The collective Modernist Fictions of the Masculine-Feminine, 1900-1940, co-directed by Andrea Oberhuber, Alexandra Arvisais and Marie-Claude Dugas, by the very tenor of its eloquent title, immediately expresses the issues that will be addressed throughout its three hundred and some pages. The noun "fictions" obviously refers to the principle of "genre", first as a literary (and artistic) category, but also echoes the question – central to the work – of gender, the choice of the plural judiciously emphasizing the profusion of their respective possibilities. The entry into the 20th century as well as the repercussions of the first world conflict imply many transformations at the societal level, the upheaval of mores and the "reversal of roles" (p. 8) that follow having as a consequence the emancipation of the European woman – and American, to a certain extent –, who will never cease to reinvent herself in life and in its distorting mirror, the work of art. According to Virginia Woolf, the evolution of a society, capable of affecting an existence, had to necessarily be accompanied by a renewal of its artistic counterpart, "modern fiction" (p. 7-8). Here comes into play the notion of "modernism", whose conceptualization is by definition plural, as evidenced once again by the title of this book – its content moreover strives to demonstrate this multiplicity, and convincingly, by choosing to illuminate mainly the feminine part of this aesthetic current. A feminine modernism, therefore, which is characterized notably by a re-evaluation of the bipartite functioning of gendered and sexual identities, favoring a "positioning of the in-between identity" (p. 12), where masculine and feminine properties overlap and interpenetrate until reaching, deliberately, a confusion quite profitable on the aesthetic level. Indeed, the temporal milestones selected for this work (1900-1940) frame a historical niche of "formal and thematic renewal" (p. 11) of the modernist narrative, referring to that of the social body, particularly with regard to the elaboration of character and narration. From the Belle Époque to the interwar period, the new century witnessed the blossoming of an unprecedented feminine identity that was subsequently qualified as "new woman1", a figure defined by her insubordination and her involvement in the public space. It is therefore possible to establish a parallel between the innovative specificities of modernist poetics and the sexual revolution that will shake, through this new genre, the foundations of a society that has been sclerotic for too long. "Figure of culmination of the changes brought about towards the end of the 19th century, the new woman belongs both to the social and literary fields, since she symbolizes the values of the (re)new" (p. 12).

Split into four parts that can be read independently or complementarily, this publication seeks to highlight the diversity of approaches to an identity issue – whether gendered or sexual – in the process of reconstruction, especially in the literary field, while paying particular attention to the visual and plastic production of the studied period. After a clear, richly illustrated and skillfully conducted introduction, the first chapter of the collective, "Contours: Literary and Artistic Modernisms", opens the way to reflection by exploring and striving to circumscribe the very concept of modernism. The two subsequent chapters, "Reconfigurations of the Feminine Character" and "Identity Confusions", aim to review a representative sampling of the plurality of new identities that punctuate modernist fictions, striving to illustrate the "blurring of boundaries" (p. 19) that works them and undermines both gender/gender notions and usual artistic and media categories. Closing this range of unconventional models, the last chapter of the book, entitled "Modernist Experimentations", intends to examine several particular cases of formal innovations specific to the modernist current, in order to "demonstrate that the hybridity of gender is often accompanied by a hybridization of literary and artistic genres" (p. 19).

A War of Territory: For a New Feminine Geography

At the dawn of the 20th century, the determining roles to play in the public sphere and, by extension, in that of art, having almost never been attributed to women throughout history, the latter, while they begin progressively to claim a reversal of their status and to take charge of responsibilities and behaviors initially reserved for men, equip themselves with a strategy that consists in claiming new rights by seeking to introduce themselves into the public space. Often constrained to evolve on the margins of places where culture is exercised, they will, taking various paths, attempt to delimit a place that belongs to them in a geography previously prohibited. Bridget Elliot and Jo-Ann Wallace have fashioned a term to account for this unprecedented phenomenon, speaking of "(im)positionings2", the prefix "im" placed deliberately in parentheses to express "the idea of voluntary positioning" in the field of culture: "This portmanteau word therefore signals both their positioning and the strategies deployed to impose themselves in the cultural milieu." (p. 17) Several of the authors and artists discussed here are characterized by this type of tactic, because, in view of their emancipation, women must be "warriors" (p. 278) who fight to defend their freedom and conquer new territories, in the front line that of speech, as emphasized by Amélie Paquet's study on Natalie Barney and the figure of the amazon: "the economy of means" proceeding from the aphorism of which the latter makes use "opposes the verbosity of her enemies, who abuse the available speech space3 to insist on their privilege" (p. 273). The feminine survival instinct, in terms of space occupation, therefore requires an aptitude to make a territory – initially too narrow – more vast, because effectively invested. Moreover, to put one's own words on oneself and the world amounts to not letting oneself be defined by the androcentric and heteronormed grammar of the dominant masculine pole. The taking of speech also manifests itself through a conquest in the fiction produced by Renée Vivien, Pascale Joubi striving to demonstrate that one of her short story collections, La Dame à la louve (1904), stems from a will of "reappropriation of clichés and stereotypes" (p. 214) produced by a literature exclusively turned towards masculine thought. The Parisian cartography offering only a fraudulent reflection of the sapphic cult, the British poetess will operate intrepidly in the field of fiction, there "where she will have the power to reconfigure the Island of Lesbos according to her imagination" (p. 212). Hence, the liberation of woman is expressed and effected often via the occupation of a territory. It is a matter, as Marc Décimo signals in his presentation of the "literary madwoman" Émilie-Herminie Hanin and her paranoid autobiography (Super-Despotes, 1934), of "making and making one's place in the sun in the world of men" (p. 216), or, according to Irene Gammel – who inscribes herself in Bourdieu's thought –, of "making a name for oneself" (p. 76), which amounts to "making exist a new position beyond the occupied positions, in front of these positions, in avant-garde4".

