L'ecriture au Feminine in Mauve Desert

Caitlin Vogel
Professor Giacoppe
LITR 363
17 November 2011

Distinguishing L’ècriture au Fèminine in Nicole Brossard’s Mauve Desert

In a world where customs, traditions, view points and written language are deemed phallocentric, it is increasingly difficult to identify and support that there is such thing as feminine writing style; so many individuals including women denounce this idea because the female mind has been conditioned to accept and promote the masculine way of living, speaking, and writing. The masculine and feminine writing styles vary significantly in the ways that ideas are structured. Historically, writing is deeply rooted in masculinity and sexuality; writing is a power and a freedom that is fairly new to women. The emergence of female sexuality has led women authors to write about their sexuality and their life experiences from their perspectives. The differences in male and female sexuality and desire are primary reasons why the two writing styles vary. Nicole Brossard’s Mauve Desert is a text that highlights and supports the existence of l’ècriture au fèminine, or “writing in the feminine” because of the differences in language use and structure that represent and promote female sexuality, experience, and freedom.
Before delving into Mauve Desert and the parameters of feminine literature, it is important to understand why this argument matters: are there truly female and male styles of writing? Perhaps people refute the existence of “writing in the feminine” because there are so few texts by female authors. Throughout history women were repressed in speech, writing, sexuality, and experience. She was not given the chance to represent her own self. It is only recently that the woman’s unique, individual voice is being inscribed on paper; she is now liberated to write about all she has always known but forbidden to say: her sex drive, her desire, and her experiences. However, many women do not realize that they have the freedoms to write their every passion and desire in texts because the social norm for women is repression. Helen Cixous proves that there are so few texts written by women because “so few women have won back their body” (256). In texts such as Mauve Desert, Brossard’s writing fights against this convention of women self-containing their emotions by writing; she no longer represses her emotions, and writes them down for the world to see. Brossard’s text represents how feminine writing style exists and her text awakens women to realize their own sexual and intellectual power. Just as Brossard freely expresses her femininity through writing, many women such as Cixous wish that other women would experience liberation through writing. She argues, “I wished that women would write and proclaim this unique empire, so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns might exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows of un-heard songs” (246). Cixous supports that there is such a style as feminine style but that it is a new, emerging style that authors like Brossard support and strengthen its existence. Perhaps as more women write, the more women readers will be inspired and aware of this unique form of writing. Let’s begin with how Brossard’s Mauve Desert does just that.
Mauve Desert by Nicole Brossard depicts the story as authored by Laure Angestelle, whose text then gets translated by a Maude Laures. This chain or “body” of female writers and translator is not coincidental, but emphasizes the overall “femaleness” of the text and its expansion over the multiple women that join collectively in the text. The main reason women write for others of their sex is greatly explained in “Writing the Body”: “a woman may experience jouissance [sexual pleasure or orgasm] in a private relationship to her own body, but she writes for others” (373). She writes to others so that the text can give the same sexual gratifications and freedoms to explore and write about the body. Roland Barthes emphasizes that a text can arouse its readers just as it has done to the translator in Mauve Desert; Barthes calls this the “erotics of the reading”(75). Susan Holbrook continues that the desire did not come just from the text “it is her [Maude Laure’s] own desire that extends the production of the book” (75). Intellectual knowledge leads Maude Laures to desire, which is the driving force that has her complete the text. Having the freedom to realize how the female body works is difficult; women lost control over their bodies from men, which is one of the reasons that feminine writing styles were not in existence. For generations women were banned from writing or showing any sort of expression. Ideologies placed upon women and constraining social norms put in place and reinforced by the patriarchal society are among one of the main reasons why the feminine style of writing is thought not to exist. It is not because feminine writing does not exist but rather because women are afraid to step out of their boundaries or they are do not realize that they can win their body back and express themselves through art and writing. The original text Mauve Desert is filled with the expression of female desire and sexuality, while the translated version of Mauve the Horizon further delves into expanding the ripeness of lesbian display of sex and pedestals the beauty of the naked female form. This is because the writing of the original Mauve Desert helps Laures delve deeper into understanding her sexuality and she becomes aroused by not only the sexual themes of the text, but also the task of writing itself.
