MÉDÉE OU LA MATERNITÉ MEURTRIÈRE DANS LA VOYEUSE INTERDITE DE N. BOURAOUI ET FRITNA DE G. HALIMI. UNE LECTURE PSYCHANALYTIQUE.
MEDEA OR MURDEROUS MATERNITY IN LA VOYEUSE INTERDITE BY N. BOURAOUI AND FRITNA BY G. HALIMI. A PSYCHOANALYTIC READING

Summary/Abstract: The murderous and destructive dimension in the acts of mothers in our corpus invites us to relate to the myth of Medea, the real place of the most tragic fantasies. The drama of Medea made it possible to build a “medeic structure” (Alain Depaulis, 2015) which today constitutes the foundation of any psychoanalytical and criminological analysis of maternal infanticide. Of all the murders that we know of through Greek mythology, the infanticide of Medea remains the most shocking and the most difficult to understand. Compared to the crime of Medea, the crime of Oedipus pales and is timid, because Oedipus killed Laos without knowing that he was in reality his father, while Medea knew well what she was doing by sacrificing her children. For this reason the choice of a myth to study the theme of infanticide remains in our eyes very relevant, because the myth through the theater and the cathartic dimension has always shown that this crime has existed for a very long time and has initiated several questions. Euripides' tragic play, composed in 431 BC, which presents one of the variants of the Medea myth, in this case that of Apollonius of Rhodes, Corneille and Sénèque, is an example which illustrates the theme chosen for our study. This exemplification represents the reality of this crime. Before entering into the analysis of the myth and its comparison with the chosen novels, it is necessary to briefly tell the story of Medea, in particular the key sequences which will help us to understand the murder committed and her revenge. Medea is an outraged goddess. Patroness of magicians, Medea masters extraordinary powers: the fire of life, the power to rejuvenate and fatal burns. She is a woman who gave everything to her husband Jason. She abandoned her hometown to run away with Jason and even went so far as to sacrifice her brother. Using her powers as a magician, she has helped Jason complete many heroic feats, including winning the Golden Fleece. Arriving at King Creon, Jason chooses to repudiate Medea and take the king's daughter as his wife. Afraid of Medea, Creon orders her exile. Medea asks Jason to babysit and Creon to add an extra day for her to prepare a murder scheme. She finally kills her rival by giving her poisoned gifts, the king and even his children. She flees thanks to the gods on a winged chariot and leaves behind an unhappy and desperate Jason. In the myth of Medea, we have the sacrifice of two male children, whereas in the novels of Bouraoui and Halimi, we have the physical and psychological sacrifice of girls. In both cases, we notice that there is a castration that haunts their mothers and the suffering that consumes their beings because of their inability to assume their sexuation and fill their narcissistic lack. The act of killing or destroying daughters by mothers embodies all the archaic modalities in the mother/daughter relationship, namely fear, despair, threat, hatred, etc. that distort the relationship between the mother and her children. If the tragedy of Euripides evokes more the passionate side of Medea for Jason which was the source of the disaster, in the novels submitted to the study destructive motherhood is motivated by the prejudices of patriarchal society, diktat and religion. This vision of woman, which reduces her to a simple object of reproduction of the human species and haunts her with fear through the power of religion, pushes her to conform to the norms imposed by man and to desire male births as wish. In Euripides' Medea, the destructive passion was due to the love felt for Jason, the man for whom she committed multiple crimes and left her native land. From the exhibition scene, the public can hear the very touching moans of Medea inside the house. Unhappy, she mourns the betrayal of the man she loved passionately: Jason. As the door opens, Medea appears pale and in a state of lamentable sadness. Aborted motherhood is presented in several ways in the novels of our study corpus. Maternity does not mean in these novels the fact of giving birth, but it depends on the sex of the child, since it is the boy who honors his father and asserts to his progenitor the precious title of mother. Even if the woman becomes a mother, society only recognizes this status after she has given birt to a male child. An aborted maternity is presented by the inability to give birth to a boy in the case of Fikria's mother in La Voyeuse interdite by N. BOURAOUI or the loss of a boy in the case of Fritna by G. HALIMI. Reflecting on the myth of Medea angry with her husband invites us to find many parallels and common points with the story of the mothers in our corpus. Anger is a key emotion in the act of destruction undertaken by these women. They are very angry that they cannot conform to the prejudices of society, satisfy the wish of the patriarch and honor him with a male birth. They are mothers angry with their own faulty bodies because they are unable to conceive a boy or at least watch over and protect him. In Euripides' play, anger has as its main source the passion for Jason, then her condition as an inferior and submissive woman that she chose voluntarily, because driven by her love for Jason. In fact, Euripides' play denounces the inferiority of women at that time who are treated as "eternal minors". Medea, a goddess therefore having a higher status compared to humans, accepted this submission to her husband who cowardly abandoned her. Medea then became the victim of an ungrateful man and consequently remained as the prototype of betrayed women. Through the myth of Medea, Euripides gives us a real indictment against the domination of men who make women mere slaves. Medea's anger against her children then comes from the fact that she considers them a part of their father, because they carry the law of the father and represent him. Children for Medea are not the product of the mother, but a metonymy of the father. Despite the great love that Medea feels for her children, this conviction drives her to later commit many murders on the children's side: she rejuvenates the parents and kills their offspring by reversing the order of the generations. Medea, who has never hated her children, begins to do so, driven by a feeling of hatred. She hates them, because fruit of