Readership Survey
U of G prof's research to chart how prize helped develop women's literary community in early 1900s
BY REBECCA KENDALL
When an unknown male writer named John-Antoine Nau won the 1903 Prix Goncourt, a newly founded French literary award, instead of better-known female writer Anna de Noailles, it set off a movement that slowly changed the face of France's literary world.
For centuries, female writers had been extremely limited in their ability to get their work published and weren't recognized by the literary establishment, says Prof. Margot Irvine, Languages and Literatures. After Nau's win, a small group of France's female writers decided change was drastically needed.
“It seemed pretty clear from the beginning that this award would never go to a woman,” she says. “There were two really strong female candidates in 1903 and in 1904, and there were many misogynist remarks made about them and their books by the men on the jury.”
So the women created the Prix Femina, a literary award that is open to both sexes and is today widely considered to be the second most prestigious French competition for writers. The award, which still has an exclusively female jury, is the focus of Irvine's research.
“The Prix Goncourt didn't go to a woman until 1944, so it seems they were right in their decision to initiate a new prize,” says Irvine, who grew up in Kingston and was educated in French-language schools before attending the University of Toronto, where she earned a BA, MA and PhD in French and women's studies.
She joined U of G in 2004 and is cross-appointed to French and European studies. This winter she'll expand her portfolio by teaching a core course in women's studies.
“I'm really excited about it because for me, teaching is every bit as important as my research,” says Irvine, who lives in Etobicoke with her husband and daughters, Thérèse, 9, and Charlotte, 5. “I've been given the opportunity to teach some really interesting courses here at Guelph.”
Irvine plans to produce a book that delves into the history of the Prix Femina and how it changed the face of French literature and cultural politics. Although there are at least half a dozen books devoted to the Prix Goncourt, not one has been written about the Prix Femina.
“Very little has been written about the founding of the Prix Femina, and its centenary in 2004 went almost unnoticed,” she says, noting that her book will also include information about the 28 women who participated in the jury from its inception to 1914. The book will take the form of a dictionary, and entries will be devoted to the first winners of the award, the newspapers that were associated with it and other key figures who supported it, opposed it or dismissed it outright.
“The unique history of the prize makes it an ideal case study about how the formation of a community affects women's access to cultural power,” she says, adding that she wants to learn if participation helped women gain access to the literary institution and if the award served its mandate to create unity among female writers.
“Studying the creation of the Prix Femina will represent a significant contribution to our understanding of the development of women's literary community in France at the turn of the last century.”
Irvine has been interested in the Prix Femina for the past three years, after discovering correspondence related to the prize while doing work in Paris on Jane Dieulafoy, a notable female travel writer who was a founding member of the Prix Femina jury.
For her PhD thesis, Irvine researched the writings of eight male-female couples who travelled from Europe to other continents in the 19th century and examined how gender influenced the travel writing they produced. It wasn't considered socially acceptable for women to travel by themselves at the time, so travelling with one's husband or another male relative was one way to be able to leave home, she says. Sometimes the couples would produce collaborative travel accounts, and other times they'd write individual accounts of the same journey.
“Interestingly, some of the male writers didn't acknowledge in their travel writing that their wives were travelling with them,” says Irvine.
She adds that, although the men provided access to travel and sometimes used their contacts to find publication opportunities for their wives, the women also helped their spouses by reworking the text to make it more interesting and comprehensible to a general audience.
“These books helped to increase interest in the regions under study and often portrayed the male traveller in a favourable light as a heroic, intrepid traveller,” says Irvine. “As there were no equivalent heroic roles for the women to adopt for themselves, they tended instead to depict themselves as dutiful wives, following their husbands to the ends of the earth, often hiding their own passion for travel.”
This spring, Irvine organized a three-day conference held at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at York University for the Canadian Association for 19th-Century Francophone Studies. There she presented a paper called “Une académie de femmes?,” which argued that the Prix Femina jury could be considered a women's academy. This month, she'll be speaking at a conference at the University of Surrey on the role that two women's newspapers played in the creation of the prize.
“I'm fascinated by the ways that women were able to write and to publish their work at a time when the literary establishment was dominated by men and was fairly hostile to them, especially if they tried to write about subjects like travel or science that weren't considered acceptable for women.”
