Gaps, silences and witnesses: the quest for identity in Henriette Yvonne Stahl’s "My Brother, the Man"
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35824/sjrs.v1i1.17240Keywords:
Henriette Yvonne Stahl, identity, womanhood, trauma, love, deathAbstract
Remarked from her very first book, Voica (published in 1924), and up to her last novel Le Témoin de l’éternité, printed first in France in 1975 and translated into Romanian in 1995, Henriette Yvonne Stahl turned from a promising female writer into a unique voice in the inter-and post-war literary life in Romania. Starting from Rimbaud’s illuminating pensée “Love has to be reinvented” (Felman 2007: 5), this paper aims to explore the identity of females in My Brother, the Man, drawing on identity and trauma as devised by Penny Brown (1992), Cathy Caruth (1995 and 1996), Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (1992). In addition, the mixture of memory and narrative covers types of talk fiction (Kakandes 2005), the shift of focus from the subject of remembrance to the mode it takes place (Anne Whitehead 2009), and Beata Piątek who looks at how narratives impact readers (2014). Are the main characters engulfed in a dense life texture able to explore their personal dilemmas, difficult choices and detach from the flux of their own passions and desires? Or are they going to fall victims to their own inability of understanding the meaning of life, paralleled by the lack of vision and humanity manifested by secondary characters? Both male and female characters display a dominant profile, their actions and inner voices are marked by subtle or abrupt shifts, meant to stimulate a noticeable response from those they love or hate. The omniscient narrator employs a vast repertoire of techniques, meant to nuance egos and changes, moving from a classically-structured narrative to a detective story supporting inner monologues and deepened psychological impasses, occasionally bringing fictional personae closer to realist and existentialist fiction.
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