The Woman of the Wolf and Other Stories E-Book

Renée Vivien

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 130

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A WOMAN RIDES CROCODILES LIKE HORSES. A QUEEN GIVES UP HER THRONE FOR HER DIGNITY. AND PRINCE CHARMING IS NOT WHO YOU MIGHT THINK . . .When a gentleman's advances are spurned by a young lady carrying a she-wolf aboard a ship, he assumes her aloofness is designed to increase his attentions - until she makes a surprising decision. 'The Woman of the Wolf' is the first in a series of powerful portraits of strong women who stand up for what they believe in - and of the aggrieved men who trail behind them.Bold, defiant and suffused with a unique poetic voice, these scintillating short stories offer a radical alternative to traditional lore. Blending myth, fairy tale and biblical story, the collection shows the writing of Belle Époque rebel Renée Vivien to be the forerunner to today's feminist retellings.

Leseprobe

Born Pauline Mary Tarn in London in 1877 to a British father and American mother, Renée Vivien was schooled in France and moved to Paris permanently when she inherited her father’s fortune at the age of 21. She lived a bohemian lifestyle among the expatriate lesbian set and had relationships with many women, including the American writer Natalie Clifford Barney and the Rothschild heiress Baroness Hélène van Zuylen de Nyevelt, to whom The Woman of the Wolf is believed to be dedicated. Vivien was a prolific writer of often autobiographical poetry and prose in the French language and became established as one of the finest second-generation Symbolists. Her reworkings of traditional myths and fairy tales prefigure the modern trend for feminist retellings. She was the subject of a pen-portrait by her friend and neighbour Colette, published after Vivien’s death in 1909 at the age of thirty-two.

Karla Jay is an award-winning author, activist and academic. She is a distinguished professor emerita at Pace University, where she taught English Literature and directed the women’s and gender studies programme.

Yvonne M. Klein is a retired college teacher and an award-winning translator. She was professor of English at Dawson College in Montreal, where she taught courses in women’s literature and Modernism. Her translation of Jovette Marchessault’s Lesbian Triptych was awarded the Governor General’s Prize for best English translation.

Also available in the Revolutionary Women series:

Three Rival Sisters by Marie-Louise Gagneur

Asphyxia by Violette Leduc

THE WOMAN OF THE WOLF

and other stories

RENÉE VIVIEN

Translated by Karla Jay & Yvonne M. KleinAdapted by Gallic Books

Pushkin Press

A Gallic Book

First published in the USA in 1983 by Gay Presses of New York

English translation copyright © 1983, Karla Jay and Yvonne M. Klein

Introduction © 1983, Karla Jay

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Gallic Books, 59 Ebury Street, London, SW1W 0NZ

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention

No reproduction without permission

All rights reserved

‘The Veil of Vashti’ appeared in Sojourner, Vol. 5, No. 12 (August 1980). Copyright © 1980 by Karla Jay. Karla Jay would like to thank the Gay Academic Union for their scholarship which encouraged her to continue research into the work of Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien. She would also like to thank Mgt. Desmond for her devoted help and support on this project.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781805334774

Typeset by Gallic Books

Printed in the UK by CPI (C20 4YY)

Dedicated to my friend

H. L. C. B.1

INTRODUCTION

The Woman of the Wolf and Other Stories, written in 1904, is probably Renée Vivien’s finest achievement, the one work in which she combines powerful characters and exciting narratives with the poetic clarity of style and vision so apparent in her other works. In this collection of short stories and prose poems, Vivien manages to touch on all the themes and ideas which obsessed her throughout her short life.

Though some of Vivien’s other works, including A Woman Appeared to Me … , are gynocentric – that is, place women at the core of human experience – it is in The Woman of the Wolf that her stance is most explicit. For example, ‘The Veil of Vashti’ takes two well-known biblical tales – the stories of Lilith and of Vashti – and recreates them so that these women are no longer peripheral figures but become central ones. In the Bible the rebellious Lilith is merely a preface to the story of the obedient Eve as the disobedient Vashti precedes the faithful Esther. Here, however, Vashti and Lilith not only take centre stage, but they are also transformed from evil figures into heroic ones. Vashti is, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton said of her in The Woman’s Bible, the epitome of ‘self-centred womanhood’. In ‘White as Foam’, the same transformation is wrought on Andromeda, originally rescued by Perseus, almost as an afterthought, on his return from other conquests. In Vivien’s version, Andromeda prefers solitude and death to Perseus’s embrace.

