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Date Posted: 17:24:21 04/06/08 Sun
Author: Cara
Subject: Anti-Mimetic Mimesis

While working through my draft on James' Portrait of a Lady, I discovered an interesting mimetic twist. The protagonist Isabel imitates several different models throughout the novel, but the criteria by which she chooses her models are, in her own mind, nearly always the same, and include a kind of anti-mimetic originality. Her first three models are strong, independent women, and the fourth is the man she marries. Oddly, though, after she marries him she discovers -- surprise! -- that he's actually disgustingly imitative. So she starts to hate him and eventually leave him. In the process she also realizes in various ways that her previous models were very imitative as well. It looks at first as though she rejects the mimetic mechanism entirely. But the thing that leads her to leave Edmund is the same idea that led her to marry him -- the myth of originality. She has left one awful husband, but it seems possible at the end that she may fall into the same situation for the same reasons again.

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