Dominique Orsini: "L'écriture féminine à l'épreuve d'une articulation topique : mariage contrarié et justification du récit de vie dans les romans de Madame Meheust et de Madame de Tencin"

Abstract:

The four memoir-novels, written by these two women (Madame Meheust and Madame de Tencin) during a short period (1732-1747), and which present male and female narrators, make it possible to determine a feminine writing, through the comparative study of the macro-topos: «thwarted wedding». This topos belongs to the gender problematic since it concerns desire and the position of woman in the first half of eighteenth-century society. It undergoes the same poetic processing, according to the gender of the fictive memorialist to whom the writers delegate their voices. indeed, they have both linked this topos to a «topos de régie»: justification of narration. This association of topoi, through an apparently traditional discourse, did allow the authors to deliver a feminist claim.

AsK, jan 2011

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