots que je pouponnais, enchantée quand il m’en “naissait” un nouveau du fait que je l’avais découvert dans un texte pour me l’approprier aussitôt’ [I claimed to cradle them to my heart as one cradles a child. Yes, it was words I played mother to, enchanted when a new one ‘was born’ from my having discovered it in a text and appropriated it for myself immediately] (26). Explaining how she was enchanted by the work of writers such as Baudelaire, Racine, Rimbaud and Eluard, she states simply, ‘avoir des enfants? L’idée ne m’en venait pas’ [having children? The idea did not even cross my mind] (27). The author thus represents her decision not to have children as something that began not as a decision at all. Instead, she presents herself as emotionally predisposed to avoiding children and argues that this awareness had already transpired prior to adulthood. Sustained reflection ensued, to which the rest of the text is testament, yet her fundamental lack of interest is isolated as the root of her decision. As we have seen to be a common factor among narratives of voluntary childlessness, including first-person narratives and interviews carried out by sociologists, the list of reasons that women give is extensive; rather than a facile, quickly taken or superficial response to an emotional state, the texts of voluntarily childless women show that the reasons for and the factors influencing such a decision are manifold. As Tilmant and Vallée argue in psychoanalytic terms, though, such explanations often emanate from a simple lack of desire that women feel obliged to justify. One of the key factors that Chapsal isolates in her discussion of her reasons for her childlessness is the heavily female entourage of her childhood. While one may imagine that this may have increased her desire to emulate her female relations and friends, the result was quite the opposite. She explains that ‘toute présence masculine était exclue de notre communauté de femmes de tous âges’ [male presence was excluded from our community of women of all ages] (22) and that the women around her were particularly powerful. Although such female role models must have made a positive impact upon her developing self, she regretted the loss of freedom that these women caused. She writes that, as opposed to the overbearing


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women and children around her, ‘j’eus très tôt le sentiment qu’il fallait laisser sa liberté à autrui (dans l’espoir qu’en contrepartie on me ficherait la paix?), qu’il s’agisse même d’un très petit enfant ou d’un animal’ [very early, I felt that everybody, whether a small child or an animal, should be left to enjoy their freedom (in the hope that they would leave me alone in return?)] (22). Chapsal explicitly links her experiences with her mother to this explanation. The mother is not necessarily a negative presence – indeed, the stereotype of the woman who chooses not to mother due to an unhappy childhood or traumatic upbringing is often misguided – but is presented as a stage of reflection through which all childless women pass. Chapsal presents her relationship with her mother as an extension of this female entourage, which is presented as cloying and oppressive. Chapsal’s mother, Marcelle Chaumont, was a highly successful fashion designer who had a prominent career in the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, some of her works are still on display in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. References to this figure are sparse in La Femme sans but in the opening chapters devoted to her childhood, Chapsal sketches her character. The opening lines of the text following the preface read, ‘Ma mère avait près de trente-cinq ans lorsqu’elle m’a eue. Ou laissée venir’ [My mother was almost thirty-five years old when she had me. Or let me come] (15). She explains her mother’s professional success of the time and asks, ‘Maman a-t-elle été heureuse de se retrouver enceinte et de devenir mère? Dans mon enfance, il était inimaginable de poser des questions à ses géniteurs sur sa propre naissance, encore moins sur sa conception’ [Was Mum happy to find herself pregnant and to become a mother ? In my childhood, it was unthinkable to ask your parents questions about your birth, even less about your conception] (15). The reader understands implicitly that the mother was a distant figure who shared little intimacy with the author, which is furthered by the frequent references to Madeleine Vionnet, a close colleague of her mother’s and the author’s namesake, who is presented almost as a surrogate mother. The tension between mother and daughter to which Chapsal hints in her narration is compounded by comments made by her grandmother. Since her mother was forced into marriage due to her pregnancy, her grandmother, who had five children and who was therefore fully aware of the

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enormity of the responsibility, would frequently say ‘on ne fait pas d’enfant à une femme comme ça’ [you don’t give a woman like that children] (16). Believing that her daughter, Chapsal’s mother was ‘quelqu’un d’exceptionnel’ [someone exceptional] (16) with a promising career ahead of her, the grandmother evidently found that the status of mother was not appropriate for her; one may only imagine the effects of such statements upon the developing child. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Chapsal claims to have understood at a young age that she held the significance, to her mother, of ‘une de ces roses de tissu piquées sur la robe de ma mère’ [one of those roses sewn onto my mother’s dress] (19). In this way, she presents herself as a voluntarily childless woman whose choice is rooted in an emotional predilection that predates her ability to reason her situation, and narrates this with the perspective of a mature adult who is able to bring an advanced level of understanding to her situation. Chapsal’s explanation is further nuanced as she narrates her memories of adulthood. Remembering herself in her twenties, for example, one of the first reasons that she explains is her lack of respect for authority and her desire to resist any confining model of womanhood. She claims to have understood very early that she had a taste for challenging the norms laid down by authority figures and connects her lack of desire to mother with this fundamental position. ‘Être mère’ [being a mother], she claims, ‘m’eût obligée à entrer dans le rang’ [would have obliged me to behave appropriately] (31). Another reason that she gives as she recounts her thirties and forties, perhaps linked to this rejection of societal norms, is a lack of interest in putting down roots. Enjoying her status as a free spirit who lives her life with a relatively carefree attitude, she writes of her reluctance to alter her lifestyle: ‘Je m’éprouvais continuellement sur le point de disparaître, comme n’étant qu’en visite temporaire dans ma condition d’être humain. Prête à en sortir à tout moment. Or, accepter d’avoir un enfant, c’est s’enraciner. Je ne voulais pas de racines’ [I always felt that I was about to die, as if I were only a temporary visitor to the human race. I was ready to leave it at any moment. But, accepting to have a child means putting down roots. I did not want roots] (31). Her desire to live a free, uninhibited and questioning life is at the root of another reason that she isolates for her choice to remain childless; as early as her twenties, Chapsal claims to have wanted to live as freely as


