Hokenson, Jan W.

Exile is a prominent subject in many recent texts by Jewish women writers in several languages. Comparative analysis of the role of exile in two such texts, the Mexican Sabina Berman's La bobe (1990) in Spanish and the Tunisian Chochana Boukhobza's Un ete a Jerusalem (1986) in French, suggests that two novelists from different cultural and linguistic realms share similar concerns with exile, memory, Jewish identity, and gender. Both explore in great anguish geographical exile, Jewishness as exile (literally from ancient Israel, socially in the new homeland or host country, emotionally within the individual, and politically with respect to Israel), and lastly femaleness as a condition of exile, within modern patriarchal societies and within traditional Judaism.

Well anchored in the romance tradition, the binary nature of the medieval text seems to lend itself to a bipartite structure. Chretien de Troyes is a master of duality. The reader has no sooner established a premise than suddenly Chretien implies its opposite. Likewise, Renaut de Beaujeu gives to his text a perpetually changing dual perspective. In both texts the hero's quest is embodied in two female characters who appear to be each other's counterpart. Like all the other characters, they participate in the overall pattern or play of opposites in the two romances. Like the structure of the text, they can be seen as their own mirrored reflections. In these two works, the duality that characterizes the medieval text leads not only to bipartition but to the reversibility of characters and narrative plot.

The well-known Grimms' fairy tale "Sleeping Beauty" forms the subtext of two recent literary works, Rosario Ferre's novella "La bella durmiente" (1976) and Margaret Atwood's short story "Bluebeard's Egg" (1983). Both contemporary authors suggest that certain negative aspects inherent in the Sleeping Beauty paradigm should not persist in women's literature, unless the texts lead to transformation and self-realization of the heroines. This study demonstrates how the authors expose the fallacy in the paradigm, depart from it, and refigure it by transforming their heroines into characters quite distinct from the Grimm prototype. This study also suggests that Ferre's and Atwood's works serve as prototypes for feminine texts. As the characters distance themselves from hegemonic patriarchal traditions, each author's work is also removed from the referent of masculine literary traditions and returned to its origins, the oral tale.

Critical estimates of George Gissing's position on "the woman question" range from "pro-feminist" to "misogynist." Three novels reveal an ambivalence that is best characterized as the attitude of a benevolent despot. In Thyrza he glorifies two female characters as respective embodiments of loveliness and wisdom. A third woman is a paragon of housewifeliness. In later novels Gissing vents the frustrations of his own unhappy marriage. The Odd Women presents two feminists advocating better education for women who do not marry, and also discusses radical ideas about marriage. In The Whirlpool Gissing reveals a patriarchal stance in his story of two married women led astray in a metropolitan "whirlpool" because of too much liberty granted by their husbands. The happiest home in the novel is a rural one with a home-loving wife and mother at its center.

Solipsism, the assertion that the self is the only reality and the only thing that can be known and verified, is less pessimistic than nihilism, the radical doctrine that nothing exists, is knowable, or can be communicated. All novels may be solipsistic in the sense that fictions have reality: the author, knowingly or not, is creating a "reality" that may be no less valid than what the author assumes to be his or her own experienced "real" life. In some cases, readers interpreting such novels as Sartre's La Nausee and Garcia Marquez's Cien anos de soledad may find their own solipsistic leanings interacting with those of the authors, and it may be through such interaction that these texts work. Hence, the solipsistic perspective presents an authorial paradox, since the expression of this or any other idea would be meaningless outside the closed circle of writer and text. In these two texts. this solipsistic paradox and the problematic role of the reader are, in great part, the subject.

Despite disparities of strategy and style, the fundamental concerns of Emerson's Representative Men and Novalis's Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (The Apprentices at Sais) are almost identical. Both works describe and promote ideals of personal development that are essentially the same, and can be understood in terms of C. G. Jung's concept of individuation. The model of expansion which is celebrated in these two works goes beyond what is usually meant by "self-culture" or "Bildung," in that its principle is a dialectic of the conscious and the unconscious psyche, the aim of which is the restoration of equilibrium and a widened sense of personality. A comparison of the programs of Emerson and Novalis underscores the compatibility of their thinking, and enables us to appreciate German and American Romanticism in the context of the evolution of the concept of the unconscious.

Undergoing an epistemological shift from the structured and rigid reasoning of neo-classicism to a philosophy oriented toward human individuality and the emotional experience of the individual, Rousseau works in new modes in his late text Les Reveries du promeneur solitaire. Complaining of adversity and persecution, he seeks lost happiness through imaginative recreation of the past. Through this recreative faculty he achieves not only recollection but the consequent re-experiencing of past events. The second imaginative experience, he insists, is sometimes superior to the first. In ways critics have overlooked, imaginative re-creation transcends the past.

Cixous rejects the conclusions reached by Freud in the "Dora case" and rewrites the analysis without changing the sequence of events. In her play Portrait de Dora (published in Paris in 1976) Dora incarnates the injustices suffered by women within the family. The importance of the play is that it shifts responsibility from Dora to the entire society to which she belongs. Cixous's Dora becomes the symbol of woman who has overcome anguish and shattered the traditional "jougs et censures" opening the way to freedom.

Les Mouches is a modern reconstruction of the ancient myth embodied in the The Oresteia of Aeschylus. Jean-Paul Sartre not only rewrote the legend of Orestes; he remodeled it. Orestes is not just a new man; he is his own man. The play, therefore, is not a mere pastiche in modern dress. Sartre infuses Orestes with an unprecendented "Existentialist" consciousness, and this transformation adds new complexities to the ancient text. This Existentialist reworking of Hellenistic images is distinguished from the classically "tragic" elements in Aeschylus as well as later modifications in Sophocles and Euripides. Sartre's early introduction into the lore of Hellenism is considered, and a discussion of Sartre's theoretical and philosophical perspective on theater suggests which Greek elements Sartre was disposed to incorporate into his script.

In A la Recherche du temps perdu, several characters
including major figures wear a monocle, which seems to
serve both concretely as an emblem of social status and
symbolically as an indicator of limited vision. This study
takes as its aim an examination of the social milieu in
which the monocle is worn, with specific reference to the
vision and moral condition of those who don the small glass
disc.