Identity Trouble ─ Fragmentation and Disillusionment in the Works of Guy De Maupassant

In this book, Eva Yampolsky explores the questions of identity, illusion and suicide in the works of Guy de Maupassant. Utilizing a historical context which stimulated numerous social, technological and scientific transformations and developments during the 19th century, Dr. Yampolsky identifies two defining aims.

Firstly, she examines the various figures of the double, such as visual representations of the subject through painting, mirror reflection, generational proximity and resemblance, and the relation between self-perception and social norms. She seeks to show the complex and often conflicting relation between the individual and society, and more specifically the attempts and frequent failures to manipulate, control and embody a unique definition of self. This divergence between the social norms, such as class, profession, gender and honor, and the characters’ notion of self is what drives the narrative.

Secondly, Eva Yampolsky analyzes the consequent psychological turmoil, madness and even suicide of many Maupassantian characters. This impossible task of embodying an identity that is sole and unique, as it is lived and perceived by the subject and others, in most short stories and novels leads to the characters’ disillusionment and, in a great number of texts, violence or suicide.

This book draws on the social, political and economic revolutions that redefined the individual. New forms of visual representation and communication, namely with the invention of photography and the developments of the press, bring forth questions of authenticity, doubling, and a new distinction between private and public spheres. Finally, the birth of psychiatry at the turn of the 19th century and the emergence of new disciplines, such as sociology and psychoanalysis, inscribe passions, illusions and suicide in new discursive and disciplinary frameworks. These transformations and developments are pervasive and, in many cases, explicit in Maupassant’s work, influences that have aided and nourished the literary analysis of his texts.

Eva Yampolsky received her Ph.D. in French literature from Emory University (USA) and is currently working on a second doctoral degree in the history of medicine at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, her research focuses on the history of psychiatry and the medicalization of suicide in France during the nineteenth century. She was a visiting scholar at the Centre Alexandre Koyre in Paris. Dr. Yampolsky recently edited a collection of Maupassant’s short stories on suicide: Guy de Maupassant: Contes sur le suicide (2015). Other publications include: ?Du crime a la folie: Une etude historique des approches medicales sur le suicide au debut du XIXe siecle en France? in Le suicide: Question individuelle ou societale? (forthcoming) and ?Le suicide du prince de Conde: Un conflit de pouvoir entre medecine et politique? in Maladie(s) du pouvoir: Histoire, diplomatie et regards politiques (forthcoming).