Fantastic Femininities: Metamorphosis and Resistance in the Fiction of Marie Darrieussecq and Armonía Somers

Abstract

Abstract This article seeks to examine the construction of female embodied identities via metamorphosis in two works of Uruguayan and French literature: Armonía Somers’s La mujer desnuda (1950) and Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996). The internal and external transformations of these heroines are a result of bodies that refuse to be disciplined into silence and passivity, and, instead, make a spectacle of themselves, symbolically voicing their right to take up space and delight in the unacceptable – the grotesque, nudity, lust. Hence, it is not surprising that both novels, in foreshadowing new ways of being in the female body, generated scandal and controversy. Read through the lens of écriture féminine, the much-debated ambiguity of these texts can be understood as a device affirming women’s corporeal autonomy. Nevertheless, the tragic ending of these tales ultimately points to society’s persistent and violent rejection of female excess as an embodied identity.