Narcissus and Echo Women in the French Récit

"Narcissus and Echo" is about romantic confessional fiction, in which the woman dies and the man lives to tell "his" tale. Whether femme fatale, nun, sister, aristocrat or fallen women, she is always somehow blamed for her own destruction. What motivates the man's narrative and how does the women's voice, curiously, survive the text? Naomi Segal brings insights from feminist and psychoanalytic theory to bear on writers such as Chateaubriand, Musset, Prevost and Gautier. Running throughout this lively and provocative study are dichotomies between speech and sight, male "doubles" and female "mirror", the narcissism of nostalgia and the paradoxes of undesire.