ABSTRACT
Jayne Anne Philips's Quiet Dell. A Novel begins and ends with a haunting. From the start, the novel thus juxtaposes two traditional figures of vulnerability: children and women. Children belong to the same poetics of helplessness. Epitomizing the vulnerability is the crudity of Achsa's submission to her husband's domineering and violent sexual fantasies, so as to draw him back to herself and their children when he engaged in a passionate, intensely physical, extra-conjugal love affair. In other words, if one accepts to consider the text as the emotional surface that bears the mark of events in the form of signifiers, "vulnerability" is engraved not only as a motif, not only as a psychological explanation, but as a narrative thread that stitches up the pages as a scar: both the trace of the wound and the sign of its healing through representation.
