Telling Madness and Masculinity in Maupassant's "Le Horla"

Hadlock, Philip G.

doi:10.1353/esp.2010.0390

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Gradually these protagonists are confronted by their ghostly "Other" (Le Horla), and finding no livable psychic or social place, they become '"hors la"; out there or outsider (Brossilon, 2017, p. 1). Hadlock (2003) has also discussed this aspect of "otherness" and selfhood construction along with the thematics of madness in The Horla. He has considered the first published version of the tale where the narrator tells his story sitting in an asylum.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Maupassant’s The Horla is a Portrayal of Human Frailties and a Critique of Anthropocentrism: An Ecocritical/Deep Ecological Perspective

Hossain

2021

IJLLT

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This research analyzes how nature, human and non-human, have been represented in Guy de Maupassant’s short story The Horla through an ecocritical lens. In its fundamental form, the ecocritical theoretical framework investigates how nature, landscape, and places have been represented in a literary text and explore how human and non-human interrelations have been portrayed. In this story, Maupassant has portrayed nature as a positive, healing force and delved into the anthropocentric and anthropomorphic constructivist attitude to non-human, invisible, emergent being, in this context, the Horla. The narrator’s anthropocentric world view has denied justice toward Horla to exist, fearing he will shake the human-centred ecological hierarchy. According to the Deep Ecological philosophical position or ecosophy, all things, including spiritual being that cannot be seen, are interconnected and have their necessary position in various modalities of Nature. Denial of the existence of a new emerging entity and the inability to schematize and adopt it will destroy the new being and the human race itself. The paper has deployed two major research methods; textual analysis and archival method. Apart from these two methods, discourse analysis method has also been used where deemed relevant and necessary. The paper finds that The Horla is not merely a generic horror story that has portrayed the inner psychological state of the narrator in a fantastique manner but also an expository one of human frailties and human denial of a being that deemed more intelligent and perfect than the human being, fearing to lose the anthropocentric dominance.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Maupassant’s The Horla is a Portrayal of Human Frailties and a Critique of Anthropocentrism: An Ecocritical/Deep Ecological Perspective

Hossain

2021

IJLLT

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Guy de Maupassant: Doubt, Dogma, and the Dead

Reis

2022

Short Stories, Knowledge and the Supernatural

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The Laboratorium: Nineteenth-Century French Studies in the Anglophone Sphere

Harrow

2021

Dix-Neuf

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This review article, across two instalments, sets out to capture something of the extraordinary interdisciplinary adventure that is nineteenth-century studies in French by combining a retrospective review of research published in the past twenty years with prospective reflections on developing trends in the anglophone sphere. This review is not intended as a comprehensive survey of the selected themes, far less of the field; it is not intended as a measure of quality or of influence; its spirit is inclusive and 'levelling' in the sense of giving as much attention to, say, a short article as to a major monograph. Scope is, of course, limited by time and space (electronic journals have page budgets too), so research published in UK, Ireland, North America, and Australasia is the principal focus here. 1 My choice of seven themes, across the two instalments, is subjective and provisional, but, I hope, salient and effective in working across traditional categories to bring diverse voices and approaches into transversal critical dialogue.

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Telling Madness and Masculinity in Maupassant's "Le Horla"

Cited by 4 publications

References 3 publications

Maupassant’s The Horla is a Portrayal of Human Frailties and a Critique of Anthropocentrism: An Ecocritical/Deep Ecological Perspective

Maupassant’s The Horla is a Portrayal of Human Frailties and a Critique of Anthropocentrism: An Ecocritical/Deep Ecological Perspective

Guy de Maupassant: Doubt, Dogma, and the Dead

The Laboratorium: Nineteenth-Century French Studies in the Anglophone Sphere

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