Chapter 2: Ravages: The Daughter’s Defection

Alex Hughes

From Violette Leduc: Mothers, Lovers, and Language (1994), pp. 40-80, doi:10.59860/td.c48d73c

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Part of the book: Violette Leduc

Alex Hughes

MHRA Texts and Dissertations 37

W. S. Maney & Son Ltd for the Modern Humanities Research Association

ContemporaryFrenchFictionopen


Abstract.  L’Asphyxie may be interpreted from both a political/feminist and a psychoanalytic perspective. Leduc’s first novel does not however invite the kind of critical approach that is generated by the (uneasy? belligerent?) ‘marriage’ of psychoanalysis and feminism. Ravages on the other hand lends itself to precisely this kind of reading. For the feminist critic who seeks to employ insights provided by psychoanalytic theory in order to understand what gender means, the processes whereby it is constructed, and the way in which gender relations function, the novel represents a rich source of interest. In Ravages, the dynamics of the mother/daughter bond are scrutinized even more closely than in L’Asphyxie.

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