SOURCE: MacLachlan, Gale, and Ian Reid. “Framing the Frame: Maupassant's ‘La Chevelure.’” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 22, no. 2 (June 1995): 287-99.

In the following essay, MacLachlan and Reid provide a stylistic analysis of “La Chevelure,” focusing on the frame narrative of the story.

Much of the work of Ross Chambers comprises a serial meditation on the subtle ways in which texts—in particular “readerly” fictions of the nineteenth century—attempt, as he puts it in Story and Situation, “both to produce and to limit meaningfulness” (1984, 35). In his view, various figures and strategies embedded within a narrative may inscribe communicative relationships that serve implicitly as exemplary models or cautionary antimodels of the reading process. Such self-referential models highlight the mixture of freedom and constraint encountered by readers in their dealings with texts. The embedding of a model “allows for relatively intense interpretive involvement on the part of the reader” and...