Perverse preterition and nineteenth-century French queer narrative strategies: the case of Belot's Mademoiselle Giraud, ma femme (1870)

Powell, David

Contemporary French Civilization (2012), 37, (2-3), 255–271.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3828/cfc.2012.17
Language: English
Pages: 17

Abstract

In this study I discuss the shifting narrative structures of a nineteenth-century text designed at once to hide and to expose partially a queer content. Lawrence Schehr first explored this structure in the writings of Proust and Gide, concluding that the beginnings of modernist narrative structure in their works also offered propitious conditions for a queer discourse. Applying Schehr's theory to an earlier text, I analyze Adolphe Belot's 1870 novel Mademoiselle Giraud, ma femme in terms of the narrative conflict of a moral discourse used in service to a titillating subject matter: lesbianism is immoral; in order to remove the danger, society must be able to talk about it. But talking about lesbianism could be perceived as subversive, so it's better not to talk about it but around it. The commercial gains of Belot's strategy being obvious, I examine the literary value of the conflicted narrative, the queer discourse. The components of literary mastery, manipulation of standard narrative techniques, and especially the continual use of preterition provide a model for a burgeoning queer discourse, one that offers queerness in form as well as in content for the playful but not frivolous presentation of a queer subject.

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