[In the following essay, Gelfand compares the writings of women prisoners to the work of canonized male writers such as Villon, Sade, and Wilde, suggesting that the themes and tone of their texts counter the “power-centered” male texts that generally constitute the genre of prison literature.]

The following quotes by some well-known students of prison literature will give an idea of the qualities long expected of and thought inherent to important prison texts:

(Albert Camus): Si l'âme est assez forte pour édifier, au coeur du bagne, une morale qui ne soit pas celle de la soumission, il s'agira, la plupart du temps, d'une morale de domination. Toute éthique de la solitude suppose la puissance.¹

(Victor Brombert): (en prison, on fait un) rêve de liberté et de transcendance … les ‘ailes’ de l'esprit permettent l'envol au-delà des murs confinants.²

Domination, power, triumph over circumstance, transcendence—these are the topoi critics have assumed to be not only the prime characteristics of great prison writing, but in fact the very wellsprings of the authors' imaginative production in confinement.

Such appreciations are noble and stirring—and yet, by their biases for the heroic, adventurous and contestatory mold of response, they have a priori excluded consideration of virtually all texts by imprisoned women. Camus' idea of a necessary physical and moral colonization of one's surroundings applies well to the writers in Genet's penal fraternity of “collective ignominy”:³ Villon, Charles d'Orléans, Boudard, Papillon, Genet himself, and of course, Sade, just to name French writers. Brombert's classic conception of unfettered imaginative escape holds as well for the more nostalgic writers, such as Chénier, Verlaine or Wilde. But women have been excluded from the prison canon. There is little evidence in their texts of a will to dominate or possess and, likewise, until recently, little exaltation of triumph over circumstance. I shall examine the writings of several; imprisoned French women for two general purposes: first, to offer reasons, which are evident in the works themselves, for the inapplicability to women's texts of long-standing critical presuppositions about prison literature; and, second, at the same time, to suggest a female tradition of prison literature, a tradition of motivation and realization, strong and identifiable in its own right. A study of French women prison writers implies an examination of the interconnecting issues of criminological theory, penal history and literary convention. These areas can all be considered contexts for the actual texts French women produced in prison.

The writings of women imprisoned in France since the 18th century—a chronological demarcation argued by Michel Foucault in Surviller et punir⁴ and one to which I subscribe—are marked by the concrete situation of their authors, that is, by their peculiar identity as female criminals. As lawbreakers, then as prisoners, and finally as writers, these women committed both literal and figurative crimes. Criminological and creative models of women's normality and abnormality reinforced each other: the moral and social deviance which characterized the female criminal and prisoner was and is quite explicitly articulated in law, judicial processes, penal codes, and criminological treatises; the transgression of the woman writer, though less apparent for not being explicitly defined, was nonetheless the real “crime” of stealing education, culture and, ultimately, the written word itself.⁵ Even with the legitimization of the prison writer in modern times, beginning with last century's cult of the heroic criminal, women authors have remained outcasts to the now-established male prison tradition. On a very basic level, then, the constructs which explained women's deviant behavior in all spheres—constructs which were never of their own making—were homologous and importantly determinant. It is to these normative views of their behavior that women's texts respond and at the same time from these views that the texts' narrative, lexical and thematic elements arise.

All models of female deviance—whether physiological, psychological or sociological—have rested on unquestioned assumptions about female “nature.” Eighteenth-century medical treatises, such as Pierre Roussel's Système physique et moral de la femme, propound that organic functions explain human thought and personality.⁶ The “normal” woman, who was of “sanguine” temperament, enjoyed unity and harmony of physical constitution with moral inclinations. Vulnerable to the tyranny of the senses and therefore unable to aspire to noble conceptions, both normal and deviant women were best confined and constricted. Prison's structure of class privilege, imported from the world at large, reinforced bourgeois feminine preoccupations with family and routinization of activity (the few women's texts in the Bastille archives series bear witness to these themes).⁷

Madame Roland's Mémoires particuliers of 1793⁸ were a response to the medical paradigm of normality and to the more general societal judgment that embraced that paradigm. A contemporary newspaper, le Moniteur universel, judged Roland as follows:

La femme Roland, bel esprit à grands projets, philosophe a petits billets … fut un monstre sous tous les rapports. Sa contenance dédaigneuse, … l'opiniatreté orgueilleuse de ses reponses, sa gaité ironique … (prouvent) qu'aucun sujet douloureux ne l'occupait. Cependant elle était mere mais elle avait sacrifié la nature … Le désir d'être savante la conduisait à l'oubli des vertus de son sexe et cet oubli, toujours dangereux, finit par la faire périr sur l'échafaud (their emphasis).⁹

It is understandable why, in her memoirs, Roland would insist her life has been faithful to the heart and senses. Her assertions of the primacy of feelings are a response to accusations that she was “denatured” and “defeminized” by her intellectual activities. Roland's memoirs are more than mere echoes of Rousseau or precursors of Chateaubriand: they are a woman's answer to specific sex-related stigmas.

Roland's Mémoires particuliers reflect the more general preference of imprisoned women for confessional genres for, in a word, memoirs counter accusations of being “desensitized” by criminal activity by showing the woman was and is, over time, the same woman, unchanged. Roland's true identity—and this presentation of self is the prime topos of women's prison literature—lay not in contemporary judicial labels of her deviance but in the future righted appreciation of the whole woman and her whole life. Memoirs likewise allowed women to trace for their own lives the story of a moral “fall” that was long the prescribed substance of feminine narrative. Further, in response to memoirs, one could only criticize the woman herself, and not the woman as author. Lastly, memoirs allowed the imprisoned woman, in a severely limited way, to engage in the “imaginative” process that has been synonymous with “creativity” since the late 18th century—that is, to show her “imagination,” but in the weakest sense of arranging the images of her life.

Roland's memoirs are an important representation of the imprisoned woman's concerns with the questions, “Who am I?” “Who was I?” and “Who will I be?”—questions which are obviously far from the corrective and contestatory mode of Genet's “penel fraternity.” Roland's portrait of her true self is at once an angry rejection of her contemporaries' view of her and a reaffirmation of the only lexicon her generation offered women: the virtues of “bonheur,” “sentiments,” “sensibilité,” “uniformité,” “pudeur,” and Rousseauseque “utilité.” The only answer to historical insensitivity towards her was insistence on her own perceptual superiority:

Peut-être un jour mes récits ingénus charmeront les instants de quelque infortunée captive, qui oubliera son sorts en s'attendrissant sur le mien; peut-être les philosophes, qui veulent peindre le coeur humain dans la suite d'un roman ou l'action d'un drame, trouveront-ils à l'étudier dans mon histoire.

(Mémoires, p. 238)

Thus, women like Roland, far from adopting in their writing an authority toward their experience, instead had to expend energy in reaction, not action: Roland leaves it to the “philosophes” to find the general usefulness of her own story. Far from transcending their ignominy, Roland and other women, ironically, reinforced the same limiting definitions of female “normality” that had originally delimited their shame.

The 19th century coexistent currents of Romanticism and positivism were of great importance in the shaping of the only woman's prison texts we have: the Mémoires and the Heures de prison of Marie Cappelle-Lafarge.¹⁰ Criminology came into its own with the period's glorification of statistics, empiricism and typology. The century's foremost criminologist, Cesare Lombroso—though long since discredited for the absurd extremes of his anthropological empiricism—enjoyed an hegemony that informed much social thought and penal policy for decades to come. Lombroso's ideas, developed in la Femme criminelle et la prostituée,¹¹ boil down to a quintessence of his contemporaries' contradictory views of women: “normal” women, who all resemble one another, are men who are arrested in their development. Women are less frequently criminal than men for biological reasons: reproduction makes them naturally more conservative. Further, their recurring endurance of the pain of childbirth implies women are less sensitive (and not, as Roussel explained, hypersensitive). The antagonism between “virile” intelligence and their reproductive function makes women too unintelligent to commit crimes. Thus, when they do commit crimes—and it is only the “born” female criminal, anatomically and intellectually a man, who does so—they are more cruel and sadistic than men. One has only to think of the 19th century female criminal's fictional counterparts, the sadistic and “virile” heroines of Romantic literature, to glimpse the fears and fantasies prevalent in the society of the time. Only Christian morality offered deviant women hope of rehabilitation—and it was at this time that religious orders replaced men as prison personnel.