Repudiation of Norms: Marriage is No Longer a Land of Election

However, making a name for oneself can mean keeping one's own by categorically refusing to rely on the institution of marriage. Sophie Pelletier, analyzing two novels5 of the Belle Époque "with didactic vocation" – their primary function was to explain to young girls how to behave in case of celibacy –, notes the progressive evolution of the way in which the single woman is perceived, at the turn of the century. The old maid put aside, usually inspiring pity, transforms into a "fulfilled, emancipated and proud single woman" (p. 115), capable of taking her destiny in hand and fully assuming herself by seizing the "power of feminine knowledge [which] must be invested in action and creation" (p. 122), for example through the writing of a diary, a genre in favor of which can be constructed a "discourse advocating remodellings, a repositioning" (p. 123). Émilie-Herminie Hanin, mentioned above, will opt for celibacy in order not to jeopardize the family inheritance, in this case the paternal discovery of the "Perpetual Calendar" (p. 219). Needless to say, this matrimonial freedom will also allow her – and above all – to devote all her energy to the defense and illustration of a creative genius that she believes unique: "She has chosen among various identity possibilities those that the society of her time values: being a painter, being an inventor and being an author" and "strives to enumerate her own qualities in an autobiographical book" (p. 216). Marc Décimo draws our attention to the fundamental inequality, relating to socio-economic criteria, between "literary madmen" and their feminine counterparts, because, producing essentially works at the author's expense, this activity requires for them to be rich widows or well-off single women: "Because, before 1907, a married woman cannot freely dispose of her salary." (p. 222) This resistance to "normative assignments that society imposes on them in matters of marriage, motherhood" (Marie-Claude Dugas, p. 105) is similarly shared by Natalie Barney and Renée Vivien, the first by promoting the amazon model that excludes man from her territory and "visit[s] [her] neighbors when she desire[s] to reproduce" (p. 277), the second by firmly rejecting any form of amorous commerce between persons of opposite sex, due to a fatal incompatibility: "for a woman, hell on earth equals living a heterosexual love dominated by a man; paradise, flourishing in a gynocentric milieu where only sapphic love has the right of citizenship." (p. 209)

The Body: "Seat of Performance" of the Modernist Artist Reviewing the different places that artists belonging to this new feminine paradigm attempt to appropriate, we cannot help but be struck by the narrowness that is common to them. These territories to be conquered being sometimes absent from all the maps originally drawn by man, it is imperative to be imaginative in order to create a vibrant treasure of unexplored "white zones". And all ruses are good. While the public space offered them few anchor points to build a work, the baroness Elsa and Florine Stettheimer, Irene Gammel explains to us, making their own body the territory of their art, "both invest the places of the New York avant-garde" of the 1910s by investing in "the aesthetics of clothing (and its diversion)", which proves to be a "means of constructing a subjectivity expressing itself outside social conventions" (p. 64). Irene Gammel recalls that modernism was punctuated by the elaboration of several currents of thought relating to "fashion", this noun being moreover included in the one that interests us here, "modernity": "Fashion and modernity, as Baudelaire and Benjamin observed, are fixed in temporality and imply first and foremost the notions of novelty and transitory." (p. 69) Cross-dressing as well as other forms of sartorial eccentricities have therefore allowed the construction and diffusion of new identities, which contravened, of course, to the normalized models of gender and sexuality. The chosen terrain of these unprecedented artistic procedures being the very body of the artist, the usual boundaries that separate art from life are seriously blurred (p. 82).

