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An Onomastic Double Bind: Colette's Gigi and the Politics of Naming

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Susan D. Cohen
Susan D. Cohen*
Affiliation:
Barnard CollegeNew York, New York
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Abstract

Although Colette did not consider herself a feminist in the activist sense of the term and even mocked feminism as a political movement, her fiction presents the situation of women in ways that stress their specificity and their imposed social inferiority. Gigi addresses the problem of naming as a crucial factor in male-female relations and implicitly identifies it as the nodal point of a struggle for discursive, as well as socioeconomic, identity.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 100 , Issue 5 , October 1985 , pp. 793 - 809
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1985

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References

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