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the men she saw around her, believing that ‘rien de ce qui était accessible aux garçons ne devait m’être interdit’ [nothing that was accessible to boys should be forbidden to me] (37). This may sound like a hackneyed battle cry nowadays, but given that Chapsal was born in 1925, her perspective was a singular one. This led her, she explains, to ‘une boulimie de lectures, aussi de conversations ‘au sommet’: politiques, psychologiques, métaphysiques. C’était l’âge – sartrien – où la philosophie régnait en maître et je m’installais et évoluais dans cet olympe de la pensée pour n’en plus redescendre’ [a bulimia of readings and intellectual conversations : political, psychological, metaphysical. It was the (Sartrean) age in which philosophy reigned and I settled into and evolved in this Mount Olympus of thought so as not to have to come back down to earth] (38). Some of her reasons are less profound – such as being disgusted at the idea of a ‘parasite’ invading her body (30) or resisting the idea of being responsible for somebody who would be ‘plus faible que moi’ [weaker than me] (34) – but many of her reasons show a sustained reflection that moves beyond the emotional disposition she described in her memories of her childhood. Indeed, her thought process during adulthood must have been extremely thorough; she claims that ‘je n’avais oublié qu’une chose: je ne pouvais pas avoir d’enfant’ [I had only forgotten one thing: that I could not have a child] (44). Her narrative contains a list of well thought out ideas that contribute to a systematic approach to her life, highlighting her desire for liberty, her commitment to self-exploration and her belief in deep and continual reflection. What is unique in Chapsal’s representation of her experience, as the citation above highlights, is the way in which she straddles voluntary and involuntary childlessness. The author reveals the complexity of her situation in the early chapters of the text, candidly explaining her biological and emotional background. She writes that, ‘c’est vers quinze/seize ans que j’ai le plus fortement éprouvé mon non-désir d’enfant. Sans pressentir que mon destin biologique, suite à ma tuberculose, était déjà scellé, sur ce plan-là, dans les profondeurs de mon corps et à mon insu’ [it was around fifteen/sixteen years old that I felt my non-desire for children most strongly. Without foreseeing that my biological destiny, following my tuberculosis, was already, unknown to me, sealed in the depths of my body] (25). She alludes to the tuberculosis and ensuing sterility infrequently throughout the text, thus emphasising

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that her childlessness is voluntary. She is careful to point out that she was already resolute in her decision not to have children and her sterility only compounded her situation. She admits that she reflected later that her lack of desire for a child may have been influenced by the fact that she was not physically capable of pregnancy, but is clear about the biological and emotional distinction. It may be that she is therefore in a perfect situation in which to discuss childlessness, since this is more accepted from involuntarily childless women; those who are physically unable to reproduce certainly suffer in all sorts of ways, and may well suffer from prejudice and discrimination, yet they are not targeted with the same stereotypes as childless women: heartless, overeducated, overambitious or selfish, for example. Throughout her narrative of the ways in which her understanding of her childlessness has changed over time, she is resolute about her lack of desire for children. This clear, decided voice presents her story in a far more direct manner than do the other writers whose work is studied in Voicing Voluntary Childlessness. One of the more comical aspects of the text emanates from Chapsal’s desire to give frank, candid accounts of sensitive ideas that would generate disapprobation were they to come from others, particularly from younger women. Some of her remarks may be unseemly if voiced by others, but the older person, and particularly the older woman in this case, has a privileged position insofar as she can say things openly with the weight of her age and experience behind her. Rather than hold back on her ideas or feelings, Chapsal broaches controversial topics without fear of upsetting or offending. For example, she is unashamed to state her revulsion for babies, for the pregnant woman’s body and for the physical consequences of motherhood on ageing women. She recounts, for instance, viewing a foetus on an echography screen as ‘cet amas larvaire’ [this larval heap] (138) and insists that: même si nous nous attendrissons – grâce à l’échographie – sur l’image de ce minuscule conglomérat de gélatine surmonté de deux gros yeux aveugles et protubérants, avec des moignons en guise de membres et un sexe sans vergogne, la vérité oblige à reconnaître que c’est affreux: on rencontrerait la Chose se baladant telle quelle sur les boulevards, qu’horrifié on crierait Halloween! (143) [even if we are moved – due to the scan – by the image of this minuscule conglomerate of gelatine topped with two fat, protruding, blind eyes, with stumps in the guise of


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limbs and genitals with no shame, truth obliges us to recognise that it’s awful: if one met the Thing walking up and down the street, one would cry Halloween in horror!]

While other writers examined in this study have written similar ideas, none have used such direct or emotive language to do so; Chapsal, who has become famous for writing popular, harmless and sugar-coated stories, is clearly intent on using her status as an older woman to offer such frank and direct critique. She returns to the idea throughout the text that women are duped by the mechanisms of society into accepting the difficult lot of the pregnant woman and the suffering mother. She comments that ‘il faut une campagne de propagande bien orchestrée pour que la femme dont le corps est ainsi transformé en usine, en réservoir d’éléments nutritifs à l’usage d’un tiers, le supporte’ [it is necessary to have a well orchestrated propaganda campaign for women to put up with their bodies being transformed into factories, into reservoirs of nutritional elements for the use of a third party] (138). She finds that the notion of the maternal instinct is a cleverly orchestrated social mechanism designed to justify why a woman should accept the changes wrought on her body, her opportunities and her freedom throughout her life. Rather than simply mentioning the difficulties inherent in motherhood, therefore, she moves into new terrain to give a harsh rebuff to the social attitudes that force women to suffer its negative aspects, making special mention of older mothers whose experiences of ageing is far from idyllic.

