- Title
- Marguerite Yourcenar: a quest for ataraxia; a locus amœnus hindered by absence and presence
- Creator
- Warren, Sandra Leslie
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2014
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- The birth in 1903 of Marguerite Yourcenar, the acclaimed French writer who was the first immortelle to be admitted to the centuries-old male bastion of the Académie française, was followed ten days later by the death of her mother, Fernande. Accordingly, she received an unconventional education almost uniquely at the hands of her father, Michel, whose erudition and passion for history underpinned his persona and heavily influenced the literary corpus of his daughter. Yourcenar’s oeuvre was initiated in her teens with two collections of poetry, the foundations of which lay in myth — a reflection of her father’s influence. Following subsequent collaboration with her father, the creation of a pseudonym to replace her birth name of Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour allowed her rebirth as Marguerite Yourcenar, in which guise she would create an expansive corpus. Her final text was truncated by her death in 1987, providing testament to her tireless literary vitality and drive. Yourcenar’s novels are replete with an atmosphere of pervading death and darkness, and suffused with the motifs of antithesis: birth and death, absence and presence, past and present. Recent scholarship has concentrated on Yourcenar’s torment concerning the circumstances of her birth which suggest the aura of longing, guilt and loss, and maternal abandonment apparent in her texts. Women are portrayed as often mute and pale reflections of the male protagonist, whilst male homosexual liaisons and incest portray unconventional romantic themes, which distance the author’s writing from societal norms. Maternal absence has been suggested as the major catalyst for the spectres which underlie Yourcenar’s texts, whilst paternal absence and/or presence have been overlooked as a motivating force of her corpus. We contend that this is a significant omission in Yourcenarian scholarship which demands the investigation and analysis to be found in the following thesis. This will provide a valuable insight into paternal absence and presence in Yourcenar’s corpus which has until now remained neglected. An investigation of the life of the author and its influence on her self-reflexive style of penmanship, evidence which insistently underlines her texts but which was vehemently denied by Yourcenar, will reveal her literary struggles for liberation from her memories. A study of memory will follow and reinforce the extent to which it acts as a prominent, yet often subconscious catalyst for literary endeavour, whilst an analysis of Denier du rêve, replete with evidence of the author’s torment and resultant quest for ataraxia,1 will demonstrate unrecognised paternal influence in Yourcenar’s oeuvre, heretofore overshadowed by the maternal spectre, and provide the climax for this thesis manifesting the extent to which absence and presence afford powerful inspiration for the Yourcenarian corpus.
- Subject
- Yourcenar; ataraxia; catharsis; maternal and paternal absence
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1049197
- Identifier
- uon:15005
- Rights
- Copyright 2014 Sandra Leslie Warren
- Language
- eng
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
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| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Abstract | 654 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Thesis | 2 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |