'In Florence’s childhood, there is a Thing you’re not supposed to talk about. It seems like everyone knows about it… except for her. And she can’t ask any questions—it’s forbidden to speak the word. What happens to children who grow up in prudish isolation, once they hit puberty? Can they ever overcome the shame instilled by a sexless education? In this autobiographical story, Florence Dupré la Tour unveils her childhood in heart-wrenching inks and watercolours: a story of the heavy weight of tradition that forces women to be submissive, and how to resist and escape that fate.'
Maiden is an autobiographical graphic novel from french writer and illustrator Florence Dupré la Tour, in which she talks readers through her early childhood, and of the challenges she went through as she grew out of childhood into puberty.
Florence had something of a privileged childhood, growing up in well off, high societal immigrant area of Buenos Ares, whilst others suffered poverty around them. Florence admits that she grew up in a bubble. Even after moving back to France the family lived in relative luxury, living in a huge country estate, and seeming to have most of their needs met. Despite this, however, Florence's childhood wasn't perfect, and you're left with the sense that her father was quite abusive towards her and her siblings. The book contains a scene where her father forces them to drink spoilt milk before he'd let them leave the dining table, and another where he poured yogurt over her head when she refused to eat it.
You come to feel for young Florence because of these moments, and you can't help but feel that many of the issues she describes growing up with in this book comes from either inattentive or abusive parenting. This even seems to translate into her main issues in the book, growing up without really understanding about the challenges she faced during puberty.
There are quite a few scenes in this book where you see a younger Florence trying to understand how the world works, and in particular what it means to grow up and become a woman, and most of these moments end with her either being fobbed off with half truths or vague hand waving, or just flat out mocked.
Florence is also raised a Christian, and much of her childhood in France seems to be centred around the church and traditional teachings, all of which seems to add to her difficulty in understanding the world, and what it means to be female. She's taught that women are weak, and must be subservient to their husbands, but sees through the abuse her mother suffers how damaging such things can be. She is told time and again that she must be like these women, but never feels like that is the role she wants to have in life.
Her life seems to take a turn around the time she hits puberty, which is also when the family move to Guadeloupe. Now not only is Florence having to face the issue of getting used to these physical changes within herself, but she's been thrown into an environment she feels completely alien in. This part of the book did give me a little bit of trouble, I have to admit, mainly due to the depiction of the people native to Guadeloupe. Here anyone who's Black is drawn as over the top caricatures, and whilst this is somewhat true for everyone in the book these depictions were uncomfortably close to racially insensitive drawings from decades past that it took me quite by surprise.
Now, I don't know if this is intentional, because this was how Florence viewed Black people at this younger age. There's a moment where she makes it clear that she had never met a Black person before, and that she had been taught before this that Black people were 'a primitive mass of uneducated savages. In short: inferior'. With how conservative, and dare I say backwards, some of her upbringing and education was it doesn't surprise me that she was raised to see people of colour this way, but I did get the sense as the book continued that this was a view that Florence would go on to challenge, and not one that she held in any kind of high regard. The book does end with Florence being asked out by a boy who's Black, and whilst we don't hear her answer in this first volume, I suspect that this is a relationship that we will see going forward, and I hope the start of her challenging her fathers racist beliefs.
There's a lot presented in this book, yet in some ways a lot of it feels like a preface, groundwork being laid out for more interesting things to come in future volumes. I can see the things that have transpired in this volume going on to inform and shape Florence going forward, but suspect that the more interesting stuff, such as her standing up to her father, will be coming in the next book. As such, whilst this book didn't tick all the boxes of things I was hoping for, it does make me eager to read the next one.
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