I would like to talk to you not as a professional critic of Swiss Frenchwomen writers - which I am not, nor as a professional reader of that literature. I met it late in my life and have the same love repulsion impulse for the country. I will speak to you as a professional writer, a colleague of all these women whom I know and am, for some, friends with them. I shall therefore be treading on a difficult path, telling you my reserves without implying that men are better writers than women or that the concerned person is to blame or condemn. Writers are ordinary men and women who happened to write in a given time and circumstances. Some writers, men and women, are extraordinary persons but this has not much to do with their writings.
Since it is impossible to tour the literature in an hour, I will be speaking on Alice Rivaz, La Paix des Ruches (The Peace of the Beehive) published in 1947. It epitomizes for me what I like and what I fear in women's literature. I realized that many themes I used in Frau William Tell Bakes Apple Cake are already in Alice Rivaz as in many other women writers. So it is not the ingredients that are strangely unfamiliar to me but their value.
Alice Rivaz was born in 1901 and died in1998. She is a much-celebrated writer as is Corinna Bille. But unlike her, Alice Rivaz never married, remained a spinster all he life. She had many men in her life but "No one was the husband. No one was even entirely mine. They always belonged to another women who came before me. » (Comptez vos jours, Count Your Days, p.181). Love is in her novel "the great profession of our class" (VW, Three Guineas). In fact all but two of her characters are married: this is deemed as a common destiny. Her heroine is Madame Jeanne Bornand and if Clara seems happy to life vicariously through her colleague, Sylvia will commit suicide when her lover gets engaged to another women. Love is the only concern, topic: " an evening when, naturally, we talked about love. But is it not the only subject we all will treat as soon as we are among ourselves. Men, I imagine, will during that time speak of money, politics, business, and military affairs. We, of marriage and love" (Alice Rivaz, p. 33). Love is the magical mirror that makes women bigger, more beautiful than in reality. Love is for women what women are for men: a magnifying glass. But love does not come easily or to just anybody. One has to work at herself even if it is only in the beholder's eyes that you are a beauty. Shopping, buying clothes, hats etc are important steps towards this goal. Replace marriage by love and Alice Rivaz agrees with Virginia Woolf: " It creates beauty for the eyes and it attracts the admiration of your sex. Since marriage until the year 1919 - less than twenty years ago the only profession open to us, the enormous importance of dress to a woman can hardly be exaggerated. It was to her what clients are to you - dress was her chief, perhaps her only method of becoming Lord Chancellor. »(Three Guineas, p.24). But Alice Rivaz stops at this conclusion. Women love to dress, it is part of the love game but is also has a civilizing purpose. Men do not care if they are ugly or dirty. In fact "We do not have enough of all our love and determination to care for the delicate covey of men. We teach them to walk, we raise them, we feed them, we dress them. But hardly are they out of our hands, of our homes, of the watchful surveillance of our eyes, the whole crowd just disappears. Where to? Later one reads in history books, one goes to the cinema to see what happened to them, these bodies so well cared for, so clean and so well dressed by women's hands. Far away from us, they cover themselves with wounds and garbage, the same beings we cuddled, washed, fed at regular hours. Then, they fall by millions, eyes shut by atrocities, on all the battle-fields of the world."( p.107) Here we can an inkling of Alice Rivaz's vision of the world and what I shall call her essentialism. I feel that she is wrong in thinking that women, be it by gene or history, are better than man, that women's only consideration is life and that we could live in a peaceful and non-violent world by simply disposing of men once they have accomplished their generative duty. She should know better. She wrote La Paix des ruches in 1947, even if the text refers to a prewar time. Many women were on Hitler's side, atrocities were performed by women kapok in concentration camps, by partisans of both sides in Spain, and women were in the military in Great Britain, Canada and the United States. Women were in the resistance in France but also in the collaboration with the nazis; Geneva was the headquarters of the League of Nations but the Swiss people could pass in front of emigration camps as did for example Yvette Z'Graggen who explores in her autobiographical novel Les Années silencieuses, why nobody paid attention to all the Jewish families living in those camps. What is so strangely and so frequently absent in women's writings is politics. If we compare La Paix des Ruches and Three Guineas, we see that Virginia Woolf took into account the politics of her time, that history had a role in her thinking. She knew that dress, its code, its beauty was not only to enjoy life; on the contrary:"What connection is there between the sartorial splendors of educated man and the photographs of ruined houses and dead bodies? Obviously the connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers. (É) Hygienic splendor is invented partly in order to impress the beholder with majesty of the military service, partly in order through their vanity to induce young men to become soldiers." (Three Guineas, p.25). Or should we give credit to Alice Rivaz and understand that this was her underway to say that there is a sex war? For she does insist often on the attraction of the military service for the young and not so young man. Still she is strangely silent on the MOB, that time when all the able men were minding the frontiers to prevent Hitler from invading Switzerland.