Solitude and Regret In keeping with her evident intention to counter the stigmatisation and negative stereotypes levelled at the voluntarily childless, Chapsal directly tackles the charge that children are a means to guard against solitude and regret in old age. Many a childless woman will have been questioned over what she intends to do in her old age to guard against loneliness, decrepitude or ill health. From the perspective of the older woman who is both unmarried and childless, Chapsal confronts this apparent quandary. While

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she accepts that children may offer protection in one’s old age, she asks, ‘Mais faut-il être protégée? Défendue contre soi-même et les grands courants de l’angoisse, de la désespérance, de la solitude – du génie, en quelque sorte?’ [Does one have to be protected? Defended against oneself and the currents of anxiety, despair and solitude – of genius, in some sort?] (193). Rather than blindly accepting that solitude is a negative state with painful consequences, she focuses on the more positive experiences of being able to write uninhibited and interrupted, and on the freedom that she feels in her daily activities. Interestingly, she lists childless men who do not seem to have suffered unduly in their old age from not having children to protect them: Nerval, Artaud, Flaubert, Musset and Saint-John Perse, for example. She admits that not having children entails a sacrifice insofar as one has no direct descendants but states that it may also lead to ‘une ouverture vers autre chose aussi: il faut chercher à se continuer d’une autre façon que par la chair, les gènes – la viande, en somme’ [an opening towards something else as well: one must try to perpetuate oneself in another way than through flesh and genes – through meat, in sum’ (193–4). In this way, she deftly rebuts the argument that children afford protection to the older woman and hints that such a discourse is founded upon fear and insecurity rather than the reality of ageing women’s lived experience. Simultaneously, she portrays ageing without children as a special form of freedom that can open up one’s life to other activities and, in particular, she counters stereotypes of the older woman’s loss of mental faculties by insisting that these can be intellectual pursuits; she turns the labels of anxiety, despair and solitude into that of ‘genius’, staking out a new terrain for the older woman’s identity. Nevertheless, Chapsal does not present the experience of ageing without children as entirely positive. Although she repeats that she does not regret her decision, she points to its negative consequence in order, she states, to spread the understanding of the childless woman’s situation. She states that: Si je poursuis le récit de mes peines, mais également de mes joies de femme sans enfant, c’est déjà pour fournir des arguments en forme de munitions à celles qui sont plus mes sœurs que n’importe quelles autres femmes. J’aimerais leur donner la force, que j’ai tenté d’acquérir, de se battre et de résister à cette violence diffuse qu’elles éprouvent toutes un jour ou l’autre, en plus ou moins pleine connaissance de cause, et qui n’a qu’un but: les réduire, les supprimer. (76)


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[I continue to tell the story of this struggle, but also of the joys of being a childless woman, in order to provide ammunition to those women whom I consider my sisters more than any others. I would like to give them the strength that I have tried to acquire to fight and to resist the diffuse violence that they all experience at some point, sometimes with full knowledge of the facts and sometimes not, but which has one sole aim: to cut them down, to suppress them.]

She claims that her perspective as an older woman has awarded her insights into the way in which she has unwittingly suffered from throughout the course of her life and reveals that old age presents the childless woman with certain painful situations. She highlights not only the prejudice that she suffers from her family members over her inheritance but also the pain she feels when old friends and family members forget to include her in events. She also describes several mundane, everyday concerns that point to the difficulty of ageing without children. Readers may be surprised to read her concern over what to do with her possessions and the considerable discomfort this brings to her; those with children need not ask themselves this question, yet the transmission of personal, intimate items may be painful to those with no immediate descendants. Such concerns may appear trivial but Chapsal’s candid, intimate record of her lived experience becomes all the more unique as a result of such passages. Of course, she is fortunate to have had a successful career that has awarded her the financial stability to escape what Beauvoir saw as the injustice done to the elderly through impoverishment. As late capitalism has advanced, those with less power to accrue capital have suffered more acutely and the ageing sit firmly within this category. As the baby boomers age, increasing pressure is thus placed on their children to provide for them financially. The Institute for Public Policy Research in the UK has suggested that by 2030, there will be over 2 million people over 65 years of age in England without children to care for them.20 Chapsal’s lament is attenuated by relief from such economic

20 Claire McNeil and Jack Hunter, ‘The Generation Strain: Collective Solutions to Care in an Ageing Society’, Institute of Public Policy Research Report (2014) accessed 1 May 2015.

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burdens, therefore, but does not overlook or skirt around the hitherto unmentioned emotional difficulties of ageing without children. Despite Chapsal’s insistence on the suffering that she has endured at the hands of doctors, nurses, analysts, lovers, institutions, friends and even family members, she uses her perspective as an older woman to offer a positive and even occasionally comical take on choosing to remain childless. Far from a self-help book, an overly optimistic or pessimistic representation or an angry narrative of revenge, therefore, the text becomes a balanced account of the positive and negative effects of voluntary childlessness across a life span. One example of the positive aspects of her lifestyle is Chapsal’s relationships with young people. She writes at length of the young adults with whom she has had such a protective role, nurturing younger writers in particular to make the first forays into the profession. She thus shows, in a very similar way to the other writers studied in Voicing Voluntary Childlessness, that the childless woman may have a very particular and privileged maternal role. She recounts long conversations with young writers in which she guides them to reformulate their ideas and style from the benefit of her experience and to show them the direction to take in beginning their writing careers. Although these relationships are generally short, since the young people launch their careers and usually only keep in touch with her through occasional greetings cards, she highlights how childless women can offer something very particular to society. She is careful to point out that many successful women in politics, in professions and in public life have children and seem capable of balancing their duties in an exemplary fashion. Yet she also lists famous women who remained childless, many of whom were/are writers and who share her privileged position of influence, particularly over young people: Marguerite Yourcenar, Renée Vivien, Simone de Beauvoir, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, Emily Brontë, Yvonne Printemps, for example. In the eyes of many, she claims, the fact of not having children ‘peut donner aussi du panache!’ [can also give some panache!] (190). The most positive aspect of ageing as a voluntarily childless woman, however, is what she terms the ‘inattendu miracle’ [unexpected miracle]: Après soixante ans, il ne vient à l’idée de personne de vous reprocher de ne pas avoir eu d’enfants!


