Temporal Migrations in Annie Ernaux’s L’Événement: Recounting (a) Lived Experience(s) in Abortion Narrative

Abstract

In Annie Ernaux’s novel, L’Événement (2001), the author writes about her clandestine abortion while she was a college student. Ernaux constructs her narrative through her journal, which serves as proof while also allowing her to relive the experience from forty years before vividly. The narrative describes and recounts Ernaux’s experiences of seeking a person to provide the abortion, the process, and the moments afterward to her reader. Ernaux’s novel offers a temporal retelling through memory from her contemporary time to the past when she had an abortion. It blends the past and present lived experiences, reminding the reader of what was and juxtaposing it with what is. The text illustrates the conditions women experienced in telling their story while juxtaposing it with how women describe their abortion story currently during a time of legal certainty. Ernaux exposes the taboo of telling one’s abortion story. The narrative structure of Ernaux’s text also illustrates the lived experience for women of a particular class without access to abortion by challenging the taboo of discussing an abortion story publicly. This article analyses how Ernaux’s novel explicitly challenges the taboo in both past and present through a feminist narrative that describes a woman’s lived experiences.

Keywords:

• Ernaux
• feminist
• abortion
• temporal
• phenomenology
• narrative

Additional information

Notes on contributors

J. E. Hornsby

J. E. Hornsby is a Senior Lecturer of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Kentucky. She holds an MA in French Literature and a doctorate in Gender and Women’s Studies. Her research focuses on gendered narratives and how they are visually represented in comics and/or film in France and the United States. She teaches courses in French about comics, film, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century women’s narratives at the University of Kentucky.

Ellen Riggle

Ellen Riggle is Chair and Professor in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies, and Professor of Political Science at the University of Kentucky. Professor Riggle is the recipient of the 2017 William Sturgill Award for excellence in graduate education at the University of Kentucky, and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association. Professor Riggle is co-author of A Positive View of LGBTQ (2012), as well as numerous publications on positive identity, minority stress, and the impact of laws and policies on the health and well-being of sexual and gender minority individuals.