Abstract
The question of vengeance appears in a particularly striking fashion in one of Gisèle Pineau’s many novels, Chair Piment, published in 2002. At the centre of the story is Mina, a young Guadeloupan woman living in exile in Paris and haunted by the ghost of her sister Rosalia who was killed in a fire 20 years earlier. Waiting in the wings is Suzon, whom the reader slowly discovers is harbouring a vengeful passion that will push her to exert a “supernatural retaliation”on the entire family of Mina’s father Melchior for his having abandoned her years earlier. Drawing from sociocriticism and the poetics of genre, this analysis will look at the language and discourse used in this somewhat fantastic treatment of the theme of vengeance. Amid this passionate melodrama lurk questions that provoke a discourse that is at times didactic, suggesting, as in fairy tales, that there is a right and a wrong path to follow. It is not vengeance that will cure the evils of the past but the magic of the spoken word.
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