fACTS AND fiCTIONS IN ALL THREE GENRES
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think form is what the authentic writer submits to and aspires to; form
is the grace of all the feelings that have gone into the situation. I think
that form should be sought in the way in which
T.
S. Eliot respected tra–
dition. He of course allowed for individual talents, but he thought of
tradition in a formal and disciplinary sense. I think he was right.
Michal Govrin :
Thank you for this wonderful panel, which was in a way
a summary of the entire conference. I think we could start from this
panel again-so many were its ideas and so many were its directions. I
will ask three short questions.
To Francine: I was fascinated by the portrait of Madame de Sevigne.
To borrow from Denis's last words about form and tradition, what was
fascinating for me was your associating her writing, her letters, with
her relation to the Church and her confessor, and later alluding to these
realms in her relationship with her daughter. And then you spoke of her
being sanctified as the model mother, although a tormented one. Does
that have to do with the Virgin Mary model of motherhood? Is that a
seventeenth-century narcissistic interpretation of the Virgin Mary,
drawn first by Sevigne herself and then by her contemporaries?
Francine du Plessix Gray:
A fascinating question, Michal. You've struck
on one of my obsessions, which is that if we examine French feminism
from the nineteenth century on, starting with George Sand and going
right on through to our time, we see that French feminism has always
stuck with motherhood.
It
never went through a phase of repudiating
the status of motherhood, or of hating the male as in the Anglo-Ameri–
can tradition. I mean, there is no Andrea Dworkin in France. And the
reason, I think, depends on the Marist tradition, on the cult of the Vir–
gin Mary in the Mediterranean countries and particularly in France,
where it has a special coloring of its own. We can follow it from the sev–
enteenth century on. Even great male writers, like Claudel, had a par–
ticular kind of fixation on the Virgin Mary. And I think that it's that
woman-centered religiousness which kept motherhood very much at the
center of any discourse. Now there is another issue to be careful
about-l didn't have time to include it in this very short presentation–
which is that the status of the letter changes a lot in France, and prob–
ably in all the other countries, from the Renaissance on.
In
the
Renaissance the letter begins to achieve a kind of honored status in the
humanist Erasmian tradition, in which the whole human being is
expected to enter the letter-his anxiety, his hatreds, his love, as well as
theoretical set pieces and descriptions of his times.