Love is the only reason for women to go on living but that love is not a very sexual one. It would seem that having sex is the price to pay to get love and admired. One thinks often of Belle du Seigneur and Albert Cohen. A man cannot love a woman with a real body and bodily functions. This is a rather common idea among women writers, one can think of Monique Laederach and the difficulty of being a woman, a writer in a patriarchal state where mothers conspire against their daughters who have no choice but to remain silent or disguise themselves as men. For those two women, desire, carnal love is akin to a sickness, old age or illness will cure them. Be it in Les Noces de Cana (1996), Si vivre est tel (1998), Je n'ai pas dansé dans l'le (2000) (all at l'Age d'Homme) or her two unpublished plays, Monique Laederach laments on the impossible dialogue or conversation between men and women. The same them is working in La Vie Rvée des btes of Nolle Revaz (Gallimard). One is surprised to find in the novel of a much younger person -she must be around thirty- the same feelings on no communication between spouse, the same scorn or dislike of a woman's sexuality while defining woman only by her sex, hence the name Vulve for the mother, A writer such as Marguerite Burnat-Provins who in Le Livre pour toi (The Book for You) claims her pleasure and desire is a rarity in the Swiss French speaking letters: "And the admiration for your strength left me speechless, holding back the rattle ready to rise through my throat, holding back the words held by my clenched teeth, holding back the wild spasm listening for your roar in the brief and triumphant fury sprung for the jubilation of your flesh, in the victory cry send forward eternal love." (Le livre pour toi, éditions de la Différence,1994 p.40).
Nevertheless most of them are unhappy in their couple, as this is a master slave relationship. Marguerite and her lover will not be together; he will marry someone else once Marguerite gets her divorce. Silvia Ricci Lempen both in Le Sentier des éléphants and Avant (both éditions de l'Aire) also deals with women who cannot live with their husband who transforms himself from spouse and companion into a foreigner, a master. They seem to discover as Jeanne Bornand that " My husband has the faults of many of our countrymen. To think I had sworn to myself never to marry such a man. It is mind blowing, it seems to me sometimes that I am not myself but my aunt, my mother, my grandmother and that it is their life that I am starting to relive (La Paix des ruches, p.117).
Even when women work for a salary outside the house, the housekeeping - all of what Simone de Beauvoir called immediate reproduction - is the women's domain. Cooking, cleaning up, washing, ironing, shopping, mending are a wife's duty. To be a menagère that is a housewife is the true destiny of women. Even nowadays when a couple migrates to Switzerland she officially dons her last job for that one. The housewife's work is for Alice Rivaz akin to the farmer's: "without beginning, without end. But it is like the work of a farmer who would not know the rewards of the harvest, the slow work of winter. (É) Still we like our work. What we do not like is injustice. What revolts us, is never to have a moment of leisure, and all that because of him who says he is stronger than us, more resistant than us et who pretends to love us, to want to protect us. What we do not like is this absence of solidarity between them and us, this original impoliteness between them and us. » (La Paix Des ruches, p.91). But for a Swiss woman being a housewife accomplishing her chores is a pleasure: " Holding a basket, buying, filling it up to the rim. Then coming back home and taking out of the basket all that it holds. To set on the table the kilo of rice, the pound of roasted coffee beans, the half pound of butter, the dozen of eggs without too much thought to their price which would obscure their contentment." (La Paix des ruches, p.92) Alice Rivaz wrote at a time where boys were still boys and where girls learned their natural role in school, as evidenced by this daily schedule for the Swiss homemaker written in 1980 :
And again I am reminded by dipping into newspaper and novels and biographies that when a woman speaks of women she should have something very unpleasant up her sleeves. Women are hard on women. Women dislike women. Women - but are you not sick to death of the word? I can assure you I am. Let us agree, then, that a paper read by a woman to women should end with something particularly disagreeable.
