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La Cousine Bette and Allegorical Realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson*
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
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Abstract

La Cousine Bette was written at a time when the classification scheme of La Comédie humaine no longer seemed adequate for its raw materials and was marked by a prodigious expansion in the length of Balzac's customary exposition. The ending of that exposition (desire gratified, desire frustrated) hints at the thematic unity of the work. Thus Bette embodies frustration, negativity, and ultimately the death wish itself: this drive is then parceled out among the other destructive women characters as well. Hulot in contrast expresses the force of Eros. Not only are both characters allegorical: they are shown in the process of becoming allegorical, and the deeper subject of the book is the very history of obsession itself. Balzac is able to record this instinctual system because his work is pre-individualistic: at the same time, the very symmetry of the instincts requires a third character, Madame Hulot, to function as consciousness or ego, and it is from this third pole that Balzac's sentimentalism (and his political ideology) derive, as necessary and inherent structural distortions.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 86 , Issue 2 , March 1971 , pp. 241 - 254
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1971

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References

Note 1 in page 254 See André Maurois, Prométhée ou la vie de Balzac (Paris: Hachette, 1965), pp. 409, 490, 493.

Note 2 in page 254 Maurois, pp. 389–91.

Note 3 in page 254 See Félix Davin, “Introduction aux Etudes philosophiques,” Comédie humaine, éd. de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), xi, 207–09.

Note 4 in page 254 The child was however born dead. Donald Adamson, Genesis of Le Cousin Pons (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 6–7.

Note 5 in page 254 Comédie humaine, vi, 264.

Note 6 in page 254 Comédie humaine, VI, 198.

Note 7 in page 254 This is the position of Lucien Goldmann, Pour une sociologie du roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), pp. 34–35.

Note 8 in page 254 In Les Chouans by unrequited love, in Une Ténébreuse Affaire by a slight to his honor, in Splendeurs et misères by the death of Peyrade.

Note 9 in page 254 Comédie humaine, vi, 335–37.

Note 10 in page 254 See in particular the opening of Le Lys dans la vallée.

Note 11 in page 254 Compare Bette's reaction to the Restoration (p. 161) with her sudden mistrust of Wenceslas (p. 192).

Note 12 in page 254 See the long passage on virginity (p. 230).

Note 13 in page 254 Comédie humaine, vi, 278.

Note 14 in page 254 Comédie humaine, vi, 278.

Note 15 in page 254 Œuvres complètes (Paris: Cercle du livre précieux, 1967), vu, 45–48.

Note 16 in page 254 See Georg Lukâcs, Balzac und der franzosische Real-ismus (Berlin: Aufbau, 1953), pp. 92–93.

Note 17 in page 254 Comédie humaine, vi, 433.

Note 18 in page 254 Comédie humaine, vi, 432–33.

Note 19 in page 254 See Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon, 1955), pp. 253–54 et passim.