Invisible Presence

The Representation of Women in French-Language Comics

Catriona MacLeod

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781789383928
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Comics & Graphic Novels Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book looks at the representation of female characters in French comics from their first appearance in 1905. Organised into three sections, the book looks at therepresentation of women as main characters created by men, as secondary characters created by men, and as characters created by women. It focuses on female characters, both primary and secondary, in the francophone comic or bande dessinée, as well as the work of female bande dessinée creators more generally. Until now these characters and creators have received relatively little scholarly attention; this new book is set to change this status quo. Using feminist scholarship, especially from well-known film and literary theorists, thebook asks what it means to draw women from within a phallocentric, male-dominated paradigm, as well as how the particular medium of bande dessinée, its form as well as its history, has shaped dominant representations of women. This is the first book to study the representation of women in the French-language drawn strip. There are no other works with this specific focus, either on women in Franco-Belgian comics, or on the drawn representation of women by men. This is avery useful addition to both general discussions of French-language comics, and todiscussions of women's comics, which are focused on comics by women only. As it is written in English, and due to the popularity of comic art in Britain and the United States, this book will primarily appeal to an Anglo-American market. However, the cultural and gender studies approach this text employs (theoretical frameworks still notwidely seen in non-Anglophone studies of the bande dessinée)will ensure that the text is also of interest to a Franco-Belgian audience. With a focus on an art-form which also inspires a lot of public (non-academic) enthusiasm, it will also appeal to fans of the bande dessinée (or wider comic art medium) who are interested in the representation of women in comic art, and to comics scholars on a broad scale.

SECTION 1

PRIMARY WOMEN CHARACTERS

1

Bécassine to Barbarella … But What Came in Between? An Introductory History of Female Primary Characters in the Francophone Bande Dessinée

Although there now exist several encyclopaedic volumes cataloguing the bande dessinée (BD) throughout the twentieth century alongside various monographs amassing among them a comprehensive picture of the medium’s evolution, gathering information on the representation and development of female characters in the BD from this existing research is far from straightforward. As previously noted, still relatively few scholars make specific mention of female pictorial presence (or absence) in the bande dessinée in their theoretical works, whilst in encyclopaedic historical tomes, a proportion of strips that have been produced in the last hundred years featuring women as principal characters are not included. This may be a consequence of authors basing their choice of included material on sales, or the perceived influence of strips on the medium as a whole. Whatever the reason, the omission of these female-led bandes dessinées from apparently comprehensive histories further contributes to an obscuring of the female character’s place in the medium, underlining and perpetuating the circular relation of cultural memory to academic attention. In what follows, a detailed chronology of recurring principal female characters by male creators will be outlined in order to establish the progression of these previously ignored figures within the bande dessinée, charting how evolving styles, trends and, indeed, changing legal restrictions influenced their depictions. This historical grounding will also provide the necessary context for close analysis of specific women characters in the following section.

The starting point in charting the presence of women in the bande dessinée begins, as one might expect, with that of the mass-produced, modern medium itself: in the pages of the turn-of-the century children’s press. Towards the end of the 1800s, weekly illustrés for children, featuring what would now be referred to as bandes dessinées (the term itself not widely used until the 1950s) began to flourish (see Miller 2007: 15–17). Following publications for young, gender-unspecified audiences, which nonetheless seemed distinctly directed towards boys – in the first five issues of La Jeunesse Illustré in 1903, for example, only one strip out of its sixteen-page mixture of bandes dessinées and text-based stories centred around a female character – certain illustrés were created that directly targeted a young female readership. These publications were of mixed format combining stories, illustrations, rainy-day ideas, instructions for the fabrication of doll clothes etc., with content designed specifically for a particular social class targeted by each journal. These publications for girls were to provide platforms for some of the first regularly recurring children’s bandes dessinées and, unsurprisingly, due to the gender of the target readership, the first female principal characters of the developing medium.

The first journal of the twentieth century created to focus solely on a young female audience was La Semaine de Suzette, which made its inaugural appearance in February 1905 with a set goal to provide a ‘quality publication for girls from good families’ (Gaumer 2010: 765).¹ From this class-driven motivation, the editor-in-chief of La Semaine de Suzette, Jacqueline Rivière, in collaboration with artist Joseph Pinchon, created the character and strip Bécassine: the first, and to this day most well-known, regularly recurring female principal bande dessinée character, who made her debut alongside the journal on the back page of its first publication.² Bécassine would eventually become very popular with the journal’s readers, and the resultant albums, figurines and films would ensure the strip’s status as a veritable phenomenon beyond the confines of its parent publication. However, in the early days of La Semaine de Suzette, the bande dessinée’s appearance was far from regular, with months occasionally passing between episodes of the strip. In the meantime, the journal continued to publish a limited number of bandes dessinées per instalment, but none which featured characters who were to re-appear regularly in the long term.

