Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-12T18:34:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 arquivo8189_1.pdf: 2465450 bytes, checksum: 6d07fd333d2d853ad275d5991b569f38 (MD5) license.txt: 1748 bytes, checksum: 8a4605be74aa9ea9d79846c1fba20a33 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2003 / This study presents a comparative analysis between Virginia Woolf s Orlando and Jacqueline Harpman s Orlanda. It takes as a starting point the fact that Harpman houses Woolf s novel inside her own text and plays overtly with parody, citation, allusion, and mise en abyme, techniques which had already been used by Woolf. The analysis points out the way Harpman transcontextualizes the structural elements in Woolf s novel and reexamines questions that had been raised by Woolf almost seventy years ago. This research goes beyond the technical features to demonstrate that the heart of the matter may reside in human being s eagerness to be accepted as a multiple self, what leads the analysis into studying the mythical representations of the double. After demonstrating the way Harpman transcontextualizes the key elements in Woolf s novel, the analysis follows the itinerary of the double in both narratives, focusing primarily on Narcissus and the Androgyne and secondarily on other mythical figures like Apollo and Daphne

The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the importance of the mother figure for the definition of the female identity in three novels by the Belgian writer and psychoanalyst Jacqueline Harpman: La fille démantelée, La plage d’Ostende and Orlanda. This perspective is largely motivated by the specific character of the mother-daughter relation which is crucial to the formation of female identity. Freud already argued that it was impossible to understand the female identity without considering a woman’s preœdipal fixation to her mother. The analysis of the three novels is based on the concept of what Kristeva terms primary narcissism, which represents a delicate stage in the relationship between mother and child. In different ways, the analyzed novels are permeated by an oscillation between identification and differentiation. On a thematic level, the female protagonist’s desire to distance herself from the mother is always countered by an awareness of an intimate bond with her, and, paradoxically, it may seem, that the differentiation from the mother opens the way for a happy reunion between mother and daughter, now two individuals who no longer form a symbiotic unit. In this process of individuation described in the novels, a third instance which Freud called father of individual prehistory is crucial. Even though, at first sight, love appears to be the most important theme in the works of Harpman, this thesis argues that the theme of love is intimately linked to that of the mother figure and that it is necessary to read the works of Harpman through the spectrum of the mother-daughter relation in order to achieve a deeper understanding. Such a reading reveals among other things the key role of the inner dynamics of love. Love is not only the main theme of the work of Harpman, it’s also the meeting place of the two “love cures” of Harpman: literature and psychoanalysis, both situated in the field between narcissism and idealization, mechanisms that are inherent to what Freud called the subject’s eternal rebirth. The way in which writing functions as a way for the Harpman female protagonist to become a subject corresponds to Kristeva's idea of the entering into language, or into the symbolic system as Lacan put it, as a way to ward off the emptiness of the abjection. The symbolic system gives the subject a sense of being an individual with clear boundaries in a structured and intelligible world.