A wind of revolt is blowing across France. By giving voice to the little girl she once was, Judith Godrèche has broken the spell under which every woman – who is just a little girl who grew up, according to Henry James (1843-1916) – has to live, while dealing with this awkward, sometimes talkative, often silent creature. This frightened little ghost that has been forced to arm itself for survival from birth. It's the revolt of little girls! It seems that our culturally reactionary country won't be able to muzzle them this time.
"What's the problem with France?" a New York Times reporter asked me recently. He was struggling to understand why the self-proclaimed nation of human rights was the last remaining country supporting (funding, praising, and defending) filmmakers who had been banned from the US for sexual crimes, such as Woody Allen and Roman Polanski. I pondered on this. Little by little, armies of dead young girls came to mind, processions of spirits paraded before my eyes, making me sick to my stomach.
"The French problem," I replied, "is the scam of Romanticism." I'm talking about the artistic movement produced by our extremely bourgeois, reactionary 19th century. This century, which sanctified the family man's authority over his wife, his property; legitimized the murder of an unfaithful wife by describing what historians now refer to as "femicide" as a "crime of passion"; and simultaneously created our model of the transgressive creator and his "muse." Virginal body and mute mouth – a silence reminiscent of the anatomical diagrams of ancient Greece, where a woman's two mouths, her uterus and her speaking mouth, are muzzled by the same catch. "Eternal feminine," "dead woman in love": The muse is a woman's corpse, a little girl's corpse.
Violence and domination
Do you want to know why the female condition exists, whether we want it to or not? Because in every woman, young or old, a little girl lives on. Like Little Red Riding Hood, to whom Godrèche compared the child she had been on France Inter radio on February 8 – a child who began earning a living at age eight by appearing in commercials before being chosen at 14 by a wolf proud of his "Bluebeard syndrome," director Benoît Jacquot – every woman learns from birth that her life will also be one of survival.
"The wolfsong is the sound of the rending you will suffer, in itself a murdering," wrote Angela Carter in The Company of Wolves. The English writer, who died prematurely in 1992, set about rewriting stories such as Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, and Snow White from the point of view of their heroines – who, in the traditional versions of these stories, are systematically mute, petrified, oppressed, horrified, disgusted, married and massacred.
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