In Mauve Desert, writing about female sexuality is extremely prevalent in the book, but another important theme that Brossard writes about is freedom and experience. In the first section of the text, the main character, Mèlanie, has a deep desire to take her Meteor into the desert and speed down the isolated highways. Her ability to do something, fun, arousing, and yet risky reveals her liberation from society and the ability to make and pursue her nonsexual dreams and desires. The liberating and adrenaline-pumping rides in her Meteor reveal that Mèlanie has much to say and contribute as a woman: she thinks, feels, relates, and expresses through experiences like these, experiences that other women can relate to. Longman, the sole male character, represents masculinity and the theme of ‘danger’ is constantly tied to his character. Longman is referred to as an “explosion,” and the word represents multiple sexual and nonsexual meanings. Longman is releasing atomic bombs, which represent destruction in the desert, a place where Mèlanie goes to isolate herself from society and find the freedom she longs for. Her mother also longs for isolation; she desires freedom so she can be with her female lover, away from the bustling population, a place she will be ridiculed for being homosexual. ‘Longman’s’ name represents the physical phallus, and he symbolically represents violence and destruction, words that are associated to masculinity. Longman brings destruction to the desert where Mèlanie and her mother reside. Longman interferes with the women’s longing for freedom: “the first section of Le Dèsert mauve represents the patriarchal project as in involving violent force. The Mauve Motel is situated in the desert, far from large cities. This suggests that the utopic space exists close to nature, beyond the social” (Wawrzinek 71). The adventures in the desert for Mèlanie and the needed seclusion for the lesbian lovers to feel safe to express their feelings freely are the experiences that the women characters possess and Brossard writes about the beauty of women’s experience. Writing about the sexual experiences of the female characters in Mauve Desert plays a large role in giving females the power to write about their own bodies.
Writing about the female body and sexual experience expands and crosses the boundaries of the phallocentric society and allows women to define and re-define their own life experiences. Language helps to communicate, express, and promote the idea that not only feminine sexuality exists, but that female writers have a unique voice and style of writing all their own when they can write freely without inhibition: “her hands swirl above our heads. The palm of our hands, sometimes her hands slide over my hips” (45). The body parts “hands,” “heads, “and “hips” not only serves for alliteration but it serves to arouse the readers of the text to feel and experience the same sexual arousal found in the text. Women’s writing can be arousing and brings life, passion, and desire, feelings that have been repressed. This answers the question posed in the beginning of the essay about how women’s writing affects other women. Angstelle’s Mauve Desert awakens Maude Laure’s repressed sexual energy and spurs her desire. The desire is not just sexual desire, but the intellectual desire to understand and write the new version of the text. She uses her desire to translate the work which will awaken the sexuality and desire in other women. Angstelle’s desire for translation evolves into a state of delirium, an obsession to forge a relationship with the female author and characters in the text. Women authors write texts with certain themes and formats than male authors.
