This chapter provides a feminist reading of Annie Ernaux's portrayal of the female condition in La Femme gelée and Passion simple. While the contrasting degrees of emotional engagement reflected in the respective titles of these works would suggest that they have little in common, La Femme gelée and Passion simple are unusual among Ernaux's works in their representation of a female narrator as a sexually active wife or mother. The narrator's migration from working to middle class and her ongoing process of adjustment, which form the main subject matter of Ernaux's writing, are replaced in these texts by an emphasis on gender and female sexuality. The narrator's early childhood and schooling may be portrayed in La Femme gelée, yet it is the adolescent and adult narrator's endeavours to negotiate the tensions between personal and public gender models which are foregrounded. La Femme gelée focuses less on the narrator as desiring subject and more on her marital and maternal roles, on her petrification into an accomplished Stepford wife – or, in this case, Annecy wife – while Passion simple portrays the narrator's sexual passion during a shortterm affair with a man from the then Eastern bloc. In a sense, Passion simple can be read as the adult narrator's rejection of conventional expectations that female sexuality be channelled into a monogamous future within marriage; as a more sexually confident, older woman with economic independence, the narrator can at last allow her sexual desires free rein.

La Femme gelée is the only work in Ernaux's corpus which provides a detailed discussion of marriage and motherhood. In it, the older narrator charts her younger self's gradual indoctrination into sociallyapproved gender roles, and identifies the more surreptitious effects of sexism. While, as the previous chapter demonstrates, the daughterly perspective figures heavily in Ernaux's first two publications – and will recur in subsequent works – La Femme gelée is unusual in that it also depicts the mother–child relationship from the perspective of the mother.