SOURCE: Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. “‘The Other Woman’: Reading a Body of Difference in Balzac's La fille aux yeux d'or.” Symposium 51, no. 1 (spring 1997): 43-50.

In the following essay, Sharpley-Whiting explores the role of sexual and racial differences in the novella La fille aux yeux d'or.

Et qu'est-ce que la femme? Une petite chose, un ensemble de niaiseries?

Balzac, La fille aux yeux d'or

In his undelivered lecture entitled “Femininity,” Sigmund Freud ventured to decipher what no man before him had ever successfully discerned—the nature of femininity:

Today's lecture, too[,] should have no place in an introduction. … It brings forward nothing but observed facts, almost without any speculative additions. … Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of femininity. … Nor will you have escaped worrying over this problem—those of you who are men … to those of you who are women this will not apply—you are...