Committed Autonomy: Emma Tennant’s Faustine and Two Women of London
p. 213-223
Résumé
Several critics have noted the all-pervasiveness of extensive rewrites of a single textual precedent in contemporary British literature. This paper will argue that such transtextuality is far from being a uniquely aesthetic performance or mark of autonomy. What is at work here is a sort of cultural re-cycling, as ideologically laden modern (especially nineteenth-century) classics are rewritten, in order to re-visit the world through the discourses that construct it. Ultimately, what is being re-visioned by this type of ideologically revisionist postmodernism (or ‘postrealism’), which often addresses fables of dominance and of identity building, is the more diffuse hypotext of the ‘world-view’ of Modernity. This is illustrated by a study of two of Emma Tennant’s novels: Faustine (1992), a re-working of the Faust legend, especially as presented in Goethe’s Faust, and Two Women of London (1989), a re-writing of Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Texte intégral
1British novelist Emma Tennant (born in 1937) has published over fortyfive short novels between 1973 and 2007. Her novels tend to revisit literary myths and past texts, especially nineteenth-century classics.1 This revisionist aspect of Tennant’s novels sets them firmly in a type of postmodern fiction that came to dominate the literary scene as from the 1980s, to such an extent that critics have spoken of a ‘postmodern subgenre.’2 Stephen Connor, for example, notes that rewriting is generally recognised as being one of the hallmarks of a form of contemporary fiction that ‘seems marked by [...] the practice of fictionally rewriting well-known or culturally central texts.’3 Christian Moraru speaks of ‘extensive rewrites’ that, at least, ‘rework in detail one or a few narratives [sic]’ (Moraru xii). Following Gérard Genette, I shall refer to the contemporary text as the ‘hypertext’ and to the past rewritten text as the ‘hypotext’.4 The rooting in a previous text is signalled by intertextuality—which I use here in the restricted sense that Genette gives to the term, i.e.: the effective presence of a text within another. The hypertextuality at work is in the form of what Linda Hutcheon has termed ‘modern parody’—or ‘extended repetition with critical difference.’5
2But, I would like to argue that such pervasive hypertextuality is far from being a uniquely aesthetic performance or mark of autonomy from the real world, as contemporary rewriting goes ‘beyond mere aesthetic celebration of textual contamination’ to engage with the ‘fabric’ of ‘culture, social life and politics’ (Moraru 168). Indeed, set in the tradition of realism, these rewrites are politically committed texts. But the difference with traditional realism is that the world is no longer commented on directly, but through the narrative explanations of the world that are conveyed by literary texts, the values whereby we live being expressed through emplotment. In other words, by transforming plots, these rewrites target the ideological underpinnings of key texts, which are thus reviewed. Indeed, as repositories of what Jameson has called a ‘political unconscious,’ the rewritten texts tend to capture or give birth to key cultural myths. As Chantal Zabus notes: ‘Each century has its own interpellative dream text,’6 i.e.: texts that ‘interpellate’ us into subjects in Althusser’s sense of the term.7 So many of these rewrites address Victorian myths and stories that they have even been seen as forming a category on their own, termed ‘retro-Victorian novels.’8 Moreover, the narratives that are revisited are usually identity narratives, or ‘heavily ideology-laden’9 tales about us as individuals and members of certain communities’ (Moraru xiii), which address questions of origin, of identity and of mastery—of oneself and of the world. Thus, what seems to be really at work through this sort of rewriting is a counter-interpellation, a reordering of collective ideology-laden mental landscapes—a sort of ‘cultural recycling’ (Moraru 7). Textuality is therefore mimetic, as the texts reflect or represent ideologies, and re-writing aims at making a political comment by reviewing the ideologies that inform our lives.
