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Some Blunders

Kent Puckett

in Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel

This chapter begins by looking at the social mistake in relation both to the novel and to the rather sudden appearance of the etiquette book in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. While ... More

This chapter begins by looking at the social mistake in relation both to the novel and to the rather sudden appearance of the etiquette book in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. While there had long been other works on manners—courtesy manuals, conduct books, etc.—the etiquette book differed from what came before because it made its case for of good form without offering the reader a stable ethical ideal. In the absence of shared social or cultural ends, the mistake emerges as an object that is at once reliable and disturbing. Then, in the context readings of eating peas with your knife in Thackeray and pointing at people in Balzac, the chapter develops a psychoanalytically inflected theory of the social mistake both in general and in relation to the particular form of the nineteenth-century novel.Less

Balzac’s Louis Lambert: Genius and the Feminine Mediator

Ann Jefferson

in Genius in France: An Idea and Its Uses

This chapter studies Balzac's Louis Lambert (1832), in which the character of Lambert is a (possibly) mentally ill genius who retreats into a world to which only his erstwhile fiancée has access. ... More

This chapter studies Balzac's Louis Lambert (1832), in which the character of Lambert is a (possibly) mentally ill genius who retreats into a world to which only his erstwhile fiancée has access. Through his writings Balzac attempts to examine and portray a certain topic on the matter of geniuses: the essential role played by women in their survival. Louis Lambert ends with the destruction of the main character, a male genius who nonetheless exemplifies all Balzac's own ideas about genius, and is also its most complete and elaborate theorist. Once again, fiction's interest in its failure may reveal more about genius than success. And that failure is also accompanied—still with considerable ambiguity—by the female presence that Balzac argued also deserved recognition as the essential helpmeet of genius.Less

The Sublimity of the Jewish Type: Balzac’s Belle Juive as Virgin Magdalene aux Camélias

Judith Lewin

in Jewishness: Expression, Identity and Representation

This chapter studies the Jewish female character in French literature. The Jewish woman's difference from feminized Jewish men and marriageable Christian women is not enough to delineate her ... More

This chapter studies the Jewish female character in French literature. The Jewish woman's difference from feminized Jewish men and marriageable Christian women is not enough to delineate her specificity and hence her function as a fictional character. She is also seen through the lens of orientalism, because of the constructed image of her roots in the Middle East as a member of the ‘Hebraic’ or ‘Israelite’ race. The French Romantic writer Chateaubriand suggested that the treatment of Jews by Christian society varied according to their gender and physical appeal. He argued that Jewish women were exempted from perpetual misery and persecution by the grace Jesus accorded to Mary Magdalene, and that this was the root of Christian men's attraction to and sexual associations with Jewish women. The chapter then presents specific examples of representations of Jewish women: in this case the Jewish woman in Paris of the 1830s and 1840s as she appears in Honoré de Balzac, one of the nineteenth century's most popular and influential European writers. While Balzac had limited contact with actual Jewish women in Paris, the figures he created had a tremendous influence on the rhetoric of representing what has come to be known as la belle Juive.Less

Observers of Locomotion: Theories of Walking in the French Science de l’homme

Andreas Mayer

in The Science of Walking: Investigations into Locomotion in the Long Nineteenth Century

This chapter details the predicament of observation as it became most acute in the ambitious program of the French “science of man” derived from Montpellier vitalism (Barthez) and its further ... More

This chapter details the predicament of observation as it became most acute in the ambitious program of the French “science of man” derived from Montpellier vitalism (Barthez) and its further proponents in Paris (Moreau de la Sarthe, Gerdy). In this context, practices of observation were often opposed to forms of experiment, following a well-known opposition within the disciplinary development of anatomy and physiology. The chapter asks whether the new experimental physiology championed by Magendie was successful in opposing the larger cultural framework of the anthropological physiologies of locomotion. The tension between a semiotic approach to walking and a new mechanics grounded on animal experiment played out in several polemical discussions among Paris physicians. At the end, Balzac’s “Theory of walking” is presented and discussed in this context. His conception of a “social pathology” of the gait lead to the skeptical conclusion that there may be no such thing as the “natural gait.” The flâneur-observer, then, is left with the task of seizing the entire spectrum of culturally shaped manifestations and deformations of walking: an endless project, doomed to failure. Balzac’s essay can serve as a cultural index of the epistemological predicaments of the human sciences of this period.Less

