ABSTRACT
“The Balcony,” an introduction to the art of story-telling, refers to the female writer’s world as a stage. Buisson shows how Grace King enhances such visibility through theatrical devices, the mimesis of dialogue and inner life, and a kind of straightforward relationship between the audience—readers as hearers—and the narrative voice. The mimesis of the writing act prevails over the mimesis of events, the text being both a performance and an artefact. King’s theatrical writing ironically dramatizes the lives of her female protagonists, who are compelled to leave the background or the wings—a strategy aimed at debunking our traditional vision of values.