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C’est même le contraire, on vous en félicite: ‘Ah, tu ne connais pas ton bonheur! Que tu as eu raison! Si tu savais ce qu’il me fait, ce qu’ils nous font … Après tous ces sacrifices! Chanceuse, va!’ [After you pass sixty, nobody thinks of reproaching you for not having had children! To the contrary, they even congratulate you on it: ‘Oh, you don’t know how happy you are! You were so right! If you knew what he does to me, what they do … After all those sacrifices! How lucky you are!] (152, emphasis in original)

Other texts studied in this book, such as Sautière’s Nullipare or Lê’s À l’enfant que je n’aurai pas, also hint at this phenomenon; parents, especially women, will occasionally make comments to those whom they trust over the negative consequences and possibly even regret of their decision to have children. The older woman is thus greeted as the one who knew best all along and who now reaps the benefits of freedom in old age. Chapsal thus underscores that ageing with children may be fraught with difficulty, observing that, ‘bien des mères, même multipares, se révèlent accablées par les chagrins, l’ingratitude, l’abandon – les maisons de retraite en sont peuplées’ [many mothers, even those with several children, are stricken by chagrin, ingratitude and abandon – retirement homes are full of them] (152). In addition to women who suffer at the hands of their children in later life, Chapsal also mentions the plight of the grandmother. Counselling others to become writers, Chapsal claims that she often hears complaints of barriers from older women who cannot find time to write even in their old age due to the familial pressure placed upon them; ‘quand les enfants sont devenus autonomes, voire indépendants, arrivent les petits-enfants, et le cercle aussi infernal que paradisiaque se referme à nouveau sur elles!’ [when the children have become autonomous, even independent, the grandchildren arrive and the circle, as infernal as paradisiac, closes in around them all over again!] (191). Ageing without children has its specific difficulties, the reader infers, but ageing with them is no panacea. From her perspective of an ageing woman who can voice controversial ideas more freely, she also writes of the physical advantages to ageing without

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children. Although Chapsal aims to give a balanced view of motherhood and avoids accusatory, superior or overly critical assertions, she also points to the ways in which the childless woman’s ageing body escapes some of the difficulties experienced by the mother. The physical difficulties of bearing a child, both short and long-term, are something that the femme sans [woman without] never has to experience and can thus keep her health, strength and even her allure; Chapsal recounts compliments on her ‘silhouette de jeune fille’ [youthful silhouette] (165) that she receives even into her seventies, for example. In a further example of her desire to use her perspective as an older woman to make stark, direct comments on the lot of women in current society, she writes that ‘on dit que la maternité épanouit. On sait ce qu’il en est des roses qui s’ouvrent trop fort, trop joliment et trop vite … La ‘femme sans’ reste plus longtemps en bouton. Son corps le manifeste, en particulier dans ce dont il n’est jamais question: les organes génitaux! Mais chut …’ [people say that motherhood leads to a blossoming. We know what happens to roses that bloom too far, too prettily and too quickly … The ‘woman without’ remains a bud for longer. Her body shows that, particularly what we never talk about: her genitals! But shhh …] (255). Chapsal’s text may not be a highly reasoned and tightly argued feminist treatise but it raises many ideas and observations that are rarely or ever expressed about older women, childless or not. Her readiness to confront the attitudes that constrain women’s liberty, that lead them to suffer physically or that lead them to lament their children’s behaviour from within retirement homes, for example, is a refreshing and timely reminder of the need for older women to be given a voice, for their sakes and for the sakes of those whom they could protect.

Concluding Thoughts Chapsal thus represents a unique, courageous and lonely voice in contemporary women’s writing. From the perspective of an ageing woman, she stakes out a new textual space for the expression of women’s lived experience. The way in which she confronts the taboo of voluntary childlessness


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through sustained reflection of the reasons for and the consequences of her choice is worthy of recognition. La Femme sans thus testifies to the thought process of this childless woman and refutes the stereotypes of the selfish, ambitious, heartless, unnatural, unfeminine or emotionless individual. Moreover, this text warns us of the dangers of the prejudices that are still rampant in contemporary society by giving examples of the – conscious and unconscious – mistreatment that its author has endured. Overall, Chapsal’s text is testament to the pride that she feels in having fashioned the life that she wants to lead as she repeatedly returns to the joy of her free existence, despite others’ mistreatment. In a positive ending, she claims that many people her own age compliment her on her choice and on the life that it awards her in her senior years. As the text draws to a close, Chapsal concludes that ‘l’humanité a besoin de femmes sans enfants’ [humanity needs women without children] (249) since they incarnate a different understanding of femininity and an imaginative approach to life and relationships. La Femme sans is thus a poignant evocation of the reasoned choices of the childless woman throughout her life and a dramatic refusal of the invisibility to which the ageing woman is frequently consigned.

