Monique, portrait of a female reader in Yourcenar's 'Alexis'

Abstract

Marguerite Yourcenar’s first novel, Alexis, paints a portrait of a reader – a female reader, that is. Monique, wife of the novel’s eponymous hero, is the addressee of the single long letter which constitutes the entire novel, and in which he explains his decision to leave her in order to live out his homosexuality. The portrait of the reader is complex. Alexis conceives Monique as a model reader according to a gendered stereotype of feminine silence, attentiveness and understanding. But Yourcenar – along with later interpretations of the novel – transforms this silence into a form of power, able as it is to call forth strong and divergent reactions, in particular critical readings which stand against the stereotype of female readers in which the narrator himself believes.