magiadoreal

When she is explaining to Rodolphe and Clémence why she can never marry Prince Henri, Fleur-de-Marie concludes her pathetic confession: "I love Prince Henri too much, I respect him too much, ever to give him a hand that has been touched by the bandits of the Cité" (...). The formula recapitulates the antithesis that governs her existence, and suggests the uncrossable bar separating the terms of the antithesis. Calling upon Freud's concepts of the "displacement upwards" that can occur in the symptoms of the hysteric neurotics, we can say that "hand" here is a metonymy, a euphemism that displaces the place of uncleanness, of soillure . Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot , p. 149