Abstract
In Manette Salomon (1867), Edmond de Goncourt (1822–1896) and Jules de Goncourt (1830–1870) depict the Jardin des Plantes’ menagerie as a utopia where artists are able to experience a profound connection with animals, which enables them to see differently. This chapter critiques the fact that this interaction between artists and animals takes place within an urban zoo. Critical readings of Manette Salomon have not discussed the novel in terms of ambivalence and either condemn the authors’ conservative biases or champion their elegy of nature. In an era of urban development, those who did not neatly fit within the framework of the capitalistic city were relegated to its margins. Through historical documents of the Jardin des Plantes and close readings, Nettleton demonstrates how the novel depicts the avant-garde artist of the Second Empire as like a caged animal, whose revolutionary vision is both bound and protected by societal constraints.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The novel could reflect a mid-nineteenth-century viewpoint that humans and animals may share similar emotions. In Guide pittoresque au Jardin des Plantes, written in 1851, A. Henry relates animal cries to human emotion, claiming that a hyena’s yelp resembles the moaning of someone who is seasick (12). He believes that a group of monkeys’ conversation must be interesting given the rapidity of the ways they move their lips (Henry 15). He comments on the primates’ fight as: “It’s a little like with us/C’est à peu près comme chez nous” (Henry 14–15). Although the author anthropomorphizes the animals within a guide that is coded as factual, the phrase “comme chez nous” is an attempt to identify with these mammals as if they were human.
- 2.
See “À propos de Manette Salomon. L’œuvre des Goncourt” in La Revue de Paris of March 15th, 1896.
- 3.
“The Goncourts sought to exorcise the demon of imitation in using parrots or monkey artists as characters [Les Goncourt cherchent à] exorciser le démon de l’imitation en suscitant des personnages perroquets, des artistes-singes” (Cabanès 93). Lathers argues that “the monkey painter theme was an effective parody of realism or naturalism” (157).
- 4.
“Lend me your eye… I won’t abuse it. Come, mesdames and messieurs, I am going to make you see what you are going to see!/Confiez-moi votre œil … Je n’en abuserai pas! Approchez, Mesdames et messieurs! Je vais vous faire voir ce que vous allez voir!” (Goncourt, Manette Salomon 83).
- 5.
“Nous disons que, pour Kafka, l’essence animale est l’issue, la ligne de fuite, même sur place ou dans la cage.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Kafka pour une littérature mineure. Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1975, p. 35.
- 6.
“C’est une ligne de fuite créatrice” (Deleuze and Guattari 65).
References
Baratay, Eric. “Belles captives: une histoire des zoos du côté des bêtes.” In Beauté animale, ed. Emmanuelle Héran, 196–209. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2012.
Baudelaire, Charles. “Peintre de la vie moderne.” In Ecrits sur l’art. Paris: Livre de Poche, 1999.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003.
Bentham, Jeremy. Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. London: W. Pickering, 1823.
Berger, John. “Why Look at Animals?” In About Looking. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.
Boitard, Pierre. Le Jardin des plantes: Description et moeurs des mammifères de la ménagerie et du Muséum d’Histoire naturelle. Paris: J.J. Dubochet et Ce., 1842.
Bouaniche, Arnaud. Gilles Deleuze, une introduction. Paris: Poche, 2010.
Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc. Histoire naturelle générale et particulière, avec description du Cabinet du Roy. Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1754.
———. Histoire naturelle des oiseaux XVI. Paris: l’Imprimerie Royale, 1781.
Butler, Samuel. Evolution, Old and New: or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, as Compared with That of Mr. Charles Darwin. London: Hardwicke and Bogue, 1879.
Carroll, David. French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-semitism and the Ideology of Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Champeau, Stephanie. La notion d’artiste chez les Goncourt. Paris: Champion, 2000.
Crosland, Maurice. “Popular Science and the Arts: Challenges to Cultural Authority in France Under the Second Empire.” The British Journal for the History of Science 34, no. 4 (2001): 301–322.
Crouzet, Michel. “Préface.” In Manette Salomon. Paris: Gallimard, 1996.
Danto, Arthur. “Animals as Art Historians.” In Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post Historical Perspective. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998.
