« La morte », a fantastic and realistic short story by Guy de Maupassant

Abstract

The traditional fantastic genre travelled around the 19th century and was also produced and considered by the realistic/naturalistic school. Maupassant, in the 1880s, wrote several short stories which included the unusual in reality, creating ambiguity, producing hesitation from the language itself, and dealing with motifs, places, and fantastic themes, such as corpses, tombs, apparitions, nights, cemeteries, madness, hallucination, and fear. Maupassant presents one more specificity: he can be realistic even though fantastic or, perhaps, fantastic even though realistic. Maupassant can uncover the reality and dissect the human condition through short stories which deal with the presence of the unusual, the mystery and the supernatural, even though they are the fruit of the imagination or hallucination of the characters. This paper proposes therefore to make a brief analysis of the short story “The dead girl” discussing the fantastic literature and the particular fantastic of Maupassant based on authors such as Todorov, Castex, Camarani, Wellek, Grandadam, and the writer and theoretician Maupassant himself.