Mauve Desert’s writing style is very different from the masculine text because of the way the language is written. There are many themes which are repeated in the text and appear in a “cyclical manner”. This is because women do not see the world in a linear, logical way like most men perceive events. In “This Sex Which is Not One,” Luce Irigaray states that “her sexuality, always at least double, goes even further: it is plural” (28). Since the woman has multiple erogenous zones, her writing is more complex and can have more repetitive cyclical themes than found in male writing. The circle is extremely symbolic to the woman because it also represents zero, or the way that her sex has often been referred to by men. The idea that she has “nothing” or “no thing” signifies her lack of a penis, the grandeur organ. Therefore, she gets equated with zero. In “This Sex which is Not Just One,” Irigaray states, “what she says is never identical with anything, moreover; rather, it is contiguous. It touches (upon). And when it strays too far from that proximity, she breaks off and starts over at “zero:” her body sex” (29). When Irigaray says “touches upon” she means how the female sex organs are always in contact, the “lips” which Irigaray states keeps women in touch with herself both in a physical and intellectual way. In Mauve Desert words and phrases are frequently repeated which represents the cyclical nature of female writing style: “mauve,” “desert,” “horizon” and “desire” frequently occur in the original and translated version of the text. The repetitions reveal that the writing style of Nicole Brossard and other woman writers differentiate from the logical, linear, and straight forward writing style of males. Cixous continues and states, “her [women’s] speech, even when “theoretical or political, is never simple or linear” (251). The layout of Mauve Desert is very complex. The first section of the novel is about one story that seems to happen in the perspective of Melanie, which is the novel’s reality. That is until readers find out that “reality” is about a woman who tries to translate the characters from the first book; Melanie in this section is only a character. The last section of the book is the translated tale that is similar to the first book, but extremely different. These two versions of the story are sandwiched between a translator that interrupts the original story and creates a new story. The complex writing style and use of repetition are natural elements of female written expression. The relationship between the translator and the author, both women, reveal the continuity of female writing style.
Just as there is a romantic relationship between Kathy and Lorna filled with desire and passion, there is a romantic and sexual relationship between the translator and the author. Maude Laures becomes completely enthralled in the language of Laure Angestelle and they become doubles since they are forming a sexual relationship with one another around the text. Although both women do not know one another, they become connected sexually through the text and they create the text together through the act of translation, arguably a sexual act. Just as a romantic relationship, the bond between translator and author is an act created by two: a couple. The reproduction of the new translated text, the “new life”, is forged by the interaction and connection between the author and translator. Like a child, a product of love, resembles traits of both parents, the original and translated version of Mauve Desert resembles one another. The similarities of their names Laure and Laures show the plurality of the name, arguably a surname. However, just as a child does not fully replicate a parent, the same is found in a translation, a product of the original. The important themes of the book are kept in the translation, although there are differences. There is a complex relationship that exists between Angstelle and Laures because even though they do not know one another, they put their passions and energies together to create something beautiful: a book and the translated version of the book. The relationships between women in this book are interlinked even if the relationship is not physically known. The book is about the relationship between character and author, translator and character, and translator to author. Finally, the book also creates a relationship between reader to character, reader to translator, and reader to author. This web of social interaction between females reveals the bond created from woman to woman in the l’ècriture au feminine. Charlotte Sturgess supports this claim and argues that this duality has great significance: “for the novel within a novel seems to offer a copy, just as Laure Angstelle, writer, and Maude Laures, translator, provides a kind of double. The “translation” that emerges is part of that fractured mirroring that both creates identifications and defers them” (92). The act of reading and writing forges the female relationship between the translator and the author which creates “identifications;” the two women are “deferred” because the original piece of writing is not copied through translation but is altered by the choice of Maude Laures and her interpretation of the text.
The translator Maude Laures becomes enthralled in the expression of female sexuality that her own sexual and intellectual desire awakens to translate and add her own sexuality to Laure Angstelle’s Mauve Desert: “her [Maude] eyes straining over the slightest detail while afar the most intimate images wavered” (60). Maude’s drive to translate the text becomes obsessive and is deeply rooted in her desire to write in the feminine voice because she becomes excited to read a text written by another woman, a being in which she can relate to. Her sexual arousal caused by the feminine text pushes her to add her own sexuality and desire into the text to satisfy the urges the text awakens in her because she states, “Laure Angstelle’s language had seduced her” (62). Women’s language such as Angstelle’s is clearly a distinguished style of writing that other women like Maude are drawn to like a moth is to light. Monika Giacoppe supports this claim further and states, “the source of the work of translation is desire, the desire is deeply personal and multivalent: physical as well as intellectual and emotional (132). The expression of feminine desire and sexuality are fundamental factors that are responsible for the emergence of female writing.
