Énoncer l’émancipation : Points de vue, plans d’énonciation et ethè discursifs chez Madeleine Bourdouxhe

This paper develops a rhetorical and enunciative analysis of Madeleine Bourdouxhe’s novels Vacances (1935-1936), La femme de Gilles (1937), A la recherche de Marie (1943) and Mantoue est trop loin (1956) by examining the enunciative treatment of thought narrations and reported speeches, the derision of a second speaker’s points of view by the first speaker, the subjective marks as well as the different types of ethos (those of the female narrators and characters) constructed in the narrative discourse. This literary work cannot be reduced to feminine sentimentalism or to a populist and picturesque aesthetic, a commonplace reproduced by traditional criticism. From a socio-discursive perspective, the hypothesis of enunciative emancipation is based on the contexts in which Bourdouxhe produces her discourses, influenced by different sociabilities, such as the personalist group (structured by the journal Esprit in the ’30s) and the existentialist movement (structured by the journal Les Temps Modernes in the second half of the ’40s and by the two figures of Sartre and Beauvoir). The analysis of Bourdouxhe’s novelistic discourse allows us to test the hypothesis of a micro-rhetoric of feminine individual lives inherent in Bourdouxhe’s work, in the inheritance of the micro-history that explores subaltern experiences and conditions.