Lafarge's prison texts respond to the dualities that constituted contemporary views of her: they provide detailed analysis of the crime's events (the alleged poisoning of her husband)—an allegation which was “proven” through the detection of a small and probably harmless trace of arsenic by a 19th century scientist. The texts also bear the Romantic nostalgia for the past in their reconstruction of Lafarge's virtuous and sensitive young persona. Lafarge embraces all the dichotomized judgments that saw her as either pure defeminized mind or as pure feminine body, unable to reconcile the two:

Quand j'étais forte, que j'avais du courage, et que j'osais lutter contre la calomnie, il disait, le monde, que j'étais une impudente, une hypocrite, une femme sans coeur. Aujourd'hui que mes souffrances crient, qu'il les entend et qu'il les voit saigner, il accuse ma faiblesse et raille mes pleurs

(Heures de prison, pp. 194-95).

All of Lafarge's words and actions were turned against her as proof of her guilt: her suffering was recast as remorse, her strength as hardness, her courage as audacity, and her intelligence as perversity. And yet, like Roland, Lafarge has no other vocabulary to present herself by the polarizing one Romanticism and positivism made available: “passion/raison,” “coeur/esprit,” “turpitude morale,” “folie morale,” plus the well-delineated faculties of “le coeur,” “l'esprit,” “la mémoire,” “la volonté,” “l'imagination,” and “la folie” (this last term will soon reappear, with psychiatric baggage, as “l'hystérie,” “la suggestivité,” “le somnambulisme,” and “l'hallucination”). Like Roland, and for reasons of literary convention which still deemed memoirs the most suitable genre for women, Lafarge disavowed her rights to the intellect, since memoirs were to deal with sentiment, not reason. Like Roland, Lafarge sought to counter her criminal stigma by reconstructing the past favorably and her writer stigma by avoiding authorial power and knowledge. And with rising positivism, Lafarge could not help also subscribing to the woman writer's estate: the inferiority implied by her choice of emotion over logic.

The modern era is too complex to embark upon here, given Freud's influence on theories of normal and abnormal motivation as well as the growth of sociological biases in criminological literature. However, the two major trends of importance for women prison writers are a shift toward individual psychological pathology—and not group typology—as the source of criminality and the concomitant shift of emphasis in prison from Christian repentance to individual cure. One also sees a clear shift in criminological literature from Lombrosoesque “zones” and “lesions” to “psychologisant” categories such as “hysteric” and “hypersuggestive.” In Surveiller et punir, Foucault gets at this issue of the change in emphasis from the physiological to the psychological from a different angle, but his conclusions are of immense significance for women. In Foucault's Marxian analysis, with the change in punishment from pre-industrial physical torture to modern psychological modification, society has depersonalized the body into an object in a network of power and economic relationships. The mind has replaced the body as the site of punishment. This idea of corporal depersonalization is a restatement of the feminist tenet that dispossession of the body is a fact all women have historically endured. Thus, Foucault's thesis that the history of punishment belongs not to the history of law or ideas, but to the history of the control of the body, points up another homologous relationship that has made imprisoned women twice victim: if all women have been oppressed by being anatomically defined, imprisoned women have suffered double biological subjection.

Modern women prison writers, such as Albertine Sarrazin, continue to assert their affective and sexual identity in the face of societal judgment. Although Sarrazin departs from her foresisters by adopting the novel form, and thereby establishing a distance from her criminal experience, she is nonetheless preoccupied with the presentation of her loving and dependent self who, in other words, embodies stereotypically “feminine” qualities. Sarrazin's 1965 fresco of prison life, la Cavale,¹² offers in dramatized form the very findings demonstrated in case studies of women's prisons.¹³ These studies, which are based on assumptions about which personal losses imprisoned women suffer most and try to compensate, are incarnated in Sarrazin's characters. For example, in the face of the loss of affective ties with the outside world. Sarrazin's co-prisoners form “family groups”; in response to the loss of their heterosexual identity, they establish lesbian couples. One could certainly argue with the assumptions behind these perceived losses and compensations—for example, the assumption that for all women, the loss of heterosexual relations is a deprivation and not either irrelevant or, as is sometimes the case, a relief from violence. But Sarrazin nonetheless subscribes to the popular mythology. Thus, like Roland and Lafarge, while rejecting society's misreading of her identity, Sarrazin describes herself in terms reflecting the ongoing biases surrounding women: she is a female “made woman” by a man and she is forced to cohabit in prison with the collective embodiment of “l'Éternel féminin.”