her union with Jason. The murders of Creon and the princess did not quench his thirst. Abandoned by Jason who did not keep his promise, Medea wanted to go to the extreme by harming her children. She wanted to kill Jason through his children as he killed her. Worse still, she deprives Jason of seeing his dead children and carries them away on a monster-drawn chariot, leaving Jason behind completely defeated. Women have a negative representation in Arab-Muslim society. Children born girls are a heavy burden on the family. They dishonor the mother and bring shame and unhappiness to the father. The multiplication of births of girl children generates family tensions and conflicts between father and mother on one side and father and daughters on the other. In the novels under study, Fritna and Fikria's mother are victims of the tradition they perpetuate, forced by the authority imposed by the husband and the patriarchal society. This situation which forces the woman to give birth to a male child to find her place in society and to assert herself in front of her husband pushes her to adopt extreme behaviors and fall into the abyss. Indeed, the hatred, murder, rejection, and abandonment of her daughters are very remarkable reactions in the relations between mother and daughter in the Maghreb novel which make impossible the dream of happy motherhood sought by every woman. In La Voyeuse interdite by N. BOURAOUI, Fikria's mother, an accomplice of the father, dared to kill her barely born daughter by coldly throwing her out of the window. The baby girl was miraculously able to survive condemned to spend the rest of her life cloistered in a corner motionless due to severe disability. Leyda, the narrator's younger sister, is constantly thrown to the ground. The name "murderous mother" which appears several times in the novel arises following this incident and is a concrete reference to the myth of Medea. In Fritna by G. Halima, the situation is not very different, Fritna is a strongly selfless mother of her two daughters. She is driven by hatred and the desire to destroy them to unjustly avenge her son who died because of Gisèle, she claimed. Fritna never agreed to bear daughters. She kept telling Gisèle, still a girl, the hateful story of her birth, a story that Fritna keeps repeating like a refrain to confirm her position of radical refusal towards her daughters. Gaby, Gisèle's sister is not spared the abandonment of Fritna, because her coming into the world was only a "parade to misfortune" (Halimi, 1999) for the mother and the father who wanted to compensate for the death of their son. Andrew. To get revenge on Gaby, the mother occupied her daughter with heavy household chores and cared very little for her well-being. Fritna gave her unconditional and indivisible love exclusively to her boys, to whom she was caring, warm and attentive. Gisèle and Gaby reaped the misfortune of being born girls while noting with regret and bitterness the degree of maternal affection reserved for their brothers. Fritna was a Bedouin who paid no attention to the future of her daughters. She did not aspire to see her daughters happy and emancipated. She wanted revenge on them by reserving a fate similar to hers. For her, her daughters had to stay locked up at home, marry very young, have rich husbands, give birth to male children, and only take care of their homes. After reading La voyeuse interdite by Nina BOURAOUI and Fritna by Gisèle HALIMI, we see that there is an ambivalence between feminine and maternal characters in Fritna and Fikria's mother. We are witnessing a repression of the maternal in favor of the feminine or vice versa. FREUD supports the idea that the woman reaches a status of completeness by becoming a mother. Freudian work continues to confirm that the arrival of a child in a woman's life repairs the feminine defect by compensating for her lack of a penis. The child is in fact a phallic substitute who fills the lack of a woman. Lacan supports Freud's idea without totally confirming it. He argues that the gift of a child is not enough to satisfy a woman's sexual desire. In Euripides' play, Medea does not feel guilty despite the great love she feels for her children. She has committed an atrocious act, but she cannot bear it. She felt sorry for the fate of her children for a long time. This dilemma led her to a schizophrenic state. Medea does not consider herself responsible for the fate of her children. First, we notice that she addresses her hands that executed the children as if she was not the one who had acted. Towards the end of the play, she empowers the Corinthians by placing the blame on them and prescribing solemn Journal of Language and Literary Studies 313 ceremonies “in expiation of this impious murder”. Eventually, she blames Jason for the deaths of her children. In the novels under study, mothers' blaming of daughters and their responsibility for misfortune leads to self-harming behavior on the part of daughters. these anxious, depersonalized teenage girls engage in selfdestruction as their fantasy orientations that chart their continuity into the future find themselves thwarted by patriarchy and the presence of a despotic mother. The latter traces for her daughters a future that resembles hers and in total rupture with their hopes. Self-mutilation as a pathological behavior that can lead to psychosis can be endowed with defensive value. Children subjected to aggression by the Other often choose to withdraw into their body, which becomes the site of narcissistic changes. Self-harm represents a communication process undertaken by Fikria and Zohr. It is a message that answers their unanswered questions, a kind of solution that betrays the tensions and conflicts they endure. In short, we can say that castration in mothers in the three works under study leads to murderous behavior towards children, but the reasons remain linked to different amorous passions. When castration is due to the absence of the male child, given the importance that the boy requires in the North African and Muslim imagination, the result of this castration results in the revenge of the female children, because considered as source of misfortune by the mother. If castration finds its source in the absence of the love felt for the spouse, as is the case of the passionate love of Medea for Jason, the result is always revenge through murder against children which aims to neutralize this love by removing the blood tie.

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