Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis
Summary (from the publisher): A year in Paris . . . since World War II, countless American students have been lured by that vision—and been transformed by their sojourn in the City of Light. Dreaming in French tells three stories of that experience, and how it changed the lives of three extraordinary American women.
All three women would go on to become icons, key figures in American cultural, intellectual, and political life, but when they embarked for France, they were young, little-known, uncertain about their future, and drawn to the culture, sophistication, and drama that only Paris could offer. Yet their backgrounds and their dreams couldn’t have been more different. Jacqueline Bouvier was a twenty-year-old debutante, a Catholic girl from a wealthy East Coast family. Susan Sontag was twenty-four, a precocious Jewish intellectual from a North Hollywood family of modest means, and Paris was a refuge from motherhood, a failing marriage, and graduate work in philosophy at Oxford. Angela Davis, a French major at Brandeis from a prominent African American family in Birmingham, Alabama, found herself the only black student in her year abroad program—in a summer when all the news from Birmingham was of unprecedented racial violence.
Kaplan takes readers into the lives, hopes, and ambitions of these young women, tracing their paths to Paris and tracking the discoveries, intellectual adventures, friendships, and loves that they found there. For all three women, France was far from a passing fancy; rather, Kaplan shows, the year abroad continued to influence them, a significant part of their intellectual and cultural makeup, for the rest of their lives. Jackie Kennedy carried her love of France to the White House and to her later career as a book editor, bringing her cultural and linguistic fluency to everything from art and diplomacy to fashion and historic restoration—to the extent that many, including Jackie herself, worried that she might seem “too French.” Sontag found in France a model for the life of the mind that she was determined to lead; the intellectual world she observed from afar during that first year in Paris inspired her most important work and remained a key influence—to be grappled with, explored, and transcended—the rest of her life. Davis, meanwhile, found that her Parisian vantage strengthened her sense of political exile from racism at home and brought a sense of solidarity with Algerian independence. For her, Paris was a city of political commitment, activism, and militancy, qualities that would deeply inform her own revolutionary agenda and soon make her a hero to the French writers she had once studied.
Kaplan, whose own junior year abroad played a prominent role in her classic memoir, French Lessons, spins these three quite different stories into one evocative biography, brimming with the ferment and yearnings of youth and shot through with the knowledge of how a single year—and a magical city—can change a whole life. No one who has ever dreamed of Paris should miss it.
All three women would go on to become icons, key figures in American cultural, intellectual, and political life, but when they embarked for France, they were young, little-known, uncertain about their future, and drawn to the culture, sophistication, and drama that only Paris could offer. Yet their backgrounds and their dreams couldn’t have been more different. Jacqueline Bouvier was a twenty-year-old debutante, a Catholic girl from a wealthy East Coast family. Susan Sontag was twenty-four, a precocious Jewish intellectual from a North Hollywood family of modest means, and Paris was a refuge from motherhood, a failing marriage, and graduate work in philosophy at Oxford. Angela Davis, a French major at Brandeis from a prominent African American family in Birmingham, Alabama, found herself the only black student in her year abroad program—in a summer when all the news from Birmingham was of unprecedented racial violence.
Kaplan takes readers into the lives, hopes, and ambitions of these young women, tracing their paths to Paris and tracking the discoveries, intellectual adventures, friendships, and loves that they found there. For all three women, France was far from a passing fancy; rather, Kaplan shows, the year abroad continued to influence them, a significant part of their intellectual and cultural makeup, for the rest of their lives. Jackie Kennedy carried her love of France to the White House and to her later career as a book editor, bringing her cultural and linguistic fluency to everything from art and diplomacy to fashion and historic restoration—to the extent that many, including Jackie herself, worried that she might seem “too French.” Sontag found in France a model for the life of the mind that she was determined to lead; the intellectual world she observed from afar during that first year in Paris inspired her most important work and remained a key influence—to be grappled with, explored, and transcended—the rest of her life. Davis, meanwhile, found that her Parisian vantage strengthened her sense of political exile from racism at home and brought a sense of solidarity with Algerian independence. For her, Paris was a city of political commitment, activism, and militancy, qualities that would deeply inform her own revolutionary agenda and soon make her a hero to the French writers she had once studied.
Kaplan, whose own junior year abroad played a prominent role in her classic memoir, French Lessons, spins these three quite different stories into one evocative biography, brimming with the ferment and yearnings of youth and shot through with the knowledge of how a single year—and a magical city—can change a whole life. No one who has ever dreamed of Paris should miss it.
Review: In this work of non-fiction, Alice Kaplan details the lives of three disparate American women, who all had one key detail in common - each spent a year abroad in Paris, a period of their lives which deeply shaped each of them. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis were three profoundly different women and each visited Paris in different decades between the 1940s and 60s, but each returned to their home country shaped by their experiences abroad. This work is a "triptych of three young women's cultural, academic, and social lives in Paris, and a study of influence in several directions" (2).
In some ways, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy was the most dissimilar from the other two women detailed in this book. She travelled to Paris as part of a study abroad program in the 40s and, unlike the other women, had relatively plush accommodations with a well to do host family and enjoyed high brow social events throughout her stay. Unlike the other two women, she was not a writer and little insight into her thoughts or feelings on her time abroad are known. Her section of the book comes across as if from a vast distance; the author analyzing the glamorous First Lady from a great remove. Kaplan and her readers are yet more spectators of the icon that is Jackie. Indeed, much of the influence of her time in France is credited to her love for French fashion, design, and reading French authors and the negative feedback she received for bringing this French influence into the White House.
Susan Sontag, unlike the other two women, traveled to Paris after marriage and the birth of her son, and did so without an affiliation with a study abroad program. The influence of her time in Paris is keenly felt in her later writing. Susan seemed trapped between two worlds: "The American literary establishment called attention to her by finding her literature impossibly French; the French literary establishment insisted she wrote like an American" (122).
Angela Davis, who was the last of the three to visit Paris, did so in the same means as Jackie: as an accomplished French student as part of a study abroad program. As an African American, France offered the opportunity to "take off the mask" of racial identity (155). Years later, Angela became closely tied with the Black Panther Party and yet maintained massive support from France, as she was seen as a student and product of French thinking. For France, Angela was seen thus: "an African American girl studying in France acquires revolutionary wisdom from the decolonization struggles and returns home to challenge the powers that be and triumph over her enemies" (221).
I had varying levels of interest in each of the women detailed in this book, but I did appreciate the analytical rather than strictly biographical take that the author provides. Additionally, I found the organization of this book helped facilitate focus on the influence of Paris for each woman. For each woman, there is a chapter detailing their time in Paris, followed by a chapter about their return that demonstrates how their time abroad shaped their lives in the following years.
Although in many ways the three women detailed in this book seem to have little in common, it was interesting to consider the influence of spending time in another county and immersed in another language has on individuals. Kaplan argues that "France gave each of these women a deep and lasting confidence, confirmed their spirit of adventure, and guaranteed their freedom from home constraints" (223). Of course, it could be argued that each of these women were already poised for the prominent roles they would one day hold, but it is also undeniable that Paris helped shape them and contributed to their stories.
Stars: 3
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