Honoré de Balzac Criticism
Honoré de Balzac, born in 1799, stands as a seminal figure in French literature, renowned for his expansive work La Comédie humaine. This series offers a comprehensive portrayal of 19th-century French society, blending romanticism with realism. Balzac’s keen observations of human behavior and society's intricate dynamics underpin his exploration of themes such as family, economics, and power. His innovative narrative techniques, including recurring characters and complex plot structures, are discussed in scholarly essays like Balzac's Metaphors and A Web of Conspiracy: Structure and Metaphor in Balzac's Novels.
Balzac’s depiction of varied social classes and exploration of themes such as alternate sexualities, exemplified in Vautrin and Same-Sex Desire in Le Père Goriot, highlights his relevance in literary history. His narrative style, which emphasizes the relationship between author, text, and reader, is further dissected in essays like Introduction to Balzac and His Reader.
Balzac's influence on later literary giants like Marcel Proust and Emile Zola underscores his status as a foundational realist. Criticism such as Balzac and the Drama of Perspective and Balzac and the Unity of Knowledge often delve into his intricate character portrayals and thematic richness. While some critique his occasional melodrama, Balzac's work remains integral to French literature for its detailed depiction of 19th-century life and innovative storytelling.
Contemporary scholarship continues to engage with Balzac’s work, exploring intertextuality and thematic depth. Studies like Works Sighted in a Frame Narrative by Balzac: Facino Cane and How to Do Things with Dreams: Dream Power in Balzac and Nerval highlight his narrative craftsmanship. Themes of community and identity are also central, as explored in Know Thyself vs. Common Knowledge, while Painting as Intertext in Balzac's La Fille aux yeux d'or examines artistic influences. Furthermore, the exploration of sexuality and difference, as discussed in 'The Other Woman', reinforces Balzac’s enduring significance in literary criticism, affirming his ability to merge realism with imaginative depth.
Contents
- Principal Works
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Balzac, Honoré de (Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism)
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Balzac's Metaphors
(summary)
In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in 1976, Frappier-Mazur argues that Balzac's use of metaphor elaborates on human identity and character and attempts to create an eternal human image in a specific historical moment.
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A Web of Conspiracy: Structure and Metaphor in Balzac's Novels
(summary)
In the following essay, Mileham analyzes the complex, weblike structures of the motif of conspiracy as it is developed in Balzac's novels, discussing how the author uses the metaphor of fabric to articulate this theme.
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Introduction to Balzac and His Reader: A Study of the Creation of Meaning in La Comédie Humaine
(summary)
In the following essay, McCarthy explores the attention Balzac paid in his novels to the craft of writing as well as to the reader's creative activity of reading, using for her analysis reception theory and touching too on other literary theories that examine the relationship between author, text, reader, and meaning.
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Balzac and the Drama of Perspective: The Narrator in Selected Works of La Comédie Humaine
(summary)
In the following essay, Dargan surveys a number of novels in La Comédie humaine written before 1835—Louis Lambert, Le Colonel Chabert, Histoires des treize, and Eugénie Grandet—to analyze the relation between the author and narrator and to trace the development of Balzac's narrative technique.
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Making the Revolution Private: Balzac's Les Chouans and Une épisode sous la Terreur
(summary)
In the following essay, Moyal argues that in Les Chouans and Un épisode sous la terreur, two works set during the French Revolution, Balzac deliberately minimizes the changes that took place during the period and depicts the private spheres of characters as limited, full of compromise, and lacking in choice and freedom.
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The Feminine Conspiracy in Balzac's La Cousine Bette
(summary)
In the following essay, McGuire explores the lesbianism in La cousine Bette and argues that the title character of the novel dies outside the narrative because her sexual rebellion threatens patriarchal society; she must disappear to the margins of the novel, it is argued, so that the virtues of the family can be extolled.
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Balzac's Go-between: The Case of Honorine
(summary)
In the following essay, Heathcote explores the representation of the themes of creation, dissolution, and recreation of difference in Honorine in terms of space, time, sexuality, and language.
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‘Le Texte de la Vie des Femmes’: Female Melancholia in Eugénie Grandet
(summary)
In the following essay, Smith-DiBiasio considers the singularity and universality of the protagonist in Eugénie Grandet against the background of the debate about Balzac's realism and analyzes the text itself in terms of female melancholia. This essay begins with the text, Eugénie Grandet, and looks at it initially against the background of La Comédie Humaine and in the context of critical debate about Balzac's realism. This in turn raises questions about the function and composition of character, character as type and character as case and my reading attempts to analyse the singularity of Eugénie Grandet, which leads inevitably to considering the universal aspects of this singularity. The specificity of Eugénie Grandet emerges from Balzac's description of a life and the text itself offers universalizing sententiae which see this life in terms of ‘le texte de la vie des femmes’, the text of women's lives. Reading the text of Eugénie Grandet's life leads me to analyse this in terms of melancholia as defined by Freud and elaborated by Abraham and Torok; and more specifically in terms of female melancholia as described by Kristeva and accounted for by Irigaray. I nearly stopped here with Irigaray's appeal to a cultural resolution to female melancholia. But I am uncomfortable with the neat clinical solution and nostalgic for the unresolved melancholy of the text. The relationship between art and psychoanalysis is not hand in glove. Eugénie Grandet is not the patient but the patient's melancholy. The essay ends with the irreducible texture of melancholy which is the text.
