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Lafayette's Ellipses: The Privileges of Anonymity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2021

Joan DeJean
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Abstract

The space of women's writing is too often described in negative terms. In Lafayette's La Princesse de Cleves, as well as in other works by seventeenth-century French women novelists, what have been read as signs of effacement can be viewed as attempts to assume control of the fiction-making process. Thus Lafayette devised a dual authorial signature for her masterpiece; an external signature-the anonymity she used to protect her person and increase her authority-and an internal signature-her heroine's gradual determination to supervise the plot of her life and the publication of her story. Both Lafayette's choice of anonymity and the princess' renunciation of marriage and life in the world can be seen not as acts of avoidance but as affirmations of the woman writer's authority.

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Type
Research Article
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PMLA , Volume 99 , Issue 5 , October 1984, pp. 884 - 902
Copyright
Copyright © 1984 by The Modern Language Association of America

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