3Yet, there is one crucial way in which these rewrites are autonomous from the socio-historical context, and it is this very autonomy that allows them to comment on the values which condition our lives. As Derrida has shown, the written word is fundamentally ‘iterable.’10 If the same facts are cut free or made autonomous of their original past historical matrix, and grafted onto another contemporary historical context, they will come to signify differently. The crucial differences in the ‘extended repetition’ will lead to the ‘formulation of new rules’ in the form of a new plot, as the hypotext is removed from its past social context, ‘reconfigurated,’ and sent out to a present social context. If we accept that mimesis is always muthos, reflecting not brute acts, but the way we organise these to make them signify, it becomes clearer just how emplotment can reflect ideology. If the world comes to us emplotted through texts, texts can re-emplot the world. Thus, parody, as repetition with a difference of a hypotext, becomes a ‘re-signifying practice,’11 an act of ‘re-vision,’ a way of ‘entering an old text from a new critical perspective,’12 a rewriting ‘in terms of some fundamental master code.’13 It is in this sense that an engagé postmodernism, which Robert Holton calls ‘postmodernism of resistance’ can be textual politics.14 It is in this way that the autonomy of a text can, paradoxically, be politically committed.
4This is what I shall try to illustrate by focussing on two of Tennant’s novels that rewrite literary myths about self-making in the form of Romantic Faustianism: Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde (1989), which is a clearly a rewrite of R.L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and Faustine (1992), which draws on the famous Faust legend. Critics seem to vaguely agree that behind these rewrites ‘lies a profound and epoch-revealing truth,’15 that they do ‘shed light on the [...] twentieth century.’16 I want to examine just how these novels associate literary rewriting and a double realistic rooting in socio-historical contexts, both past and present, in order to raise questions, and to try and define what exactly is being reviewed.
5The subtitle of Two Women of London—The Strange Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde—refers to Stevenson’s novel in a very explicit manner.17 The two novels have basically the same story line: a mysterious murder case witnessed by a young girl, the main character who keeps changing between a respectable Jekyll and a disreputable murderer Hyde, a strange will entrusted to a lawyer friend, visits by Jekyll/Hyde to their doctor friends, who die of shock shortly after Jekyll’s revelations. Characters’ names are repeated: for example, in addition to the obvious Jekyll and Hyde, Ms. Jekyll’s gardener and cleaner, Roger Poole and his wife Grace, are named after Dr Jekyll’s butler. The narrative structures of both novels are similar: Stevenson’s third-person narrator is replaced by an ‘editor’; the doctor/lawyer’s narrative and Jekyll’s final testimony also figure at the end of the rewrite. There are also many similarities in setting (London, two houses, a back door, moonlight, a strong wind), in dialogue (the lawyers both ask to see Hyde’s face), in textual details (the Jekyll figure is seen sitting at a window, the instrument of the murder is a stick), and in chapter titles, which are sometimes repeated.18
6Two Women of London is not only rooted in a previous text. It is also realistically and self-consciously set in two historical contexts one hundred years apart. It is set in contemporary London, i.e.: in an empirical present contemporary to the hypertext, by several clear indications of dates and times, going from February to December 1988, for example: ‘As it is Mid-February—8 a/m. on the twelfth, to be exact’ (Tennant 1990, 2). Yet, it is also grounded in an empirical past contemporary to the hypotext, by constant allusions to the 1880s, when Stevenson’s novella appeared, thus drawing attention to an age of which Stevenson’s tale has become emblematic.19 Thus there are, for example, references to ‘Victorian fogs,’ or to ‘Victorian madwomen’ (Tennant 1990, 93). The interplay of metafiction and of the rooting in two different socio-historical contexts draws attention to the fact that the hypotext is being ‘decontextualised’ and ‘recontextualised’ in time and space, from London of the 1880s to London of the 1990s.