There is, however, a sub-text in la Cavale that works against the apparent structure of traditional definitions of the female criminal, a sub-text which signals an important change in women's prison literature. The sub-story is Sarrazin's struggle to be recognized as a writer and not as a criminal. La Cavale is the account of the narrator's efforts to whip her imagination out of its prison-induced paralysis. The book ends with Sarrazin's fictionalized self having traded off physical escape from prison for partial imaginative escape through writing. And she succeeds—for the novel itself is the concrete realization of that imaginative escape. Thus, for Sarrazin, the motivation for and realization of writing in prison are inextricable.

But Sarrazin's completion of her novel cannot be seen as the unfettered flight of her imagination, in the way that Doris Lessing's contemporary heroines, in The Golden Notebook, cannot be seen as fully liberated women writers. Does Sarrazin reorganize her experience in the way that male writers—from the earliest Bastille picaresque narratives to Genet's mythic prose and drama—have done? I think not. She does not attempt to correct the world through her fiction; at most, she inverts her sense of weakness into ironical, borrowed, off-handed toughness. Does she display consistent and directed judgment of the world? Only in her deflected anger, which is not the unbridled and subversive energy of a Boudard or a Papillon. Rather, Sarrazin displays a private ambivalence and feelings of inadequacy, which she believes love and dependency can correct. Does she offer an alternative vision of society? No, for she neither experiences nor expresses “transcendence” in the same terms as men, as she must wrestle if not with the social, certainly with the psychological barriers to her own self-expression.

The negative answers above are the female prison tradition: a non-destructive and life-affirming one. Sarrazin, like Roland and Lafarge, forces us to question not the power of her vision, but rather the very literary tenets which have guided judgments of that vision, tenets which are incompatible with women's texts and which have relegated them to critical darkness. Women's prison texts force us to put into question the monolithic, universalizing and power-centered criteria that have long named and validated the so-called “literature of revolt.”

Notes

1. Albert Camus, L'Homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), p. 54.

2. Victor Brombert, La Prison romantique: essai sur l'imaginaire (Paris: Lib. José Corti, 1975), p. 13.

3. For Genet's idea of the “common ground of audacity,” see his introduction to George Jackson, Soledad Brother (New York: Bantam, 1970), introd. written 1970 and trans. by Richard Howard.

4. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975).

5. See Claudine Herrmann, Les Voleuses de langue (Paris: des femmes, 1976). Herrmann demonstrates how, historically, women had to hide the fact that they were educated and how, if they wished to publish, they had to disguise themselves further.

6. Pierre Roussel, Système physique et moral de la femme (Paris: Caille et Ravier, 6th ed. 1813, 1st ed. 1775).

7. For information on the Bastille Archives, see F. Ravaisson, Archives de la Bastille (Paris, 1870) and F. Funck-Brentano, Légendes et archives de la Bastille (Paris, 1902).

8. Madame Roland, “Mémoires particuliers,” in Mémoires de Madame Roland (Paris: Mercure de France, 1966), pp. 201-340.

9. Cited in Benoîte Groult, Ainsi soit-elle (Paris: Grasset, 1975), p. 46.

10. Marie Cappelle (veuve Lafarge), Mémoires écrits par elle-même (3eme éd., Bruxelles: Hauman et Cie, 1842-43) and Madame Lafarge, Heures de prison (Paris: Lib. Nouvelle, 1856).

11. C. Lombroso and G. Ferrero, La Femme criminelle et la prostituée, trad. de l'italien par L. Meille (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1896).

12. Albertine Sarrazin, La Cavale (Paris: J-J Pauvert, 1965).

13. For case studies of women's prisons, see Rose Giallombardo, Society of Women: A Study of a Women's Prison (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966) and Esther Heffernan, Making It in Prison: The Square, the Cool, and the Life (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1972). For a feminist approach to women's imprisonment, see C. Erhel and C. Leguay, Prissonnières (Paris: Stock, 1977) and K. W. Burkhart, Women in Prison (New York: Doubleday, 1973).