"Middlebrow" Literature: A Feminine Modernism on a Large Scale

Having therefore explored, so to speak, the infinitely small (the body), modernist women also turn towards the infinitely large, namely "mass culture", especially through "middlebrow" literature, qualified as such in English to designate easily accessible novels, "targeting a "middle" readership, which offer the pleasure of a captivating story while addressing themes relevant to readers" (p. 51). Diana Holmes, in a study on Daniel Lesueur, Marcelle Tinayre and Colette, observes a clear contrast between feminine and masculine modernist productions: indeed, "feminine modernism" (p. 52) is characterized less by formal innovation than by a tendency to "capture and map" (p. 53) the reality of an era, mainly by creating paper heroines representative of the "new woman" model, mentioned previously. Diana Holmes proposes two convincing arguments to explain this tendency. First, it appears that modernity is not similarly experienced according to the artist's gender: a skepticism towards progress prevails for men, while women see in it the promise of a better future. Second, the socio-economic factor is, once again, determining, women writers not having the same material resources as their masculine peers, in addition to the lack of credibility linked to their sex: "Women's access to publication therefore often passes through the back door of 'mercantile' literature, whether popular or middle, because in these cases publishers worry less about the social status of their authors than about their ability to please the general public and achieve high sales." (p. 52-53) In her article on "The Ambivalence of the Feminine Character in Popular Novels of the Belle Époque", Fanny Gonzalez highlights the plurality of this literary category, insisting on the "multiplicity of [its] possibilities" (p. 127), because, far from being only stereotyped or conventional, the genre is on the contrary fluctuating and lets a wind of progress infiltrate its pages. The industrial mode of production of the popular novel has a result that is at least ambivalent: democratizing the diffusion of its works, it facilitates the propagation of avant-garde conceptions while "duplicating narrative schemas, thus creating tropes that give men and women a precise social role" (p. 137).

Defying Expectations by Inverting Positions The feminine artists of the studied period therefore resort to diverse strategies to take possession of territories initially occupied by men, sometimes inventing new ones for themselves, but the modalities of this space occupation also translate into the adoption of a symmetrically opposite approach, namely the evacuation of positions traditionally assigned to the feminine gender, beginning with that of the woman-object, contemplated and coveted by man. Analyzing two novels by Colette, Chéri (1920) and La Fin de Chéri (1926), Vanessa Courville reports a disruption of the "binary divisions of masculine and feminine", which derives singularly from the ascendancy that the character of Léa exerts over Chéri, her young lover: "The singular approach of the gaze repositions traditional gendered roles by posing man as the thing seen and the body without subjectivity." (p. 196) A similar phenomenon is observable in the study that Anne Reynes-Delobel proposes to us of the portrait of Tanja Ramm conceived by Man Ray, Hommage à D. A. F. de Sade (1930), which displaces authority relationships by presenting in his work a "feminine signifier [which] is not only manipulated there, but manipulates the fantasies of the (consenting) artist and the spectator" (p. 237) The same is true for several of the photographs of the companion of the American painter and photographer, Lee Miller, which testify to a reflection on "the fetishization of the feminine signifier and its putting under glass" allowing "to question it in terms of transparency, consumption and value" (p. 240). The artist, resorting to an aesthetics of rupture that stages "the interior experience of loss" (p. 239), will gradually free herself from her past function of model and muse to be reborn as a full-fledged photographer: "By refusing to let herself be further objectified […] and by seizing the medium to, in turn, objectify her subjectivity and favor her passage into reality, Miller experienced her individual autonomy in the light of her creative freedom." (p. 239) This conquest of a territory that is embodied in an inversion of the gaze similarly takes place in Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), the film by Maya Deren that Sylvano Santini presents to us: "the woman, in Deren, is not the object of a gaze, is no longer a muse, but affirms herself from the outset as gaze and vision, as artist and filmmaker." By rethinking the way in which the mechanisms of perception manifest themselves on film, Deren renews the tradition of surrealist film and "consciously indicates the place she occupies in the world" (p. 92).