7The transposition of the story in time and space is accompanied by a shift in point of view, reflecting a new feminist consciousness. The most obvious difference is the feminisation of Stevenson’s tale, focusing the reader’s attention on gender, class and identity issues secretly encoded in the hypotext, thus compelling attention to the ways in which the apparently absent female is in fact present in Stevenson’s story’ (Connor 1994, 83). Whereas Stevenson’s tale has a male narrator and a cast of characters who are almost exclusively male, the narrator and characters of Two Women of London are female. Stevenson’s respectable middle-class Dr Jekyll, who lives in a house ‘which wore a great air of wealth and comfort’ (Tennant 1990, 16), becomes Ms Eliza Jekyll, the successful, beautiful, cultured and affluent manageress of an art gallery, who lives in ‘one of Notting Hill’s most desirable quarters’ (Tennant 1990, 2). Dr Jekyll’s disreputable double Mr Hyde, who lives in a ‘dismal quarter of Soho’ (Tennant 1990, 23), is translated into the poor, slatternly, disreputable and violent Mrs Hyde, who lives in a ‘tatterdemalion house [...] on the wrong end’ of Notting Hill (Tennant 1990, 2). The novel thus ‘directs attention to patriarchy’s emphasis on female youth and beauty in order to explore the objectification of women’ in contemporary society (Anderson 120).
8From this new perspective, which retrospectively highlights implicit aspects of Stevenson’s text, the same events come to signify differently. In Stevenson’s story, Dr Henry Jekyll’s ‘original and better self’ is transformed into Mr Edward Hyde, whom he calls his ‘second and worse’ self (Stevenson 62), with the help of a drug he has discovered. Stevenson’s novella insists on the ‘dual nature’ (Stevenson 55) of Dr Jekyll. His real ‘identity’ (Stevenson 57) is his social civilised self, which he refers to as his ‘moral’ or ‘spiritual’ side (Stevenson 56, 66), reached through ‘a life of effort and control’ (Stevenson 58). This self harbours inside it what he calls a dangerous ‘evil’ side, a ‘natural body’ (Stevenson 57), an ugly ‘ape-like’ (Stevenson 70) double, ‘centred on self,’ ‘relaxed’ from the ‘grasp of conscience’ (Stevenson 60). Dr Jekyll’s pure evil double is also associated to the impure female—it is described as ‘knit to him closer than a wife’ (Stevenson 69), or in terms of ‘hysteria’ (Stevenson 78). The whole text is thus structured around a series of dualities, in which the first term of the binary opposition is central, dominant and exclusive: society/individual, self/other, culture/nature, good/evil, spirit/body, human/animal, male/female. Dr Jekyll kills out of pure pleasure and sense of power, but the drug makes him ugly, and his antisocial behaviour inspires hatred in all he meets. Once released, this antisocial evil side becomes uncontrollable and it becomes increasingly difficult for Mr Hyde to turn back into Dr Jekyll, who thus voluntarily puts an end to his life, in order to regain control, thereby restoring social order.
9Tennant’s rewrite, which is not lacking in humour, inverts the pattern of Stevenson’s tale, and changes the nature of the double, the use made of the drug, as well as the end of the story. With the help of the drug ‘ecstasy,’ the disreputable Mrs Hyde turns back into her old self, the young, beautiful and successful ‘Yuppie’ (Tennant 1990, 117), Ms Eliza Jekyll, ‘the person she had been’ (Tennant 1990, 113) before she grew into an old, ugly, depressed, unloved and marginalised ‘avenging slattern’ (Tennant 1990, 117) abandoned by her husband (Tennant 1990, 107). But, the drug loses its power and she begins to turn back into Mrs Hyde ‘more and more often’ (Tennant 1990, 116). This is when she kills, out of revenge, a man whom she identifies with the rapist that has been terrorising the area for months, and who comes to represent all male tyranny: ‘The rapist walked there, [...], with the face of my husband and the landlord’s long, straight legs, and the slight pot belly of Sir James [Ms Jekyll’s employer]’ (Tennant 1990, 118). After committing her crime, Mrs Hyde/Jekyll leaves England, and the novel refuses closure, ending with the police still searching for her. Mrs Hyde does not die neither does Eliza Jekyll have the final word.
