“Sortir de l’Auberge”: Strategies of (False) Narration in Atwood and Triolet

Abstract

The following comparative study is born of two arguments. The first is that the philosophy espoused by feminist movements in the Western European literary world suggests that a commonality of origins, angsts, and attempts contained in feminist opposition to patriarchy should exist on at least some levels. The second is that, considering the evidence of the migration (sometimes with mutation) of literary movements in this same world, a commonality of approaches and devices would also exist. Although each of these arguments comes with its share of provisos and caveats, it can certainly be put forward that commonality a transcendence of cultural or social differences is attainable at some level, that there are universal and basically human behavior patterns, concepts, and institutions, on the basis of which literary comparisons can be made to some extent within a literary sphere such as that of Western Europe.1 This study offers one example of such transcendence. In the context of modernist and postmodernist writing, two women from different sides of the Atlantic and different backgrounds, living and writing at different times and without much possibility of reading each other, show a similarity of approaches and writing strategies.2