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It is evident that the first topic overwhelms the second. The text is very careful to make the first more blatant, but it cannot be said that the second is concealedit is simply suggested by more sophisticated devices. There is a logic of preference even in activating intertextual frames, and Allais seems to know it very well. In fact, he is unmasking the underlying ideology of his naive reader, so eager to conceive of social life in mere terms of sexual possession. The naive reader is so sensitive to frames concerning sex and marriage (and marriage as a system of sexual duties) because his moral and social sensitivity has been molded by an exaggerated series of drames bien parisiens, where a male owns or buys a female as a 'challan' buys or owns a commodity. |
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It is, however, true that the text does its best to support its reader's ideological biases. |
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Raoul and Marguerite are married to each other. A /marriage/, to analyze it encyclopedically, is a legal contract, an agreement by which some goods are in common, a parental relationship presupposing and determining other parental relationships, the custom of eating and sleeping together, the possibility of having children legally, a series of social commitments (especially for a bourgeois couple in nineteenth-century Paris), and so on. But in Drame it seems rather evident that what really matters is the reciprocal duty of fidelity and its possibility of being jeopardized by adultery. |
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To blow up this sole property among so many others, chapter 1 surrounds the semantic unit «marriage» with a series of other units uniquely related to sexual matters. Raoul and Marguerite are nice names for lovers; their marriage has been /d'inclination/ and therefore a love affair; Raoul swears that Marguerite will not /belong/ (euphemism) to another man, and so on. Chapter 2 is devoted entirely to jealousy: it could be taken as an interpretation (in Peirce's sense) of the lexeme /jealousy/, as could chapter 4 be taken as an interpretation of /deception/ and of /delation/. Thus co-textual pressures collaborate to isolate, among the possible connotations and denotations of /to be married/ only those connected with mutual possession. |
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As for the second isotopy, the title, while suggesting frivolity and a 'Parisian' mood, represents an oxymoron and therefore a contradictio in adiecto: drama as opposed to comedy. Obviously, the oxymoron 'tames' the contradiction, but it equally suggests that in this story there are things that cannot usually go together. |
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The title of chapter 1 discloses the notion of 'malentendu', misunderstanding. The last phrase of the same chapter suggests that our two heroes are substantially tricking and fooling themselves. |
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The epigraph of chapter 2 plays again upon the coincidentia oppositorum; false etymologies, paranomasias, phonic similarities and rhymes suggest that everything can become everything else, love and death, biting |
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