Le devenir-monstre au féminin dans Truismes de Marie Darrieussecq
Becoming-Monster in Truismes by Marie Darrieussecq

Summary/Abstract: In Marie Darrieussecq’s novel, Pig Tales, the female narrator becomes an animal, a sow. This physical transformation is an aberration and an abhorrence; a transformation that goes against human nature; everything that human beings in general, and male individuals in particular, are not. The narrator is a female monster (la femme-monstre). She is the strange, rather grotesque, almost a caricatural being that disturbs her surroundings because of her physical abnormality, but also and above all because of her becoming, “l’être en train de se faire” (Schérer 1998, 53). Why and how is the narrator transformed into a sow, this farm animal, the female pig whose only function is to procreate? Is it a personal choice or is this transformation imposed on her? This article proposes to examine the notion of becoming-monster by contrasting two crucial representations: that of the female body imagined by a phallocentric and capitalist society, and that of the image re-constructed by the narrator, which gives rise to the concept of Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-woman. This aporia between beauty and monstrosity will be highlighted through the narrator’s metamorphosis into an animal, and through the act of writing. The sow-woman overturns the criteria of the beautiful and the monstrous, consequently creating the image of a new woman; the one Helene Cixous advocates in her essay, “Laughter of the Medusa.” The female monster becomes afterward the model of a liberating transformation. Finally, what is monstrous is just as beautiful.

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