Contemporary contexts of the self: architectural and geographic representations of roadblocks to self-construction in Marie Redonnet’s triptych of novels

This thesis examines the spatial contexts occupied by the narrators of Marie Redonnet’s triptych of novels (Splendid Hôtel, Forever Valley, Rose Mélie Rose) as a means for investigating those narrators’ halted constructions of self. Although structured in the fashion of traditional Bildungsromane, these novels withhold character development, the genre’s expected payoff. I argue that the geographic and architectural contexts of the novels contain representations of existential conditions that prohibit self-construction and are characteristic of the contemporary moment. I use the parameters set out by Redonnet in her essay The Story of the Triptych as a barometer for the narrators’ self-constructions, the first and most pertinent of which has to do with coming to terms with one’s inheritance. My thesis, I argue, is in a broad sense a discussion of the narrators’ inheritances on literal and symbolic levels. In an initial chapter dedicated to geographic context, I examine the dual character of the novels’ natural environments, which are by turns hostile and nurturing, as well as the symbolic nature of the novels’ landforms, which represent the alienation of the modern self geographically. Also in the first chapter is a consideration of how Redonnet’s natural symbolism operates on a metatextual level, speaking to her own path to self-discovery as an author who wished to renegotiate the novelist’s relationship to poetry. In a second chapter, I consider the symbolism in representations of human-built architecture in the triptych. In a discussion on the ruinous quality of specific structures throughout the triptych, I analyze Redonnet’s portrayal of the degraded social context in which her narrators, understandably, struggle to gain subjectivity. I find that the dilapidation of certain buildings corresponds to the dilapidation of their analogous social institutions in the novels. Together, the ruinous states of religion, education, government and patriotism, and romantic and familial relationships point to an atmosphere of ruin, where both building, in the sense of creating new structures, and Bildung, in the sense of personal formation, are antithetical. Overall, I find that Redonnet’s geographic and architectural symbolism foregrounds the challenging existential conditions of her narrators, painting a bleak portrait of the modern day.