On the whole, La Semaine de Suzette was to remain a more text-based journal than its future competitors. Examples of the bande dessinée were, particularly initially, limited within its pages, perhaps thought too proletarian for the publication’s class-inspired motivation (Gaumer 2010: 765). However, the growing popularity of the medium generally, and that of the Bécassine series in particular, meant that over time more of the journal was devoted to the adventures of the Breton maid and other stories in strip form.³

Following the pioneering introduction of Bécassine in 1905, another notable strip featuring a regularly recurring female principal character made its entrance before the end of the decade. L’Espiègle Lili appeared for the first time in 1909 in the first issue of the illustrated journal Fillette. Created with a strong Christian backing, Fillette was destined for an audience with a more modest income and education than La Semaine de Suzette (Lipani-Vaissade 2009: 155), with its content differing accordingly. From the outset appearing as a publication with more of an image-based focus than its bourgeois competitor, the first issue of Fillette featured bandes dessinées of varying lengths on ten out of its sixteen pages. Presumably anticipating a lower literacy rate amongst its readers than that of La Semaine de Suzette, this new illustré for girls continued its elevated proportion of image to text throughout its long publication span (1909–64). It contained, like its earlier counterpart, many single-episode strips featuring female characters that would never re-appear. L’Espiègle Lili, however, became a popular drawn strip feature. Originally drawn by André Vallet and Jo Valle, this series featured the cheeky exploits of the young eponymous figure. Although it garnered neither the fame nor the sales of Bécassine, this strip was to outperform its more successful counterpart in terms of longevity and album-production, ending in 1988 after 73 published hard-backed books. It was principally drawn by three artists, with René Giffey taking over from Vallet in 1921 and, in turn, Al.G taking the artist reins in 1947. Two entirely new tales significantly modernizing the series were published in 1996 and 1998 drawn by Anne Chatel, entitled Lili chez les top models and Lili à Chérie FM. Since the appearance of these albums, however, no further episodes featuring Lili have been published.

The character of Lili was reinvented several times over her considerable lifespan, with each of her artists interpreting her focus and temperament differently. Initially, under the partnership of Vallet and Valle, Lili proved to be worth her ‘mischievous’ title, spending her time playing practical jokes. Following her artistic adoption in 1921 by René Giffey, however, Lili began to grow up, and even married in episodes published in 1923. Her progression into adulthood was short-lived, however, as from 1925 Giffey chose to return Lili to her original infantine incarnation (Moliterni et al. 2004: 1106). Under Al. G’s direction following the Second World War, Lili again evolved to shake off her enfant terrible roots and the strip became more adventurous, featuring episodes of its main character travelling and trying a multitude of different jobs as she tries to earn her own living. The ‘espiègle’ epithet was eventually abandoned from the title of the bande dessinée and its structure and style was considerably modernized, with Al. G introducing the use of speech bubbles to replace the original format of above-panel captions (Moliterni et al. 2004: 1106).

It is interesting to note that despite being one of the longest-running francophone bande dessinée characters, with a span of 89 years between her first and last appearance, Lili is often omitted from non-encyclopaedic histories of the twentieth-century bande dessinée. As has become the case for many of the female-led strips from the pre-1960 period, the retrospectively bolstered iconic status of Bécassine seems to have overshadowed, if not all but erased, the memory of other early women principal characters from the medium’s collective consciousness. The original mischievous incarnation of Lili, however, seems to have provided a blueprint for the future depiction of female primary characters during the first half of the century in France and Belgium, as, as shall be seen, almost all were to be drawn as little girls in light-hearted adventures, drawn in traditionally structured strips that separated text and image, a recipe not mirrored in either style or substance by pre-war US imports featuring female leads and one which certainly did not survive the turning point that was to be 1949.

