Être femme sur la scène des hommes : archéologies de l’identité féminine dans Les Enfers ventriloques de Sylviane Dupuis

Abstract

The protagonist of Sylviane Dupuis’s play Les Enfers ventriloques (2004) is a young dramatist lacking
inspiration, who descends into her past in search for her personal identity and in the past of the theatre in search for an artistic identity. Disguised as a man and guided by the Maternal Shadow, the young woman visits the masculine, paternalistic universe of the world’s most famous playwrights. Her confrontations with Eschyle,
Shakespeare and Brecht, but also with the characters that these authors have created help her assume herself as a writer and find her artistic inspiration.
This paper aims at interrogating the way in which the triad identity/ femininity/ creation is inscribed into this
text which turns the voyage into the one’s memory (the personal and the artistic one) into a source of the
reinvention of the self, both as a human being and as a creator.