Women of the Left Bank

Shari Benstock's Women of the Left Bank is a history of women writers, publishers, booksellers, and others associated with literary modernism, who made their homes in Paris in the decades from 1900 to 1940. A large number of these women were lesbians who, like gay people throughout this century, sought the relative anonymity of a large, cosmopolitan city. But a number of the women discussed here were not lesbians and the central irony that emerges from Benstock's lively book is that one did not have to be gay to seek out this type of urban protection. It was sufficiently transgressive merely to be a woman who wanted to write, publish books, or in some way lead a life that did not confine itself to the paradigm of women's lives established in the nineteenth century.

But Paris, in particular, offered advantages and attractions that other cities, such as New York or London, did not. In the first place, Paris became the birthplace of modernism. In the visual arts especially Paris had long held the leadership position in the Western world and writers and artists of every sex and sexual persuasion recognized this preeminence and sought to be a part of the emerging modernist project. Secondly, Paris offered the right combination of the familiar and the exotic. Standards of living were more than adequate for the flocks of American and British expatriates, yet everything around them was subtly different and decidedly foreign--a constant reminder of their own bravery in striki

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aptations to Paris but they had in common the fact that Paris enabled them to write. Colette, whose great fortune was never hers because her books were published under the name of her domineering husband Willy, claimed that she never wanted to write at all, but did so out of economic necessity. But the others found their voices in Paris. Wharton's writing earned her an immense second fortune, Stein's writing earned her admiration and, eventually, great fame--but little in the way of popularity or even comprehension, and Barney's writing project was only one facet of her determination to live an utterly open, unapologetic life as a lesbian--never dissembling and always supportive of other lesbians and women. Since much of Benstock's book is dedicated to the appreciation of the way the nature of women's experience in Paris emerges from their works, she concentrates on a great deal of literary analysis. In most cases her critique informs the reader's sense of Paris as a retreat for women whose goals and interests were at odds with those of the larger society. Her analysis of Djuna Barnes' novel Nightwood, for example, is a remarkable reading that gets at the sense of geography (the geography of an emotional and actual underwor

Category: Literature - W