{Epilogue}

Elizabeth Amann

in Dandyism in the Age of Revolution: The Art of the Cut

The first part of the epilogue identifies a series of traits shared by the five figures examined in the study. The second part explores how aspects of the revolutionary vision of dandyism reappear in ... More

The first part of the epilogue identifies a series of traits shared by the five figures examined in the study. The second part explores how aspects of the revolutionary vision of dandyism reappear in nineteenth-century attempts to theorize the figure: specifically, Honoré de Balzac’s Traité de la vie élégante, Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and Charles Baudelaire’s “Le peintre de la vie moderne.”Less

Introduction: The Hypothetical Mandarin

Eric Hayot

in The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, modernity, and Chinese Pain

Beginning with an overview of the Western sympathetic revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, this chapter lays out a series of instances in which China makes its appearance inside moral ... More

Beginning with an overview of the Western sympathetic revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, this chapter lays out a series of instances in which China makes its appearance inside moral philosophy, focusing mostly on works by Adam Smith and Honoré de Balzac. It introduces the book's two major theoretical keywords, the “ecliptic” and the “example-effect,” and considers them in relation to the history of moral philosophy and the “Asian values debate” on human rights.Less

Political Catastrophe and Liberal Legal Desire: Two Stories of Revolution, Remediation, and Return From the French Nineteenth Century

sylvia schafer

in Law and Catastrophe

This chapter takes up the historicity of “law and catastrophe” by exploring the problem that political events, represented and narrated as human-made catastrophes, have posed for the liberal legal ... More

This chapter takes up the historicity of “law and catastrophe” by exploring the problem that political events, represented and narrated as human-made catastrophes, have posed for the liberal legal imagination during the turbulent first half of the nineteenth century in France. It considers those political catastrophes that appeared to contemporary observers to result in an unbearable disintegration or dislocation of the legally meaningful civil individual: the catastrophes of revolutionary uprising and their long aftermaths. The analysis focuses on two strongly charged discussions of how liberal constructions of law might mitigate political catastrophe and its long-lasting effects. Both date from the period between 1789 and 1850. The first, Honoré de Balzac's Colonel Chabert, looks at the problem of civil existence after the revolutionary and Napoleonic breaks with France's monarchical past. The second, a set of juristic writings on the significance of state-provided legal aid around the revolution of 1848, addresses the catastrophic consequences of a poverty that excluded individuals from seeking rectifications through civil action and, once radicalized, threatened to drive them to the barricades.Less

Monsters and Artists

Jonathan Strauss

in Human Remains: Medicine, Death, and Desire in Nineteenth-Century Paris

This chapter reveals ways in which artists and novelists aestheticized material death and the abject desires associated with it. They drew on the materiality of their works to examine the relations ... More

This chapter reveals ways in which artists and novelists aestheticized material death and the abject desires associated with it. They drew on the materiality of their works to examine the relations between life and death. The painter and lithographer Odilon Redon used his conversance with anatomy, biology, and evolution to develop a pictorial universe in which death could be viewed from the viewpoint of the dead. Balzac went further by looking at the relations between putrefaction and the fictional status of literary characters. Flaubert tapped a metaphorics of dead bodies to imagine the complex relations between historical and novelistic narratives. In each of these cases, the medicalized knowledge of death offered a means for expressing and thinking through the materiality of artworks while offering insights into the imaginary and libidinal aspects of medical thought. As such, they represent a significant commentary on contemporary scientific theories.Less

Mi manca la voce: How Balzac Talks Music—or How Music Takes Place—in Massimilia Doni

John T. Hamilton

in Speaking of Music: Addressing the Sonorous

As his letters attest, Balzac was deeply concerned about incorporating musical composition, performance and reception into his broad novelistic project. The task, as he explicitly describes it, is ... More

