SOURCE: Cottille-Foley, Nora C. “Abortion and Contamination of the Social Order in Annie Ernaux's Les armoires vides.” French Review 72, no. 5 (April 1999): 886-96.

In the following essay, Cottille-Foley maintains that the motif of abortion in Les armoires vides “functions as a powerful expression of the protagonist's social alienation.”

Carefully analyzing the unconscious repression at work in canonical writing, especially in Leviticus, Julia Kristeva casts light on the implicit connections between impurity, contamination, sickness, and the womb of a pregnant woman (116-23). According to Kristeva, the body of the mother has to be abjected and designated as “other” in order to ensure the constitution of a complete system of logical oppositions. In Le Deuxième Sexe, Simone de Beauvoir also underlines the connection between pregnancy and sickness: “On dit volontiers que les femmes ‘ont des maladies dans le ventre’; il est vrai qu'elles enferment en elles un élément hostile...