10Thus, in Stevenson’s text, which conveys a dualistic vision of the world, the autonomous subject is in control and social order triumphs over the metaphysical evil that threatens to engulf him. But things are not so clear-cut in Tennant’s novel. Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll is the singular masterful male ego that gives birth to its dangerous non-self, whereas both Tennant’s Mrs Hyde and Eliza Jekyll are social constructs. Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll uses the drug to free himself of the moral bonds that prevent him from indulging selfish pleasures, whereas Tennant’s Mrs Hyde uses the drug to obtain work, power and social acceptability, which she has lost by becoming old in a society which values youth and beauty in women. Thus, if the nineteenth-century male protagonist transforms himself into an isolated anti-social self that brings him great pleasure, his twentieth-century female counterpart transforms herself into a more socially acceptable self in order to be happy. Stevenson’s autonomous self thrives in isolation, whereas Tennant’s relational self needs to be loved. Stevenson’s antisocial Mr Hyde kills for pleasure, whereas Tennant’s Mrs Hyde, who is described by the lawyer as ‘a tragic victim of our new Victorian values’ (Tennant 1990, 121), kills out of self-protection. Foregrounded, the threat of rape becomes a metaphor for all the forms of abuse of power that are secretly inscribed in patriarchy’s dualistic world-view. The rewrite suggests that evil is engendered by social rules, that it is patriarchy itself that is evil and responsible for Mrs Hyde’s taking ecstasy and becoming a murderer. The nature of evil is openly debated and the lawyer Jean Hastie, author of a book on the Gnostic Gospels, presents her ‘doctrine of ethical self-determination [that] stands against the demonizing impulses of Stevenson’s story’ (Connor 1994, 86), as she writes: ‘The message of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is that we are responsible for the choices we freely make, good or evil’ (Tennant 1990, 73).
11Tennant’s title, Faustine, refers explicitly to the Renaissance Faust legend—the historical George Faust (born around 1480) gave way to the legendary Johannes Faustus in the sixteenth-century, the birth of the legend corresponding to that of Modernity. There are many literary versions of the legend, but I have chosen to treat Goethe’s nineteenth-century Faust—in two parts published in 1808 and in 183220—as the main hypotext, mainly due to Faustine’s references to the Victorian Age. Tennant’s hypertext refers to its hypotext in more or less manifest ways. The story of the charlatan who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for twenty-four years’ worth of knowledge, power and wealth is echoed by Tennant’s plot: the protagonist, Ella, leaves Australia to go in search of her grandmother, Muriel Twyman, and discovers that the latter made a pact with the devil twenty-four years before, and was transformed into the young and beautiful Lisa Crane. Tennant’s devil openly makes a parallel between his victim and Faust: ‘If a man, such as Dr Faustus, was offered such commodities by myself, [...] why not a woman [...]?’ (Tennant 1992, 137).
12Like Two Women of London, Faustine21 is not only rooted in a past text, but also realistically and self-consciously set in two historical contexts, past and present. It is situated in an empirical present by numerous references to dates, newspaper articles, and allusions to new technologies. Ella, aged almost twenty-seven, leaves Australia (where she was sent to an adoptive family at the age of three) in 1990, to go in search of her beloved grandmother, Muriel, at Woodford Manor near Stonehenge, where a summer solstice gathering of hippy fans of the 1960s is being held. In a series of flashbacks, Ella remembers her early childhood in the late 1960s, her surrogate mother, Muriel, and her feminist mother Anna with her ‘progressive ideas’ (Tennant 1992, 136), who never had any time for her daughter. The empirical past of the nineteenth century, the age of Goethe’s Faust and the age in which the values of Modernity were dominant, is also very present—first through the character of Muriel, who before her pact with the devil, was the embodiment of the ‘Angel in the home,’ the stereotype of the devoted selfless Victorian mother; secondly, through numerous allusions to Victorian times, for example, the door of Muriel’s former flat is ‘Victorian’ (Tennant 1992, 92), and on Lisa’s bedside table is Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Managament (1861), which used to belong to Muriel.
