Numerous critics have discerned in Barbey d'Aurevilly's L'Ensorcelée a nostalgia, an inclination to recuperate a departed spiritual sensation or order. That nostalgia is said to be found in the novel's supernatural atmosphere and in its anachronistic mood. In this article, I demonstrate that the narrator's mourning of a vanished sacred order comes not just from poetic anachronisms, but from a systematic critique of modern secular reasoning. The novel's failed clarifications and epistemological obscurities, particularly its fusions of the natural and the supernatural, are part of a methodical program of undermining science and secular explanations – of demonstrating the disorder and arbitrariness of a world without religion. The first part of the article establishes the connection between the decline of religion and the ominous narrative ambiance. The second part demonstrates how the narrator proposes scientific or natural explanations in order to undermine them – in order to illustrate the insufficience of what he calls the 'pensée moderne.' Finally, the article considers the novel's epistemological uncertainties and narrative indeterminacies in terms of this insufficience. L'Ensorcelée, in the end, mourns the departure or repudiation of a cosmic order and, what is more, subtly undermines the 'pensée moderne' that comes to substitute for it.
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