| Summary: | This paper attempts to locate Adolphe Belot's novel Mademoiselle Giraud, my wife (1870), whose central theme is the protagonist's lesbianism, within the process of socio-political change in 19th-century France. This period marked the emergence of the modern "lesbian sign" in French literature as a result of the "discursive explosion" on (homo)sexuality. Lesbianism in the novel seems to be a semiological and epistemological problem facing both the protagonist-narrator and the reader, and can only be articulated by means of a "riddle poetics" within the heterosexual meaning regime that governs the novel's narrative Trying to go beyond the authorial semantic project inscribed in the text, which requires the use of an "epistemology of the closet," this paper reads the lesbian character not only as an "opaque sign" within the heterosexual logic but also as a sign of an obsession of a bourgeois society in the process of redefining its identity as the novel was being written. In the conclusion, the author attempts to assess the possible impact of the normative image of the lesbian on lesbian subject formation, polemicizing with the vision of love between women as an "unrepresented reality" and drawing attention to the emancipatory potential present even in negative representations of homosexuality.
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