Virginia Woolf, A room of one's own, p.105
Women's science was then the art of sweeping (Begin opposite the door; bend down and sweep up the dust while remaining in place, using the entire surface of the broom. Shake the dust off the broom into the trashcan.) For it was women who taught future women the natural Swiss order (1) of things: i.e., put them in place; (2) of time: i.e., pay bills promptly, keep appointments; (3) of money: i.e., avoid debts; (4) of social relationships: i.e., answer letters, return what you borrow, obey laws. Hence the success of the housewives in 1991, the constant demands for a national certificate of competence in housewifery, the poor professional expectations of young girls, the drop out rate among young women professional once they have a child.
All this is not original; a lot of men thought so. In Switzerland Rousseau, Ramuz popularized these ideas with everyone. But mostly you need them in a state where men go to the army every year for their entire adult life. They also reflect the Calvinist nature of the country. The nation could not survive as such if men and women did not feel they came from another planet say Mars and Venus for exempla. Women have the right to vote only since 1971, equality is a new thing and the new matrimonial code enters into law only in 1994. Every woman hence women writers still suffers from the lack of civil rights their grandmothers, mothers did not have. Coed schools and curriculum are also a new concept. Universities went from closed to women to women unwelcome, to only unmarried women can teach. All this leaves a mark on women writers, be it Amélie Plume, Anne-Lise Grobety, Monique Laederach, Silvia Ricci Lempen, they all speak of the mutilating experience of being in a faculty of letters where men taught, men decided on the canon, where male critics decided what women's writing was. Alice Rivaz is praised for she was not a frenzied feminist; she was not a vindictive troublemaker. She was faithful to the father, not her biological father who was a communist, but to the literary one Ramuz. A comparative reading of those two writers would show how close their are in their view of humanity. Most writers still compare themselves to Ramuz, to be awarded the Ramuz prize is essential to many, Alice Rivaz and Anne-Lise Grobety are the only women laureates. It means that the Swiss French literature remains one of autobiographical novels, a literature of peasant in a country that is more and more urban and this is a big contrast between German and French Swiss literature. It is a literature of entropy, of the minimal, a literature from which politics is excluded in favor of the personal even in writers who tackle political problems such as Janine Massard or Mireille Kuttel, Mousse Boulanger. Time seems timeless in the country famous for it watches. Myth is given precedent over history. Everything a French person, even after 22 years in Switzerland, cannot understand or accept.
But Alice Rivaz did know that we are not bees, that a women's dictatorship could be as disastrous as a men's one. Only the disasters would not be the same. She is the fisherwoman of women's ordinary life. She is therefore a grandmother to all of us who are trying to recreate a female universe. Maryse Renard ( La Regardeuse, Eclats de Patience, éditions le Cadratin) who compares herself to a tricoteuse as words and wool mix to form a map continues the Penelope canvas that men undo according to Alice Rivaz, She too is attentive to places, ancestral gestures. If the feminist claim that the private is political is true, then Alice Rivaz is a great political thinker as she wrote about Aristophanes: "No, I do not think that it is love we should refuse to them, but domestic care. We would not feed them; we would not care for them. They would make their own beds, cook their own meals, do their own little washes, their ironing. We would let them mend their stockings, knit new ones. The entire planet would be transformed and History, would change its course." (La Paix des ruches, p.109). If only Madame Guillaume Tell had read Alice Rivaz.
© Thérèse Moreau, 2004
6:45 Get up
Wash and dress
Prepare breakfast
Air out bedding
Get the children ready for school
7:15 Breakfast
7:40 Take the children to school Clean up the kitchen
Scrub the bathroom
Make the beds
Hang up the clothes
Vacuum the bedroom rugs
10:00 Do the shopping
11:00 Unpack the food
Set the table
Welcome husband and children home
12:15 Lunch
Clear the table
Clean up the kitchen
Get the children ready to go back to school
1:40 Take the children to school
Answer the mail
Ironing, mending, knitting
Free time for hobbies
4:00 Prepare children's snack and supervise homework
6:00 Prepare supper
Welcome husband home
7:00 Supper
Clean up the kitchen
Get the children ready for bed
8:00 Children's bedtime
Evening with husband
10:30 Bedtime.