Abstract
This essay deploys a semiotic approach to proper names in an analysis of the vast landscape of Alfred de Musset's female characters. No distinction is made among literary genres: characters examined belong to theatre, prose fiction, and poetry. This study is informed by the basic analytical tools developed in a chapter devoted to onomastics in Alfred de Musset's work (in Gilles Castagnes, Les Femmes et l'esthétique de la féminité dans l'œuvre d'Alfred de Musset, Bern, Peter Lang, 2003). It fleshes out this approach to proper names through an analysis combining several different aspects of the sign. The proper name is posited as a complex linguistic sign which is defined by its signifier, its signified, the relationship it establishes with ail the names in a given work, as well as by more "pragmatic" criteria — its cultural origins and the expectations created by its reappearance in the literary text. Certain proper names in the works of Alfred de Musset can be read as veritable statements in and of themselves, and thus require their own decoding.
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