As his letters attest, Balzac was deeply concerned about incorporating musical composition, performance and reception into his broad novelistic project. The task, as he explicitly describes it, is not “to talk about music” (parler de musique) but rather “to talk music” (parler musique), that is, to depict musical experience without employing it merely as a literary metaphor. In a reading of his novella Massimilla Doni, which features an extended analysis of Rossini's oratorio Mosè in Egitto, the present article discusses the various aspects of music's place in literature, which in turn offers some reflection on the tensions between music and verbal language, between the sound of the opera house and the silence of the page.Less

The Midpoint of Life

in On Borrowed Time: The Art and Economy of Living with Deadlines

This chapter discusses conceptions of “midpoint of life” through the lives and works of Dante, Petrarch, Friedrich Hölderlin, Goethe, Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, Vittorio Alfieri, Friedrich Shiller, ... More

This chapter discusses conceptions of “midpoint of life” through the lives and works of Dante, Petrarch, Friedrich Hölderlin, Goethe, Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, Vittorio Alfieri, Friedrich Shiller, Honoré de Balzac, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Chatterton, John Keats, Gottfried Benn, Thomas Mann, and Ingeborg Bachmann.Less

The Big Sell

in Consumer Chronicles: Cultures of Consumption in Modern French Literature

Aside from department stores, some groups of small shopkeepers offered an alternative to unattractive little shops in France. These shopkeepers assembled in arcades and provided a more congenial ... More

Aside from department stores, some groups of small shopkeepers offered an alternative to unattractive little shops in France. These shopkeepers assembled in arcades and provided a more congenial environment to attract customers, becoming an important forerunner of the department store as well as the modern shopping mall. Napoléon I's liberalisation of the laws governing commerce led to the appearance of new stores in the early years of the nineteenth century, offering other forms of shopping before the department stores became the target of resentment by small shops. These innovations bear witness to sales and marketing strategies that Honoré de Balzac highlights in his 1844 novella Gaudissart II. Balzac also gives centre stage to the sale of a piece of merchandise, which he considers a key drama in human interactions, and demonstrates the techniques in customer relations in action.Less

The Diorama, Apparitions, and Dream Image in Robert le diable

Gabriela Cruz

in Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera

The far-reaching transformation of grand opera into a modern medium of spectacle was inaugurated by Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable. In the Act III ballet, with the theater darkened, the dead ... More

The far-reaching transformation of grand opera into a modern medium of spectacle was inaugurated by Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable. In the Act III ballet, with the theater darkened, the dead left their graves, and, phantom-like, haunted the stage. Those “ghosts” of deceased nuns clad in white ushered in a new genre, the ballet blanc, while another phantom—Robert’s mother—bestowed on grand opera the gift of lyric spectrality when Alice, in Act V, relayed the woman’s last words. Parisian mélomanes regarded this moment of song with special reverence after the 1830s and, arguably, its lyrical qualities guided efforts to reform singing in the 1830s and 40s. But, at the same time, Robert ushered in a new understanding in Paris of opera as an art of dream-like states: indeed, it was the visual procedures of phantasmagoria and diorama that inspired the radical change in Meyerbeer’s art of composition.Less

Golden Age

Thomas Dodman

in What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion

In the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars nostalgia progressively ceased to be a precise medical term and instead grew into a more capacious cultural category—a concept open to competing meanings. A ... More

In the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars nostalgia progressively ceased to be a precise medical term and instead grew into a more capacious cultural category—a concept open to competing meanings. A victim of its own success, the diagnosis was adopted across the medical profession—and found equally in irritated esophagi or pronounced cranial lumps—ultimately losing much of its coherence. By mid-century, the term had also crept into vernacular language, through the writings of Balzac and playwrights drawn to this mysterious condition. Unlike other meteoric nineteenth-century mental disorders, though, nostalgia did not simply disappear when doctors began to lose interest in it. Instead, it was successfully reframed as a romantic disease akin to tuberculosis—that is a malady coupled up with a pleasurable aesthetics of suffering—and as an instinctual attachment to home all the more valuable in a society still jittery from post-revolutionary aftershocks. In moderate doses, nostalgia thus became a wholesome feeling, a perfectly natural sign of patriotic devotion. Only in the army and navy did it continue to spell disaster, as young conscripts in regimental barracks across Europe came to find out, and as French medical officers sent overseas knew only too well.Less