Delacroix, Eugène. Eugène Delacroix: Journal 1822–1863. Edited by André Joubin. Paris: Plon, 1996.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka pour une littérature mineure. Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1975.
———. Mille plateaux. Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1980.
Dépasse, M.A. Le Jardin des Plantes: poème descriptif. Paris: Schneider, 1842.
Derrida, Jacques. The Animal that Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet. Translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
Docquois, Georges. Bêtes et gens de lettres. Paris: Flammarion, 1895.
Duzer, Virginia. Impressionisme littéraire. Saint-Denis, France: Presses Universitaires Vincennes, 2013.
Fitzmaurice-Kelly, James. “Preface.” In Renée Mauperin. London: Vizetelly & Co., 1988.
Gavarni, Paul. Oeuvres Nouvelles. Paris: Librairie Nouvelle, 1903.
Gee, H. Before the Backbone: Views on the Origins of Vertebrates. Philadelphia: Springer Science and Business Media, 2007.
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Étienne. Philosophie anatomique. Paris: J.-B. Baillière, 1818–1834.
Goncourt, Edmond et Jules de. Journal: Mémoires de la vie littéraire. Paris: Bouquins, 1989.
Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de. Manette Salomon. Paris: Gallimard, 1996.
Grant, R.B. The Goncourt Brothers. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972.
Héran, Emanuelle. “Des Ménageries aux zoos.” Beauté Animale. Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2012.
Imbs, Paul. Trésor de la langue française; dictionnaire de la langue du XIXe et du XXe siècle (1789–1960). Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1971.
Ireson, Nancy. Interpreting Rousseau. London: Tate, 2005.
Jossart, Aaron. Acts of Viewing in Stendhal, Zola, Maupassant, and the Goncourt Brothers. PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 2008.
Kelder, Diane. The Great Book of French Impressionism. New York: Abbeville, 1980.
“La nouvelle rotonde des fauves au Jardin des Plantes.” Le Petit Journal supplément illustré, 31 March 1895.
Laissus, Yves, and Jean-Jacques Petter. Les Animaux du Muséum: 1793–1993. Paris: Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, 1993.
Lathers, Marie. “Models, Monkeys and Naturalism.” In Bodies of Art. French Literary Realism and the Artist’s Model. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.
Lewis, Paul G. “Monera”: The Principles of Evolution and Immortality in Atomic Life. Milwaukee: Paul G. Lewis, 1911.
Lippit, Akira. Electric Animal: Toward Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Malamud, Randy. Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007.
McHugh, Susan. Animal Stories: Narrating Across Species Lines. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Moore, Olin Harris. The Literary Methods of the Goncourts. New York: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 1916.
Morton, Timothy. “All the Corners of the Buildings.” Ecology Without Nature, 15 May 2009. Accessed December 4, 2017. http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2009/05/all-corners-of-buildings.html.
Pick, Anat. Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
Pomarède, Vincent, and Gérard de Wallens. L’école de Barbizon: peindre en plein air avant l’impressionnisme. Lyon: Musée des beaux-arts, 2002.
Renan, Ernest. Vie de Jésus. Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1863.
Rodenbach, Georges. “À propos de Manette Salomon. L’œuvre des Goncourt.” La Revue de Paris, 15 March 1896.
Rosenblum, Robert, and H.W. Janson. Art of the Nineteenth-Century Painting and Sculpture. London: Thames and Hudson, 1994.
Rothfels, Nigel. Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
Seigel, Jerrold. Bohemian Paris. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
Smith, Charles Sprague. Barbizon Days. Millet-Corot-Rousseau-Barye. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1903.
Spotte, Steven. Zoos in Post Modernism. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 2006.
Vallès, Jules. “Chronique parisienne.” La Situation. 10 November 1867.
Vezin, Luc. Les Artistes au Jardin des Plantes. Paris: Herscher, 1990.
Vouilloux, Bernard. L’Art des Goncourt: une esthétique du style. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Nettleton, C. (2019). A Caged Animal: The Avant-garde Artist in Edmond and Jules de Goncourt’s Manette Salomon. In: The Artist as Animal in Nineteenth-Century French Literature. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19345-4_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19345-4_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-19344-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-19345-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)