Interior Conflicts: Doubling of the Feminine Modernist Ethos

If the objective of the authors and artists that this collective deals with rests most of the time on the "conquest of public space and the domain of artistic expression" (p. 34), it is important to signal that a certain number of contradictions work their works. In an article that initiates the theoretical and conceptual reflection of the work, Andrea Oberhuber, while examining the manifest writings of the disconcerting Valentine de Saint-Point, recalls that the equation between modernism and avant-garde does not always go without saying: "It happens that modernist fictions are underpinned, as the saint-pointist case shows, by a resolutely antimodern groundswell." (p. 47) Without equaling the radicality of the antifeminist remarks of fascist character of Lamartine's great-great-niece, the woman of letters known under the pseudonym of Rachilde is at the origin of a paradox that it is interesting to mention. Indeed, while the heroines of her novels are symptomatic of the "mutations of the feminine" (p. 111) and an evolution of mentalities during the Belle Époque, Rachilde surprises by the tenor of her sexist chronicles that go against the claims expressed in her fictions. However, Marie-Claude Dugas affirms that, "despite the intransigence of her remarks, Rachilde's independence as well as her appropriation of certain rights and roles reserved for men confer on her qualities attributed to new women" (p. 109). In the same order of ideas, Patricia Izquierdo observes an imbalance between the posture held by Lucie Delarue-Mardrus in the public space – for example in certain of her interventions in newspapers – and the will for emancipation of her feminine characters, "as if the novelistic mediation liberated her speech" (p. 141). She explains this antinomy by a phenomenon of "double bind" (p. 145) establishing itself in the psyche of the author, and which results from a tearing produced by the incompatibility between her status as a writer in the literary sphere and her feminine condition: "The two are only reconcilable at the time on the condition of refusing any clearly feminist implication and any strong claim related to her sex." (p. 145-146) To this is added the impossibility for Lucie Delarue-Mardrus to make public her sexual orientation, revealing her lesbianism only in 1938, when she publishes her autobiography (p. 147). Patricia Izquierdo therefore insists on the necessity of taking into consideration the entirety of this complex writer's texts "in order to compare her ethos and highlight her true ethics" (p. 151).

The Inter Positioning of Modernism

The postural frictions observed by several of the contributors are only one of the consequences of the particular conjuncture, corollary of the passage from one century to another, where the "points of tension between old and new" (p. 20) are legion. In the corpus studied here, one of the works most characteristic of this distortion is Monsieur Ouine (1943) by Georges Bernanos, in which the author expresses by roundabout ways his catastrophist perception of modernity: "not a simple evolution of mores […], but a complete destabilization of the old order, which sees civilization running to its loss in the mode of a terrifying collective hysteria." (p. 157) Yves Baudelle advances that, despite the pamphleteer vocation of a novel that castigates the failure of a civilization to prevent the inexorable dismantling of usual gendered models (p.161), Bernanos brings his stone to the (future) edifice of gender studies by "sketching an explanatory archaeology of the new gender codifications" (p. 162).

Emblematic of a transitional period of reconfiguration of old models, the work6 of Claude Cahun that Alexandra Arvisais analyzes is also, since it reveals a tension between the literary tradition of the end of the 19th century – with the notable influence of symbolism – and recent pictorial currents like Art nouveau, as well as between the ancestral conception of a unified subject and the putting into crisis of the notion of identity, generally linked to modernity. "Hybrid book at the inter position" (p. 252), Vues et visions articulates heterogeneous aesthetics by using a "procedure of the double" which has the virtue of offering a "space where new literary and visual f(r)ictions are inserted" (p. 258). Alexandra Arvisais has forged the concept of "sharing" to particularize what underlies the constitutive hybridization of Cahun's production: "Her aesthetics thus advocates sharing, because it takes pleasure in blurring the boundaries, already porous, through doubling." (p. 261) Moreover, this desire to escape from artistic conventions, considered obsolete, of a now bygone time but which is slow to embrace the ardor of a youth in search of change, is also the fact of Mireille Havet's novel, Carnaval (1922), of which Patrick Bergeron gives us an unprecedented critique, insisting on the originality of a "work throbbing with modernism and of more worked craftsmanship than appears at first reading" (p. 291). At the intersection of decadent-symbolist influences and a bold aesthetics that re-evaluates novelistic norms, Carnaval is symptomatic, according to Patrick Bergeron, of the "new Mal du Siècle" (p. 289) proper to a young generation irreparably marked by the Great War.

Reborn as a Lotus Flower

Ultimately, the collective Modernist Fictions of the Masculine-Feminine: 1900-1940 proposes a "reflection on the mobility of gendered identities" (p. 25), whose richness and diversity exemplify perfectly the fecundity of the aesthetic and thematic renewal proper to this niche of art history that is modernism, moreover when it is worked by the tensions of the masculine-feminine. Jean-Pierre Montier, proposing to us an unusual but sharp interpretation of the pseudonym behind which the writer Louis Viaud (alias Loti) hides, well highlights "the additional thickness to the analysis of a work" (p. 42) that, according to Andrea Oberhuber, gender thinking brings. Indeed, "loti" is the Latin plural form of "lotus", and, simultaneously pen name and fictitious patronymic of character, this appellation is consequently the "symbol of a troubled sexual identity: this flower being hermaphrodite (it contains stamens and pistil), it incarnates in some way the literary myth of the 'third sex'" (p. 184).