English to French Other Poetry & Literature

here is the context :



The theme of justice is indeed ambiguous in the short stores Les Diaboliques by Jules Barbey D’Aurevilly. The stories are indeed graphically vivid, which take an unflinching perspective on life, love, sex, honor, lust, beauty and power—mostly from a masculine point of view. It is this masculine perspective which can shackle and disarm the female characters of these stories. But in each story, justice prevails on the fictional reality by allowing the females to consistently have an uncanny sense of beauty or cunning—a beauty that prevails by giving each female a bewitching or animalistic quality which endures and ends up haunting the male protagonists or disarming other female characters of the narratives. In this sense justice has fallen: while the female protagonists often don’t have the same amount of freedom or power that the male characters do, they have a strong hold on the uncanny and the bewitching and their beauty continues to haunt and bewitch time after time, regardless of whether they’re physically there or not.

Justice via Haunting in Le Rideau Cramoisi

The first instance of justice presented as an enduring, bewitching quality is in the short story, “The Crimson Curtain” (Le Rideau Cramoisi). “The story sets up a series of veils: the curtain, the table, the hand, the girl herself. Though we penetrate several layers, the mysterious reality beneath continues intact, and the girl forever remains an enigma. What is her power? What drives her?” (Pasco & Allen, 60). The girl’s power is precisely her enigmatic quality; her power resides in her ability to remain in the memory of men, despite the steady passage of time. The girl has that extreme quality of “je ne sais quoi” that the narrator sees immediately and which drives into his very soul.