Hybridizations of the animal-woman in Boris Vian’s short stories

Abstract

The place given to the female character in Boris Vian is very distinctive. She is often presented as a secondary character. Yet, although the appearances of female characters in the stories may be succinct, their development as characters is far from simple. They undergo body transformations that grant them an animal nature. With this privileged space of the female character, which places her between two worlds, the author succeeds in presenting a panorama of the position of women in the twentieth century, from the garçonne to the pin-up. However, these characters fit into the sphere described under the term langage-univers coined by Jacques Bens. For this study, we focus on the author’s short stories, which, despite their brevity, offer a range of hybridizations of the animal-woman.