IDENTITES ET SEXUALITES DE GENRE DANS LE ROMAN LA GRADIVA DE W. JENSEN
IDENTITES ET SEXUALITES DE GENRE DANS LE ROMAN LA GRADIVA DE W. JENSEN

Summary/Abstract: The paper discusses the novel La Gradiva, a Pompeian fantasy of W. Jensen, which drew the attention, among others, to C. G. Jung who expressed his interest to S. Freud, latter one analyzes the novel in his essay “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s La Gradiva.” The line that organizes both the novel and Freud’s commentary is “knowledge of love.” The thing that serves as engine, phrases and words “capable of engendering and consequences” (Maurice Blanchot), in the novel and the psychoanalyst’s interpretation, is that of a content and of a perspective of being in love, the search of women and men for personal identity and especially for the sexual one. Why to choose a partner and not another? What aspires to the ideal image of this woman? How do we find in the other what we want? In this novel, one can note that wishing to possess an object-other means being already be possessed by him or her. A man chooses an object that opens again infantile sexual questions that he did not find an answer for. The object then embodies a question, a sexual riddle mystery that turns into an ideal object. In the novel, the girl has not entered a small part of the puzzle for her own sex and she wants to clarify this conundrum in light of the desire that man has for her.

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