SOURCE: "Narration and Exhibitionism in 'Le rideau cramoisi,' " in The Romanic Review, Vol. LXX, No. 2, (March, 1979), pp. 146-58.

In the following excerpt, Sivert examines aspects of Barbey's narrative technique in "The Crimson Curtain, "citing an interplay between voyeurism and exhibitionism in his storytelling.

Voyeurism, seen recently [by Marcelle Marini in "Ricochets de lecture: La fantasmique des Diaboliques" Littérature 10 (1973)] as an organizing principle in Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's Les Diaboliques, logically suggests its apparent opposite, exhibitionism. The connection between these two instinctual drives is developed in Freud's "Instincts and their Vicissitudes" where he shows their common auto-erotic source (the subject looking at his own sexual organ). The instinct of gazing (scoptophilia) and that of exhibitionism, and the dynamic of their interrelationship, can be located in Barbey's fictions where the text plays with two narrators and the reader in such a way that the acts of narrating, writing and...