SOURCE: Smith-DiBiasio, Anne-Marie. “‘Le Texte de la Vie des Femmes’: Female Melancholia in Eugénie Grandet.” Nottingham French Studies 35, no. 2 (autumn 1996): 52-9.

[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.

The question of the interrelation of social and psychic structures emerges from Balzac's creation of characters possessing both a general and quite singular authenticity. This question is itself inseparable from the debate about Balzac's realism and in turn from issues of representation.

Balzac's project in La Comédie Humaine is both onto- and phylogenetic: in his ‘avant-propos’ he defines as central to his romanesque project the portrayal of ‘l'espèce sociale’ by which he means man in culture, but he also speaks about the emotional realism of his characters, of ‘l'importance et la poésie de cette histoire du cœur humain’.¹ His novels in fact testify to the fact that the account of human subjectivity in general emerges from a keen concentration on singularity.

In Eugénie Grandet we have a character whose fate is accountable to a whole set of cultural, emotional and psychic structures, the relentless interaction of which is integral to this representation of both a type and a case of femininity.

The realism of La Comédie Humaine has been seen as the product of a carefully-crafted fantasy structure whereby the reader is spellbound by the illusion of an autonomous closed world to the extent that this world begins to represent the ‘whole world’ and the ‘real world’ becomes uninhabitable outside ‘la comédie’. The realist fantasy is stage-managed by a whole materialist rationale whereby for example, a historical retrospect initiates the reader into the earlier life of an individual or social group and serves, because of its quasi-objective status, as a narrative summary of the ‘real’ past; or careful period detail establishes a relationship between the movement of history and the course of private fortunes so that in Eugénie Grandet Grandet emerges as a characteristic product of his time; or a situation is created in which a chosen character acts out his given nature at a precise historical moment and within a clearly-specified economic and social pattern, such as Grandet leaving Saumur at the dead of night to exploit the Restoration's inadequate system of public credit, or Grandet going to Angers where the price of gold has doubled.² This realist strategy establishes characters as types. So on one level Grandet is the modern miser, the business man whose machinations precipitate enormous changes in provincial and family life, and the novel is about the new power of money in a society new to business ventures and financial speculation, with woman as an object of exchange within that system, as sacrificial. But the social-realist rationale is insufficient to explain what actually drives and motivates the characters, what accounts both for their compelling singularity and the universal appeal of that subjectivity. If we look closely, the world of Eugénie Grandet, of her mother and her father can be seen to repeat the very structure of the Comédie's seminal fantasy whereby a microcosmic world exerts such a powerful hold on a subject as to make the ‘real world’ uninhabitable for her. I would like to examine the form this structure takes in the character of Eugénie and to explain this with reference to psychoanalysis, a discourse for which the hyperreality of the fantasmatic structure is daily bread.

Eugénie Grandet does not submit to a position of object of exchange within the system of nascent capitalism defined in the novel through her father. In Kristevan terms we might say that she repudiates the symbolic order he represents, neither speaks his language nor submits to such an order of things. Hers is not a liberating alternative; she can be seen to inhabit a world of pre-Oedipal fusion with her mother, a state Kristeva would call the semiotic.³ Confined to the womb-like locus of the Grandet's living room, mother and daughter have spent every day for the last fifteen years sitting together maintaining the household linen. Not only the living room but the whole of Monsieur Grandet's house represents the mother-daughter relationship:

Une travailleuse en bois de mérisier déteint remplissait l'embrasure, et le petit fauteuil d'Eugénie Grandet était placé tout auprès. Depuis quinze ans, toutes les journées de la mère et la fille s'étaient paisiblement écoulées à cette place, dans un travail constant, à compter du mois d'avril jusqu'au mois de novembre (…) La mère et la fille entretenaient tout le linge de la maison, et employaient si consciencieusement leurs journées à ce véritable labeur d'ouvrière, que, si Eugénie voulait broder une collerette à sa mère, elle était forcée de prendre sur ses heures de sommeil en trompant son père pour avoir de la lumière⁴

(p. 40)

Madame Grandet avait une chambre contiguë à celle d'Eugénie, chez qui l'on entrait par une porte vitrée.

(p. 68)

Mother and daughter sleep separated only by a glass door; and these bizarre sleeping arrangements along with the description of the room where they spend their life, and the later image of their being attached to each other like Siamese twins are all symptomatic of fusion, identification and incestuous claustrophobia:

Mais à la vérité, la vie des célèbres sœurs hongroises, attachées l'une à l'autre par une erreur de la nature, n'avait pas été plus intime que ne l'était celle d'Eugénie et de sa mère, toujours ensemble dans cette embrasure de croisée, ensemble à l'église, et dormant ensemble dans le même air.

(p. 81)

As Kristeva would argue, this state of pre-Oedipal fusion is as oppressive as the law of the father, the symbolic order of things represented by Grandet's world, for it is equally totalitarian. It is related to what she calls the paralysis of the abject position, a boundary position between the infancy of the pre-Oedipal and access to language in the symbolic.⁵ The internalization of lost objects prevalent in melancholy is a similar boundary state, and it is the state of melancholy which I should like to examine further here in so far as it is a defining structure in Balzac's text. The structuring principle of Eugénie Grandet's world is melancholy, female melancholy in which mother and daughter are bound together in a state of mournful non-differentiation.

