Le Château de mes Soeurs. Des Brontë aux Kardashian, enquête sur les fratries féminines (“My Sisters’ Castle. From the Brontës to the Kardashians, an investigation into female siblings”) is a book written by Blanche Leridon, the French editorial director of Institut Montaigne, published in 2024.
The book is a study inviting us to “think about sisterhood through the prism of sisters’ lived experience”, in order to dispel stereotypes about sister-siblings and provide visibility to a term that has become political.
French: “The aversion to the feminine plural”
Another French author, Adeline Dieudonné, wondered in 2023, through the narrator of her novel Reste (“Stay”): “It’s curious, there’s no word to designate a group of sisters, as if the brother were self-evident, always. Could we say a sororie?”. Her questioning stems from the absence or invisibility of a French equivalent of fraternité (“fraternity”), the English word sorority. Blanche Leridon makes the same observation of a lack of vocabulary in the French language to designate clans of girls and women of the same blood.
In Latin, soror refers to the noun “sister” and the adjectives “similar/same”. In 1975, Albert Blaise’s dictionary of medieval Latin indicated that the form sororitas appeared in the Middle Ages, to designate a religious community of women. The dictionary also mentions the verb form sororio⸱are, the action of living as sisters in an abbey, which can be translated as “to sororize”. It took until 1546 for the term to leave this exclusively religious meaning in the writings of Rabelais, with the first occurrence of the French form sororité, designating a “community of women having a relationship, bonds” or the “quality, state of sisters”. And then the word is forgotten, disappearing from usage or rather “sleeps in the dictionary”, as the French Chloé Delaume writes in her 2021 book Sororité (“Sorority”). To name sisters, in duos, groups or clans, the word fraternité (“fraternity”), derived from frère (“brother”), has monopolized usage.
Blanche Leridon sees this “omission” in the French language as the trace of “a whole history, a whole sociology which meant that, in reality, we didn’t really want to give words to it, because we didn’t really want to recognize the existence of this reality… Because for a very long time, having only girls was considered a burden, it was considered an anomaly”. As Leridon reminds us, this is a reality that still exists in certain societies, notably in China, India, and Armenia, where giving birth to girls is still perceived as a failure.
Indeed, the author highlights the “aversion to the feminine plural” as one of the main reasons for the negation of a masculine equivalent of the word fraternity. She notably explains that, since the establishment of patrilineality as the basic system of filiation in France towards at least the end of the 14th century, having daughters was seen as a burden, as they were destined to take their husband’s name and give him children. Leridon gives numerous examples of these prejudices about female existence and sisters, proposing “a form of archaeology of sisterhood” to study the deep-rooted idea that naming siblings as feminine has no value.
Sister archetypes: the models, the rivals, and the evil ones
Leridon considers that a “perpetuation of clichés” fostered by popular culture shapes our conception of sisterhood. Three main sister archetypes stand out: model sisters – like Comtesse de Ségur’s Les Petites Filles modèles (Good Little Girls) -, rival sisters – like the Kardashian sisters -, and evil sisters – like the witches in the Charmed series. The author, who herself comes from a sisterly sibling, explains how these three representations proved to be limiting for her and her eldest daughters, once they reached adulthood.
“These representations have an absolutely huge impact on how you build, how you grow as a girl and as a girl member of a female homeland.”
Lediron also sets out to show how, in addition to fictional sisters, it is real sisters who have been forced into these predefined categories. She explains that, in the collective imagination, sisters are necessarily rivals. Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac are used as examples of this rivalry, which is dramatized and instrumentalized by celebrity magazines. The author explains that if we examine the testimonies of the two sisters and those close to them at the time, we see that this rivalry was conditioned and that they were, above all, very close.
For Leridon, titling her essay “My Sisters’ Castel” means that it’s possible for sisters to build their own image, with its own architecture: “We don’t give in to easy binarities or misogynistic shortcuts, and it’s under these conditions that beautiful, stimulating stories emerge”.
Finally, she considers that Disney’s Frozen offers hope for the future of sisterly representation in popular culture, as the character of Anna is delivered by sororal love rather than the love of a man. Leridon also observes the Kardashian sisters with indulgence, seeing in them “in moderation”, beyond the rivalry, “something cheeky, liberating, formative too”.
“Making sisters”: a political act
Opposing the social convention that sisters should gradually drift apart in adolescence to form a family in another way – such as with a man whose surname they will take – Blanche Leridon encourages us to explore all the “creative, even subversive, possibilities of sorority”. In particular, sisterhood can be political, as the Women’s Liberation Movement demonstrated in the 1970s when it argued that “making sisters ” is a political act. According to Leridon, “By setting up sisters as models, we do not consent to the [patriarchal] system: we atomize it from within”.
Long left dormant in dictionaries, as Chloé Delaume writes, the concept of a sorority has been resurrected in the #Metoo era, where being sisters means being together, stronger, and therefore less intimidated. The novelist sees sorority as a sine qua non for feminist revolution. French activists in the Women’s Liberation Movement drew inspiration from their American counterparts to bring the term sorority back into use. Sororité now stands for fraternité, just as brotherhood was opposed to sisterhood, a term popularized in 1970 by Robin Morgan’s book Sisterhood is Powerful.
However, in France, fraternity retains a very close link with the ideas of the French Revolution and the Lumières, so much so that the term sorority has difficulty establishing itself and its credibility. Essayist Raphaël Enthoven summed up this conflict in a phrase coined in 2017: “Sorority is to fraternity what a supporters’ club is to a nation.”