Dying in Detail: Feminine death and the question of authorship in 19th century French fiction Open Access
Burba, Audrey Anne-Gaelle (2012)
Published
Abstract
Abstract
Dying in Detail:
Feminine death and the question of authorship in 19th century
French fiction
This dissertation examines the paradoxical status of the
feminine death scene throughout 19th century French fiction.
Focusing on novels and a novella produced after the birth of
Realism, Honoré de Balzac's Le Lys dans la Vallée
(1835), Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856) ,
Emile Zola's Nana (1880), and Guy de Maupassant's "Yvette"
(1884), it is specifically interested in looking at the effects
that the growing importance of the detail in narrative production
has had on the representations of feminine deaths.
Certainly, the most obvious effect has been on the aesthetic of the death scene. The 19th century's early idealization of the dead feminine form, characteristic of the romantic tradition, is gradually replaced by a more gruesome depiction of death. Who can forget the smallpox which turns Nana, the perfection of the feminine form, into an oozy mass of discarded flesh? or Emma's horrendous suicide, punctuated by the detailed descriptions of her vomit (first white and gravelly, then thick and black as ink)? Narrated in detail, these feminine deaths appear fiercely opposed to the alignment of death and beauty. Each text stresses the physical symptoms of death and highlights the body of the protagonist: she rots, yellows, pales, and decays.
However subversive they may seem in the realm of aesthetics, the
"detailed deaths" of feminine protagonists also raise troubling
questions with regard to narrative production and authorship. The
three chapters which make up this dissertation examine the ways
that details, instead of participating in the narrative's
elaboration, appear as fragments of another narrative. Rather than
operate in a manner consistent with their narrative function, as
the tools of the masculine author, the details that fill the deaths
of feminine protagonists depict a woman's death as a conscious act
of authorship. Mme de Mortsauf, Emma, Nana and Yvette all fiercely
appropriate the odious realities of their deaths to author
something other than the fiction to which they belong.
Table of Contents
Table of contents
Introduction: Inusta feminea mortis infamia 1
I. Le Temps des belles mortes 1
II. Kalos thanatos 7
III. In detail 12
CHAPTER 1: Twice Dead : Madame de Mortsauf's deaths in Le Lys
dans la vallée 15
I. Failed eloquence 18
II. An Odious death 30
III. Beautiful deaths 37
IV. Opium & Poetry 46
V. A Deadly fiction 54
CHAPTER 2 : Moles and Beauty Marks : Signs of sex and signs of
death in Nana 59
I. Signs of sex 69
1. The Anatomy of Venus 69
2. Displaced anatomy 85
II. Signs of death 93
III. Petits riens 102
CHAPTER 3: Voir Yvette et mourir 106
I. Quelle fille? 108
II. Liseuses enragées 115
III. Literary suicides 126
IV. Endings 139
Conclusion:Death in a flower bed 151
Bibliography 159
Document Outline- Distribution Agreement
- Approval Sheet
- Abstract Cover Page
- Abstract
- Cover Page
- Acknowledgements
- Table of contents
- Dissertation - Body
About this Dissertation
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Primary PDF
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Dying in Detail: Feminine death and the question of authorship in 19th century French fiction () | 2018-08-28 13:02:56 -0400 |
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Supplemental Files
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Table of contents.docx () | 2018-08-28 13:03:11 -0400 |
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Abstract.docx () | 2018-08-28 13:03:16 -0400 |
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Acknowledgements.doc () | 2018-08-28 13:03:23 -0400 |
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Cover Page.docx () | 2018-08-28 13:03:30 -0400 |
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Abstract Cover Page.docx () | 2018-08-28 13:03:41 -0400 |
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Approval Sheet.docx () | 2018-08-28 13:03:50 -0400 |
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Distribution Agreement.docx () | 2018-08-28 13:04:02 -0400 |
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