“The Body in Pain”: George Moore’s A Mummer’s Wife

Abstract

We propose to study how A Mummer’s Wife by George Moore orchestrates the discovery of otherness within the self and dramatizes the body’s function as a site of difference and of violence by bringing to the fore the body of its heroine. Written to emulate Zola, A Mummer’s Wife relates the downward trajectory of a shopkeeper’s wife, deserting her husband to follow an actor. An irreversible process of entropy underlies the plot and works first and foremost on the body whose sensations are foregrounded and turned into pain, making it even more visible. The sense of physical immediacy conveyed by Moore’s writing is mediated through tropes, comparisons and metaphors that can be envisaged as an annexation of the bodily otherness of the heroine made and unmade by language.