Marguerite Yourcenar was a literary rebel who looked to the past to break the rules of her present.
Born in Belgium, she eventually moved to the United States, where she wrote and taught at Sarah Lawrence College in NY.
Best known for her masterpiece Memoirs of Hadrian, she made history in 1980 as the first woman elected to the Académie Française—shattering a 345-year-old boys’ club.
While she famously rejected the political label of “feminist” in her public life, her art told a much bolder story.
In her raw, 1936 lyrical book Fires (Feux), Yourcenar used ancient Greek myths to openly explore intense, same-sex love and female desire. Dropping a queer narrative into the hyper-conservative society of the 1930s wasn’t just brave; it was revolutionary. She didn’t march for rights—she simply wrote with the absolute freedom that society tried to deny her.
Fires is a brilliant read that immerses the reader in monologues and narratives, weaving in strong female prototypes like Sappho, Antigone, Clytemnestra, and Phaedo – women who stood out through the centuries for their stands, their views, their talents, and their ‘rebellions’.
I love to shine the spotlight on brilliant cultural ‘greats’. I want to share this post I saw today on X and add it to Yourcenar’s ‘spotlight ‘!
The following excerpt is from Yourcenar’s Les Yeux Ouverts – a fascinating transcribed ‘conversation’ with Matthieu Galey – in which she reveals her personal views on so many topics including drugs, spirituality, relationships, love, and feminism. This excerpt is from the post by Paroles d’ Auteurs on X.
Magnificent Text by Marguerite Yourcenar (Les Yeux Ouverts, 1980) 🤩
from the post on x
“I condemn the ignorance that reigns at this moment in democracies as much as in totalitarian regimes. This ignorance is so strong, often so total, that it seems willed by the system, if not by the regime. I have often reflected on what the education of the child might be.
I think there should be basic studies, very simple ones, where the child would learn that he exists within the universe, on a planet whose resources he will later have to spare, that he depends on air, water, all living beings, and that the slightest error or the slightest violence risks destroying everything.
He would learn that men have killed each other in wars that have only ever produced more wars, and that every country arranges its history, mendaciously, in a way that flatters its pride.
He would be taught enough of the past to feel connected to the men who preceded him, to admire them where they deserve it, without making idols of them, any more than of the present or a hypothetical future.
One would try to familiarize him at once with books and with things; he would know the names of plants, he would know the animals without submitting to the hideous vivisections imposed on children and very young adolescents under the pretext of biology.
; he would learn to give first aid to the wounded; his sex education would include attending a birth, his mental education the sight of the gravely ill and the dead.
One would also give him the simple notions of morality without which life in society is impossible, instruction that the elementary and middle schools no longer dare to provide in this country.
In matters of religion, no practice or dogma would be imposed on him, but one would tell him something about all the great religions of the world, and especially that of the country where he is, to awaken in him respect and destroy in advance certain odious prejudices.
One would teach him to love work when work is useful, and not to let himself be taken in by advertising imposture, beginning with the one that praises more or less adulterated sweets to him, preparing future cavities and diabetuses for him.
There is certainly a way to speak to children about truly important things earlier than is done.”
by Paroles d’auteurs
@Paroles_auteurs
Discover more from Erratica
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
