ABSTRACT
As the century turned, divorce remained one of the major objects of retrospection in the society’s self-analysis. Divorce was praised by the likes of the Margueritte brothers, the male feminist authors of Deux Vies, as a landmark on the road to modernizing French mores. Divorce displaced the notion of a single sexual relationship sanctioned by the civil contract, and propounded a model of encounters and commitments which were no longer unique and, as the twentieth century opened, might even take a serial form. This shift from linear to serial lives had profound implications for narrative. Camille Pert’s novel series suggests an ideologically resonant alignment between, on the one hand, the discourse on the blurring of boundaries between girlhood and womanhood, and on the other, that marker of refashioned sexual mores in the early to middle years of the Third Republic, divorce.
