SOURCE: "Diversions in Reading: Esthetics and Mérimée's La Chambre bleue" in French Forum, Vol. 14, No. 3, September, 1989, pp. 303-10.

In the following essay, Carpenter examines Mérimeé's short story La chambre bleue as a marginal and subversive text that conjoins themes of sex and death, transgression and communication.

How does one distinguish between major and minor literary works or between essential and contingent elements within them? The assumption that such distinctions are possible underlies the entire enterprise of literary studies or even, as Jacques Derrida has argued, all of Western esthetics.¹ While the privileging of one element of a work over another often appears arbitrary or impressionistic, this act generally conforms to a set of principles which permit the formulation of paradigms for reading and writing; thus, most obviously, literary critics identify the distinguishing characteristics of Romanticism, of Realism, of Symbolism, and so forth. The ensuing...