SOURCE: “Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and the Engendered Canon,” in Yale French Studies, Vol. 75, 1988, pp. 129-47.

In the following essay, Danahy explores Desbordes-Valmore's relationship as a woman writer to the highly gendered poetic canon.

Les femmes, je le sais, ne doivent pas ecrire;                                                   J'écris pourtant 

—Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (Une Lettre de femme)

Freud thought that all men unconsciously wished to beget themselves, to be their own fathers in place of their phallic fathers and so “rescue” their mothers from erotic degradation. It may not be true of all men, but it seems to be definitive of poets as poets. The poet, if he could, would be his own precursor, and so rescue the Muse from her own degradation.

—Harold Bloom, Yeats

Among the politicized forces circumscribing women's place in the literary tradition are paradigms of genre which create what I will call the “en-gendered” canon. Not only is the canon...