Fossilized Memories and Loss in Monique Bosco’s La Femme de Loth

Arenberg, Nancy

Quebec Studies (2015), 59, (1), 131–144.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3828/qs.2015.9
Language: English
Pages: 14

Abstract

Monique Bosco’s intriguing novel, La Femme de Loth, is a text that explores the obsessive loss of the narrator’s married lover through the repetition of the moment of abandonment. As a Jewish transnational writer, Bosco uses the biblical story of Lot’s wife as a compelling archetype to direct the reader’s focus to the narrator’s memories, which are indelibly etched in the past. This article will focus on petrified memories and the loss of self through the lens of Bosco’s biblical archetypes. To enhance the study of entrapment by past memories, a psychological perspective on traumatic memory will be used to add dimension to the narrator’s cultural hybridity. The latter part of the discussion will consider the role of writing with emphasis on the recovery of the narrator’s absent self.

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Author details

Arenberg, Nancy

Quebec Studies