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The Bechdel Test, sometimes called the Mo Movie Measure or Bechdel Rule, is a simple test which names the following three criteria: (1) it has to have at least two women in it, (2) who talk to each other, about (3) something besides a man.
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Friendship is one of those incidentals in literary history, a biographical note in the margins of a larger, longer story of movements, schools, and traditions. 1 propose, however, to linger in those margins in order to pursue the implications of friendship for French women writers of the mid-twentieth century, because it seems to me that there is a bigger story to be discovered there concerning women's abjection within the institution of literature and some of the solutions they found to it. Simone de Beauvoir and Violette Leduc were friends-albeit with differing degrees of investment in their friendship- and although neither of them knew Monique Wittig (nearly thirty years their junior), all three women had friendships with Nathalie Sarraute, who belonged to the same literary generation as Beauvoir and Leduc and became a lifelong friend of Wittig's after the publication of L'Opoponax in 1964. Sarraute's connection to these three writers makes her a necessary part of the story of female friendship in the French literary institution of the twentieth century, and what interests me about these friendships is precisely their literary rather than their personal or private significance-in other words, their status as a literary fact.
In adopting the term "literary fact," I am appropriating the expression first coined in 1924 by the Russian Formalist Yuri Tynyanov, who clinched its currency in 1929 with the inclusion of his essay "Literaturnyi fakt" in the volume Arkhaisty i Novatory (Archaists and Innovators).1 I use the term in the first instance to refer to something like the event described by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own as she reads an imaginary novel, Life's Adventure, by an imaginary woman writer Mary Carmichael. By nice coincidence, Woolf's essay was also published in 1929. At that time, Nathalie Sarraute was pursuing a desultory career in law and expecting her second child. She did not begin writing until three years later, but it's quite possible that she read the essay in the...