At the heart of these transformations lies a startlingly radical core of perception about the profound antagonism between the psyches of men and women and about the potentialities of women sprung loose from conventional stereotypical behaviour. These themes appear most clearly in the group of short stories which are told from the point of view of male narrators, of which the title story is one.

In Renée Vivien’s view, men are not merely contemptuous or patronising towards women: they are positively murderous. All of them are locked in a self-protective, impregnable egotism, which assumes a kind of gender solidarity from other men and which demands passive support from all women. When this support is withheld – or worse, when their smug self-satisfaction is challenged by women who refuse to accede to their demands – the men turn killer.

In the title story, for example, the narrator regales a mixed after-dinner party with the tale of an extraordinary woman he remembers from a shipwreck. Throughout the course of his story, he turns again and again to the men present for confirmation that his notion of the innate flirtatiousness of women is correct. No one interrupts with an objection. He presents his portrait of a woman who prefers a pure death in the sea in the company of her pet wolf to the ‘normal’ existence he has implicitly offered her as an oddity; he never understands what motivates the heroine. But if a normal existence consists of sexual connection with this monster of egotism, the reader is with the heroine all the way to the bottom of the sea.

The heroine of ‘The Woman of the Wolf’ challenges the narrator simply through her aloof indifference to his dubious sexual charms; in the two stories set in a rather Gallic version of the American wilderness, the challenge is more aggressive. The heroine of ‘Sniggering Thirst’, Polly, is infinitely more competent and assured than the narrator. The traditional roles here are almost completely reversed. The narrator maintains he is ‘slightly more intelligent’ than his companion on the American prairies, but the reader is given no evidence to support this. In the face of almost certain death, he becomes a quivering mass of jelly, incapable of action but consumed with hatred of Polly for her fearlessness. Polly, on the other hand, conforms to the ideal of the male hero of adventure fiction. A ‘gentle giant’, she is a hard-drinking woman of few words, but of effective action. Her prompt initiative, which rescues them from immediate death, generates no gratitude in the narrator; on the contrary, he hates her the more for her capability and continues to plot her death. For him, indeed, the only good woman is a dead one: he dreams throughout the story of an unnamed woman from his youth with a pale face whose very passivity, the reader suspects, led her to an early grave, perhaps assisted by the narrator.

The superior woodcraft of the heroine of ‘The Nut-Brown Maid’ is also instrumental in saving the two characters. Although the relationship between Nell and Jerry in this story is somewhat more egalitarian than in most of the others, the heroine still displays a spirited defiance of Jerry’s sexual demands on her. Even in the face of death, she spurns Jerry’s maudlin pleas for a quick kiss.

Some of this extreme behaviour will seem comic to many, and the intent is clearly so. After reading the satirical commentary of a wry story such as ‘The Saurienne’, those who have misconstrued Renée Vivien as a lugubrious writer obsessed with death will be pleasantly surprised.

Readers of all ages will be enchanted with tales such as ‘Prince Charming’, in which Vivien takes a fresh approach to old themes and deftly destroys all the fairy-tale nonsense on which most of us were raised.

Vivien’s genius lies precisely in reworking the material around her, whether it is a biblical story such as ‘The Friendship of Women’, a popular adventure story such as ‘Forest Betrayal’, or a Greek or Roman tale such as ‘Bona Dea’. In the last, for example, Vivien compiles a number of Sappho’s fragments into a prose poem about the rites of spring. Sappho’s love for Atthis (‘Atthis, I loved you long ago while you still seemed to me a small ungracious child’) is transformed into a mistress’s love for her slave, Amata (‘You were but a sickly and graceless child’). Just as Sappho freed Atthis to pursue Andromeda (a rival poet), the narrator liberates Amata for the Goddess and other women.

In other words, Vivien feels most comfortable beginning with familiar models, whether it is Sappho or a popular Symbolist theme such as chastity. Then she transforms them so that they take on new perspectives and meanings. Whereas traditional female figures such as Sara in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Axël are chaste from a deep-rooted and unalterable frigidity, Vivien’s heroines are virgins because they are defiant and disdain men, and in some cases because they are lesbians.

Vivien’s weaknesses stem from the same source – that is, using the models provided for her by others. In the Romantic mode, Vivien often chooses settings that are exotic, improbable or bizarre. Her stories take place in Africa, on the high seas, in Renaissance Italy, ancient Greece or the plains of North America. It soon becomes apparent how little Vivien knows of certain periods of history or of life in the wild. Vivien would probably argue that she hardly means for the reader to take her stories literally. Vivien is not primarily concerned with the real world as we might recognise it. Her fantastic universe majestically floats several feet above the ground, never anchored firmly to reality by factual accuracy or believability. Rather, Vivien is concerned with the embedded meanings and deep symbolism, which she clothes in the gaudy colours of faraway places and distant times.

