Feminists Read Stendhal (or do they?)

In the United States in particular, Stendhal received less and less attention from literary critics throughout the final quarter of the twentieth century. Many American feminist critics seem to have rejected the author Beauvoir called "ce tendre ami des femmes" in favor of more obviously political writers like Zola or, alternatively, women writers whose works merit rediscovery. Although Stendhal, whose heroines often find self-affirmation through passion, evinced a brand of feminism that may have been insufficiently militant for some late-twentieth-century American feminists, I contend that we still have much to learn from Stendhal's gender-bending representations of both femininity and masculinity. (LGZ)