Nodier's Post-Revolutionary Poetics of Terror: Thérèse Aubert

Charles Nodier, perhaps more than any other nineteenth-century writer, was haunted by the Terror. Thérèse Aubert, a short story published in 1814, at first seems an incisive critique of the excesses of 1793 and a turn away from the political. Nevertheless, a close analysis of this text reveals a profound ambivalence that is played out in the disintegration of conventional gender distinctions. The text foregrounds the notion that the individual masculine subject's closure is illusory, as is textual closure. The inscription of radical difference into the narrative sequence results in a new, postrevolutionary poetics. (MR-D)