Abstract EN:

The novels of gabrielle roy emphasize the omnipresence of the body. The subject of the body is of major importance to these novels because of themes that surround it : porosity, maternity, sexuality, disease and so on. Nevertheless this omnipresence is paradoxically conveyed in a writing style that seemingly drains the body of all physical reality : the body is sometimes kept secret or indeed erased. Major male characters, like alexandre chenevert or pierre cadorai, recognize their body only by their own dependence to it : hungry, desire. . . Or by the body's illness : disease, pain. . . They all the more refuse it. And for the female characters like rose-anna and florentine lacasse, eugenie and irene chenevert, the body is only a one more source of humiliation and pain that stigmatize their woman destiny. So gabrielle roy's characters are submitted to their body and its contingencies. They deeply feel animosity and reject for this enemy. Our research would like to illustrate the unyielding presence of the body and a double will : negation by the characters and ellipsis from the style writing. For the body reveals an ambiguity from the style writing, oscillating between presence end absence. The presence of the body is all the better depicted because the author has to avoid its exaltation. The writing of the body by gabrielle roy tends to a characteristic : to supplant it by representing an ill body with redundant and incurable illnesses or with such a pejorative representation that it incites the reject of the body. Royen writing would like to bring to a successful conclusion : the death of the written body. Thus reasons of frustration become de facto non-existents and only persists what is valorized : the power of the mind against the weakness of the body. From the redundance of the body to its ellipsis, the writing would be devoted to the inexpressible, to the sensible world and above all to the creative imagination.