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Psychoanalysis and Naturalism both revolve around concepts of the mirror and its relation to print. However, the reflective textual surfaces of Naturalism are conventionally placed in diametric opposition to those of psychoanalysis, as Lacan’s notions of realities constructed <i>by</i> the mirror are invoked to deride the ‘naiveté’ of Naturalism’s belief in a given world and self unproblematically reflected<i> in </i>the mirror. My thesis undermines this antithetical reading of psychoanalysis and Naturalism. These two movements, born of the same era, are locked in a fascinating play of reflections as Zola and Maupassant anticipate, evaluate and even elaborate the theories of subjectivity which Lacan formulates a century later. Anticipating Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’, Zola and Maupassant present the self and its world not as given entities passively reflected in their works, but rather a textual artefacts actively constructed by them. They represent subjectivity and reality as scripts printed on the ‘mirror’ that is the reader. Moreover, both are fascinated, as twentieth-century feminist Luce Irigaray will be, by the gendered nature of this process. Within Naturalism, the self which writes itself is invariably masculine, whilst the reflective gaze which reads and ratifies it is feminine. The place afforded to femininity is thus an ambiguous one. It is necessarily present in order to see the masculine subject, inevitably absent in that it may not itself be seen. It is in the myriad of Naturalist feminine ghosts that this notion of feminine half-presence, half-absence is best conveyed. Naturalism, with its aspirations to supreme realism, is suffused with, and predicated upon, hosts of feminine spectres.

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The thesis examines the representation of the body in the work of the eighteenth-century French libertine novelist Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, known as Crébillon <i>fils.</i> In addition to its close concern with a specific historical period and genre, it is located within the broader context of recent theoretical work on corporeal representation, an area that has been dubbed ‘body criticism’. Methodologically, close textual analysis converges with a study of the historically-situated scientific and philosophical discourses of medicine, rhetoric and the visual arts that Crébillon integrated into his novels. The study engages with and troubles the traditional (‘Wattian’) view of the evolution of the eighteenth-century novel as fundamentally concerned with the psychological emergence of the bourgeois subject. Despite the underlying sexual stakes of the libertine novel, many critics have assumed that physical description is a minor aspect of the genre, preferring instead to focus on an author’s creation of abstract ‘mental’ qualities. The thesis contends that bodily depiction is a significant site for the expression and diffusion of social and philosophical debates: a position that has characterised more recent historiography. While there is indeed little direct description of characters’ physical features in Crébillon’s works, an underlying preoccupation with corporeality can be discovered in his texts through an analysis of displaced instances of bodily representation such as those found in iconographical supplements, rhetorical figures of speech or references to medical and physiological theories. The three major areas investigated by the thesis are those of prose description and portraiture, sentiment and emotion, and visual or pictorial depiction. Within each of these areas, the intellectual and historical context surrounding representations of the body is surveyed, eludicating literary usage through a study of its sources in discourses conventionally judged ‘exterior’ to fiction. The thesis employs a revised methodology for the study of eighteenth-century prose fiction that is sensitive to the permeability of the boundaries between genres and permits an exploration of the interpenetration between fiction and non-fiction that structured early Enlightenment conceptions of identity. It advances an increasing awareness that Crébillon was not merely a frivolous pornographer, but a writer who reflected and even shaped the philosophical debates of his day.

My doctoral thesis questions a specific paradox and I identify in the work of contemporary North American queer theorists. At this particular historical moment, the majority of queer theorists who position themselves in their writing self-identify as lesbian, gay, or queer. Although I concede that this link between identity and stance is crucial to queer theory, I question its exclusivity. I contend that the queer-, lesbian-, or gay-identified theorist is currently positioned within this theoretical field as the only person who can do queer theory. An important facet of much queer theoretical writing is devoted to the deconstruction of identity categories in order to emphasize relations rather than divisions between sexualities. With this in mind, I argue that the implicit and as yet unquestioned link between one's identity and one's ability to write queer theory can be read against the desire among many queer theorists for a more relational line of thought. This new line of thinking would not make queer, lesbian, or gay identity the only ethical position from which one can relate to queer theory. In my thesis I theorize precisely this possibility of an ethical relation to queer theory on the part of the straight- or bisexual-identified reader. In order to question the exclusive queer theoretical link between sexual identity and stance, I turn to a different but related theoretical area. Critical engagement with the texts of four French feminist theorists, (Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Monique Wittig, and Hélène Cixous), permits me to envisage a different relation between queer theory and its readership. My overall aim in the thesis is to open up an ethical space that permits readers and writers to articulate a relation to what they may not have experienced themselves.

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