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Women in the Discourse of Balzac's Horace Bianchon
(summary)
In the following essay, Yates maintains that Balzac identifies with his character Dr. Horace Bianchon and examines the five texts in which he appears as narrator to expose the author's understanding of the social condition of women as well as his essential misogyny.
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Theatre as Metaphor in La Comédie humaine
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Dickinson analyzes terminology and imagery in La Comédie humaine to illustrate how the theatre metaphor is used in various ways.
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Madness and Military History in Balzac's ‘Adieu’
(summary)
In the following essay, Shuh argues that in his short story “Adieu,” Balzac comments on historical narrative and indeed competes with the genre in his fictional account, maintaining too that the madness in the novel represents historical trauma.
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The Allusive Complex of Balzac's Pierrette
(summary)
In the following essay, Pasco explores the use of allusion in the neglected novel Pierrette, focusing on references in the work to the eighteenth-century novel Paul et Virginie and to the case of Beatrice Cenci, the young girl who was abused by her father, whom she later killed.
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‘Tomber dans le phénomène’: Balzac's Optics of Narration
(summary)
In the following essay, Goulet explores the dual narrative modes of vision and sight, or mystical revelation and scientific observation, in La Comédie humaine, showing how images of the eye and seeing, as well as ideas about spiritual seeking and inner vision, permeate Balzac's novels.
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Balzac and the Unity of Knowledge
(summary)
In the following essay, Thiher claims that Balzac transformed the novel from philosophical allegory to a discussion about the nature of knowledge, and explores the author's attempt to offer a reality in his novel that would compete with the supposed total truths posited by scientific discourse.
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The Claims of the Dead: History, Haunted Property, and the Law
(summary)
In the following essay, Caruth maintains that in Le Colonel Chabert, a novel about a ghostly claim to property, Balzac illustrates how the law, functioning as historical memory, recognizes and yet fails to understand those traumatized by history.
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Introduction to Balzac's Shorter Fictions
(summary)
In the following essay, Farrant discusses Balzac's shorter works—stories, articles, and fragments—and their relationship to and development into his longer works, exploring in the course of the discussion the idea of brevity and the role of the fragmented in Balzac's fiction.
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Vautrin and Same-Sex Desire in Le Père Goriot
(summary)
In the following essay, Berrong examines the nature and presentation of the homosexuality of the character Vautrin in Le père Goriot, noting the differences between Balzac's views of same-sex desire and homoeroticism and modern essentialist conceptions.
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Desert, Desire, Dezesperance: Space and Play in Balzac's La Duchesse de Langeais.
(summary)
In the following essay, Mileham discusses the metaphor of movement through space in La Duchesse de Langeais, arguing that the spatial dynamics are represented in two modes: games and rituals.
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Balzac's Metaphors
(summary)
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Balzac, Honoré de (Short Story Criticism)
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Works Sighted in a Frame Narrative by Balzac: Facino Cane
(summary)
In the following essay, Lowrie provides a stylistic analysis of “Facino Cane,” focusing on the structure of the frame story.
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How to Do Things with Dreams: Dream Power in Balzac and Nerval
(summary)
In the following essay, Weber examines the function of dreams in Balzac's “L'Auberge rouge” and “Sur Catherine de Médicis,” and Gérard de Nerval's Aurélia.
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Know Thyself vs. Common Knowledge: Bleich's Epistemology Seen through Two Short Stories by Balzac
(summary)
In the following essay, Hutton explores the concept of community in “Le Colonel Chabert” and “Adieu” and employs David Bleich's epistemology to gain insight into the two stories.
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Painting as Intertext in Balzac's La Fille aux yeux d'or
(summary)
In the following essay, Majewski analyzes the influence of Delacroix's paintings on Balzac's novella La fille aux yeux d'or.
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Barbey d'Aurevilly, Balzac, and ‘La Vengeance d'une femme.’
(summary)
In the following essay, Toumayan establishes thematic and “intertextual connections” among Barbey d'Aurevilly's “La Vengeance d'une femme” and Balzac's La fille aux yeux d'or.
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Absolute Fetishism: Genius and Identification in Balzac's ‘Unknown Masterpiece.’
(summary)
In the following essay, Bresnick investigates the role of genius in The Unknown Masterpiece and considers how it impacts Balzac's aesthetics in the novella.
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Melville's Séraphita: Billy Budd, Sailor.
(summary)
In the following essay, Haydock considers the influence of the novella Séraphita on Melville's novella Billy Budd, Sailor.
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‘The Other Woman’: Reading a Body of Difference in Balzac's La fille aux yeux d'or
(summary)
In the following essay, Sharpley-Whiting explores the role of sexual and racial differences in the novella La fille aux yeux d'or.
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‘Le Dernier Coup de Pinceau’: Perception and Generality in Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu.
(summary)
In the following essay, Peterson investigates the scientific notion of proof in the artistic context of Balzac's Le chef-d'oeuvre inconnu.
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Works Sighted in a Frame Narrative by Balzac: Facino Cane
(summary)
- Further Reading