Conclusion

Maternity impacts on an individual woman’s sense of self, irrespective of whether or not she is actually a mother: social expectations that women are and want to be mothers continue to bear on commonly-held perceptions of normal womanhood. –Gill Rye

At the conclusion of this study of narratives of voluntary childlessness, it will be clear that all of the texts explored have two common denominators. First, they are all marked by a desire to represent the decision to remain childless beyond negative stereotypes, beyond existing formulations of femininity and against the fetishisation of motherhood evident in contemporary discourse. Second, they all play with the limits of autobiography to create unique and innovative ways to inscribe their voices in narrative. From Lê’s manipulation of the epistolary form, to Sautière’s use of autofiction, to Joubert’s reformulation of personal criticism to Chapsal’s unique inscription of the ageing woman’s voice in autobiography, each author creates a new means of expressing the female self in literature. Taken together, their corpus stages a collective questioning of autobiography as a means of encapsulating the identities and life experiences of those who deviate from a norm. There are important differences in the ways in which these authors approach the representation of voluntary childlessness in narrative, which is testament to the individual response that non-mothering necessitates. Lê’s narrator’s defiant tone contrasts to the doubtful approach of Sautière’s. Chapsal’s hyperbolic comedy differs from Joubert’s acerbic humour. Sautière’s melancholic narrator strikes a different note to Joubert’s accusatory one. The four texts also portray enormously varied reasons for voluntary childlessness, including family history, concern for

188 Conclusion

ecology, psychological difficulties, problematic relationships with their own mothers, resistance to the norm, a desire for an alternative lifestyle, freedom from the responsibilities involved in child-rearing, concern for their physical wellbeing during and after pregnancy, a preference for pursuing their writing and many more. What unites the narratives of these authors is their sustained reflection of their individual response to society’s overwhelming predilection for motherhood. Gone are the stereotypes of the heartless woman, the selfish woman, the career woman, the irresponsible woman, the unnatural woman or the incomplete woman and in place are candid depictions of the thought process behind their decisions. In a culture in which ‘le droit à l’enfant’ [the right to a child] has become a fixed expression, these non-mothers carve out a new space for the expression of female experience. By restoring voice to the non-mother and asserting that there should be no shame in this lifestyle, they proclaim a female identity that does not depend upon reproduction. Their reasons for, their explanations of, their reflection over and their inscription of their choice shows that it is not possible to define voluntary childlessness through any universalising, overarching or unitary notion of female identity. On a less positive note, these texts all represent voluntary childlessness as a persistent source of stigmatisation. On one level, the authors refer to isolated, seemingly trivial incidences in which they are made to feel deviant, non-normative or inferior due to their childlessness, such as Chapsal’s tale of being placed in tiny rooms as an overnight guest or Sautière’s narration of the mammography in which the protagonist is labelled nullipare. On another level, however, these texts point to a more insidious, more systematic and more damaging level of stigmatisation. Joubert’s reflections on the landscape of academic life demonstrate the professional discrimination that she has suffered at the hands of colleagues who are mothers and the surrounding network that supports them. Chapsal’s tale of being disinherited on the basis of her childlessness highlights the ways in which this lifestyle choice can be successfully employed as a means to delegitimise individuals’ rights. An element that recurs in all of the texts studied in this book is the authors desire to link their experiences with that of a collective of women who have made the same choice. In this way, they proclaim that they are writing on behalf of other childless women as a call

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for tolerance and equality. Ultimately, they hint at what Chapsal makes clear; the voluntarily childless have learnt to accept their treatment since they can so easily be accused of complaining for no reason. Their laments, when they venture to express them openly, can be dismissed as middleclass navel gazing, as the naïve whining of women who do not appreciate their freedom, or as the self-obsessed ranting of individuals who are, to the contrary, very privileged. This last issue is particularly important, since, as we have seen both in the literary expressions and the theoretical studies, the women who currently choose childlessness are mostly white, educated and from a comparatively high socio-economic class. Only when the expression of voluntarily childlessness becomes more socially acceptable will a wider variety of women voice their decision and render the stigmatisation more evident and more unacceptable. At present, as Chapsal indicates, voluntarily childless women are more likely to accept discrimination since they do not believe their voices will be heard or awarded credibility, and they suffer as a result. It follows that an important facet of the texts studied in this book is that they testify to the difficulty of proclaiming voluntary childlessness as a lifestyle choice. This ranges from the awkwardness that ensues when Sautière’s narrator is asked whether she has children, to the barrage of arguments Lê’s narrator is forced to answer from her partner S, to the suggestion of Joubert’s colleague that her professional performance be assessed on a different basis to that of her fellow academics with children. Instead, these women call for acceptance of their choice by asserting their knowledge of the enormity of the responsibility of mothering and by proclaiming that mothers and non-mothers need to come together for mutually beneficial ends. Amid the current discourse over motherhood, the choice to remain childless can be viewed as a judgement of those who choose to mother, as though non-mothers consider motherhood to be an inferior lifestyle choice to that of somebody who is free to live otherwise. Our increasingly materialistic, commercialised and globalised societies extol an individualism that valorises behaviours such as amassing wealth, travelling or advancing professionally. The voluntarily childless lifestyle renders the acquisition of such things easier and can attract envy, suspicion or mistrust from those who choose to reproduce. Similarly, the family is a mechanism of control