Even within the terms of her created world, Vivien displays many of the limitations of her class and situation. She is an elitist, admiring a small number of highly favoured women whose circumstances have permitted them to withdraw altogether from economic and social reality to pursue lives of aesthetic purity. She is frequently suspicious of sexuality, though she recognises its force. She exhibits the unconscious and unwitting racism and anti-Semitism of the white Anglo-Saxon of her period. If judged from a contemporary lesbian/feminist perspective, some of Vivien’s work might appear embarrassing.

Again, Vivien lived in a world of poetic reality, not political reality, and it would be harsh to judge her on terms she didn’t even think in. She was more concerned with the manner in which the story was told than the plot. Indeed, her talent partially lies in the fact that she managed to offer radically different alternatives to the deceptively familiar myth or adventure story. In other words, one might suggest that the smoothness of her finished work shields the complex imagery and poetic philosophy that went into the construction of it, much as Vivien often tried to hide the effort that went into her craft by pretending it was raw and unrefined inspiration.

The woman behind the stories is equally complex. Born Pauline Mary Tarn in London in 1877, she moved to Paris at the turn of the century and wrote in French. She was considered one of the best second-generation Symbolist poets of France, though French was not her native tongue. Despite the fact that she died in 1909 in her thirty-second year, she wrote over ten volumes of poetry, several prose poems, some plays and two novels (one unfinished). Three of her works – A Woman Appeared to Me …, The Muse of the Violets and At the Sweet Hour of Hand in Hand – appeared in English for the first time in the 1970s from Naiad Press.

In her earliest works, Vivien pretended she was a man by writing under the name R. Vivien or René Vivien; but in 1903 she began to sign her works Renée Vivien, thus making it clear that she was a woman. She soon became known as the Sappho of her era because of the explicitly lesbian nature of her love poems.

Shortly after she began writing, Vivien became involved with Natalie Clifford Barney, the renowned ‘Amazon’, who was later noted for her many lovers and for her salon (which began in 1909), to which all the intellectuals of Europe flocked. Barney was also a writer and the most flamboyant lesbian seductress of perhaps any era (her conquests included Liane de Pougy, Romaine Brooks, Dolly Wilde and many other well-known women of the period who lived in Paris). Vivien’s liaison with Barney has been widely discussed, including in two biographies about Barney: George Wickes’s The Amazon of Letters and Jean Chalon’s Portrait of a Seductress. Djuna Barnes also wrote a book, Ladies Almanack, about Barney and her conquests.

Vivien is notable for her enterprises as well as for her writing and love affair with Barney, for Vivien (like Barney) felt it was not enough to have a good idea: one had to live it as well. In 1904 Vivien and Barney travelled on the Orient Express to Constantinople; from there they went by boat to Lesbos, where they decided they would set up an artists’ colony for lesbian poets. They first invited English poet Olive Custance, with whom they had both been involved, to join them, but the colony never materialised, for Vivien’s other lover, the Baroness Hélène van Zuylen de Nyevelt (one of the most powerful noblewomen in Europe) came to ‘reclaim’ Vivien.

Though Barney and Vivien were never reunited, this adventure shows in part why Vivien is the kind of woman around whom myths and legends are made. She was the subject of curiosity for many of her contemporaries, including Colette, whose wonderful portrait of her next-door neighbour Vivien in The Pure and the Impure captures some of Vivien’s withdrawal from the world after her separation from Barney, her fascination with the Orient, her mysterious method for creating poems (no one really saw her write), her mysterious love affair (with a woman who never appeared before others) and her mysterious death (some suggest she died of anorexia, others of alcoholism – and perhaps it was a combination of both). Perhaps even her death was part of her belief that she should reify her ideas – in this case, the beauty of death. Its circumstances also created another mystery: whether or not Vivien converted to Catholicism before she died in order to be reunited with her first love, Violet Shillito, whose death in 1901 left Vivien inconsolable and from which she never fully recovered.

During her life Vivien dreamed of creating a new golden age of Sappho – first on the island of Lesbos and then in her writing – in which the principles of the divine tenth muse would be enacted, a world in which the goodness and the courage of women would be praised and recounted, a world in which the evil values of the patriarchy would be overturned. More than a century after Vivien’s death, we still do not have the world she envisioned, but this translation of Vivien’s defining work tries to capture her spirit. Now all may know why this highly praised writer is so much discussed and written about and why her memory, like that of her beloved Sappho, is still cherished.

— Karla Jay

CONTENTS