摘要

Heroic Tropes examines the nature of the heroic figure in the French canon. In opposition to the criticism of the past, Pierrette Daly denies that the figure for the female hero is a mere reversal of the male. She considers memoirs, correspondence, confessions, and autobiographical works of fiction in seeking the nature of the female hero in terms that are independent of the male model. Through the ages, literary communities have validated men's stories while neglecting women's stories. Daly argues that, to compensate, women writers have found it necessary to construct alternative narrative conventions in order to portray female heroes. The conventions of heroinism, as opposed to heroism, confine female characters to submission, silence, or mirroring and repetition of the feats of male heroes, in the manner of Homer's Penelope or the myth of Echo. From an ancient Egyptian text, Ahura's Tale, the poems of Ulysses's journeys, the memoirs of Bourignon and Guyon, the correspondence of Abelard and Heloise, the letters of Sevigne to her daughter, and the autobiographical works of Rousseau and Sand, Daly traces recurring patterns of narrative innovation that seem convincingly linked to both the author's gender and the gender of characters. Her final chapter analyzes theoretical writings by Cixous and Kristeva in terms of the fictional paradigms she has established. As it addresses heroic narratives of the self in the works of men and women, Heroic Tropes promises to enrich the theoretical framework in which we read. In both traditional and revisionist readings of autobiographical works, through a process of comparison which considers similarities as well as contrasts, Daly delineates thegender bases and biases from which the esthetics and ethics of critical discourse originate.