13Goethe’s nineteenth-century version of the Renaissance Faust legend is feminized as it is recontextualised in the context of the youth culture of the 1960s, referred to through a profusion of cultural references to the world of the media and fashion, to the cult of rock stars and actors, to miniskirts, to feminism and to sexual liberation. Faust becomes ‘Faustine,’ or the dual character Muriel/Lisa ‘Twyman’ [my emphasis]. In addition, Goethe’s feminine characters, who disappear leaving the limelight to Faust, are brought to the fore: indeed, Muriel is a combination of both Goethe’s Margaret and of his Helen. As a middle-aged devoted mother figure at the end of the 1960s, Muriel is clearly a reincarnation of Goethe’s pure and pious Margaret, both characters corresponding to Modernity’s patriarchal stereotypes of woman, whether in Germany or in England. But Muriel is in-between two worlds and, as a modern financially independent and single woman, feels ‘a certain anger at [her] predicament,’ as ‘growing old, [...] was probably the worst thing that could happen to a woman in a free, consumerist society’ (Tennant 1992, 46). She thus succumbs to a Faustian transaction, as the devil tempts her by projecting pictures of her younger self onto a series of television sets, and is reborn as the famous pop star Lisa Crane, stealing her daughter’s desirable husband from her and getting rid of her grand-daughter in order to live her life. Transformed into Lisa, Muriel compares herself to Helen of Troy: ‘The mask of Mammon has the exquisite features of Helen of Troy’ (Tennant 1992, 77).
14Like Goethe’s Helen, Lisa’s beauty gives her immense and dangerous power over men, but Tennant’s Helen is a modern version of Goethe’s heroine: she is freer and stronger; she no longer perceives her beauty as a curse, but rather as an asset, as a weapon to be used against men. Faust and Lisa have a great deal in common: both feel trapped in an ageing body, confined to domestic chores or to an office; both sign a twenty-four-year pact with the devil in exchange for youth, becoming famous, widely-travelled, immensely rich and powerful. But, whereas Faust owes his success to his scientific knowledge, Lisa owes her power to her sole beauty. Faust derives his power from his mind, Lisa from her body and her sexuality. Whereas Faust’s quest for ultimate knowledge isolates him from mere mortals as he rises spiritually and intellectually, Lisa’s quest for the beauty of youth brings her the social recognition which was denied to her as an ageing woman. The final comment of Faustine is on the stereotypes of women perpetuated by patriarchy, which is ultimately responsible for pacts made with the devil. Moreover, whereas Faust is structured around a series of hierarchical dualities—mind/body, good/evil, man/woman, activity/passivity, innocence/experience—the main characters being the polarized facets of the human soul, Faustine tends to blur these oppositions: Muriel/Lisa is both aggressor and victim, male and female, active and passive, good and evil; roles are reversed and boundaries are transgressed, as Anna and Muriel exchange roles. In Faust (which has been interpreted as a morality play) poetic justice triumphs and progress is possible: Faust repents and goes to meet the chaste Margaret in Heaven; the devil, that represents disorder, is punished. But, in Faustine, the Devil becomes the conscience of modern society, revealing its shortcomings and the irresponsibility of man. Lisa goes to Hell with her lover, the Devil: as long as women conform to the chaos generated by patriarchy’s secret collusion with tyranny, the cycle will continue.
