Les milles et une positions de Mme Marbouty: socio-mécanique d'un écrivain femme sous la Monarchie de Juillet

A paradigm of mid-nineteenth-century feminist writing, Caroline Marbouty's now forgotten novel Une fausse position depicts the intolerable social and economic situation of single women under the July Monarchy, as well as the struggle and ultimate failure of a woman writer in the male literary world of that period. The recurrent motive of the "false position" and its satellite imagery suggest a veritable sociomechanics, often treading a thin line between the temptation of solidification and the imminence of the fall. However, it is movement that prevails in the end, albeit in the form of a still partly inhibited "moving statue. . . ." This progress parallels and exemplifies the numerous metaphors of walking and advancing found at the core of the feminist press between 1830 and 1850. In spite of its melodramatic denouement (one which, through the heroine's madness, raises issues about what, or more exactly who, defines "reality" and "realism"), Une fausse position remains not only an interesting document but courageous and dynamic fiction and deserves to be exhumed from oblivion. (In French) (AS)