Identity Trouble

Eva Yampolsky

Identity Trouble

Fragmentation and Disillusionment in the Works of Guy de Maupassant

PETER LANG

New York • Bern • Frankfurt • Berlin
Brussels • Vienna • Oxford • Warsaw

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Yampolsky, Eva, author.

Title: Identity trouble: fragmentation and disillusionment
in the works of Guy de Maupassant / Eva Yampolsky.

Description: New York: Peter Lang, 2017.

Series: Currents in comparative Romance languages
and literatures; vol. 213 | ISSN 0893-5963

Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015035394 | ISBN 978-1-4331-2147-0 (hardcover: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4539-1779-4 (ebook pdf) | ISBN 978-1-4331-3857-7 (epub) ISBN 978-1-4331-3858-4 (mobi)

Subjects: LCSH: Maupassant, Guy de, 1850–1893—Criticism and interpretation.

Illusion in literature. | Suicide in literature.
Identity (Philosophical concept) in literature.

Classification: LCC PQ2357 .Y36 2017 | DDC 843/.8—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015035394

DOI: 10.3726/b10468

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

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Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
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About the author

EVA YAMPOLSKY received her Ph.D. in French literature from Emory University (USA) and is currently working on a second doctoral degree in the history of medicine at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, her research focuses on the history of psychiatry and the medicalization of suicide in France during the nineteenth century. She was a visiting scholar at the Centre Alexandre Koyré in Paris. Dr. Yampolsky recently edited a collection of Maupassant’s short stories on suicide: Guy de Maupassant: Contes sur le suicide (2015). Other publications include: «Du crime à la folie: Une étude historique des approches médicales sur le suicide au début du XIXe siècle en France» in Le suicide: Question individuelle ou sociétale? (forthcoming) and «Le suicide du prince de Condé: Un conflit de pouvoir entre médecine et politique» in Maladie(s) du pouvoir: Histoire, diplomatie et regards politiques (forthcoming).

About the book

In this book, Eva Yampolsky explores the questions of identity, illusion and suicide in the works of Guy de Maupassant. Utilizing a historical context which stimulated numerous social, technological and scientific transformations and developments during the nineteenth century, Dr. Yampolsky identifies two defining aims.

Firstly, she examines the various figures of the double, such as visual representations of the subject through painting, mirror reflection, generational proximity and resemblance, and the relation between self-perception and social norms. She seeks to show the complex and often conflicting relation between the individual and society, and more specifically the attempts and frequent failures to manipulate, control and embody a unique definition of self. This divergence between the social norms, such as class, profession, gender and honor, and the characters’ notion of self is what drives the narrative.

Secondly, Dr. Yampolsky analyzes the consequent psychological turmoil, madness and even suicide of many Maupassantian characters. This impossible task of embodying an identity that is sole and unique, as it is lived and perceived by the subject and others, in most short stories and novels leads to the characters’ disillusionment and, in a great number of texts, violence or suicide.

This book draws on the social, political and economic revolutions that redefined the individual. New forms of visual representation and communication, namely with the invention of photography and the developments of the press, bring forth questions of authenticity, doubling, and a new distinction between private and public spheres. Finally, the birth of psychiatry at the turn of the nineteenth century and the emergence of new disciplines, such as sociology and psychoanalysis, inscribe passions, illusions and suicide in new discursive and disciplinary frameworks. These transformations and developments are pervasive and, in many cases, explicit in Maupassant’s work, influences that have aided and nourished the literary analysis of his texts.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

table of contents

Introduction

Chapter 1. Resemblance, Repetition and the Double

Chapter 2. Proper Names and Troubled Genealogy

Chapter 3. Victims, Disillusionment, and Suicide

Chapter 4. Horlamil: A Figure of the Social Mass

Bibliography←vii | viii→ ←viii | ix→

Introduction