Against a background of political turmoil, economic crises, and cultural upsets from both within and abroad, France between the two World Wars was home to a flourishing romance novel industry. At first glance lighthearted love stories seem simple and frivolous in comparison to the canonical writings of the time, such as those of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. However, this literature was far from art for art’s sake. The romance novels of interwar France, written half a century before the scholarship of romance fiction would truly begin, have yet to receive the attention they deserve. During the interwar period, women and their romantic relationships with men carried an intensely moral signification. French citizens of the interwar period earnestly believed in the possible collapse of their civilization, and women were both the scapegoat of and the solution to the supposed demise of their nation. The ensuing cultural discourse used idealized and vilified images of women to argue for the roles real women should or should not play in society. The romance novel was a uniquely powerful medium of discourse in the modern-woman debate. Essential to the interwar popular romance novel was the foregrounding of femininity, morality, and romantic love between men and women, themes that were equally essential to discussing the role of women in society. At a time when the image of the woman was so saturated with social signification, a literature written largely by and for women could not be devoid of ideology.
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Against a background of political turmoil, economic crises, and cultural upsets from both within and abroad, France between the two World Wars was home to a flourishing romance novel industry. Partaking in the onset of mass culture, paperback romances offered what many books in the literary canon could not: a regular diet of them was affordable for all economic classes. Designed to be read and discarded to make room for next month’s romance, they sold in quantities that made millionaires of the most successful authors. Their overwhelmingly feminine readership consumed book after book, never tiring of the same formula of two young and beautiful people falling madly in love and ending up happily ever after. (3)
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The most popular romance novels of the interwar years were moral romances. With a moral message at their core, they aligned with Catholic and bourgeois values and were aimed at young girls They focused on defining and showing good, feminine morality with hints of “chaste” erotica, such as fleeting kisses and embraces. (7)
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This thesis takes the interwar novels of Magali as its subject. Compared to her contemporaries, Magali, wrote about heroines who forged their own paths through the complicated social climate of the interwar modern-woman debate. Simultaneously subversive and conformist, her heroines drive cars, have careers, and find their ultimate happiness in marrying a man and starting a family. (11-12)
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Chapter two is a reading of how symbols of the modern-woman debate were used in Magali novels. Three novels, Le jardin aux glycines (1927), Pour devenir lady (1936), and Le voyage sans retour (1939), present a complex take on where a woman’s happiness was to be found during a time of powerful and largely unrealistic ideals of femininity. I analyze these novels as twentieth-century fairy tales and read them as recreations of the Cinderella story using social symbolism of the interwar period. By analyzing the poetics of the plot and characters, the ideology of these novels can be pinned down. Chapter three is a reader-response analysis of imagined Magali readers. The experiences of the original readers of these novels are long inaccessible, but they constitute an important mode of French women’s history that has been largely ignored. Therefore, three imaginary readers are constructed based on mentions of Magali novels in the press of the 1920s and 1930s. (15-16)
Here's the abstract:
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