About the author: Robin McArthur Long is assistant professor of French at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Caroline, where she lives with her husband and two children. She has published on nineteenth and twentieth-century French and Spanish literature. Her current research interest is Jules Vallès.
This study offers a different and original reading of the Jacques Vingtras Trilogy, contributing a deeper comprehension of the work on a psychological, social, and literary plane. New dimensions of the text are explored using Girard's concept of desire and Lacanaian thought in an analysis of the protagonist's Self. The power of discourse, both verbal and non-verbal, is illustrated as exerting the various forms of social control portrayed in the trilogy. Finally, a look at the unresolved question of classifying Vallès' writing shows that he created a full or global view of his subject through the combination of both internal and external realism.