Volume 45, Number 4 · March 5, 1998
Portraits of a Lady
By P.N. Furbank
Women's Words: Essay on French Singularity
by Mona Ozouf, translated by Jane Marie Todd
University of Chicago Press, 300 pp., $29.95
The 'woman's portrait' ('portrait de femme') has tended, says the author of Women's Words, to be a male genre. The genre has its great men—Sainte-Beuve, Michelet, the Goncourt brothers—and its own rules, chief among them being that the portrait should be done from the point of view of what Woman is and ought (or ought not) to be. This entails, further, an assumption that the subject, and indeed any woman, 'is a nature before being a person.' By contrast, as Mona Ozouf rightly points out, 'the author of a man's portrait has no need for preliminary reflection on what a man is.' What she says is all too true, and Michelet's Les femmes de la Révolution and Sainte-Beuve's Portraits de femmes can make a reader cringe. A woman, according to Michelet, for example, is a 'daughter of the sidereal world'!
Review, 3899 words
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