Madame Bovary X! , or "on a le droit de vouloir être un objet" - Johns Hopkins University
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Madame Bovary X! , or “on a le droit de vouloir être un
objet”
Gabrielle Parker
L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 59, Number 3, Fall 2019, pp. 47-59 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.2019.0031
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/734228
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]Madame Bovary X!, or
“on a le droit de vouloir être un objet”
Gabrielle Parker
L
EÏLA SLIMANI’S DANS LE JARDIN DE L’OGRE,1 inspired by a
scandal,2 informed by “les classiques” of adultery fiction,3 itself
enjoyed succès de scandale upon publication, thereby achieving that
“exquise infamie du scandale,” one of the “caractéristiques génériques (au
sens grammatical, poétique et féministe)” that according to Audrey Lasserre
distinguish women writers’ first novels.4 Tahar Ben Jelloun, a fellow Moroc-
can novelist, foregrounded the author’s gender and ethnicity: “Une Marocaine
ose et ne prend aucune précaution. Elle y va sans filet et sans pudeur, en même
temps, c’est ce qui fait l’intérêt du livre.”5 “Pudeur” is key: like the Arabic
h’chouma, it is intrinsically linked to gender and ethnicity, intimating trans-
gression.6 Ben Jelloun further highlighted the book’s topic as transgressive:
“une addiction, pas n’importe laquelle, la plus perverse, la plus dangereuse,
celle du sexe.” The author’s mother added helpfully, “C’est Madame
Bovary X!” (Schwartzbrod). There is no scandal, however, where the trans-
gression is not publicized.7 Slimani’s first novel enjoyed extensive media cov-
erage, both in France and in Morocco, where it was awarded the sixth La
Mamounia literary prize for Moroccan fiction in the French language. Attrib-
uted to a woman for the first time, the prize prompted Boyd Tonkin to wonder,
“Has an erotic novel by a woman ever won a major honor in the Muslim Arab
world before?,”8 a question that underlined the same scandalous elements that
Ben Jelloun had: the author’s social identity and her subject matter. Slimani
herself described Dans le jardin de l’ogre as “un livre libre et sexuel,” “un
livre trash et cru,”9 mauvais genre, in other words, allying “monstration exa-
cerbée du sexe (organe sexuel et sexualité) et violence faite au corps” (Las-
serre 59). Intensifying her provocative stance, Slimani asserts her intention to
challenge the feminist notion, and ethics, that posit a woman’s right to agency
and self-empowerment: “Aujourd’hui, le féminisme considère la passivité
comme quelque chose de totalement négatif. Or, moi je considère que dans
notre sexualité, dans notre vie, on a le droit de vouloir être un objet” (Ravix,
our emphasis). Yet, as we have seen, notwithstanding her reference to trash
fiction this neophyte writer appears determined to inscribe her book within a
literary lineage and a specific genre, that of the adultery novel on which she
intends to imprint her own subversive interpretation. Considering earlier
transgressive tales, she traces an underlying leitmotiv: “toute la littérature
© L’Esprit Créateur, Vol. 59, No. 3 (2019), pp. 47–59L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR
classique [...] de Flaubert à Tolstoï, a étudié la question du couple et du
désœuvrement au féminin.”10
Slimani’s character, Adèle Robinson, is indeed bored with her life as a jour-
nalist living in Paris, and as a young mother struggling to conform to the com-
peting demands and expectations of modern urban and bourgeois life. She is
also caught between her marriage and her sex addiction. She compulsively ini-
tiates casual sexual encounters with complete strangers in often sordid, always
joyless, and occasionally dangerous circumstances. She tries to control her
cravings, to be “sage” (Jardin 11), but her “monstrous” desire is untameable.
Her complicated life unravels when her husband uncovers her double life.
We propose to examine the author’s project on its own terms: as a twenty-
first-century reworking of the adultery novel and its intertextual resonances,
and as the tale of a woman who claims her right not to take ownership of her
life. In the first instance, Adèle’s fictional genealogy will be decrypted; then
Slimani’s “subversif” (Ravix) treatment of Adèle’s addiction and paresse, her
self-objectification, will be examined. Finally, we will address the ambiva-
lence that pervades the book.