Melancholy is often associated with the failure of symbolic activity, the state Kristeva refers to as both ‘l'abjection’ and ‘l'asymbolie’⁶ and which Abraham and Torok have seen as the failure in the mourning subject of a metaphoric activity they call introjection.⁷ Introjection involves the infant's initiation into metaphoric activity, the replacement of a mouth full of breast/milk by a mouth full of language. The meaningfulness and success of this first metaphoric activity is guaranteed by the presence of a maternal figure who is herself an initiate of the world of language and has learnt to supplement loss with communication. The failure of the introjection of words into the mouth empty of milk takes the form of a fantasy of incorporation whereby the lost object is incorporated into the self in a fantasy guarding the subject against its loss. The self becomes a crypt and the lost object the source of an interminable mourning process we call melancholy. The fantasy of incorporation is anti-metaphoric ‘en accomplissant au propre ce qui n'a de sens qu'au figuré’,⁸ taking literally that which only has figurative meaning, since rather than replace loss with language it imagines taking the lost object into the self, literally, so that the self becomes a crypt. This process is an aspect of mourning which mourning works through and eventually resolves through introjection. Melancholy is the failure of the work of mourning, and as Freud noted is different from mourning in that the loss of self-regard, prevalent in melancholy, is absent in mourning.⁹

Eugénie and her mother inhabit a world of melancholy absent of metaphor. The melancholic principle of demetaphorisation and the concomitant fantasy of incorporation can be very clearly defined on a semantic level in the text of Eugénie Grandet and especially in the pseudo-realist description of the house at Saumur and its evocation of degradation and depoetisation, of mourning and melancholia. In Monsieur Grandet's house the allegorical figures sculpted into the stone work have become eaten away by time and decay, the figure carved out of the doorknob is now almost unrecognisable, the chair-covers, once representing La Fontaine's fables, are now worn and faded, like the portraits hanging on the walls and the wooden barometer eaten away by flies; this is the room occupied by Eugénie and her mother. On reading we ask ourselves what is the meaning of all this melancholy and decay?

Les sièges de forme antique étaient garnis en tapisseries représentant les fables de La Fontaine; mais il fallait le savoir pour en reconnaître les sujets, tant les couleurs passées et les figures criblées de reprises se voyaient difficilement (…) Au dessus de cette table, il y avait un baromètre ovale, à bordure noire, enjolivé par des rubans de bois doré, où les mouches avaient si licencieusement folâtré que la dorure en était un problème. Sur la paroi opposée à la cheminée, deux portraits au pastel étaient censées représenter l'aïeul de Madame Grandet (…) et défunte Madame Gentillet (…)

(p. 40)

Eugénie Grandet is trapped in a world of impossible fusion with a mother whose reaction to any perturbation we are told is to ‘faire la mort’. Dutybound to Grandet, she and her daughter live in the space delimited by his moods and after her mother's death Eugénie will virtually live the life of a mystic, bound to her mother's dying words, ‘il n'y a de bonheur que dans le ciel’ (p. 163). Their life corresponds closely to the three figures of female depression traced by Kristeva in her Soleil noir: dépression et mélancolie, in which she refers to three cases of female depression whose defining symptoms are roughly ‘le corps-tombeau’, ‘la perversion blanche’ and ‘la vierge mère’.¹⁰ These figures are each typified by a defining symptom, such as: the female body as crypt for the lost object, ‘faire la morte … le dedans féminin … [devient] la crypte qui englobe la morte’ (pp. 84-9); the perverse devotion to duty which masks sexual identity, ‘l'activité débordante de la mélancolie … investit en secret la perversion dans ce que la loi a de plus implacable: dans la contrainte, le devoir, le destin, et jusque dans la fatalité de la mort’ (p. 93); and self-enclosure within a pre-Oedipal space against the threats of the outside world, ‘entr[er] en maternité comme on entre au couvent’ (p. 101).

Both Kristeva and Abraham and Torok see a certain form of metaphoric activity as melancholy's ultimate prevention and cure. Now Eugénie has an opening for metaphoric activity when she falls in love with her cousin Charles:

Dans la pure et monotone vie des jeunes filles, il vient une heure délicieuse où le soleil leur épanche ses rayons dans l'âme, où la fleur leur exprime des pensées, où les palpitations du cœur communiquent au cerveau leur chaude fécondance, et fondent les idées en un vague désir; jour d'innocente mélancolie et de suaves joyeusetés!

(p. 70)

When this moment arrives for Eugénie she interests herself in her appearance for the first time in her life, wakes early and dresses with care. As she looks out of her window awaiting her cousin she watches the garden. Despite being bathed in the sunlight of her new love it hosts a sinister scenario. The plants are tangled, withered and blighted, ