Chapter 3 - Copycat Crimes

Summary

Chapter 3 looks at Duras’s adaptation and serialization of an actual fait divers from the press in Les Viaducs de la Seine-et-Oise (1960), L’Amante anglaise (1967), and finally Le Théâtre de l’Amante anglaise (1968, 1991). Like a “copycat killer,” I argue that Duras copies the sensational media style of the true crime case in her three works by insisting on the power of fascination in such stories. She creates mises en abyme in the three works as her characters read and discuss newspaper reports on the crime. In so doing, the fait divers at the origin of the works becomes a sort of “found object,” circulating within the fictional world created by the author and calling attention to itself as an outside, real-world referent.