Mothers of Invention: Feminist Authors and Experimental Fiction in France and Quebec

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French Studies at the University
of Guelph. She is the author of Courts métrages et instantanés and La
Soupe.

Miléna Santoro, a Canadian who teaches French at Georgetown University,
explores novels written in the 1970s by Hélиne Cixous, Madeleine
Gagnon, Nicole Brossard, and Jeanne Hyvrard. What distinguishes these
innovative novelists from their male avant-garde colleagues, Santoro
argues, is the ethical dimensions of their work, their political
awareness and ideological stance, and the esthetic quality of their
work. “[Their] experimental, genre-bending narratives,” she writes,
“paved the way for many other women to begin to tell their stories in
that particular blend of fiction and autobiography [now called
autofiction].”

In her conclusion, Santoro states that all four writers were
“negotiating, on both thematic and formal levels, the multiple
subjectivities and identifications, the closeness and conflict, that are
inherent in mother- and daughterhood” (and that can be destructive as
well as nurturing). They contested the “laws” created by male
writers and critics. They favored disruptive strategies in their
writing, such as “parataxis, ellipsis, disturbed syntax, and a play
with words.” And while incorporating theory into narratives, they did
away with respect for chronology and character.

Santoro’s rich and nuanced analysis gives these four authors pride of
place in the “avant-garde pantheon” of contemporary literature
written in French.