A skein of transgressive fictions
Dans le jardin de l’ogre is the work of a first-time author determined to be
published. Slimani has told of the failure of her first attempt, which prompted
her to enrol in a writing course and learn the “keys” to editorial success.11 It
is also the work of an outsider yearning for recognition. Born and educated in
Morocco before her family moved to France when she was eighteen, she nei-
ther disowns nor claims her Arabic background, though she expresses regret
at having missed out on its classical language and culture. She is intent, how-
ever, on establishing her literary credentials in a mainly French context. This
dual ambition informs a deliberate strategy of positioning: having situated her
topic within a literary lineage, she then proceeds to anchor it within that tra-
dition through a process of intertextual references.12
The novel is a cat’s cradle of narrative threads drawn from a multiplicity of
sources. The choice of the female protagonist’s name resonates with echoes of
other Adèles or Mrs. Robinsons. The latter, not a particularly common French
patronymic,13 recalls Isabella Robinson, a Victorian lady whose life story has
been recounted in novelistic form.14 The diary she had written to record her
feelings—“the raving of a sex-obsessed lunatic,” “an erotomaniac”—was used
to prosecute her, leading to her ruin. Married to an industrialist who had several
mistresses and two illegitimate children, she had fallen in love with a married
man. There was no proof of an affair, but she had consigned her erotic longing
48 FALL 2019GABRIELLE PARKER
and hope of reciprocation to her diary in which she also confided “the misery
of her marriage, her ennui and entrapment.” “She wrote out her fantasies and
expressed the full force of her desire.”15 Slimani appears to confirm an aware-
ness of this story in an interview in which she referred to “l’Angleterre victo-
rienne,” its “invention” of the word “nymphomane,” and the barbaric treat-
ments devised to treat this “désordre” (Ravix). A more recent, and this time
entirely fictitious, Mrs. Robinson is the older woman, the femme fatale, in The
Graduate.16 Mired in suburbia, bored, unsatisfied, fond of a drink, and intent
on obstructing her husband’s plan to pair off their daughter Elaine with Ben,
the eponymous graduate young man, Mrs. Robinson seduces him. As to the
character’s first name, it suggests Adèle H., itself a filmic fiction based on the
real-life Adèle Hugo, the poet’s second daughter. L’histoire d’Adèle H. relates
Adèle Hugo’s erotomania, her delusional belief of being loved in return for her
own obsessive love for Lieutenant Albert Pinson, as she has described it in the
first two volumes of her private diary (1852 and 1853).17 Her life ends in
degradation, despair, and madness.
Details such as the incriminating diary and its contemporary reincarna-
tion, a dedicated flip phone, play a part in the downfall of Slimani’s Adèle. As
an adolescent, she kept a diary, read and mocked by her mother. As an adult,
her little black book is discovered and read by her husband, Richard, as is her
white flip phone. Just as Joseph Kessel’s Séverine Sérizy was instrumental in
her husband’s accidental maiming by her lover,18 Adèle is indirectly the cause
of Richard’s road accident, the result of extreme fatigue at the end of an on-
call shift when he had been standing in for a colleague, Adèle’s lover, during
one of their assignations.
Further features of earlier fictions weave their way through the plot. Like
Emma Bovary, Adèle enhances her social status through marriage and disap-
points her mother-in-law. The social differences between Adèle and Richard
are played out in the narrative during the contrasting end-of-year celebrations
at his parents’ home and at hers. The discrepancy in treatment goes beyond
reflecting the length of their stay with each set of parents. The Robinsons are
expansive and at ease. The lives of Adèle’s parents are as narrow and limited
as their accommodation. They are known only by their first names, Simone
and Kader, which signals Adèle’s mixed ethnicity while reinforcing the era-
sure of her original identity prior to marriage. Odile, Madame Robinson mère,
is the perfect matriarch, cook, understanding spouse, attentive mother dis-
cretely disappointed at her son’s choice of a wife, and helpful grandmother.
Practical, she steps in and whisks the child away as soon as she hears of her
son’s accident. Similarly, Madame Bovary senior had also been a perfect
VOL. 59, NO. 3 49L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR
mother to her son. Betrayed by a straying husband, she had retained her dig-
nity. Unhappy with her son’s choice of a wife, she would take in his daughter
Berthe after Emma’s death.
Husband characters share a family resemblance too: Charles Bovary was
a public health officer (“officier de santé”); Pierre Sérigny in Belle de jour
was a surgeon, as is Richard Robinson. Richard shares further similarities
with Alexis Karenin and Charles Bovary. “Boring,” but also “bon et
généreux” (Slimani, Jardin 68), honorable, complex, and a committed profes-
sional, he is a caring father and loves his wife deeply. Like Bovary who left
his blossoming practice to begin again in a new country town hoping the
change may alleviate Emma’s suffering, Robinson leaves Paris and his estab-
lished position to start again privately in Normandy anxious to spare his wife
the temptations of the capital.
Adèle especially recalls Flaubert’s Emma. An indifferent mother who
needs consciously to pull herself together to look after her own child, she does
not particularly love Lucien, conceived as a “remède” to her “mal-être”
(Jardin 36). Indeed, her entourage would prescribe a second child as the nec-
essary prop to her equilibrium. Indifference to sex with their own husbands is
another trait she shares with her fictional predecessors who, frustrated by their
powerlessness and lack of agency, slump into apathy and idleness. Like her
fictional forebears, Emma Bovary, Thérèse Desqueyroux or Anna Karenina,
Adèle is trapped in wilful boredom. Thérèse was entrapped by the mores of
her time and milieu and by her dowry—pines are not movable assets. Observ-
ing her husband overdosing on his medication by mistake, she did not inter-
vene out of paresse.19 That first omission will lead to commission and to his
‘accidental’ poisoning.
