SOURCE: Cairns, Lucille. “Passion and Paranoia: Power Structures and the Representation of Men in the Writings of Marie Cardinal.” French Studies 46, no. 3 (July 1992): 280-95.

In the following essay, Cairns investigates Cardinal's experimentation with nontraditional gender roles in her novels and traces her treatment of men and male-female relationships throughout her works.

The novels of Marie Cardinal, highly successful within francophone countries, are surprisingly neglected outside them. The first, published in 1962, was followed by a whole series of novels which have been published at frequent intervals from then to the present day, coinciding with the upsurge of women's writing from the 1960s onwards.¹ Although interest in her work is now growing, particularly in the United States,² she has previously been overlooked in most Anglo-American studies of French women's writing, largely because of critical fixation upon the narrowly defined phenomenon of écriture féminine. My own interest lies in Cardinal's...