Le triptyque delportien comme portrait de la Sad Girl : autothéorie graphique d'une tristesse de corps et d'esprit

This thesis focuses on Juli Delporte’s autobiographical comics — Journal (2014), Moi aussi je voudrais l’emporter (2017), and Corps vivante (2022) —, which form an autotheoretical sequence relating the feminist and lesbian development of their narrator. Although comics studies in Quebec have become increasingly frequent over the past twenty years, critics have yet to take a true interest in the work of Delporte, a French author who has been living in Montreal since the early 2000s. My analysis aims to fill this gap in Québécois comics research by studying the sadness aesthetic that lies at the heart of my corpus and affects the Delportian subject’s search for identity, as she seems to perfectly embody Audrey Wollen’s Sad Girl Theory (2014). The narrator’s sadness will be considered as both innate and acquired — the result of her melancholic temperament as well as that of a prolonged exposure to the oppressive norms of patriarchal society —, allowing her to refuse happiness as prescribed by the male gaze, but also to escape from this very gaze that forces women to exist solely as objects of desire. The first part of this thesis examines the feminist reversal of Delporte’s sadness in her three comics, which ultimately detach themselves from the male gaze to make way for a more feminine (and even lesbian) ideology. The aim will be to show that the narrator does not fulfill herself through the perfect acceptance of her gender identity and sexual orientation — a form of quiet contentment valued by the patriarchy —, but rather through a perpetual sense of dissatisfaction leading to the flawed (and all the more human) expression of her feminist ideals: kindness, self-reliance, queerness. The second part of this thesis focuses instead on the (lack of) visual representations of the Delportian narrator, who seems to gradually free herself from her physicality by the end of Corps vivante. Indeed, because of the triptych’s contemplative aspect, and because of the narrator's difficult relationship with sexuality, Delporte’s comics proceed to a progressive erasure of the human body, which is no longer drawn, but replaced, rather, with animals and plants that accompany the narrator’s thoughts and blend them with a natural environment that serves as her refuge from the social world. This thesis will reflect on the scope of the narrator’s foundational grief and on the means taken by Delporte’s autotheoretical comics to allow the deployment, both textual and visual, of a healthy sadness which sharpens the mind as much as it sublimates the traumas of the body, and through which one manifests her refusal to please others

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