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Articles

Volume 20, Number 1 (1995)

Anne Hébert's "La Fille Maigre": Gendering Poetics

  • Emile J. Talbot
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1995-01-01

Abstract

Although Anne Hébert's "La Fille Maigre" is not a direct response to "Contre une dame trop maigre" by the French baroque poet Jean Auvray, the poems are inverted versions of each other. Auvray's male speaker despises the thin woman, the "carcasse d'os," whom he both embraces and repulses as a symbol of death. Hébert gives voice to the woman, who reconfigures her bony body (bones used as metonymy for the essential woman) as a means to enter the lover whose heart is absent. In Auvray, sex powers the text; in Hébert, it is text that powers sex. Hébert's speaker rearticulates her body as subject and gives the essential woman a voice.