Portraits d’écrivaines en métissage de soi: la quête de l’identité chez Colette, Leduc et Djebar

In this study we propose to examine works by Colette, Leduc and Djebar in order to throw light on the main paradigms of the quest for identity in the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on ‘feminine’ identity. Taking as our starting point a rejection of the ‘feminine myth’ that once prevailed and was used to form and manipulate the identity of women, we will suggest that these writers have contributed to the founding of a ‘myth in the feminine’ by their subversive use of the textual interface, a tendency they share with postmodernism. To support this argument, we will look at three general problems related to the formation of identity: conceptual space (to be explored through theories of sychoanalysis and existentialism); the connection between body and identity (especially in mother/daughter relationships); and the importance of the voice as a means of asserting the self and its possibilities (especially within the textual space). Each of these problems will be linked primarily to the work of one of the authors examined; thus we will explore the space of childhood for Colette, the importance of the body for Leduc and the birth of a new voice in Djebar. However, we will also show how all three paradigms of identity are connected within each text. Through comparison of these authors, a new image of a liberated (feminine) self gradually emerges: that of a self that cannot be defined in terms of gender or of a particular group but reinvents itself each time it talks through the text. The work of these authors suggests, then, that representations of the self in the twentieth century are inflected by differing paradigms of identity and that the portrait of the self can only henceforth be drawn by a use of multiple perspectives on the self.