The Art of Rupture

Narrative Desire and Duplicity in the Tales of Guy de Maupassant

Charles J. Stivale


Sheds new light on the psychological forces at play in Guy de Maupassant's writing.

The nineteenth-century French writer Guy de Maupassant has long been renowned for his ability to capture the foibles of the human spirit and flesh, and to render them with exquisite irony. What has not been previously explored, however, is what Charles Stivale calls the "fundamental masculine fear" that lies beneath the surface of Maupassant's cynical vision of French society. Stivale argues that a fear of threatening outside forces, usually incarnated as woman, drove much of Maupassant's fiction, and led to his proposal that men defend themselves through recourse to "the art of rupture." Through this "art," hoped Maupassant, men might protect themselves from the ensnaring chains of women.

Stivale's study uncovers and analyzes manifestations of "the art of rupture" in a broad range of Maupassant's short fiction. Turning Maupassant's own phrase into a tool of literary analysis, Stivale examines themes and stylistic devices in tales of war, marriage, and bachelorhood. Engaging narratological criticism and feminist theory, Stivale disrupts the surfaces of Maupassant's realist fiction to identify an undercurrent of male dis-ease that functions as the force of rupture---rupture which simultaneously unleashes defensive responses and leaves open avenues for further invasion and seduction.

The Art of Rupture will appeal to students and teachers of French literature, as well as to any reader interested in issues of gender, violence, and appropriation in canonical literary texts.

Charles Stivale is Associate Professor of French, Wayne State University.

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6 x 9, ca 288 pages

ISBN 0-472-10544-2

cloth 37.50E (tentative)

October