Lines On The Body. The Dasch-Lined Body, Imaginary, Lyricism, And Internal Alterity In Narrative Of The Unusual Written By Women

Abstract

The «narrative of the unusual» is a modality inside the fantastic that has been practiced exclusively by women. This article aims at clarifying some of the possible reasons for this phenomenon. Firstly, it resorts to the regimes of the imaginaire that, according to the pre-cognitivist theorist Gilbert Durand, are divided into diurnal and nocturnal. These regimes govern human imagination and grant different roles to the masculine and the feminine. Secondly, it analyses the theme of the body in these narratives and recovers the contributions of feminist criticism that tried to define écriture feminine by focusing its attention on women’s bodies. Finally, these theoretical contributions come together in order to critique ‘the unusual’ by explaining its texts’ lyrism and its alienating processes with respect to an invasive internal Other. This produces a fragmentation of protagonists’ bodies, which can completely or partially mutate in a process in search of their own identities in an ethical context of narcissism.