15Thus both novels associate a rooting in a past text and a double rooting in a socio-historical context, both past and present, in order to decontextualise and re-contextualise texts that are central to the cultural life of the West, with the ultimate aim of re-viewing the ideology that underpins their plots. Realistic techniques are subverted from within: the double realistic rooting in the world indicates the autonomy of the text from its original historical context, and the profusion of cultural references to the real world serves not only to anchor the text in time and space, but also in the ideology that defines reality. Modern parody becomes a structural device, used to make a satirical comment on contemporary society—what Hutcheon names ‘parodic satire.’22 But, instead of using satire in a traditional manner, to criticise deviant behaviour with the aim of making the individual confirm to existing stable accepted social values, the satire is here aimed at the values themselves.
16Tennant’s rewrites reflect on the roles and stereotypes ascribed to women in contemporary society. But, they seem to go beyond mere feminism, as what seems to be finally and globally reviewed in these two texts is the latent and more diffuse hypotext of the ‘world-view’ of modernity, which is challenged in a new form of satire that goes well beyond ‘political correctness’ (Gutleben 169), calling for a change in the century-old fundamental philosophical values that continue to dictate contemporary behaviour. As they question key cultural individual hypotexts that seek to instil male-authored behavioural modes in women, these hypertexts bring hidden questions of power to light, and offer a different version of modernity’s myths of origin, of identity building, of the nature of evil, of individual mastery and responsibility—basically, of the relation between the subject and the world. The autonomous self-centred Kantian self is replaced by a relational subject, engendered and maintained by its being-in-the-world. Whereas the hypotexts uphold the status quo, the hypertexts, which foreground social injustice, are an indictment of the social regime itself. Evil is no longer perceived as some irresistible metaphysical force, but rather as emanating from man himself. Latent dualities that conceal within themselves an implied hierarchy of values are brought to light and deconstructed. The individual is, paradoxically, both less masterful and more responsible.
17Finally, everything boils down to a question of point of view, as the same narrative facts are submitted to a new vision. In Deleuze’s terms, ‘seules les différences se ressemblent,’ i.e.: the traditional conception of difference as derived from previous similitude is inversed: the repetition does not modify the content that is repeated; rather, the repetition modifies the point of view on the content that is repeated. These contemporary rewrites seem to illustrate what Ronald Shusterman has called the ‘metaethical’ dimension of literature,23 as the intentional deviations from the contents of the hypotext will act, not so much on the ‘represented content’ of the text itself, but on the abstract ‘total [aesthetic] experience’ it provides,24 to ‘modify our imaginative schemas’ (Shusterman 2003, 47), in a constant questioning of existing values, which calls for the formulation of new rules. The real world, which is the ultimate signified, is only attained indirectly through its cultural representations, that therefore become the object of such fictions—thus the prefix ‘meta’ (which indicates both a fiction on a fiction, or, more generally, self-reflexivity, in the sense of language taking another language as its object). Contemporary rewrites that use this particular paradoxical association of mimesis and hypertextuality to make a political comment, as well as texts that more generally combine realistic techniques and formal experimentation to make a political comment, could be termed ‘postrealistic.’ The term ‘postrealism’ has the double advantage of setting this type of novel both in the tradition of an engagé realism, and in a historical epoch that is highly conscious that the world can only be represented through the filter of discourses that vary according to the socio-historical context.
Notes de bas de page
1 For example, both Pemberley (1993) and An Unequal Marriage (1994) are sequels to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813); Adèle: Jane Eyre’s Hidden Story (2002) and Heath-cliff’s Tale (2005) respectively rewrite Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Wuthering Heights (1847).
2 Christian Moraru, Rewriting; Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning (Albany: U of New York P, 2001) 20.
3 Steven Connor, ‘Rewriting Wrong; On the Ethics of Literary Revision,’ Postmodern Studies 8: Liminal Postmodernisms, ed. Theo D’Haen and Hans Bertens (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994) 80.
4 Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes (Paris: Seuil, 1972) 7-9.
5 Linda Hutcheon, ATheory of Parody (London: Routledge, 1985) 7. In ‘modern parody,’ the target of the parody is the society contemporary to the hypertext.