Anna, Emma, Thérèse, Séverine, Adèle... all seek to escape the constraints
of their gender and their bourgeois status. Drugs, be they medication, nar-
cotics or poison, feature in the four novels referred to by Slimani, as do alco-
hol, tobacco, the occasional illegal substances, and sex in Dans le jardin de
l’ogre. Séverine Sérizy was addicted to rough sex, Thérèse Desqueyroux to
cigarettes, Anna Karenina to morphine, Emma Bovary to shopping. Emma
spent her way out of disillusion until she fell into the hands of the shady debt-
collector M. Lheureux. Adèle is continuously à découvert (Jardin 20, in the
red, after indulging in drinks, taxis, lingerie, and a drug orgy. À découvert
seems intended as a double-entendre: exposed, as she will be, and perhaps
hopes to be, since Adèle Robinson is also an addict, a sex addict.
Thus Slimani deliberately borrows from canonical literature and film,
nudging recognition on the part of the reader, a strategy that brings to mind
50 FALL 2019GABRIELLE PARKER
Philippe Vilain’s analysis of the epigonal approach in first-time writers.20 In a
sense, any literary text is palimpsestuous: as Gérard Genette admits, hypertex-
tuality can be in the eye of the reader, “a simple matter of critical ingenuity,”21
yet the hypertextual approach in Dans le jardin de l’ogre is “more or less offi-
cially stated”—one of Genette’s criteria (9)—in the carefully choreographed
interviews with the author that accompanied the publication of the novel and
in “paratextual clues” (8) such as the book’s epigraphs. It is striking, however,
that those hypotexts are male-authored. In light of the author’s stated project
of reworking the “classiques” of transgression in order to bring the notion into
the twenty-first century, it seems an idiocratic positioning, given the particu-
larly rich output of twenty-first-century women-authored transgressive litera-
ture in France.22 There may also be something provocative in taking this stand
since Slimani claims to be deliberately opposing a current feminist trend that
disapproves of “passivité” and claims the right for women to crave objectifi-
cation if they so choose (Ravix).
Slimani’s ‘subversive’ approach
Although she shares several traits with her character—at the time of writing her
novel she was also aged thirty-five, an actor manqué, of Maghrebi descent, mar-
ried to a successful French banker, mother of a two-year-old son, and working at
Jeune Afrique—Slimani’s narrative is not autobiographical. On that score, too,
she differentiates herself from the previous generation of French women novel-
ists whose work, frequently written in referential mode, draws on the personal
and political. The protagonist, deprived of her fictional agency, is referred to as
“elle” throughout. This choice is in part stylistic: Slimani adopts a journalistic
approach to the construction of the novel, and in her expository style and social
gaze she presents the Other. She has explained her writing method as allying the
sense of observation fostered by her training as a journalist with her mentor’s
advice to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’ (Comment j’écris 38). The action is presented
as a series of “scènes” (Comment j’écris 50). The use of the present tense, short
chapters, and clipped sentences dramatize the urgency of Adèle’s physical needs
and gnawing inner voice. The neutral, pared-down tone brings a new perspective
to the novel’s subject matter: an investigation of a woman’s “perverse” and “dan-
gereuse” addiction (Ben Jelloun), and an attempt at understanding it.
The first page goes straight to the point: the crux of the story is the char-
acter’s suffering.23 Adèle experiences withdrawal symptoms, is desperate to
compensate for her cravings, then yields to them: “Elle agit en opiomane, en
joueuse de cartes” (Jardin 13). The next chapter develops the story: a journal-
ist up against an already extended deadline and bored with her assignment—
VOL. 59, NO. 3 51L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR
she is covering the incidents of December 2010 in Tunisia that would result
in “the Arab Spring.” Faced with her quandary, the protagonist considers what
she ought to do: interrogate contacts, verify the information, and draw from
her knowledge of the issues and the area. She opts for improvisation instead,
cutting and pasting from a variety of materials, faking quotations, and invent-
ing sources. The character’s progressive build-up develops a gradual
crescendo towards what is simultaneously the climax of the story and its
denouement: Richard’s accident. The event is an opportunity for a turning-
point for Adèle, shocked into taking stock of her life. Yet Richard’s absence
and helplessness also afford her unfettered freedom, and she is soon on the
loose, overstepping all boundaries. Her recklessness leads to Richard’s dis-
covery of her double life.
