Journal Article

Becoming Hare: Emotional Hybridity and Ecological Precarity in Mireille Gagné’s Le Lièvre d’Amérique

Angelo, Adrienne

2025

Overview

This article argues that Mireille Gagné’s novel Le Lièvre d’Amérique (2020) uses a woman-hare metamorphosis to explore emotional hybridity, or the interlacing of human and non-human emotions. Through close readings of the protagonist’s evolution, the predator-prey motif, and the fusion of human-animal perspectives, this study examines how Gagné’s engagement with zoopoetics reconfigures emotions as shared and environmentally situated forces rather than purely interior states. Drawing on affect theory and literary animal studies, this article traces how certain emotions function as symptoms of neoliberal alienation and ecological precarity, registering damaged relations to habitat and more-than-human others. The novel’s alternation between subjective viewpoints, ethological descriptions, and fragmented temporal markers draws the reader’s attention away from anthropomorphic projection toward reciprocal, if asymmetrical, interspecies synergy. Le Lièvre d’Amérique ultimately reframes care as an interspecies practice while contesting neoliberal commodification of bodies and emotions. A brief coda on Gagné’s Bois de fer (2022) extends this argument by showing how emotional hybridity and ecological emotions become key sites where northern Francophone fiction imagines multispecies solidarity amid climate crisis.

• Publisher: Babeș-Bolyai University,Universitatea Babeş-Bolyai
• Subject: Comparative Study of Literature / Language and Literature Studies / Studies of Literature