6 Chantal Zabus, Tempests after Shakespeare (New-York: Palgrave, 2002) 1.
7 Louis Althusser, ‘Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’état’ (1969), La Pensée 151 (June 1970): 3-38.
8 See Sally Shuttleworth, ‘Natural History: The Retro-Victorian Novel,’ The Third Culture: Literature and Science, ed. Elinor Shaffer (Berlin and New York: Walter De Gruyter, 1998). See also Christian Gutleben, Nostalgic Postmodernism. The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001) 5.
9 I am using the term ‘ideology’ in Althusser’s sense, i.e.: as ‘an imaginary structure that exists not only in the form of concepts but also in the form of attitudes, gestures, patterns of behaviour, intentions, aspirations, refusals, permissions, bans, etc.’ See Louis Althusser, Writings on Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia UP, 1996) 75. As it is the very condition of our experience of the world, it is unconsciously written into language and is necessarily linked to power structures, the dominant voice being that of those in power.
10 Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature événement contexte,’ Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972) 365-393.
11 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech; A Politics of the Performative (New-York: Routledge, 1997) 13-14.
12 Adrienne Rich, ‘When We Dead Awaken; Writing as Re-Vision’ (1971), On Secrets, Lies and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 (London: Norton, 1995) 35.
13 Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Routledge, 1996) 58.
14 Robert Holton, Jarring Witnesses (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994).
15 Isabelle Roblin, ‘Writing as Re-Vision: the Strange Cases of Emma Tennant’s Two Women of London (1989) and Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly (1990),’ Alizés 20 (July 2001): 142.
16 Carol Anderson, ‘Emma Tennant, Elspeth Barker, Alice Thompson: Gothic Revisited,’ Contemporary Scottish Women Writers (Edinburgh: EUP, 2000) 128.
17 The editions used are the following: Emma Tennant, Two Women of London. The Strange Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde (London: Faber & Faber, 1990). Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002).
18 For a more detailed account of the similarities between the two novels, see Roblin 134- 138.
19 Carol Anderson, ‘Emma Tennant, Elspeth Barker, Alice Thompson: Gothic Revisited,’ Contemporary Scottish Women Writers (Edinburgh: EUP, 2000): 121.
20 Johan Wolfgang Goethe, Faust (1808 and 1832; Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merril, 1965).
21 The edition used is: Emma Tennant, Faustine (London: Faber & Faber, 1992).
22 Linda Hutcheon, ‘Ironie, satire, parodie,’ Poétique 46 (1981): 148.
23 Ronald Shusterman, ‘Hell for the Spell-Checker: The Metaphysical Dimension of Incorrect language,’ Études britanniques contemporaines 24 (June 2003): 45.
24 Ronald Shusterman, ‘And Now for Something Completely Different: Contradiction and Aesthetic Experience,’ Études britanniques contemporaines 22 (June 2002): 123.
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
À la rencontre de la différence
Traces diasporiques et espaces de créolisation
Robin Cohen et Olivia Sheringham Elise Trogrlic (trad.)
2020
L’androgyne dans la littérature britannique contemporaine
Métamorphose d’une figure
Justine Gonneaud
2020
Borders and Ecotones in the Indian Ocean
Cultural and Literary Perspectives
Markus Arnold, Corinne Duboin et Judith Misrahi-Barak (dir.)
2020
Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’ 1
Diasporas and Cultures of Migrations
Judith Misrahi-Barak et Claudine Raynaud (dir.)
2014
Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’ 2
Diaspora, Memory and Intimacy
Sarah Barbour, David Howard, Thomas Lacroix et al. (dir.)
2015
Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’ 3
African Americans and the Black Diaspora
Corinne Duboin et Claudine Raynaud (dir.)
2016
Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British literature
Jean-Michel Ganteau et Christine Reynier (dir.)
2013