Adèle’s aberrant behavior leads to her husband’s calling her a “monstre”
(Jardin 152), a judgment that brings to mind Toril Moi’s sentence: “The mon-
ster woman is the woman who refuses to be selfless, acts on her own initia-
tive, who has a story to tell—in short, a woman who rejects the submissive
role patriarchy has reserved for her.”24 On the other hand, Adèle’s self-
loathing confirms her as prey to patriarchal positioning. She longs to “n’être
qu’un objet,” a “poupée dans le jardin de l’ogre” (Jardin 11, 12). She would
have liked to be gloriously idle but is not sufficiently well off. Her job serves
as an alibi, providing opportunities for sexual encounters. Her friend Lauren
is another alibi: her home another elsewhere where she is supposed to be; her
friend an excuse-provider who can cover for her (Slimani, Jardin 45). Lauren
is her confidante, the only one who knows Adèle’s secret, yet Adèle betrays
her with her boyfriend. A whole chapter is devoted to the self-imposed con-
straints linked to her addiction, the secrets and lies, the expense, the cheating,
robbing her son of medical care, choosing the ‘wrong priorities,’ the elaborate
deceptions. She sees her husband’s accident as an “aubaine,” “un signe, une
délivrance” (Jardin 107). She reaches a nadir in the drug-fueled indiscrimi-
nate sex she organizes at home while Richard is in hospital. Her seduction of
Xavier, her husband’s patron, is the fullest illustration of her sexual fantasy:
she seduces him, uses him, then discards him: “il a trop servi” (Jardin 141,
142). She treats men as objects, mere instruments to stave off her addiction.
She appears to illustrate text-book symptoms of dependency: lack of control,
an inability to stay away from her ‘fix.’ In the opening pages Adèle is shown
in a predatory stance, observing the male passengers in the métro carriage,
thinking ‘they would do’ (Jardin 12). Desperate for sex, she seeks Adam, an
earlier chance encounter, whose name appears to stand for archetypal man:
any mate will do. She neglects her professional commitments and believes
52 FALL 2019GABRIELLE PARKER
that sleeping with her boss has sunk her career. She accumulates risks both at
a professional level and in her personal life: her erratic sex life makes her late
to work and miss deadlines; she ignores relationships, from her neglected son
to her neglected friend Lauren. Indeed, she courts danger on an escalating
basis and is ready to inflict self-harm.
Adèle’s missed calling as an actor surfaces in her need to stage her sexual
fantasies. She aches to feel wanted in order to exist, yet the men themselves
are mere instruments, blurred images, rather than the objects of true memo-
ries. She does not seek to fulfil her own sexual impulses but is aroused by
men’s desire: “elle comprit très vite que le désir n’avait pas d’importance. [...]
Ce n’était pas à la chair qu’elle aspirait, mais à la situation” […]. L’érotisme
habillait tout” (Jardin 126). Unlike Virginie Despentes who, in Amaleena
Damlé’s analysis, “points to the politically empowering potential of perform-
ance and spectacle,”25 Slimani’s protagonist is disempowered by her depend-
ency on the parody of desire. When considering the possibility of quitting
before age deprives her of her ‘magic power’ (Jardin 128), she realizes that
this renunciation would be tantamount to self-erasure, and that she would
become “[u]ne surface sans fond et sans revers. Un corps sans ombre” (Jardin
128). She relishes the sense of being “in charge” (Jardin 101), and she must
initiate and control sexual violence. Yet, when after his discovery of her
hidden life her husband demands to know why she has betrayed their love, her
response is “c’est plus fort que moi” (Jardin 153).
Adèle suffers, in every sense, from the consequences of her sex addiction:
shame, self-hatred, despair, loneliness, moral conflict, and suicidal behavior.
Her sexual activity seems out of control to her. It is less her sexual activity
itself that is an addiction than her dependency on it to numb negative emo-
tions and difficult experiences. The narrative gives several clues to the cause
for her behavior: the social and cultural gap between her family background
and that of her husband, and her early traumatic sexual experiences. Her diary
spells out the many expectations that weary her as a daughter, wife, daughter-
in-law, mother, friend, as a mistress even, an illustration of the author’s
contention that “Aujourd’hui on dit aux femmes qu’elles doivent être de
bonnes mères, de bonnes épouses, de bonnes maîtresses, mais dans une cer-
taine mesure, qu’elles doivent aussi assurer dans leur travail” (Ravix). This
description reads as a tamer version of Despentes’ “portrait of social projec-
tions of femininity,” in Damlé’s words, made still more acute, “precariously
balanced between competing cultural and familial imperatives” (Damlé 19).
