"La fourme du pie toute escripte": Tracking Melusine through "A la recherche du temps perdu"
Item
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Title
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"La fourme du pie toute escripte": Tracking Melusine through "A la recherche du temps perdu"
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Identifier
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AAI3063827
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identifier
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3063827
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Creator
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Foy, Sarah Wernick.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Bettina L. Knapp
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Date
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2002
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Romance
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines the ways in which Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu incorporates the legend of Melusine, primarily seen through Jean d'Arras's 14th century work, into its vast panorama. As a fairy who assumed a human form Melusine had to hide the division marking her as a supernatural being. Half woman and half serpent Melusine signaled the destabilization of the boundaries between genders and even species driven by a process of metamorphosis. Melusine's image, the division inscribed on her body, and the uncertainty surrounding her identity are refracted in the characters, episodes and structure of the Recherche .;The crucial role and the schemata that structure first encounters in medieval narratives where fairy meets mortal is adopted and espoused in the narrator's first meetings with his love objects, and with Gilberte in particular.;The points of contact between both works are moreover subtended by the themes of profanation and voyeurism that are central to d'Arras's The Roman de Melusine. These themes covertly inform all of the narrator's major relationships and mediate his apprehension of the world.;Furthermore, Melusine's multiplicity and the concomitant impossibility of determining the veracity of her nature or of anything she says, is replicated to some extent in all the characters of the Recherche, but particularly in Albertine. Albertine, like Melusine, resists decipherment. Both are hybrid figures, ambiguous etres de fuite who are impossible to domesticate and to bring within the confines of human understanding. Their shifting identities consistently undermine notions of a definitive truth.;Thus, this study in pointing out the numerous connections between both works, establishes the Melusinian narrative as a covert intertext for the Recherche and reveals it as one of its most important livres modeles.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
