Politics and Narratives of Birth
Gynocolonization from Rousseau to Zola

A feminist analysis which combines a psychoanalytic perspective on catastrophic birth with the politics of reproduction in the emergent democracy of nineteenth-century France.

Carol A. Mossman (Author)

9780521415866, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 1 April 1993

272 pages
22.2 x 14.3 x 2 cm, 0.452 kg

"Mossman's presentation, while demanding, rewards the reader by providing an innovative contribution to feminist criticism. Her study has the merit of introducing a measure of balance to traditional interpretations of nineteenth-century fiction that focus on the father." Hollie Markland Harder, Nineteenth-Century French Studies

This book is a feminist analysis which combines a psychoanalytic perspective on catastrophic birth with the politics of reproduction in the emergent democracy of nineteenth-century France. It focuses on three major thinkers whose personal relation to origins is problematic, Rousseau, Constant and Stendhal, and also includes a broad reading of the nineteenth-century novel within the frame of pathological generation, giving special attention to works by Michelet and Zola. Professor Mossman identifies important areas of interaction between production and reproduction at the level of aesthetic form and between private, birth-related discourse and the ideology of the birth of democracy. Within the context of the collapse of Ancien Régime France, the nascent ideology of motherhood collides with modes of discourse that invade and colonize the maternal body, generating a considerable burden of anxiety expressed in the nineteenth-century French novel.

Acknowledgements
A note on translations
Introduction: conception of this book
Part I. Stendhal: Delivering a Plot: 1. Death and transfiguration in the Vie de Henry Brulard
2. Palimpsest and pregnancy: reading across Stendhalian autobiography
3. Stendhalian fictions: plotting the unspeakable
Part II. Production, Reproductions and Narrative Form: Adolphe: 4. Introduction
5. The economy of production: the paternal and narrative form
6. Reproduction: (de)composing mother
7. Rebirth and the performance of matricide
Part III. Gynocolonization: Rousseau, Michelet, Zolar and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel
Section 1: 8. Introduction: toward a bodied politics
9. For unto us a son is born: Emile
10. Birthing the body politic: Du contrat social
11. The politic in the body Rousseau: Emile revisited and 'La Reigne Fantasque'
Section 2: 12. Introduction: birth, motherhood and the disease of democracy
13. The flesh made word: Enfants du siècle and pathologies of reproduction in the nineteenth-century French novel
14. Liberty, equality, maternity: Michelet as body snatcher
15. Into Africa: Zola and gynocolonization
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]