Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- Introduction: A Clash of the Comparable
- Chapter I The Creation of the American in Paris: The American
- Chapter II The Splendor and Misery of the American Scientist: L'Ève future
- Chapter III The American Woman and the Invention of Paris: The Custom of the Country
- Chapter IV The Expatriate Idyll: The Sun Also Rises
- Chapter V Truths and Delusions: The Cold War in Les Mandarins
- Chapter VI Embracing American Culture: Cherokee
- Chapter VII An American Excursion into French Fiction: The Book of Illusions
- Chapter VIII Rerouting: Ça n'existe pas l'Amérique
- Chapter IX L'Américaine in Paris: Le Divorce
- Conclusion: Stasis and Movement
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Chapter IX - L'Américaine in Paris: Le Divorce
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- Introduction: A Clash of the Comparable
- Chapter I The Creation of the American in Paris: The American
- Chapter II The Splendor and Misery of the American Scientist: L'Ève future
- Chapter III The American Woman and the Invention of Paris: The Custom of the Country
- Chapter IV The Expatriate Idyll: The Sun Also Rises
- Chapter V Truths and Delusions: The Cold War in Les Mandarins
- Chapter VI Embracing American Culture: Cherokee
- Chapter VII An American Excursion into French Fiction: The Book of Illusions
- Chapter VIII Rerouting: Ça n'existe pas l'Amérique
- Chapter IX L'Américaine in Paris: Le Divorce
- Conclusion: Stasis and Movement
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Paris affects the American visitors, but it does not seem they affect Paris very much.
(Diane Johnson, Into a Paris Quartier, 172)What facilitated the transfer to the new celebratory mood in the French intelligentsia's perception of the United States [in the 1970s] was that the phenomena taking place on the shores of the Pacific did not contradict the prevalent opinion among the French literati that American culture was unacceptable.
(Jean-Philippe Mathy, Extrême-Occident, 198)Our American [expatriate] world is, as it always has been, a world within a world, more or less invisible to the real inhabitants.
(Diane Johnson, Into a Paris Quartier, 180)Versailles tend à devenir le lieu principal du culte monarchique.
(Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Le Roi-machine, 137)Isabel Walker, the main character in Diane Johnson's Le Divorce (1997), represents a tentative effort to project a different American attitude toward France and the French. This change will develop slowly over the course of a novel, whose principal irony is that as Isabel's openness increases, the French attitude toward Americans, relatively positive at the beginning of Le Divorce, begins to regress until, toward the end, it appears to be an updated version of what Mme Bellegarde and her older son thought about Christopher Newman in The American.
L'Américaine à Paris is the French translation of Diane Johnson's bestseller, which deals with the travails, triumphs, and disappointments of a young American woman in contemporary France. Part of the novel's appeal stems from Johnson's skill at showing, with considerable humor, how French and Americans’ perceptions of each other are largely filtered through longstanding clichés. Thus, Americans like Paris but are somewhat distrustful of the French, whereas a Frenchman might be charmed by a young woman's “Americanness,” without being able to explain what it is (124). Americans tend to be uncultivated, while the French are sophisticated, yet fearful that their traditional way of life has been imperiled by the changes wrought by the influx of Americans: “The end of la civilization française? … I suppose when it became ‘fromage ou dessert’ instead of ‘fromage et dessert’” (41; emphasis original).
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- Frères EnnemisThe French in American Literature, Americans in French Literature, pp. 234 - 258Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2018