Asked about her mother’s labelling of her book as “Madame Bovary X,”
the author welcomed the pertinence of the remark, adding, “Adèle partage
VOL. 59, NO. 3 53L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR
avec madame Bovary le désir de fuir une vie qu’elle juge médiocre, l’envie
d’avoir des sensations fortes. Adèle vit aussi à une époque où le sexe est par-
tout et où il est devenu en partie un objet d’aliénation tant il est obsédant”
(Bouazza 2014).
Ambivalences and ambiguities
Alienation is manifest in Adèle’s behavior, a reaction to two early exposures
to the pervasive presence of sexuality Slimani denounces: a vicarious experi-
ence as a child, and a chance reading as an adolescent. In the latter, Adèle
comes across Milan Kundera’s L’insoutenable légèreté de l’être in a rented
apartment during a summer holiday.26 The scene is described en abyme, Adèle
slipping into the fictitious character of the female protagonist (Teresa) and
into the story. It is the ambiguity of Teresa’s response to Tomas’ unwanted
advances—she is aroused in spite of herself by his desire—that leads Adèle to
a self-discovery, a fascination akin to the vertige described by Kundera, which
echoes the book’s epigraph: “ivre de sa propre faiblesse” (Jardin 9). As a nar-
rative device, these buried memories recall the incident in Belle de jour, also
suggested as a trigger for the protagonist’s sexual addiction: Séverine, aged
eight, was molested by a plumber in her parents’ home, her first and striking
experience of male sexual desire (Kessel, Prologue). Later in life, Adèle acts
as her own agent, while also seeking to be instrumentalized, courting debase-
ment in her masochistic pursuit of pleasure: simultaneously “victim” and
“culpable agent of sex and sexuality.”27 The account of her first sexual expe-
rience with a young man her own age, around seventeen, describes an event
carefully planned, yet every plan goes awry, becoming something both dirty
and disappointing, leaving her simultaneously “fière,” “humiliée,” and “vic-
torieuse” (Jardin 91–93). Further unsavory episodes are hinted at: “le voisin
du huitième” whom she used to visit and service after school is present at her
father’s wake (Jardin 201). The guests gone, her tipsy mother delivers some
home truths about her own depraved childhood. In Adèle’s adolescent eyes,
emancipation meant exchanging childish passivity for lasciviousness.
It is a childhood experience, however, an event in which she was a passive
and unwitting participant, that left the initial indelible mark. Aged ten, Adèle
was exposed to sex as a spectacle. Taken to a seedy strip-show in Pigalle
during a trip to Paris with her mother and witnessing the lewd glances and ges-
tures exchanged by her mother and the louche stranger accompanying her, the
child found the squalid atmosphere and exhibitions particularly disturbing:
“Adèle a ressenti pour la première fois ce mélange de peur et d’envie, de
dégoût et d’émoi érotique. Ce désir sale.” As an adult, she will long for, and
54 FALL 2019GABRIELLE PARKER
never again fully experience, “ce sentiment magique de toucher du doigt le vil
et l’obscène, la perversion bourgeoise et la misère humaine” (Jardin 67). The
occasional visits she pays to a sordid establishment on Boulevard de Clichy
can be seen in that context: sleaze continues to be both attractive and repellent
to her. When she is shamed on one such visit by an elderly “Maghrébin,” who
spits out “tfou”28 and “h’chouma” (Jardin 137), the performative utterance
coming from the “vieil Arabe” is especially significant for Adèle who under-
stands not just the words but all their connotations. Following the book’s pub-
lication, two words recurred in the author’s encounters with Moroccan women
readers: hudud, which she defines as “frontières sacrées”; and h’chouma, mod-
esty or shame,29 an énantiosème or auto-antonym. Those two notions and the
very ambiguity, or ambivalence perhaps, that they convey are at the core not
only of Dans le jardin the l’ogre but also of the author’s project.
Ambiguity attaches to the very construction of her protagonist, a con-
flicted character, reserved, modest, demure, diffident, almost bashful, but also
coarse, indecent, and crude. Although Adèle courts danger and exposure in
sexual encounters, she proves a timid and fearful creature who does not like
walking alone at night, is afraid of the dark while waiting for Xavier, and
brazenly engages in sexual practices in semi-public places. After her father’s
funeral, she feels unable to face a walk in the dark to retrieve the jacket for-
gotten at her mother’s flat, yet she shares a joint with an unknown young man
in a shady café and is ready to follow him. At the narrative apex, dreading a
night on her own, she brings danger home by inviting two unknown men for
a drugs and sex session—l’ogre est dans la maison, if not in the jardin. This
duality pervading the novel is a deliberate choice on the part of the author,
starting with her title:
Le titre est un peu un oxymore puisque le jardin est, par définition, un endroit pacifié,
une nature bourgeoise et n’est donc pas censé être habité par des ogres. Je voulais jus-
tement montrer l’irruption de la monstruosité dans un univers extrêmement bourgeois.
