Suite Francaise

Némirovsky was an outsider in French wartime patriarchal society as a Jewish woman lacking official French nationality. The situation of the female characters in Suite is less dire. They do not face the stigma and prosecution of stateless Jewish people, and insofar as they are fostered, married into other families, or the mistresses of powerful men, they are second-class citizens, but citizens nonetheless. This has conflicting consequences in wartime: on the one hand it is understandable that given their second-class status, they cannot unequivocally feel simple patriotism or a wish for a return to normalcy; one the other hand, the equally understandable affinity some younger women have for German soldiers is highly problematic, given that they are French citizens.

In Storm in June, Arlette, Monsieur Corbin’s mistress, is an outsider. Exempt from both the privileges and strictures that characterize official wives, Arlette looks out for herself and flirts to curry favor and pass the time. We hear of her “gadding about […] with those two English pilots” and later, when the Germans occupy France, entertaining soldiers of enemy nationality (38). Arlette uses her charms and ruthlessness to secure a passage out of Paris in Monsieur Corbin’s wife’s car, thereby displacing the Michauds, whom he originally promised to drive. However, on the road, Arlette soon tires of Corbin, who seems weak where she is strong. Thus, when Corbin’s face is “distorted with terror” when loses his possessions in the Tours bombing, she emerges from the same crisis “without having lost a single handkerchief, a single box of make-up, a single pair of shoes” (91). Portraying Arlette as the ultimate survivor, Némirovsky also characterizes her as being out for herself, only, as when she steals Corbin’s car and then contemplates a future of “new rich men” whom she’ll take advantage of (92).

In Dolce, while Madeleine Sabarie and Lucile Angellier are married, they are also outsiders. Madeleine was adopted into the Sabarie family, and though she catches the eye of the son of the house, Benoît, has many notions of escape. These include becoming a nun, or, conversely, attaching herself to gentlemanly strangers, whether the Parisian soldier Jean-Marie or the comely, slick-mannered German soldier Kurt Bonnet. Benoît, who feels threatened by Madeleine’s fascination with escapism and the upper classes, muses that “people shouldn’t take in foster-children, you never know where they come from,” adding that the obscurity of her origins is what makes her “feel some vague bond with strangers, with the enemy, so long as he happened to be a gentleman with fine clothes and clean hands” (232). Madeleine’s being a foster daughter, which prompts her to imagine that she hails from refined origins, thus weakens her link to the reality of her married life.

The position of a daughter-in-law who leaves her family of origin to reside with her husband’s is an extension of that of a foster daughter. Lucile Angellier, whose dowry proves less than expected, is emotionally jettisoned by her philandering husband. She is both trapped in her mother-in-law’s household and not a part of it. Thus she, like Madeleine, is susceptible to romantic fantasy, although her relationship with Lieutenant Bruno von Falk is much more intense than Madeleine’s with Kurt Bonnet. Ironically, the crisis in the plot that forces Benoît to escape from the village—his shooting Bonnet—is what moves her to transfer her loyalty to her in-laws and to the French.

In Némirovsky’s various portrays of female characters as outsiders, she underscores their second-class status in a patriarchal society, which in turn explains their ambivalence about existing relationships and wishes to escape them.