SOURCE: "To the Lighthouse: Fictions of Masculine Identity in Rachilde's La Tour d'Amour," in L'Esprit Createur, Vol. 32, No. 4, Winter, 1992, pp. 41-51.

In the following essay, Hawthorne interprets Rachilde's novel La tour d'amour as an allegory of the author's place as a woman writing in a literary world dominated by men.

"Is a pen a metaphorical penis?" asked Gilbert and Gubar in their study of women writers, [The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination] encapsulating the question of the role of gender in women's writing in the nineteenth century. The cultural assumption of a link between writing and gender explains in part the difficulties women had to overcome in order to write. But Gilbert and Gubar's study focused on British women writers; when turning to the French context, the question must be more nuanced. For one thing, the French nineteenth-century novel is not...