Jean Cocteau Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Jennifer Hatte

Critical Essay by Jennifer Hatte

SOURCE: Hatte, Jennifer. “Jean Cocteau's Snow.” Modern Language Review 89, no. 2 (April 1994): 328-40.

In the following essay, Hatte examines the significance of the appearance of snow in Les Enfants terribles and its meaning to the “mythology” of Cocteau's other works.

Snow appears frequently in Cocteau's work, but its most famous occurrence is in the bataille des boules de neige of the novel Les Enfants terribles (1929),¹ and the film Le Sang d'un poète (1930), written and directed by Cocteau. As is the case with all frequently recurring Coctelian motifs, his snow is not merely snow, but an aspect of the personal ‘mythology’ through which he expressed his beliefs about the nature of man and the universe, and, particularly, of poetry and the poet. My intention here is to examine the snow in the first chapter of Les Enfants terribles in the light of several of Cocteau's other works,...
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