Boule De Suif

An allusion is an indirect reference to another work of literature or an otherwise well-known event, person, idea, etc. While allusions are often deployed directly by a work’s narrator, several of the most significant in “Boule de Suif” come from the characters. In their efforts to persuade Boule de Suif to sleep with the Prussian officer, the women in the group reference numerous women from history and myth:

Examples from ancient history were cited: Judith and Holofernes, and then, without any apparent connection, Lucretia and Sextus, Cleopatra admitting to her couch all the hostile generals, and reducing them to the servility of slaves. […] [T]he women of Rome were seen on their way to Capua, to rock Hannibal to sleep in their arms (42).

As ostensible examples of women who have wielded sex for patriotic causes, these allusions are meant to serve as inspiration for Boule de Suif. However, a reader familiar with the stories behind the allusions will recognize that Boule de Suif’s fellow travelers are ignorant, self-serving, or both. Judith, for example, is a biblical heroine who saved her city from the besieging general Holofernes; although she played on her beauty to gain entrance to Holofernes’s tent, where she plied him with wine and then killed him, there is no suggestion that she actually had sex with him.