The male-dominant world controls language and the ways that texts are written and “have produced language, thought, and reality” (Spender 143). The man has silenced the woman in more ways than just her ability to speak or write. He has repressed her desire and her ability to explore and discuss the functions of her body and the multifaceted nature of her erogenous zones and sexual experiences. Hèlène Cixous argues that “to write. An act which will not only “realize” the decensored relation of woman to her sexuality, to her womanly being, giving her access to her native strength; it will give her back her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal” (250). The woman’s ability to write without inhibition allows her to better understand her intellectual and sexual passions, a part of her that has been repressed by male-driven society for many generations.
In Mauve Desert, Brossard creates lesbian lovers that embrace and become enthralled in their passions and desires and have accepted and promoted their female sexuality openly. Unlike many masculine texts, where there is the adoration of the penis, Mauve Desert celebrates the female anatomical parts such as the labia or “lips” (201). In Mauve Desert, the repetition of female anatomy expresses female desire and also encourages women to break free of the taboo about “writing their bodies”. Other anatomical parts such as the vagina are referenced in Brossard’s text and she even includes segments about female masturbation: “my body still in front of the mirror. My hand would be slow”(38). The depiction of female masturbation reveals the power of the woman promoting her sexuality. This depiction of sexuality and pleasure is heightened further on in the book when lesbian lovers talk about their own physical and emotional desires for one another. Brossard’s freedom to write is responsible for bringing into fruition freedoms that female characters possess such as: female masturbation and lesbian relationships, Mèlanie’s unbridled joy ride in the desert, and the freedom to criticize violent, patriarchal society. Writing about female sexuality, experience, and freedom are extremely important themes in l’ècriture au fèminine.
Writing about desire is extremely fundamental when writing the world in a woman’s perspective. In “Writing the Body”, the main argument is that Brossard’s unbridled sexuality in her novel is derived from her own body: “the female body is seen as a direct source of female writing, a powerful alternative discourse seems possible: to write from the body is to re-create the world” (366). Brossard engages in this type of writing where she unveils passions and desires that illustrate and define female sexuality and supporting its existence in a male-driven world where it for years was unknown. The character Lorna is deeply aware of her sexuality and her attraction with Kathy. While Kathy’s notion of love is much more logical and less physical, Lorna burns with lust and the desire to communicate love though carnal actions. These sexual feelings of both characters are being expressed in the novel and are being communicated by two females to each other. This provides evidence that Nicole Brossard is daringly writing from her own body to convincingly and believably write about the passion shared between two female characters. This bold writing is derived from her understanding and knowledge of her own complex sexuality: “I want traces, marks, blood streaming in our veins. Love needs evidence. Carnal evidence otherwise the body languishes” (125). These words are written from an author that is in sync with her body and its functions. The intensity of the words “traces,” “marks,” and “evidence” help to increase the sexual drive of the female readers of the text so that they begin to feel just as aroused as the female characters in the text. Susan Holbrook states, “Brossard invokes dèlire/de lire in order to convey the momentous stimulation, excitation, and creative response a woman experiences when reading the text of another woman” (72). The word “delire” means to go astray but in French it means ‘passion or frenzy’ (72). The idea that women’s writing can have such an impacting effect on other women reveals that the style of feminine writing will only continue to grow once these feminist texts begin to circulate around women readers.
There is a structural cyclical writing style that Nicole Brossard carefully inserts that directs the form of the novel into a feminine attribution to writing style. Every chapter begins with Longman and then switches off into Melanie’s perspective, which is repeated throughout the first section of Mauve Desert, which occurs throughout the book and performs a cycle of events which lead up to the same point as the text progresses. It becomes expected that every new chapter will undoubtedly begin about Longman and then eventually merge and end in Melanie’s perspective. Although the text Mauve the Horizon is in many ways completely different than the original, the same cyclical format still is carried on into the translation. This “borrowing” of style shows that this is the natural feminine way in which multiple women write. The cyclical nature of beginning the chapter with Longman and O’blongman, which then merges and then ends in the perspective of Melanie argues that multiple women borrow this unique style which reflects the “zero” or “circular” nature of their text and then evolves into a writing style strictly related to their gender.
