Suture Self: Constructing Femininity in Edmond de Goncourt's Chérie

This study evaluates the role of the ellipsis in Edmond de Goncourt's novel Chérie (1884), a text he calls a purely analytic account of French girlhood and adolescence. The ellipsis exemplifies the paradoxical poetics of Goncourt's project: the punctuation mark of omission and elision, ellipses also act as suture marks, typographically and metaphorically, where female-authored documents have been incorporated into Chérie. The ellipsis makes Goncourt's bricolage possible while also showing the limits of his attempt to create a transparent study of la jeune fille. What is produced in Chérie is not a documentary of female development, but a construct that conforms to Goncourt's own notion of femininity.