ABSTRACT:

For many critics, Marguerite Yourcenar's writing is representative of the French classical tradition. She epitomizes what feminist critics call a "phallic woman" who has erased all traces of sexual difference and desire by submitting herself to the "law-of-the-father." Although Yourcenar's contribution to French literature cannot be denied, her works truly constitute the "dark continent" in the field of women's and feminist studies, and her name is conspicuously absent from collections of essays dedicated to the problematics and the specificity of women's writing.

This dissertation seeks to explore and demystify this "dark continent." It reevaluates Yourcenar's writing within the general theoretical framework of feminist discourse and intends to challenge the preconceived view of her narrative as being genderless, that is to say, masculine. Yourcenar's narrative, as this study posits, carries the traces of a specifically feminine discourse.

Focusing on her autobiographical trilogy Le Labyrinthe du monde, the purpose of this dissertation is threefold: circumscribe Yourcenar's inscription of the self and female subjectivity in her writing; to trace the continuous movement out of the autobiographical and into the fictional writings, and vice-versa, which reveals her attempt to re-present her-self and her desire; and to investigate the problematics of the mother-daughter relationship which constitutes the basis on which her autobiographical writing is founded.

Moreover, my reading of Le Labyrinthe du monde represents an effort to contribute to the growing field of studies on women's autobiography. Yourcenar's resistance to gender categorization, combined with the gendered narrative which issues from her autobiographical text, provides further confirmation that one cannot read women's autobiography according to the theoretical encoding of the (masculine) autobiographical tradition.