190 Conclusion

that obliges individuals to behave in certain ways, lest state authorities intervene. Freeing oneself from these responsibilities enables the childless woman to escape this mechanism of social control, which can in turn create the suspicion of a value judgment on the part of the childbearing majority. To the contrary, these texts all affirm the need to avoid conflict between mothers and voluntarily childless women, since enmity will be mutually damaging: both to mothers who are obliged to conform to the maternal expectations of current discourse and to non-mothers who are rendered deviant by their choice. This book has studied a range of expressions of voluntary childlessness in narrative from a range of authors, thus comparing tales of women who are of different ages, of different social classes, in different relationships, of different ethnic backgrounds, from different professional situations, from different family groupings and even from different linguistic backgrounds. In this manner, these narratives from the early years of the twenty-first century provide a first glimpse into what it means to be voluntarily childless in France today. These narratives engage with previous texts of feminist theory and of first-person writing by women yet also contribute to a remapping of this terrain by inscribing new experiences within it. Now that voluntarily childless women are beginning to find their voices, it will be interesting to see how this literature develops in the next decades of the twenty-first century. Recent changes in French society, such as laws over marriage equality and debates over surrogacy and reproductive technology, coupled with external factors such as the impact of globalisation on racial, ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity, point to the possibility of a wider range of narratives in the near future. The experiences of voluntarily childless women of different races and sexual orientations would provide interesting comparisons to the narratives studied here, for instance. Moreover, as we have seen, most of the authors studied here locate their origins outside of France. It is worth reiterating that this suggests that it is problematic for French women to voice their voluntary childlessness given France’s pronatalist, Catholic history, rather than presenting this choice as the result of the trauma of immigration, the loss of language or the irretrievability of origins. It is reasonable to expect that this will also change as the choice to remain childless becomes steadily more acceptable within France. The

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relative paucity of texts recounting voluntarily childless to date is testament to its persistent status as a taboo subject, but, as this book demonstrates, this is set to change. Texts by male authors who recount their experiences of choosing to remain childless would also be a welcome addition to this field, despite the fact that men and women who choose not to reproduce are subject to vastly different stereotypes. During the period of researching and writing this book, new interventions on the topic of voluntary childlessness have become steadily more visible. From Carrie Bradshaw calmly asserting that she does not want children in Sex and the City to the first major international conference on this topic, the Not Mom Summit in Cleveland, Ohio, in October 2015, the representation of the choice not to mother is cutting across cultures.1 Such representations have led to an array of neologisms for the voluntarily childless; in English, Melanie Notkin proposes ‘other’ and ‘otherhood’, for example, and in French, Debest invents the term ‘SEnVol’ as an abbreviation of ‘sans enfant voluntairement’ [without children voluntarily].2 This latter term has the advantage of the homonym ‘s’envole’, the third person conjugation of the verb ‘s’envoler’, which means to fly, to fly away or to soar; this terms thus hints at the freedom and the lifestyle possibilities that the voluntarily childless may enjoy. By contrast, Voicing Voluntary Childlessness has not advanced a neologism for those who choose not to mother since, as is explained in the introduction, this engenders the risk of categorising the voluntarily childless woman as deviant, inferior or lacking: non-mother, childless, etc. Instead, this book ultimately argues that the literary texts that it studies call for understanding, tolerance and acceptance of the choice not to mother as an equally valid lifestyle that is based upon an equally valid formulation of female identity. The authors studied here do not create a word or expression for their choice, but rather ask that society refrain from defining women according to their reproductive role. In this way, they 1 2

Details of the conference of The Not Mom association, entitled ‘Redefining Feminine Legacy’, are available at accessed 21 May 2015. Melanie Notkin, Otherhood: Modern Women Finding A New Kind of Happiness (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2015). Debest, Le choix d’une vie sans enfant, 18.

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reframe their choice not to mother, turning it from something that consigns them as deviant to something that has the potential to destabilise current understandings of female identity. By exploring their voluntary childlessness in literature and creating a textual space for the expression of their lifestyle choices, they open up the possibility of new formulations of identity that do not depend upon reproduction. The act of taking ownership of their voluntarily childless identity in narrative constitutes a radical departure from established social, cultural and literary patterns and paves the way for others to do likewise.

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Index

Abma, Joyce 31, 161 abortion 2, 3, 11, 23, 82, 173 academia 15, 131, 133, 136, 147, 155 adoption 110, 145 ageing 15, 155, 157–185, 187 agency 37, 70 Anderson, Jean 158 Angot, Christine 3, 105, 106, 114 anorexia 113, 120 anxiety 92, 180 Atwood, Margaret 79, 159 autobiography 15, 83, 100, 129, 138, 158 boundaries of 14, 76, 84 challenges to 13, 130–1, 140, 187 risk of 134 sub-genres of 14, 104, 106, 117, 127, 130 theories of 97, 143 truth of 118 see also autocritography; autofiction; life writing autocritography 15, 127, 130–1, 138 see also personal criticism autofiction 14, 83, 103–27, 130, 187 Averis, Kate 88, 89 Awkward, Michael 131, 138 Bachu, Amara 32 Badinter, Élisabeth 25–7, 98 n37, 129, 137, 150 barrenness 1, 23 Bayamack-Tam, Emmanuelle 11 Beauvoir, Simone de 20–2, 143, 149, 159, 181, 182

belonging 110, 124, 126 birth 38, 56, 64, 83, 92, 116, 123, 175 compared to writing 54, 125 drug-free 26 pain of 64 pleasure of 21 policies surrounding 8, 9 Boccolini, Laurence 10 body 108 n17, 109 ageing 124, 159, 164, 184 female 3, 95, 168, 177, 179 of childless woman 41, 45–6, 51, 184 of the mother 178 psychoanalytic theories of 12–13, 55 Blackstone, Amy 36, 39 Burkett, Elinor 30, 40 Butler, Judith 57, 141 Campbell, Annily 41 Carmichael, Gordon 36 Carminati, Jean-Paul 10 Catholicism 2, 9, 16, 27, 34, 69, 190 Cazot, Véronique 5 Chancey, Laurie 40 Chapsal, Madeleine 15, 155, 157–185, 187, 188, 189 Cheallaigh, Gillian Ni 83, 84, 90, 95 childfree 5, 30, 40, 45, 52, 67 origin of expression 4, 6–7 Chodorow, Nancy 53 Cixous, Hélène 54, 56, 159 Clarke, Lynda 32

