Webb, E. (ed.), 2006. Marie Cardinal: New Perspectives. Modern French Identities, 43, Bern: Peter Lang. (ISBN 3-03910-544-2). Price £30.00 (pbk). 258 pp.
Reviewed by Fiona Barclay (University of Glasgow)
The writer and actress Marie Cardinal is best known for her autobiographically inspired novels, which achieved considerable popular success during her lifetime. Born in 1929, she spent the first twenty-four years of her life in Algeria, and travelled extensively before settling first in France in 1958, and then in Canada in 1984. Her writings deal primarily with aspects of women's experiences, such as female identity, the mother-daughter relationship, and writing and the body. As a result, she is frequently referred to as a feminist although, like many figures linked to the French feminist movement, this is a label which she repudiates. However, each of the three monographs which have so far appeared on her work emphasise the ways in which her writing diverges both from other so-called 'French feminist' writers, and from influential literary currents such as the nouveau roman (Cairns 1992, Durham 1992, Hall 1994).
With her emphasis on clarity of expression, Cardinal is often contrasted with more stylistically experimental writers, such as Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray. Given the influence of this triumvirate on French literary studies, it is easy to see why a writer such as Cardinal, who is dealing with similar subjects in a more conventional style, might be somewhat neglected by the Parisian intellectual establishment. As Emma Webb says in the Introduction to this collection (p.17),
'Cardinal's professed aim is to reach the greatest number of readers through avoidance of the use of 'elliptical language' (Cardinal, 1977, p.61). While this approach has demonstrable popular appear, with Cardinal's refreshingly new discourse of the female body winning her a wide readership, it appears to have held her at one remove from the French Academy'.
It is against this background, neatly summarised in Emma Webb's introduction, that the present collection of essays, based on proceedings of a conference held in 2003, appears. Its appearance is timely: Cardinal's novels remain popular, but the last book-length analysis of her work appeared over ten years ago, and as the focus of literary criticism has shifted in the intervening years, it seems appropriate to reconsider her writing in light of more recent trends in scholarship. While her best-known work, Les Mots pour le dire (1975) continues to attract significant critical interest, featuring in eight of the thirteen articles in the current collection, other varied aspects of her work are highlighted, some for the first time. Most prominent of these is the influence of her Algerian childhood. This (post)colonial aspect of her writing is taken up by Owen Heathcote, Alison Rice and Nancy Lane, each of whom is interested in the way in which Cardinal problematises the gendered nature of Algeria as mother(land). Heathcote and Rice locate her work in relation to Hélène Cixous, another French writer born and raised in Algeria, and the Francophone North African writer Assia Djebar. In doing so they situate her writing against the backdrop of France's colonisation of Algeria and the violence of decolonisation, thus foregrounding issues of national identity and ethnicity. The question of gender remains a vexed one, but in this new historicised context the authors demonstrate for the first time the common ground between Cardinal and Cixous.
Elsewhere the collection demonstrates a welcome breadth of analysis, with pieces on Cardinal's earlier works, such as Cet Été-là (1967), and more recent writing, such as Amour... Amours (1998). Particularly refreshing is Elaine Martin's case-study analysis of Les Mots pour le dire as feminist best-seller, which compares Cardinal's novel with two equally popular German texts. Given that Cardinal's populist status is frequently commented on but little analysed, this piece raises interesting questions about reception and genre. The collection is satisfyingly concluded by one of the best-known Cardinal specialists, Colette Trout, who reflects on Cardinal's legacy in light of the obituaries which followed her death in May 2001, and the varying attention which she has received from Anglo-Saxon and French academics.
Trout's piece brings to a close a collection which largely achieves its stated aims of locating Cardinal's textual practice beyond the context of second-wave feminism, and viewing her work through the lens of recent developments in literary criticism. While it is easy to recognise the conference origins of the articles, which in places overlap more than would perhaps be the case in an edition of commissioned essays, this has the benefit of reflecting the focus of current research in the area. Moreover, the collection brings together a broad range of scholarship, from the established figures of Phil Powrie and Owen Heathcote, to younger researchers such as Alison Rice and Kathryn Robson, whose work is already attracting widespread attention. In view of this general level of success, therefore, it is unfortunate that the collection opens with its most glaring blunder. In beginning her first sentence with 'When Marie Cardinal died in 1991', Emma Webb succeeds in mis-dating Cardinal's death by a full ten years, and effectively kills her off before her final novel was published in 1998. Happily this is not reflective of the general standard of the collection.