I have now settled into temporary digs in Paris, from which I’ll be sending Lingua Franca missives for the next five months. I have dusted off my French and plan to delight in a language that, I realize, drives many English speakers mad.
One of the first things I began thinking about as I navigated around my new neighborhood is this vexed question of l’écriture inclusive, on which I hope to follow up with some local experts. Before I left the States, my French exchange student commented that she thought French could never be gender-neutral; as a native French speaker, she thinks of the material things of the world in gendered terms. That is the quickest giveaway, I suspect, of the foreigner’s lack of competence in French, and probably in other languages that distinguish nouns by gender.
My French is good enough that instinct generally lands me in the right place. Yesterday, for instance, referring to a box of books due to arrive, I noted that they were packed with un emballage assez fort, and it turned out that the masculine was correct, probably because of the –age suffix on the noun. Still, unable to grasp why a cup should be feminine and a glass masculine, I am always tempted to order une verre rather than un verre of vin rouge. Clearly, I haven’t yet achieved this innately gendered sense of the world, whose appeal lies not just in mastering French but also in perceiving a world that I imagine as more lively and engaged than what I perceive in English.
Or, perhaps, what I perceived as a child. In Emma Donoghue’s novel Room, adapted into a film in 2015, 5-year-old Jack sees the objects of his closed-in world as living beings, and therefore gendered:
I jump onto Rocker to look at Watch, he says 07:14. I can skateboard on Rocker without holding on to her, then I whee back onto Duvet and I’m snowboarding instead.
My exchange student gave a nod to the Disney film Beauty and the Beast, in which various of the Beast’s former companions have been turned into household objects. “I don’t know, but I suppose their sex matches the gender of the nouns representing them,” she said. “It would be very disturbing to me if a table were represented by a man.” I have not delved deeply into either the original 18th-century fairy tale or the famous film by Jean Cocteau, but I believe the Disney animation is the first version with a full cast of personified objects. I checked and came up with nine objects voiced by men or women whose gender matches French gender designations, although three characters — Chip, the boy teacup (la tasse in French); the young-woman feather duster (le plumeau); and the elderly male grandfather clock (la pendule) — fail to match up. (Lumière, the candelabra, is voiced by a man, and lumière itself is a feminine noun, but candélabre is masculine.)
The neo-Whorfian psychologist Lera Boroditsky has run experiments suggesting that the gender ascribed to objects affects how native speakers describe those objects and how they treat them artistically. A word like key, for instance, finds itself described with stereotypically feminine adjectives like lovely, shiny, golden when the speaker’s language has assigned it feminine gender, and with adjectives like hard, heavy, jagged when the language has assigned it masculine gender. In art, German painters depict death, a masculine noun, as a man, while Russian painters tend to depict death, a feminine noun, as a woman.
I have no idea whether this theory holds up in most cases or across most languages. What’s more tantalizing to me, as I make French a central part of my daily life, is whether I will begin thinking of the objects of my world in terms more gendered than before. First, of course, I have to get the gender right. Pour me un verre de vin rouge, and I’ll loosen up my tongue.