The face of the writer: Readings in literary self-portraiture

At once an individuating and expressive sign, and a corporeal inevitability interposed between self and other, the face is a perplexing, and often disturbing, element in literary self-portraits. In first-person texts the writer\u27s face may be asserted or denied as a locus of identity and its potential lack or loss. Written descriptions confront the banality of the face and its elements, and the impossibility of the true likeness. This dissertation works towards a poetics of the face, through close reading of works by Colette, Michel Leiris and Marguerite Duras. An introductory chapter on Montaigne and Louise Labe brings out historical dimensions of the question, and raises central themes: the paradoxes of physiognomy, the perception and value of physical beauty in men and women, the meanings of make-up, the experience of aging, and the relationship between the writing subject\u27s conception of self, and their sense of existence in the visual. The experience of the mirror and of the eyes of others, the skin as envelope and border of the self, and the negotiations of the masquerade define the subject\u27s relationship with her or his own face. Colette\u27s La Vagabonde reflects on the inevitable loss of beauty, and its consequences for women. Also highlighting the potentially empowering fictions of make-up, Colette draws out the ambivalent (both euphoric and profoundly dysphoric) experience of being a picture. Leiris\u27s L\u27Age d\u27homme opens with a physical description whose overdetermined intertextuality raises questions of representation and reference. The dialectic between self-protective make-up and clothes, and masochistic self-exposure throws light on the narrator\u27s complex narcissism. In Marguerite Duras\u27s L\u27Amant, the writer\u27s claim to have aged suddenly, in her late teens, creates a radical discontinuity between the woman-child described obsessively in the novel, and the aging narrator. The young girl\u27s conscious adoption of a provocatively feminine visibility is recounted with transgressive jubilation, and announces her active choice of seduction and sexual pleasure