Abstract
Ever since Denis de Rougemont’s famous study of the representation of desire in the West, it has been a critical commonplace to assert the permanence of the theme of adultery.1 More specifically, though, Tony Tanner’s account of such transgression in the ‘bourgeois novels’ of Rousseau, Goethe and Haubert is only the most famous of a number of analyses which highlight the particular urgency of the theme, which is seen as coincident with the rise of the middle classes in much of Europe and prior to the birth of Modernism.2 What needs to be defined is the relationship between the apparent ubiquity of the form and the historical specificity identified within the bourgeois novel. Tanner suggests that a shifting of social norms around the turn of the century is reflected in a ‘move from the more realistic novel of contract and transgression […] to what might be called the novel of metaphor’ (86). In his terms, ‘as bourgeois marriage loses its absoluteness, its unquestioned finality, its “essentiality”, so does the bourgeois novel’ (15). The disaffection with the ‘novel of contract and transgression’ which inspires the development of Modernist prose is sketched by Tanner in terms of a triple impulse, embodied by Lawrence, Proust and Joyce respectively.3
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World (New York: Anchor Books, 1957); first published as L’Amour et l’Occident (Paris: Plon, 1939).
Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel (Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).
Emile Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart, 5 vols, ed. by Henri Mitterand (Paris: Gallimard (Pléiade), 1960–67).
Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1974), 19.
Henry Céard, Une Belle Journée (Genève: Slatkine, 1970), 260.
Stephen Heath, Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 80.
Cited in J.K. Huysmans, Lettres à Destrée, ed. by G. Vanwelkenhuyzen (Genève: Droz, 1967), 78, n. 4.
These range from Mario Praz’s classic account of The Romantic Agony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970; first published in English in 1933)
to Elaine Showalter’s Sexual Anarchy (London: Bloomsbury, 1991)
and Jennifer Waelti-Walters’s history of French Feminist Novelists of the Belle Epoque (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990).
Gustave Flaubert, L’Education sentimentale (Garnier-Flammarion, 1969), 440.
Copyright information
© 1997 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
White, N. (1997). Carnal Knowledge in French Naturalist Fiction. In: Scarlet Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25446-0_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25446-0_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-68430-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-25446-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)