208 Index class, socio-economic 16, 22, 31, 70, 153, 189, 190 Colonna, Vincent 105 community 1, 20, 22, 92, 98, 126, 174 Constant, Paule 3 Crispell, Diane 32 Cusset, Catherine 105, 114 Darrieussecq, Marie 3, 105–6 daughters 76, 89, 90, 116, 117, 153, 176 psychoanalytic approaches to 65–7 see also mother–daughter relationship Daum, Meghan 4, 103 death 3, 11, 109, 116, 139, 158, 159 in psychoanalytic theory 64, 65 of father 81, 97 of mother 120 Debest, Charlotte 8, 29, 34–5, 38–9, 42–3, 46, 191 Defago, Nicki 4 Dellamora, Richard 133, 134 Delphy, Christine 22, 23, 143 desire 28, 36, 39, 61, 108, 147, 177, 188 female sexual 12, 54 for children 28, 38, 42, 45 absence of 10, 14, 16, 42, 58, 82, 88, 92, 115, 120, 123, 159, 169–70, 173, 178 psychoanalytic theories of 49–54, 57, 59, 62–71, 116, 125, 174 sociological theories of 34, 161 see also sexuality, female Despentes, Virginie 3 Devienne, Emilie 5, 141, 147 discrimination 133, 188, 189 gender 53–4, 79 of involuntarily childless women 178 of voluntarily childless women 2, 152–3, 154, 165, 166, 188, 189 divorce 62, 63, 169, 172 Do, Tess 76 n2

Doubrovsky, Serge 104–6, 111–12, 118 doubt 84, 101, 144, as literary technique 13, 81, 83, 100, 107–8, 110–27 over childlessness 42 Douglas, Susan 25 Duchen, Claire 9 Dumais, Susan A. 40 Dye, Jane Lawler 31 ecology 93, 188 economic precarity 25–6, 159 écriture féminine 54 embodiment 45 Engwall, Kristina 45–6 Ernaux, Annie 76, 96, 105, 159 ethnicity 16, 70, 119, 120, 190 Fallaci, Oriana 82, 95 family 1, 23, 65, 67, 69, 126, 138, 150, 151, 152, 160, 169 and control 189–90 history 12, 16, 83, 94, 109, 116, 124, 126, 166, 187 in France 7–10 legal 167 patterns, changing 63, 34–5 prejudice within relations 61, 136, 142, 170, 181, 182 see also daughters; fathers; grandmothers; motherhood fathers 12, 23, 62, 76, 81, 83, 89, 90, 94, 97, 138, 168 absence of 115 fatherhood, desire for 86, 88 in psychoanalytic theory 50, 65, 67 Fell, Alison 23 n12, 54, 56 feminisms 13, 53–4, 68–70, 82, 98, 126, 146, 164 and ageing 158

209

Index and childlessness 36–7, 47–8, 49–51, 148–54 identification with 131–3, 136, 146 theories of 12, 19–28, 190 fertility rates 2, 4, 7–9 Firestone, Shulamith 22 Fouquet, Catherine 27 Fortino, Sabine 21, 23–4, 25 Freud, Sigmund 47–53, 55, 58, 65, 68, 69, 142 Gasparini, Philippe 105, 109 General de Gaulle 8 Gillard, Julia 1 Gillespie, Rosemary 36, 38, 41, 44 Girard, Eliane 11 Goldsmith, Elizabeth 78–9, 80, 81, 87 grandmothers 64, 66, 89–90, 158, 175–6, 183 Guibert, Hervé 105, 114 guilt 99, 116 Harper, Kate 30 Hawkins, Barbara M. 30 Heaton, Tim 31, 32 n41, 33 n48 Heffernan, Bob 1 Hird, Myra 39–40, 43, 51, 55, 57–8, 59, 142 homosexual couples 11, 68, 70, 79 Horney, Karen 48, 51–2 Houseknecht, Sharon K. 29 n30, 36, 38, 39 Howard, John 1 ideology 26, 27, 78, 79, 137 independence 20, 28, 36, 37, 149, 157, 162 infanticide 11, 122 infertility see involuntary childlessness inheritance 167, 181 intimacy 83, 100, 109, 136, 163, 175

involuntary childlessness 6, 10, 137, 162, 163, 177, 178 studies of 24, 43–4, 48, 160, 161–2 Iran 14, 103, 110, 111, 120 Ireland, Mardy 33 Irigaray, Luce 48, 54–6, 142 isolation 63, 79, 160–1, 179–84 Jacobson, Cardell 31, 32 n41, 33 n48 Jensen, Kathryn 77–8 Jones, Elizabeth 106–7 Jordan, Shirley 3 n6, 105 n8, 159 Joubert, Lucie 14–15, 129–55, 160, 187, 188, 189 Kauffman, Linda 88, 134, 138 n17 Kelly, Maura 31, 32, 33–4, 37 n62, 42, 43–4 Knibiehler, Yvonne 27–8, 129, 150 Kristeva, Julia 9, 48, 54, 56, 64 Kurmann, Alexandra 95 La Bruyère 77, 87 Lacan, Jacques 47, 53, 54, 56 Laufer, Laurie 107, 108, 116–7 Lê, Linda 3, 13–14, 16, 75–101, 113, 125, 126, 127, 187, 189 Leclerc, Annie 20–1 Lejeune, Philippe 104, 109 Lesthaeghe, Ron 7 Letherby, Gayle 38 life writing 13, 97, 98, 129, 130, 143, 159, 164 see also autobiography; autofiction Loucif, Sabine 76, 84 n23 McAllister, Fiona 32 McIlvanney, Siobhan 163–4 McMillan, Laurie 133 Maier, Corinne 5, 147

