Hand Writing: Dismembering and Re-membering in Nodier, Nerval, and Maupassant

French literary history is haunted by the specter of the Revolution, and nowhere more tellingly than in fantastic fiction. This article argues that the repeated appropriation of the severed hand refers to a cultural memory, the Terror, and produces a particularly French poetics of the fantastic grounded in the terror that is ignited by the surfacing of a repressed memory. Through the metaphor of the severed hand, French fantastic fiction reproduces in textual fragments an unspeakable past and embodies the repressed memory of violence and terror. The recurring sign of the severed hand suggests an obsession, however unconscious, with a historical moment of terror, which, in spite of the horror it may have inspired, also produced as a by-product a new freedom from literary verisimilitude and a new literary fashion for the supernatural text. (SH)