Profession, Antisemite: Ideology and Gender in the Life and Works of Gyp

The prolific fin-de-siècle novelist and caricaturist Gyp was notorious as an anti-Semitic activist and propagandist, hailed as "the feminine center of nationalism." Her anti-Semitism stemmed partly from her ambivalence about her gender and from her paradoxical craving for strong authority combined with a revulsion toward it. The success of her anti-Semitic romans à thèse published during the Dreyfus Affair rested on their obsessive redundancy, with Jewish names, looks, and language forming part of a polemic strategy that helped give an ideology shape in the popular mind. (WZS)