Et puis l’ogre incarne une figure un peu double; c’est à la fois ce qui attire et ce qui
répugne. C’est une métaphore de la sexualité d’Adèle. (Bouazza 2014)
This contradictory approach is evident in the tension in the author’s provoca-
tive assertion “Pour moi la vraie liberté, c’est aussi le pouvoir de choisir sa
dépendance” (Ravix). At the same time she marks out the protagonist’s path
towards sexual addiction through events that underline the contingency of that
‘choice.’ Except for the pursuit of her monomania, “l’amour” (Jardin 107),
Adèle’s passivity is emphasized. During Richard’s courting it was his promise
to take care of her and of everything that won her over. She owes him every-
VOL. 59, NO. 3 55L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR
thing, including her job. Following the accident that might cost him his life,
she reflects she cannot do without him, not out of love, but because she
depends on him for every practical aspect of her life. In Slimani’s narrative,
Adèle’s paresse is not a hedonistic choice, but rather a form of apathy, a
pathology beyond her control.
Further, Slimani’s character is robbed of her agency at both the diegetic
and the extradiegetic level. Within the narrative, her betrayed and wounded
husband copes with his emotions by allowing his doctor persona to take over.
His expertise in dependencies is brought to bear; he analyzes the medical case
in order to find a way to understand her illness and help her recover. Adèle’s
craving for self-fulfillment is turned into a project, a set of syndromes for her
husband to diagnose and cure. Seeking such cure, however, represents an eth-
ical conundrum. Adèle is prey to drives she cannot control, that endanger her
well-being and bring suffering, her own and that of her husband and child. Yet
since she cannot overcome them herself, to help her is to deprive her of her
own agency. In the end, Adèle experiences a double loss of control—over the
addiction and over her husband. Indeed, in an encounter with Lauren before
her final relapse, Adèle who believes she has cut herself off from her past,
finds herself ‘impersonating Richard’ (Jardin 199), echoing his words and
arguments. Deprived of her core self and own voice, she has become what she
feared, a simple form devoid of her own substance.
In interviews and comments on her book, the author views her character
as ‘a case.’ Adèle’s story is told for her; she is observed, used, watched,
helped, explained. Again appropriately, those ‘classics’ in which Slimani dis-
cerned a study of “désœuvrement au féminin” also present the condition as
pathological.30 Each stages a female figure who seeks to escape her condition
through some form of addiction, mere distraction, then a spiral of compulsive
‘improper’ forms of behavior. Each figure ends up robbed of all agency, both
through being subjected to forms of confinement, and through being denied
their final defining act. Thus, Emma’s suicide is camouflaged as a fatal con-
fusion between sugar and poison and turned into an accident; Thérèse’s
attempted crime becomes a non lieu (dismissed); and Tolstoy robs Anna
Karenina’s final gesture of much of its import by handing the final word to
Levin rejoicing in his own religious rebirth.
If the concept of agency vanishes, life itself becomes meaningless. At the
end of the narrative Adèle oscillates between boredom and oblivion, consider-
ing suicide as she confronts the prospect of banishment by Richard. Dans le
jardin de l’ogre ends in suspense, with Adèle on the brink, longing for home but
incapable of facing walking to the train station—whether to return or to throw
56 FALL 2019GABRIELLE PARKER
herself under a train à la Karenina. The novel also ends with Richard’s hope, his
longing for Adèle, and his celebration of his desire for her. Richard’s love is
patient.31 The last words are his: “nous n’avons pas fini” (Jardin 215). They are
ambiguous words: hopeful, but heavy with an understandable longing to con-
trol, to ensure Adèle surrenders herself to his love. His is a generous love, capa-
ble of waiting. “L’amour, ça n’est que de la patience” (Jardin 215), that of wear-
ing down the devil in the soul of one’s partner—or the actual person? As Diana
Holmes has observed, “True Love was shown to be an ideology that served to
legitimize oppressive relations at both domestic and state level.”32
Conclusion
Leïla Slimani’s “trash” interpretation of Bovarysme (Slimani, Sexe et men-
songes 11), intended in part as a sympathetic examination of nymphomania,
is less about eroticism than addiction. As we have seen, Slimani is aware of
the tragic medical history of nymphomania, a concept that constructs a female
sexuality totally out of control.33 Nevertheless, the author’s identifying
Adèle’s behavior as an addiction is yet another way of branding female desire
as dysfunctional: the paradigm of disease endures. Presented as the combina-
tion of a physiological and psychological disorder, it requires watching,
restricting, and taming by her husband, a medical man. Moreover, the narra-
tive suggests moral trespass on the part of a character whose cultural back-
ground brands as failure a woman’s inability to adhere to norms of gender and
femininity. Indeed, Adèle’s addiction might be to shame itself: “an elaborate
mixture of shame and sexual excitement.”34
Even if Slimani is exploring “not so much promiscuity as the pressures
that drive Adèle into this perilous ‘loss of self’” (Tonkin), this “loss of self”
conflicts with the author’s stated intention to challenge what she deems con-
temporary feminist idées reçues. Her protagonist’s most striking feature is her
plight, her suffering. As her chosen remedy to her mal de vivre, Adèle’s sex-
uality is not scandalous by nature but because of the tyranny it exerts over her
life. Similarly, Adèle’s “paresse” is not in itself scandalous, nor does it under-
mine feminist ethics; it does, however, undermine the reader’s belief in her
decision-making power. Both appear to be antonymic to the freedom Slimani
claims for her character.
