Narcissus and Echo
Subtitle: women in the French récit
By: Naomi Segal.
Publisher: Manchester University Press; Distributed exclusively in the U.S. and Canada by St. Martin's Press
Published: 1988
Place of publication: Manchester, UK; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 253
Subjects: French fiction -- History and criticism.; Women and literature -- France.; Women in literature.
Description: "Narcissus and Echo" is about romantic confessional fiction, in which the woman dies and the man lives to tell "his" tale. Whether femme fatale, nun, sister, aristocrat or fallen women, she is always somehow blamed for her own destruction. What motivates the man's narrative and how does the women's voice, curiously, survive the text? Naomi Segal brings insights from feminist and psychoanalytic theory to bear on writers such as Chateaubriand, Musset, Prevost and Gautier. Running throughout this lively and provocative study are dichotomies between speech and sight, male "doubles" and female "mirror", the narcissism of nostalgia and the paradoxes of undesire.
Notes: Bibliography: p. 238-247.
Includes index.