210 Index Majumdar, Debarun 32 Marinopoulos, Sophie 59–60 Martin, Madeleine 5 Martinez, Gladys M. 33 n46, 33 n48, 161 maternal instinct 26 medical profession 11, 26, 64, 68, 103, 108, 167–9 memory 12, 106–7, 112, 115, 142, 164, 173 Michaels, Meredith 25 Miller, Nancy K. 131–2, 138, 148 Millet, Catherine 3 Mitchell, Juliet 48, 53 Moi, Toril 20 n2 Morell, Carolyn 33 n46, 41–2 mother–daughter relations 21, 55, 60 n37, 64–70, 90, 115–8 mothering see motherhood motherhood as institution 25 as slavery 19, 20–2, 149, 150 celebration of 20–22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 93 dangers of 37, 40, 178, 179, 184 desire for 10 discourses of 3, 43–4, 122–3, 138, 145, 187, 189 and femininity 2, 27, 141 history of 27, 28 in psychoanalysis 50–71 lesbian 11 questioning of 2 theories of 9, 19–26, 27–8, 49–61, 148–50, 160 Motte, Warren 135–6 multilingualism 14, 110–1 myth 54, 60, 75, 88, 95, 123, 149 nature 28, 47, 77, 98, 126 dangers of 109

female 87, 126 and maternity 26–7, 45, 51, 149 Negra, Diane 25 Neyrand, Gérard 28 Nimier, Marie 3 No Kidding! 4, 6 O’Reilly, Andrea 25, 98 n37, 150 O’Sullivan, Sheila 48–9, 53, 58, 59 Paltineau, Maya 29, 34–5, 38–9, 42–4, 46 Parens, Henri 52 Parent, Anne-Martine 107 Parker, Rozsika 57 Patai, Daphne 134 patriarchy 23, 131, 168 personal criticism 15, 127, 129–55, 187 see also autocritography Peterson, Helen 37, 45–6 pregnancy 22, 53, 55, 67, 86, 169, 175, 188 comparison to writing 96 discomfort towards 38, 39, 64, 112 pleasure of 21 pronatalist policies 8–10, 16, 44, 46, 190 psychoanalysis 12, 47–71, 80, 106 Quebec 14, 130, 144 race 8, 16, 10, 161, 190 Redonnet, Marie 3 regret 69, 86, 119, 126, 150, 158 associated with childlessness 41, 100, 115, 139, 146, 160–1, 179–84 associated with children 122, 183 reproductive technologies 22, 33, 190 Rich, Adrienne 21, 23 Rodgers, Julie 24 Rooke, Constance 158

211

Index Rye, Gill 3, 3 n6, 23 n12, 123 n23, 187 Sautière, Jane 14, 16, 101, 103–27, 141, 163, 167, 173, 183, 187, 188, 189 Savigneau, Josyane 11, 137, 141 sexuality, female 3, 16, 30, 43, 99, 159 theories of 12, 28, 47, 49–55, 141 Schneck, Colombe 5–6 Shapiro, Gilla 31, 36–7, 41 Sheringham, Michael 97, 143 Smith, Sidonie 98–9 n37 Snitow, Ann 19 Somers, Marsha 32, 33 stereotypes interrogation of 61, 70 of ageing women 157, 160, 180 of childless women 37–8, 94, 123–4, 166, 167, 178, 179 of mothers 90 subversion of 2, 15, 30, 39–43, 96, 124, 175, 185, 188–9 Stewart, Mahala Dyer 36, 39 Stott, Laura 4 subjectivity 133 female 13, 54, 62, 77, 88, 94

Tilmant, Isabelle 49, 60–71, 89, 116, 125, 174 trauma 26, 68, 80, 91, 113, 190 of involuntary childlessness 10, 11 traumatic family history 12, 16, 65, 89, 175 Tuttle, Elaine 11 Vachaud, Pauline 107 Vallée, Edith 49, 60–71, 89, 116, 143, 174 Veevers, Jean 29–30, 40 Vietnam 13–14, 75–6, 84 Vincent, Frédérique 10 violence 16, 61, 108, 180–1 Wajsbrot, Cécile 11–12 Walker, Alice 79 Waxman, Barbara Frey 158 Well, Eleanore 4 Whittaker, Andrea 36 Williams, Catherine 38 Vachaud, Pauline 107 Vincent, Frédérique 10

Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing Series Editor gill rye Director, Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing, Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London

Editorial Board Adalgisa Giorgio University of Bath Emily Jeremiah Royal Holloway, University of London Abigail Lee Six Royal Holloway, University of London Claire Williams St Peter’s College, University of Oxford This book series supports the work of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London, by publishing high-quality critical studies of contemporary literature by women. The main focus of the series is literatures written in the languages covered by the Centre – French, German, Italian, Portuguese and the Hispanic languages – but studies of women’s writing in English and other languages are also welcome. ‘Contemporary’ includes literature published after 1968, with a preference for studies of post-1990 texts in any literary genre. Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing provides a forum for innovative research that explores new trends and issues, showcasing work that makes a stimulating case for studies of new or hitherto neglected authors and texts as well as established authors. Connections are encouraged between literature and the social and political contexts in which it is created and those which have an impact on women’s lives and experiences. The goal of the series is to facilitate stimulating comparisons across authors and texts, theories and aesthetics, and cultural and geographical contexts, in this rich field of study. Proposals are invited for either monographs or edited volumes. The series welcomes single-author studies, thematic analyses and cross-cultural discussions as well as a variety of approaches and theoretical frameworks. Manuscripts should be written in English.

Vol. 1 Gill Rye with Amaleena Damlé (eds) Experiment and Experience: Women’s Writing in France 2000–2010 2013. isbn 978-3-0343-0885-4 Vol. 2 Katie Jones Representing Repulsion: The Aesthetics of Disgust in Contemporary Women’s Writing in French and German 2013. isbn 978-3-0343-0862-5 Vol. 3 Natalie Edwards Voicing Voluntary Childlessness: Narratives of Non-Mothering in French 2016. isbn 978-3-0343-1809-9