Résumé
Maupassant’s texts feature characters types whose often perceptible marginality makes them powerless victims of an otherness that is beyond them. The scapegoat is a rough synonym for the whipping boy. The way we look at another person determines our concep-tion of the scapegoat. Whether he becomes the scapegoat or the pet peeve, he is nothing more than a solution, an escape route and an outlet able to respond to societal difficulties, of which injustice and violence are the final strands. How can we report on an anthropological phenomenon in the literary text? What is the basis of the victimisation of Maupassian cha-racters ? To what extent can a reading combining anthropology, semiotics and ethnocriticism make another approach to Maupassant’s work relevant? These are the thinkings raised by our approach to the Maupassanian text. This study highlights the usefulness of mimetic theory in literary studies, which, is to reveal the victimization mechanism, the existence of scapegoats and to detect, through the literary text, a certain reading of the ideological effect. Victimisation will thus be read as a mechanism that obeys a given narrative structure, by means of the short story or the victim tale. Our corpus also uses recurring characters types whose marginality is part of a highligh-ting of a form of collective victimisation. We will then examine how Maupassant, through these recurrent types in our corpus, gives us a reading of a society in the midst of a crisis and therefore conducive to the constantly repeated resurgence of the victim mechanism
Source: http://www.theses.fr/2022LYSE3019
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