Death, Abjection and Feminine Resistance in Eliette

“Death, Abjection and Feminine Resistance in Eliette Abécassis’s La Répudiée”
“La femme sera toujours le danger de tous les paradis”
– Paul Claudel (conversations in Loir-et-Cher)
“L’homme véritable veut deux choses: le danger et le jeu.
C’est pourquoi il veut la femme, le jouet le plus dangereux”
– Friedrich Nietzsche (Ainsi parlait Zarathoustre)
In the Western search for truth, female bodies have been associated with danger. Greek antiquity
and the Judeo-Christian tradition have produced countless images of powerful, dangerous
women (Eve, Medusa, the witch, the siren, to name a few) who are often the cause of men’s
mortality. In the citation above, Claudel suggests that women – as representations of carnal
temptation, ruse, and weakness – will always catalyze the transformation of utopia into dystopia;
and yet, according to Freud, this danger is caught up in feelings of desire. Through the study of
Rachel, the main character of Eliette Abécassis’s La Répudiée (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000), as
abject female (Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs d’horreur, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1980) this paper will
explore how the female body-as-dangerous is tied up with religious rationality that creates the
fatal metaphor of death-female, trapping women within the “eternal feminine” and placing them
in a state of endangerment. My study of La Répudiée questions how we might reimagine the
relationship between death and the “dangerous” female by considering Rachel’s suicide at the
end of the novel as a form of resistance, which along with her comportment throughout the
novel, questions the Western construction of “self.” While there is a historical, religious and
social divide between Rachel’s Hasidic community in La Répudiée and the Western traditions
from which Claudel, Nietzsche and Kristeva derive, Abécassis’s novel demonstrates a larger
trend to associate the female body with fear, danger and desire, which is a relationship that must
be recognized and rewritten.