SOURCE: “Poetess or Strong Poet? Gender Stereotypes and the Elegies of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore,” in French Forum, Vol. 18, No. 2, May, 1993, pp. 185-94.

In the following essay, Porter argues that Desbordes-Valmore's elegies in many cases transcend the gender stereotypes usually associated with female poets of the nineteenth century.

Naïve, emotional, formally incoherent, limited to personal concerns, and weakened by a dependent attitude: such is the phallocratic stereotype of literature by women. Sophisticated, rational, wide-ranging, formally disciplined, and of broad social significance: such are supposed to be the attributes of “masterpieces” by men.¹ Easy to refute, and scarcely worthy of consideration when it comes to women's writing that transcends gender (such as we find in works by Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, Madame de Staël [in her essays], Marguerite Yourcenar, and others from all periods of French literature), such stereotypes acquire an insidious, subtle power when it is...