Middlesex University
VOL. 59, NO. 3 57L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR
Notes
1. Leïla Slimani, Dans le jardin de l’ogre (Paris: Gallimard, 2014); Adèle, Sam Taylor, trans.
(London: Faber & Faber, 2019).
2. The arrest of Dominique Strauss-Khan, then managing director of the International Mone-
tary Fund (IMF), accused of sexual assault in New York in 2011. Sarah Leduc, “Un roman
sur l’addiction sexuelle féminine récompensé au Maroc,” https://z.umn.edu/4azm.
3. “Madame Bovary, Thérèse Desqueyroux, Anna Karénine, Belle de jour…” Alexandra
Schwartzbrod, interview, “Leïla Slimani: “Madame Bovary X,” Sept. 29, 2014,
https://z.umn.edu/4azn. Each of those novels was also deemed scandalous at the time when
it appeared.
4. Audrey Lasserre, “Mauvais genre(s): Une nouvelle tendance littéraire pour une nouvelle
génération de romancières (1985–2000)?,” Premiers romans: 1945–2003, Johan Faerber
and Marie-Odile André, eds. (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2005), 59. Although Sli-
mani (b. 1988) comes well after the generation Lasserre was considering (born in the 1960s
and producing in the 1980s onwards), her analysis remains relevant.
5. Tahar Ben Jelloun, “Le livre du sexe et des plaisirs,” Le point, Aug. 19, 2014,
https://z.umn.edu/4azo.
6. “Hchouma is the label applied to virtually everything considered transgressive, taboo, uncon-
ventional, provocative or progressive by the cultural order in Morocco. […] It is the master
socio-cultural code into which the Moroccan individual, and women in particular, have been
and still are socialised.” L. H. Skalli, Through a Local Prism: Gender, Globalization, and
Identity in Moroccan Women’s Magazines (Oxford: Lexington Books 2006), 96.
7. Slimani underlines the mediatization of Dominique Strauss-Khan’s public disgrace: Anna
Ravix, interview, “Leila Slimani en tournée au Maroc pour signer son premier roman Dans
le jardin de l’ogre,” Nov. 9, 2014, https://z.umn.edu/4azp.
8. Boyd Tonkin, “Leïla Slimani’s Dans le jardin de l’ogre: Eroticism in a Repressed World,”
Oct. 22, 2015, https://z.umn.edu/4azq.
9. Leïla Slimani, Sexe et mensonges: La vie sexuelle au Maroc (Paris: Les Arènes, 2017), 11.
10. “Adèle, une Bovary des temps modernes,” Aïda Bouazza, interview, L’économiste, 19
(2014), https://z.umn.edu/4azr.
11. In Comment j’écris (Paris: Éditions de l’aube, 2018), the author reveals that this is in fact
her second novel, the first having turned out to be a failure, 48.
12. For Genette, hypertextuality is “a universal feature of literariness”: Gérard Genette,
Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1982), Channa Newman and Claude Doubin-
sky, trans. (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1997), 9.
13. http://www.genealogie.com/nom-de-famille/Robinson.html.
14. Kate Summerscale, Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady
(London: Bloomsbury, 2012).
15. Alexandra Harris, “Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace by Kate Summerscale,” The Guardian, May
9, 2012, https://z.umn.edu/4azs.
16. Mike Nichols’s film (1967), based on Charles Webb’s novel The Graduate (1963).
17. François Truffaut, L’histoire d’Adèle H. (1975), with Isabelle Adjani in the title role; Bruce
Robinson was Lieutenant Pinson. Adèle Hugo’s diaries have been published as a three-
volume set: Frances Vernor Guille, Le journal d’Adèle Hugo (Paris: Lettres modernes
Minard, 1968, 1971, 1984).
18. Joseph Kessel, Belle de Jour (Paris: Gallimard, 1928).
19. François Mauriac, Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927) (Paris: CAL, 1963), 82.
20. Philippe Vilain, “Stratégies et tentatives de positionnement dans le champ littéraire contem-
porain,” in Faerber and André. His analysis instances his own L’étreinte (Paris: Gallimard,
1997) as a hypertext of Ernaux, “Fragments autour de Philippe V,” L’infini, 56 (1996): 25–
26. Vilain also mentions the neologism “actufiction” coined to design the tendency for a
current-affair event to be used as fiction fodder—a strategy adopted by Slimani in both her
first novel and her second: Leïla Slimani, Une chanson douce (Paris: Gallimard, 2016).
