ABSTRACT
Marguerite Yourcenar, the woman chosen to end the French Academy's 300 years of male exclusivity, vehemently denied that she was a feminist, and her most famous work focuses on male heroes. This chapter examines the production of the feminist questions through analysis of the classical and modern elements in the second of a pair of short stories, "Achille ou le mensonge" and "Patrocle ou le destin," that were originally published together in 1935 as "Dedamie" and "Penthesilee" under the general title "Deux amours d'Achille". In "Achille" Achilles' simultaneous embrace of Patroclus and heroism had involved adopting categorical distinctions. It was traditional for Achilles to fall in love with the dead Amazon queen upon seeing the beautiful face under the helmet. The shift from feminine to masculine, from personal to abstract, in the last paragraph of "Patrocle" occurs also in the naming of the stories between their original publication and their inclusion in Feux.
