The relationship between the literary work and society is mutual. On the one hand, the work reflects the author’s viewpoint, which comes from a particular era and cultural circumstances. On the other hand, as soon as it is published, it can affect public opinion. In this research the interaction between literary work and the society has been studied in the work of Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. Given the privileged role of women among the characters in Clézio's works, we decided to examine the representation of those characters in their relationships with others. This study would inform us about the way the author views women, doubly echoing reality, that of an era and, at the same time, that of our experience today, in the modern era. In this regard, to achieve our objective, we have delimited our corpus to two collections of short stories by Le Clézio, the protagonists of which are mainly women: The Heart Burns and Other Romances and The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts. The study has been conducted based on the two key theoretical works of existentialism, Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre and The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, since the first deals deeply with the relationship of oneself with others, and the second is the study of the impact of others on the life of the woman.
Our research shows that there are two types of female presence in Le Clézio's work. The first group represents women who act as being-for-themselves. They realize their freedom in situation and show themselves courageous to face the realities of their life. On the other hand, the second group includes women-objects, those who are considered as beings-for-others. Indeed, on the one hand, the author draws us the scenes in which the woman becomes victim of the violence of the Other and even her body becomes desirable. On the other hand, it reveals another image of women, that of a free and committed woman who becomes the master of her destiny. The multiplicity and variety of situations in which the female characters find themselves in these short stories show that the author takes a rather realistic look at women and their living conditions in contemporary society. |