Following the introduction of L’Espiègle Lili in 1909, no popular recurrent female bande dessinée figures are identifiable until a decade later. In November 1919, a new journal for girls was published, its first issue appearing as a free supplement to Le Petit Vingtième.⁴ The journal, named Lili after the character of the same name, made a brief claim to unisex appeal in a sub-heading on its first cover page that encouraged adults to ‘[g]ive this magazine to a little girl or boy and make them smile’ (Anon. 1919: 1).⁵ However, this request was never repeated in subsequent issues and even within this first publication the uniquely female direction of the illustré was clear. Despite the name of the journal, the series Lili was never to appear in it, continuing its pre-publication in Fillette. The name of this new journal was connected to Jo Valle’s mischievous creation, however, as explained in a letter from the character Lili to the readers of the illustré in its first issue in which she described her pleasure at becoming ‘the inspiration for a new magazine’ (Anon. 1919: 3).⁶ Lili, which was to have a much shorter lifespan than the publications discussed above (it was discontinued in 1926), produced one strip notable for its regularity, which it introduced in its first issue: Ninette et Clo-Clo. This new series followed the humorous and harmless exploits of the 8-year-old Ninette and her younger sister Clo-Clo. Jo Valle, the original writer of L’Espiègle Lili, provided the texts alongside André Galland’s drawings. A rigidly formatted structure saw each story composed of three strips, divided into two rectangular panels on either side of a circular panel with text in prose, equally divided and placed below its corresponding illustration. The bande dessinée featuring female figures and directed towards a female readership remained, at this time, stylistically traditional.

Following Ninette et Clo-Clo, the next notable female-led bande dessinée to be regularly included in a French-language publication did not appear until 1929, with the Fillette strip Nigaude et Malicette.⁷ There are no strips featuring women principal characters from earlier in the 1920s in France or Belgium identified in any reference book or source consulted in the compilation of this history, suggesting a dearth of production apparently not experienced throughout the wider international medium as the appearance in the United States of popular strips Winnie Winkle (1920) or Little Orphan Annie (1924) attests (both of these American strips are featured in such bande dessinée dictionaries as those of Gaumer and Moliterni).⁸ This lack of comparably remembered female figures implies a particular reluctance on the part of the Franco-Belgian medium in the early twentieth century to include female characters in its strips. This reluctance would continue, to varying extents, throughout the century. Nigaude et Malicette made its debut in the twenty-first year of Fillette’s production, in the issue of 29th January 1929, signed by Ribémont. Occupying a double page in each issue, it followed the format of the francophone strips created before it, with frame-less images separated by sizeable gutter spaces rather than occupying distinctly outlined panels, and all text placed below the illustrations. From the pages of Fillette, and later through the course of four albums published by the Société Parisienne d’Edition (SPE), it told the story of two cheeky young girls who, after creating continual mischief in their rural village, are each sent to work as maids for rich families. The pair is sometimes accompanied in their adventures by Zoé, a chef to one of the families. Zoé is a rotund, middle-aged black woman, drawn with excessively large lips, commanding a poor level of French and described as ‘lazy and greedy’⁹ (Ribémont 1929: 3), reminiscent to the modern-day reader of the Congolese inhabitants of Hergé’s later Tintin au Congo and to the 1920s reader of African characters in the work of Alain de Saint-Ogan.¹⁰ Her appearance and occupation strongly suggest her to be a bande dessinée incarnation of the ‘black mammy’ stereotype, and it is interesting to note that she is not the first to grace the pages of Fillette: in its publications from the mid-1920s the journal included characters of African origin in non-recurring or short-term strips in several of its issues, with the ‘black mammy’ figure featuring among them. The mother of Mokoko, Peggy’s black friend from the strip Les Aventures du bébé Peggy (1926), for example, is very similar to Zoé in appearance and behaviour. The presence of this stereotype in these bandes dessinées would seem to clash with Jan Nederveen Pieterse’s assertion in White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture that the black mammy stereotype was largely confined to the United States, with European popular culture overwhelmingly sexualizing its images of the black female (Pieterse 1995: 178).¹¹

Whilst Nigaude et Malicette is absent from both Moliterni and Gaumer’s encyclopaedic volumes on the bande dessinée (1994, 1997), as with Winnie Winkle and Little Orphan Annie the imported American strips featuring female principal characters which appeared, translated, in French-language publications from the 1930s and would dominate female-centred bande dessinée until the Second World War receive complete entries. The first to appear was Little Annie Rooney, translated into French as La Petite Annie or Les Malheurs d’Annie (Gaumer and Moliterni 1997: 483), which made its debut in Fillette in 1933. It then moved to Le Journal de Mickey the following year, making it the first regularly published female-led strip to appear in a French-language publication not specifically directed towards girls, and the only strip prominently featuring a female character to be included in the e...