Repetition is a device that Brossard copiously uses in Mauve Desert. Another interesting quality of her writing style is that themes have symbolic meaning, but it remains vague or unknown what the meaning is. The ‘horizon’ is a motif that recurs in the text along with the color ‘mauve’ and the ‘desert’. The desert could represent freedom, solitude, and release from society, but the exact meaning remains unknown. The color mauve is a feminine version of red, a color generally linked to male passion for a woman. Mauve is a common color found in cosmetics, and when mauve is linked to passion, it represents female passion like red represents male passion. The repeating themes in the novel also have significance but their symbolic meanings are ambiguous. The uncertainties of meanings of themes serve a very important purpose in Mauve Desert; it allows for the exchange and development of thought in the reader. It allows for freedom in deciphering the meaning. One of the main themes in Mauve Desert is about the freedom that the women characters possess: Melanie’s freedom to speed in her Meteor and Kathy and Laure’s freedom to openly express and love one another in the solitude of the desert. The freedom that the characters have speaks to the woman readers of the text, a voice that encourages women to partake in the freedom of expressions both physically and intellectually. Unlike logical straight-forward masculine-style writing, the style of female writing allows for thought and reflection. The vagueness of Brossard’s writing follows the model of feminist writing style. In “This Sex Which is Not One,” the author proclaims, “this is doubtless why she [women writer] is said to be whimsical, incomprehensible, agitated, capricious… not to mention her language, in which “she” sets off in all directions leaving “him” unable to discern the coherence of any meaning” (29). Women’s writing is more ambiguous and more difficult to immediately understand. It does not mean that the writing or the language does not make sense but that there is hidden meaning that lies beneath the text.
Feminine writing shares many of the structural and thematic elements that Nicole Brossard’s Mauve Desert contains. It is extremely important to acknowledge the differences between female and male writing styles so that females can find their own source of independence and liberation in their expression of words. The powerful words from Cixous perfectly explain how important it is to distinguish this distinguishable style of writing: “we must affirm the existence of this writing. It is through ignorance that most readers, critics, and writers of both sexes hesitate to admit or deny outright the possibility or the pertinence of a distinction between masculine and feminine writing” (253). By understanding and acknowledging the ways that females write, both through their sexual bodies, and intellectual minds, texts such as Mauve Desert clarify and highlight l’ècriture au fèminine’s existence and its unique qualities.





Works Cited
Brossard, Nicole. Mauve Desert. Trans. Susanne Lotbiniere-Harwood. 1987. Montreal: Coach , 1990. Print.
Cixous, Helene. “Helene Cixous.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. New French Feminisms. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle Courtivron. New York: Schocken, 1981. 245-64. Print.
Giacoppe, Monika. “’’The Task of the Translator’ in Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Brossard’s Mauve Desert.” Bucknell Review: A Scholarly Journal of Letters, Arts, and Sciences 47.1 (2004): 124-38. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 19 Nov. 2011.
Holbrook, Susan. “Delirium and Desire in Nicole Brossard’s Le Desert Mauve/ Mauve Desert.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 12.2 (2001): 70-85. JSTOR. Web. 19 Nov. 2011.
Jones, Ann Rosalind. “Writing the Body Toward an Understanding l’Ecriture feminine.” The New Feminist Criticism Essays on Women, Literature Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon, 1985. 361-75. Print.
Luce Irigaray. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. New York: Cornell University, 1985. Print.
Wawrzinek, Jennifer. Ambiguous Subjects: Dissolution and Metamorphosis in Postmodern Sublime. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. Print.