Women translators in nineteenth-century France: Genre, gender, and literary creativity.

The goal of this dissertation is to examine the importance of translation in the history of women's writings in nineteenth-century France and the ways in which it not only contributed to the development of women's intellectual activities, but also afforded access to literary production. I therefore explore how translation, when conceptualized as a women's literary activity, both reinforced existing roles for women in literature and at the same time allowed them access to other forms of creativity. For, contrary to the opinion of many scholars of literary genre and gender who do not discuss translation in this context, translation was intimately related to varied forms of textual production. In order to demonstrate this relationship and the enormous impact of translation on women's conceptions of their creative capacities, I examine translations, as well as the prefatory discourse that often accompanies them, autobiographical statements by women translators, and fiction by women translators with texts from Therese Bentzon, Victorine de Chastenay, and Mme Lesbazeilles-Souvestre. I first address how literary creativity was a gendered activity in the nineteenth century, with women limited to certain secondary modes of literary production. I then examine the relationship between translation and the modes of textual creation named above in order to demonstrate the fundamental related-ness of these writings and, finally, I demonstrate the creative aspects of translation through a close reading of several translations in comparison to their source texts to show how translation was not only a creative activity, but a gendered one as well. Despite the widespread dismissal of translation in consideration with issues of gender and genre in nineteenth-century France, its inclusion opens important new areas of research and allows for a fuller understanding of what it meant to write as a woman in the nineteenth century.