This thesis, consisting of four chapters, explores female alienation and subjectivity as
described by post-war French women writers. The first chapter will focus on critical and
theoretical approaches to female alienation. Through feminist and Marxist criticism, I
explore the condition of women as a dominated class. The second chapter examines
literary strategies such as irony, humor, parody and satire used by the authors of my
corpus to undermine and question gender stereotypes which they inherited from the
tradition of the French novel. The third chapter is devoted to the issue of women
novelists' uses of the figure of the naive female narrator. Through their reworking of this
stereotype, they perform a political act of providing agency to a figure who was
traditionally deprived of all agency. The fourth chapter analyzes the question of the
female body. By playing with the concept of the grotesque female body and its
representation, the novelists whom I study, attempt to liberate their female narrators from
the status of an object and the influence of the beauty myth. What interests me most is the
potential of feminist literature to create alternative representations of women in French
literature. In the novels studied here, narrators move from a position of naivety and
alienation to an unexpected sense of agency and subjectivity. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis examines the evolution of the representation of female alienation and female
identity in the postwar French novel, as well as the textual strategies of resistance used by
three postwar French women novelists to subvert and rework the trope of the naive
female narrator. My research project highlights the emergence of female agency in the
French novel in recent decades through the examples of novels by Christiane Rochefort,
Marie Redonnet and Marie Darrieussecq. The novels studied in this dissertation feature
the point of view of female narrators who move beyond their initial naivety and passivity
to discover unexpected forms of agency.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/25395 |
| Date | January 2020 |
| Creators | Vaghei, Sanaz |
| Contributors | Stout, John Cameron, French |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | French |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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