As the title of this study suggests, the formative influences of childhood shape the many themes and concerns which make up Ernaux's corpus – even, as Chapter 2 argues, in a work as firmly anchored in the present as Passion simple. Underlying and uniting these thematic recurrences is the role played by social class in the narrator's socialisation process, and the psychosexual consequences of the confrontation between her working-class childhood and her middle-class education. If, for Ernaux, class and sexuality are imbricated in the construction of individual subjectivity, it is nonetheless the former which provides the conditions for the development of the latter: ‘Comme je l'ai raconté dans Les Armoires vides on appartient d'abord totalement au milieu dans lequel on naît et on est, dans les deux sens du mot.’ To interpret the narrator's developmental trajectory independently of the sociocultural environments in which it evolves is to produce a reductionist reading of the text, and, indeed, of Ernaux's corpus as a whole. Toril Moi's regret at the paucity of feminist studies on the interconnection between class and gender – which remains valid – is surely redundant in analyses of Ernaux's writing, in which the portrayal of female sexuality cannot be read without reference to the formative parameters of social class.

More than any other work by Ernaux, Les Armoires vides illustrates the corrosive consequences – both physical and psychological – of these influences on female sexuality. The social divide between the working class and the bourgeoisie, or, as Ernaux prefers, adopting Bourdieuian terms of reference, between ‘la classe dominée’ and ‘la classe dominante’, and the traumatic ramifications this entails for the self-image of the female protagonist, constitute the subject matter of the work. As the first of Ernaux's texts, Les Armoires vides details that divide with a violence which appears gradually to burn itself out in the remainder of the trilogy: while the narrator of Ce qu'ils disent ou rien manifests a less virulent form of parental loathing, her counterpart in La Femme gelée adopts a still more conciliatory position towards her origins, manifesting a tolerance which may stem from her greater maturity and reflective distance vis-à-vis the events she is relating, as well as the fact that she is now a parent herself and better able to comprehend her own parents’ conduct.