The Woman's Role in Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Search for the Ideal

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's symbolic heroine is the projected image of a male ideal to become perfect in beauty, purity, and power. However, her need for communication in love and language, her desire for emotion and self-expression, threaten her goal. Unable to resist the human temptation, she falls. My analysis of Morgane (1866) emphasizes the conflict between a desire to reach the absolute and the need to be human, and shows that the woman appears as a signifier given ideal content. Slipping in this role, she becomes fatal to the ideal, thus reminding man that he cannot escape physical reality. (LBK)