Becoming an Old Woman: Feminism, Destiny and Freedom According to Alice Rivaz and Simone de Beauvoir

摘要

When asked to define fiction, Alice Rivaz answered that it consisted in giving a voice to those who usually go unnoticed, and in her work older women are granted a very special position among those figures reduced to silence by social hierarchies and cultural representations. Even if the mimesis of her novels reflects the marginality of her elderly female characters, their voices and/or interior monologues have a crucial role to play in inviting readers to share the privileged position of the author who can see ‘l'envers du décor’. While Simone de Beauvoir describes this specifically female knowledge of ‘l'envers du décor’ in purely negative terms as sterile, this is not the case with Alice Rivaz's characters, whose lives are inscribed in a context of social injustice and military culture which, for the author, define the male-centred society of the twentieth century. In the world described by her novels, therefore, the wisdom of the old woman becomes a very productive perspective with which the reader is invited to identify in order to remain critically alert.