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13 - Stendhal: the pursuit of happiness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2015

Brian Nelson
Affiliation:
Monash University, Victoria
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Summary

Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.

– Stendhal, On Love

A child of the Enlightenment, a sympathizer with the Romantic movement and, with Honoré de Balzac, the progenitor of the realist novel, Stendhal (the pen name of Marie-Henri Beyle, 1783–1842) was one of the most original writers of his time. The themes and style of his major fictional works – The Red and the Black (Le Rouge et le noir, 1830), Lucien Leuwen (written 1834–35, published posthumously) and The Charterhouse of Parma (La Chartreuse de Parme, 1839) – have an almost self-contradictory quality: ironic and poetic, comic and tragic, satirical and lyrical. This is reflected in the psychological complexity of the central characters and the subtlety of Stendhal's style of narration. A particular blend of Romantic fervour and eighteenth-century rationalism gives his novels their distinctive quality. The characterization, themes and oblique narrative methods of Stendhal's fiction reflect his preoccupation with the nature of post-Napoleonic France and the problems of selfhood confronting the generation that grew up in the aftermath of Napoleon's downfall at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

After Waterloo

An ardent admirer of Napoleon, Stendhal thrived in the heady atmosphere of the Napoleonic age. In 1800 he joined Napoleon's army in Italy (but resigned his commission the following year). From 1806 to 1814 he served as an aide de-camp during the Emperor's campaigns in Germany, Austria and Russia. After the fall of Napoleon, he experienced French society – that of the Bourbon Restoration (1815–30) – as a dull anti-climax, presenting the spectacle of a philistine, money-grubbing bourgeoisie jostling for power with a stagnant, effete aristocracy. As the momentous events and military triumphs of the Napoleonic era receded into history, the world seemed to shrink and grow grey. The qualities Stendhal valued – energy, passion, spontaneity: the qualities he saw embodied in the Emperor – were those he found lacking in the world around him.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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References

Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Trask, Willard R. (Princeton University Press, 1953). (‘In the Hôtel de la Mole’, pp. 454–92.)Google Scholar
Bolster, Richard, Stendhal: ‘Le Rouge et le Noir’ (London: Grant & Cutler, 1994).Google Scholar
Brombert, Victor, Stendhal: Fiction and the Themes of Freedom (New York: Random House, 1968).Google Scholar
Brombert, Victor (ed.), Stendhal: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962).Google Scholar
Brooks, Peter, The Novel of Worldliness (Princeton University Press, 1969). (‘Stendhal and the Styles of Worldliness’, pp. 219–88.)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brooks, Peter, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Knopf, 1984). (‘The Novel and the Guillotine; or, Fathers and Sons in Le Rouge et le Noir’, pp. 62–89.)Google Scholar
De la Motte, Dean, and Haig, Stirling (eds.), Approaches to Teaching Stendhal's ‘The Red and the Black’ (New York: MLA, 1999).Google Scholar
Finch, Alison, Stendhal: ‘La Chartreuse de Parme’ (London: Edward Arnold, 1984).Google Scholar
Genette, Gérard, Figures of Literary Discourse (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). (‘Stendhal’, pp. 147–82.)Google Scholar
Girard, René, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965). (‘Triangular Desire’, pp. 503–21.)Google Scholar
Haig, Stirling, Stendhal: ‘The Red and the Black’ (Cambridge University Press, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Humphries, Jefferson, ‘The Red and the Black’: Mimetic Desire and the Myth of Celebrity (Boston: Twayne, 1991).Google Scholar
Jefferson, Ann, Reading Realism in Stendhal (Cambridge University Press, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jefferson, Ann, Stendhal: ‘La Chartreuse de Parme’ (London: Grant & Cutler, 2003).Google Scholar
Moretti, Franco, The Way of the World: The ‘Bildungsroman’ in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987), pp. 75–94 and passim.Google Scholar
Pearson, Roger, Stendhal's Violin: A Novelist and his Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).Google Scholar
Pearson, Roger (ed.), Stendhal: ‘The Red and the Black’ and ‘The Charterhouse of Parma’ (London and New York: Longman, 1994).Google Scholar
Petrey, Sandy, Realism and Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 123–62.Google Scholar
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Wood, Michael, Stendhal (London: Elek, 1971).Google Scholar
The major novels are available in Oxford World's Classics and Penguin Books. In addition, the following are excellent:
The Charterhouse of Parma, trans. Howard, Richard (New York: Random House, The Modern Library, 1999; London: Picador, 2002).Google Scholar
The Life of Henry Brulard, trans. and with an intro. by Sturrock, John (New York Review of Books, 1995).Google Scholar
The Red and the Black, ed. Jefferson, Ann, based on a translation by Moncrieff, C. K. Scott (London: J. M. Dent, Everyman's Library, 1997).

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