Women writing in contemporary France

Mother–daughter relations in Constant’s fiction 67
by the human warmth provided by the adult Tiffany who conquers her fear
of the sick and dying to cradle him in her arms.
That this recurring motif is a trope for the psychological trauma
endured by Constant’s little-girl characters, and emblematic both of the
loss of the self and of the mother that is at the heart of all the novels, is never
clearer than in La Fille du Gobernator, in which Chrétienne secretly adopts
a puppy against the express orders of her parents. When the animal falls ill,
she is ill-equipped to look after it, and in a cruel punishment inflicted by
her father, the little girl is forced to shoot the half ant-eaten creature herself
to put it out of its misery. If Chrétienne had killed herself instead, the narrative
suggests, it would have been preferable to the trauma of living with
the memory of this scene for the rest of her life. It is most telling that this
particular episode is juxtaposed with the departure of Chrétienne’s mother
to a leper camp, never to return; she has finally achieved the martyrdom she
has been seeking: to become a leper. Significantly, these two events are
described in the novel with the same vocabulary. According to
Chrétienne’s father: ‘l’abandon d’un animal est un crime’ (p. 153) (‘it is a
crime to abandon an animal’ (p. 123)), while the narration goes on to reveal
that Chrétienne’s mother ‘était partie pour toujours. Elle l’avait
définitivement abandonnée’ (p. 155) (‘was gone for ever. She had abandoned
her for good’ (p. 125)). The use of the word ‘abandon’ for both episodes
is noteworthy, since it programmes the judgement of the reader
against the parents in favour of the little girl. In sacrificing herself,
Chrétienne’s mother has also made a sacrifice of her daughter, and if, in the
view of Chrétienne’s strictly Christian father, it is a moral crime to abandon
an animal, it must surely also be one to abandon a child. What is more,
Chrétienne’s father subsequently ‘abandons’ her too as he goes on to abnegate
responsibility for everything and disappears, shipwrecked, thus fulfilling
his own desired destiny.
In Confidence pour confidence, Constant very explicitly reworks the
motif of the suffering creature yet again, when the character Gloria
squeezes to death a dehydrated pet jerboa (which she refers to as a ‘rat’) in
order to put an end to its suffering. Here, the system of mirroring between
the five novels is also turned in on itself to produce a mise en abîme that
challenges the distinction between fiction and reality within the novel itself.
Not only are multiple references made to a similar scenario from one of the
books the character Aurore has written, but also memories resurface of an
event in this character’s own childhood, which, in turn, is strongly reminiscent
of the petite bête episode in Constant’s Ouregano. The fact that Aurore