SOURCE: Barbour, Sarah. “A Feminist Reading Tropismes.” In Nathalie Sarraute and the Feminist Reader: Identities in Process, pp. 60-72. London, England: Associated University Presses, 1993.

In the following essay, Barbour acknowledges that although many critics have attempted to read Sarraute's Tropismes as a feminist text, the work is ultimately a non-gender-specific text that is to be experienced through the semi-participation of the reader within the narrative.

My “discovery” in 1979 of Nathalie Sarraute's Tropismes resonated within current discussions among feminists about a woman writer's relationship to literary tradition and the difference between writing by women and men.¹ Some feminist literary critics in this country were analyzing the stereotypical roles assigned to female characters in men's writing and others were engaged in (re)discovering writings by women. The “revolutionary” qualities of Sarraute's work seemed to embody the challenge to patriarchal “norms” that these critics found in writings by women.

In critical...