Une vie à se mentir : The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922) de May Sinclair

Florence Marie

Authors

Florence Marie Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour

Keywords:

Lying, Aesthetics of lying, False self, White writing, M. Sinclair, Angel in the house

Abstract

The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922) by May Sinclair is a stark, concise novel. The story of the heroine exemplifies the dreadful consequences that a certain kind of upbringing can have on a daughter who is so desperate to comply with her parents’ wishes that she always behaves as she is expected to behave, puts on an act, and shows to the world a false self (D. Winnicott) lacking spontaneity and authenticity. But the heroine is not an individual case; her behaviour mirrors the examples set in edifying novels extolling the misleading myth of the angel in the house to create inauthentic women and prop up Victorian patriarchal society. In such a context the plain style of this novel could well be the ethical answer May Sinclair came up with to undermine the omnipresence of falsity in Victorian society–a style which being purged of the characteristic marks of literature is as little false as possible, announces “the white writing” defined by R. Barthes and suggests the modernity of Sinclair.

Author Biography

Florence Marie, Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour

Florence MARIE is Senior lecturer at the University of Pau et les Pays de l'Adour. She is a member of ALTER. She defended her thesis on John Cowper Powys in 2003 and since then she has published articles on his first eight novels and on other modernist writers (with special interest in Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage). She has edited, with Fabienne Gaspari and Michael Parsons, a volume of Rives entitled Premières rencontres avec l’autre (L’Harmattan, 2010), and edited another one entitled Le fou — cet autre, mon frère (L’Harmattan, 2012). She has co-edited Le Genre, effet de mode ou concept pertinent ? (Peter Lang, 2016) and participated in the writing of Féminisme et prostitution dans l’Angleterre du XIX^e siècle : la croisade de Josephine Butler (ed. by Frédéric Regard, ENS Éditions, 2014).

florence.marie@univ-pau.fr