Bologna, Paris, Madrid (1829–1834):: Stabat mater, Olympe Pélissier, and Balzac

Richard Osborne

in Rossini: His Life and Works

The Théâtre Italien’s Édouard Robert spent the winter on a long-drawn-out scouting mission through Italy, beginning and ending in Bologna. He was looking for singers and operas, but he was also ... More

The Théâtre Italien’s Édouard Robert spent the winter on a long-drawn-out scouting mission through Italy, beginning and ending in Bologna. He was looking for singers and operas, but he was also acting as a courier between Gioachino Rossini in Bologna and Carlo Severini and Alejandro Maria Aguado in Paris, as plans were laid for the triumvirate to take over the administration of the theater. By the spring of 1832, Rossini had composed six of the 12 movements. Unable to face the task of completing the textually less-promising sections of the poem, he asked Giovanni Tadolini to complete them for him. Their Stabat mater was performed in Madrid on Good Friday 1833. It is not clear when Rossini and Olympe Pélissier first met. Whenever that was, the relationship itself appears to have taken root in 1832. A letter to Honoré de Balzac in January invited him to supper in the company of Rossini.Less

La Lente Agonie du petit commerce? Balzac, Grandeur et décadence de César Birotteau and Zola, Au bonheur des dames

in Consumer Chronicles: Cultures of Consumption in Modern French Literature

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, France witnessed the decline of small shops due to their inability to compete with department stores. This tension between the two forms of commerce was ... More

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, France witnessed the decline of small shops due to their inability to compete with department stores. This tension between the two forms of commerce was perhaps not inevitable. In his 1837 novel César Birotteau, Honoré de Balzac shows how two sectors of the retail trade, petit commerce and grands magasins, can coexist. Meanwhile, Emile Zola highlights the political and ideological conflicts between practitioners of old-style commerce and advocates the new in his 1883 novel Au bonheur des dames.Less

Prophets and Precursors: Paris 1830–1848

David Roberts

in The Total Work of Art in European Modernism

This chapter explores the recreation of the union of art, religion, and politics in Athenian tragedy in music drama, just as the modern synthesis of the arts, in which the orchestra takes the place ... More

This chapter explores the recreation of the union of art, religion, and politics in Athenian tragedy in music drama, just as the modern synthesis of the arts, in which the orchestra takes the place of the Greek chorus, is intended to give life and body to the vision of social synthesis. It analyzes the works of Saint-Simon, Mazzini, Balzac, Berlioz, and Wagner. It argues that the centrality of Wagner to the history and the idea of the total work of art is twofold: his theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk forms the central directing inspiration of his music dramas; his manifestos Art and Revolution (1849) and The Artwork of the Future (1849) fuse in the heat of revolutionary fervor the various anticipations since the French Revolution of the artwork to come into a powerful vision of the regeneration of man, society, and art. Beyond that, however, Wagner’s aesthetic conception of politics complements Rousseau’s political conception of art.Less

Flags in the Dust and the Birth of a Poetics

Arthur F. Kinney

in Faulkner and Formalism: Returns of the Text

This chapter focuses on the publication history of William Faulkner’s third novel Flags in the Dust (which would be retitled Sartoris) and its rejection by the publishing house Horace Liveright. It ... More

This chapter focuses on the publication history of William Faulkner’s third novel Flags in the Dust (which would be retitled Sartoris) and its rejection by the publishing house Horace Liveright. It suggests that readers for Liveright judged the novel’s structure haphazard and fragmented because they initially could not comprehend Faulkner’s emerging aesthetic. By contrast, Jean-Paul Sartre of France was able to grasp the nature of Faulkner’s textual experiments early on, probably because the latter’s poetic reminds him of that of Honoré de Balzac. Both Balzac and Faulkner developed a distinct sense of place and a richly detailed prose style to create “tapestry-like fiction.” The chapter argues that Faulkner had actually carefully designed what initially seemed haphazard prose. It also discusses many similarities between Flags in the Dust and another Faulkner novel, The Sound and the Fury, highlighting their close intertextual links and parallels between their “deliberate and revolutionary poetics.”Less