Give and Take: Marriage and Disinheritance in Nineteenth-Century French Women's Writing

Abstract

The theme of inheritance undeniably looms large in the nineteenth-century French novel: from Balzac's Ursule Mirouët to Zola's La Terre, it serves as a vehicle for the exploration of both the material realities and the ideological obsessions of the century. Yet nineteenthcentury French women's writing-at least, nineteenth-century French women's writing "as we know it"-seems rather to have shunned the topic. From Mme de Staël to the feminist writers of the fin de siècle, by way of the better-known works of George Sand, inheritance fails to recommend itself as a significant theme. This absence ought to strike us as suspicious if only in comparison with nineteenth-century British women's writing, where it is ever-present (consider Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, or Middlemarch), and with good reason: as Ruth Perry has shown, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain saw a "psychological not to say legal disinheritance of women" (38). The women's writing of nineteenth-century Britain shows an acute and continuing awareness of the existence and consequences of this disinheritance, suggesting repeatedly that for women, inheritance is seldom a smooth or certain process. A paradigmatic episode from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, in which the resentful and vindictive Mrs Reed withholds from the heroine a letter from her uncle announcing his intention to make her his heir (Mrs Reed replies with the false assertion that Jane has died of typhus), exemplifies the vicissitudes which beset female inheritance in women's writing. Yet more paradigmatic still, in a sense, is Jane's calm acceptance of this disinheritance when Mrs Reed reveals it to her in a deathbed confession three years later. Jane is, at this point at least, emotionally fulfilled, and the utter lack of venality she displays as a result almost makes a non-event of what for a male hero would be a disaster.My contention in this article will be that a certain female tradition in nineteenthcentury France treats the theme of inheritance in a way which has much in common with the approach adopted by female British novelists, though the texts of this tradition are generically very different. For the bulk of nineteenth-century women's writing on inheritance consists of moralistic Catholic romans d'éducation for girls and young women (see Pernot, 3); 1 within this under-studied genre, titles such as L'Héritage de Françoise (or Hélène, Thérèse, Marie and so on), Le Testament d'une mère, and Le Roman d'une héritière abound. In this article, I shall consider a number of representative novels of this sort, in order to examine how in these texts, women's "inheritance" is seen above all as a metaphor for self-sacrifice, and their very real economic disinheritance as an inevitability which must be accepted with resignation, or alleviated by a male rescuer. I shall then consider two further novels to show how such uncomfortably patriarchal-apologetic models may be questioned, both outside the genre, in George Sand's Antonia, and within it, in Adrienne Duhamel's ...