La hantise de la chevelure dans le roman Bruges-la-Morte de Georges Rodenbach
The Obsession with Hair in Georges Rodenbach’s Novel Bruges-la-Morte

Summary/Abstract: This paper discusses a man’s obsession with the memories of his dead wife as represented in Bruges-la-Morte. More precisely, Rodenbach draws a haunting picture of the woman’s hair, which is personified and acquires the dimension of a full-fledged character in the novel. The Belgian author places Hugues Viane’s dead wife’s hair at the center of his particular vision of fictional space, vacillating between tangible and intangible (Boraczek 1999) as well as between sacred and demonic. The woman’s gold braid is preserved in a glass case: by worshipping it, the widower makes a religion of his sorrow. Furthermore, the woman’s hair generates a dense web of analogies between Bruges, in which Bachelard (1942) sees the ophelization of an entire city, Viane’s dead wife compared in the novel to a Virgin, and the actress Jane Scott, a femme fatale who seems to have the same blond hair as the dead woman. By doing so, Rodenbach places the woman’s figure at the crossroads between literature and visual arts.

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