Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2019

‘Over the Edge’: Orpheus and Eurydice, Myth and Solace in Ali Smith’s Artful

Résumé

Ali Smith’s Artful, an innovative work that mingles the genres of essay and fiction, weaves references to seminal myths of Western culture into its fictional background. Among them features a subverted, modern rewriting of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which the characters’ genders are blurred. I would argue that, in the experience of mourning that constitutes the red thread of the book, the protagonist/narrator engages in multiple inverted Orphic quests: instead of entering the realm of the Dead, the genderless narrator/Orpheus receives visits from his/her dead lover, a genderless Eurydice. In this paper, I intend to show how Smith dwells on feminist rewritings of Eurydice’s story to place the character at the heart of her storytelling. Indeed, instead of remaining a passive object of mourning and desire for Orpheus, the “Eurydice” figure is given agency. Furthermore, even though the dead character “is over the edge”, having “changed worlds” (133), the narrator envisions crossing the limit and being led to the Underworld by this authoritative Eurydice. By wishing to obediently follow Eurydice back into the Underworld, the narrator thus reverses the characters’ traditional roles. This paper will examine how this reversal allows for a reinterpretation of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in the light of gender studies and postmodernist rewritings of canonical texts.

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Dates et versions

hal-05010563 , version 1 (28-03-2025)

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  • HAL Id : hal-05010563 , version 1

Citer

Héloïse Lecomte. ‘Over the Edge’: Orpheus and Eurydice, Myth and Solace in Ali Smith’s Artful. ‘All we are is Eyes’: The Literary Art of Ali Smith, 2019, 9783631811412. ⟨hal-05010563⟩

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