Citation

Cheallaigh GN. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 2014; 18(4): 438-446.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014)

DOI

10.1080/17409292.2014.938509

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This article examines how, through tropes of female madness and female suicide, Linda Lê exposes a compulsive process of composition and de-composition of writing and the self. Lê traces, erases, and re-traces her mutilated central characters-particularly the (dead) father figure; the central protagonists and narrators (often a femme de lettres); the figure of the potential mother; and the unborn son. The trajectory reveals a self at first in crisis, manifest in the spectral, uncanny madness dominating Voix (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1998) and exposing an anxiety of female authorship. Lê appears to overcome this through an assumption of authorship apparently predicated on abjecting the feminine and the maternal, and incorporating the masculine, early on in the form of the dead father in Lettre morte (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1999), and later the unborn son. Lês later works present a politics of negation personified in the putatively mad, suicidal, and certainly rebellious figure of Antigone haunting what I call Lês Antigone tryptych, comprising In memoriam (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2007), Cronos (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2010), and À lenfant que je naurai pas (Paris: Nil, 2011). I conclude that this process is deeply ambivalent, raising surprising questions about contemporary women writers. © 2014 Taylor and Francis.

Language: en

Keywords

Women; Sacrifice; Antigone; Linda Le; Madness; Women's Writing