Resumen de Les eaux troubles, figures de noyées dans l’œuvre de Jean Genet
This article analyses the drowning scenes in Jean Genet’s work, focusing more specifically on the film script Mademoiselle and the play Les Paravents (The Screens). It argues that Leila’s mysterious disappearance in The Screens is indeed a drowning scene and shows that the Mademoiselle-Bruno couple in the film script (with the autobiographical content explained at the beginning of the article) and the Leila-Said pairing in the play are in fact a self-portrait of Jean Genet and his two mothers: one his biological mother, the other, Eugénie Régnier, his foster mother. As drowned figures are always feminine in Genet’s work, all elements related to them are examined, including skirt, water, and darkness. These scenes reveal the writer’s sadistic impulse toward the maternal figure, whom he dismisses in his texts, and show that this rejection of the mother figure creates space for his fantasy about being brought into the world through self-generation.
