Abstract

"Woman before Love: Ethics and Sexual Difference in French Women's Writing" reexamines the question of sexual difference as it has been posed over the last two centuries in literary, psychoanalytic, and ethical contexts. Building on Shoshana Felman's notion of "reading otherwise," I engage less-read works by George Sand , Colette and Nathalie Sarraute , exploring the way each of these writers articulates and works through the dilemma of how to imagine ethical relationships between human beings in the face of differences between the sexes which are always asymmetrical: Sand, through her revolutionary equality politics; Colette, through her vision of sexual pluralism, and Sarraute, through her refusal of sexed delimitations of the human. The first chapter situates the project in light of current debates within and between psychoanalytic and feminist theories. Through a careful reading of Jacques Lacan and Luce Irigaray especially, I argue that a feminist ethics, in order to be both feminist and ethical, needs to embrace a radical psychoanalysis. This argument in turn informs my readings of Sand, Colette, and Sarraute in the subsequent three chapters