FRENCH 214 Desire, Power, and Language in the Nineteenth-Century Novel

Ambition, passion and corruption.  Money and politics.  Love, lust and luxuries.  In this course, we will study the evolution of society and power in post revolutionary France.

Four masterpieces of the period will serve as our window onto the complexities of human relations in a century wrought by social and political upheavals.  In the nineteenth century, the novel flourishes as a genre and acquires a new status and respectability as it reflects upon the society of its time.  We will study how the realist novel evolves as the best medium to represent and explore historical contexts, and work out the meaning of individual destinies in an uncertain world.  We will explore how the "favorite" themes or topics in the realist text: history, money, power, adultery, the street, the city, relate to the social and historical contexts of the time.  Ultimately, analyzing the treatment of these themes can shape our understanding of the ideas, trends and attitudes of a society that was searching for its identity after the upheavals of the French Revolution.

Specifically, we will focus on how male and female destinies are inscribed in these novels, and study how differently patterns of ambition and transgression play out in these tales of passion.  We will examine the "plot", understood in the double meaning of story line and conspiracy, each author weaves about or against his hero or heroine, concentrating on topics such as:

-           the consequences of the emergence of capitalism on the concept of values at all levels of society (financial as well as moral)

-           social mobility in post-revolutionary France (ascent as well as descent)

-           the weakening of family ties in an emerging modern society

-           the experience of transgression and scandal

On an aesthetic level, we will also explore the notion of realism in the novel.  How can we best understand the relation between fiction and reality, novelistic and historical “truth”?  What are the various ideological underpinnings of each author’s conception of contemporary reality, or of his mission to uncover that reality?  In this way we will attempt to define each author’s own version of the realist text.

Le Rouge et le Noir, Stendhal

Le Lys dans la vallée, Balzac

Madame Bovary, Flaubert
L’Assommoir, Zola