Rikki Ducornet Revisits Hawthorne: "The Stain" or a Time for ‘Sexts’

Abstract

Among Rikki Ducornet’s strongest intertextual bonds in her first novel The Stain is certainly Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Her main character Charlotte unmistakably points back both to Hester Prynne and her daughter Pearl. In this dialogic enterprise Ducornet attempts to show what Hawthorne gives secondary focus to: the construction of the heroine’s identity. Whether a precocious feminist or a covert phallogocentric, as the majority of feminist critics maintains, Hawthorne centres the dramatic conflict on his male characters. Contrary to his patrilineal filiation, Ducornet displays a matrilineal one and places her female character centre stage. Albeit subtly ironic and overtly comic, The Stain’s relation to the The Scarlet Letter seems to be complimentary and complementary. Although Rikki Ducornet refutes being a feminist, some of Hélène Cixous’s concepts such as the feminine, the gift, the feminine libidinal economy could enlighten the American author’s text.