21. According to Genette, the object of poetics is not the text but its transcendence, trantextu-
ality (1), its relationship to other texts, He identifies five types of transtextual relationships:
58 FALL 2019GABRIELLE PARKER
from intertextuality, defined as “a relationship of copresence between two texts or among
several texts” that is more or less explicit (1, 2), to hypertextuality, “any relationship uniting
a text B [...] [hypotext] to an earlier text A [...] [hypotext]” (5).
22. From the 1990s onwards, this literature includes Annie Ernaux, Passion simple (1991), Se
perdre (2001); Virginie Despentes, Baise-moi (1993), Les jolies choses (1998); Marie
Nimier, La caresse (1994), La nouvelle pornographie (2002); Marie Darrieussecq,
Truismes, 1996; Catherine Cusset, Jouir (1997); Camille Laurens, Dans ces bras-
là (2000), L’amour, roman (2003), Romance nerveuse (2010); Nelly Arcan, Putain (2001);
Catherine Breillat, Pornocratie (2001); Catherine Millet, La vie sexuelle de Catherine
M. (2001); Christine Angot, L’inceste (1999), Le marché des amants (2008).
23. One epigraph is an extract from Anna Akhmovata’s long narrative poem Rekviem (1963),
translated as Requiem in Selected Poems (1976), published for the first time in Russia
during the years of perestroika in the journal Oktiabr’ (October) in 1989, https://www.poet-
ryfoundation.org/poets/anna-akhmatova. The poem expresses not only depths of suffering
but depths of alienation, albeit from different causes.
24. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (New York: Methuen, 1985),
58.
25. Amaleena Damlé, “The Mutant Metamorphic Subject: Femininity and Embodiment in Vir-
ginie Despentes’ King Kong théorie,” in Experiment and Experience: Women’s Writing in
France 2000–2010, Gill Rye with Amaleena Damlé, eds. (Bern: Peter Lang, 2013), 23.
26. Milan Kundera, L’insoutenable légèreté de l’être (1984), François Kérel, trans. (Paris: Gal-
limard, 2003). The novel is situated in Prague in 1968 at the time of the “Printemps de
Prague,” as Dans le jardin de l’ogre is contemporary with the “Printemps arabe.”
27. Damlé à propos Despentes’ analysis of female “masochism,” 20.
28. Tfou is an onomatopoeic interjection meaning “I spit on you.”
29. Hudud generally refers to limits, definitions, the bounds of acceptable behavior. The Collins
English Dictionary defines it as “the set of laws and punishments specified by Allah in
the Koran,” which neatly illustrates how the very notion of trespass simultaneously calls for
retribution. Hudud spells out both what is permitted and what is penalized (Slimani, Sexe et
mensonges 14-15).
30. With regard to Flaubert, see Rancière’s deciphering of “what is at stake in the construction
of the fiction and what might be the true politics of literature”: Jacques Rancière, “Why
Emma Bovary Had to Be Killed,” Critical Inquiry, 34:2 (2008): 234.
31. Richard appears to be echoing the Bible: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it
does not boast, it is not proud” (Corinthians 13:4-8), perhaps an echo of Tolstoy’s Levin.
32. Diana Holmes, “The Return of Romance: Love Stories in Recent French Women’s Writ-
ing,” L’Esprit Créateur, 45:1 (2005): 97.
33. The word and condition were originally defined by D. T. de Bienville, La nymphomanie ou
traité de la fureur utérine (Amsterdam: Marc-Michel Rey, 1771)—its subtitle a case of
defamation by definition: “dans lequel on explique, avec autant de clarté que de méthode,
les commencemens & les progrès de cette cruelle maladie, dont on développe les différentes
causes. Ensuite on propose les moyens de conduite dans les divers périodes, & les spéci-
fiques les plus éprouvés pour la curation.” English translation 1775. Bienville’s work
helped establish the disease paradigm with regard to female sexuality and desire: “Fureur
utérine: c’est une maladie qui est une espèce de délire attribué par cette dénomination aux
seules personnes du sexe.” Encyclopédie, dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des
métiers, vol. 40, tome 7 (Livourne: 1778), 388.
34. Erica Gazza, “Addicted to Shame: For Years, Sex and Porn Wreaked Havoc on my Life,”
https://z.umn.edu/4azt, text written to accompany her essay: Erica Garza, Getting Off: One
Woman’s Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018).
The book’s Introduction is entitled “The Shame Addict.”
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