Title: Narcissus and Echo
First published: 1988
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.
Subjects: History and criticism, French fiction, Women and literature, Women in literature, Femmes dans la littérature, Roman français, Histoire et critique, Femmes et littérature, Histoire, History
Places: France
LC classification: PQ637.W64 S44 1988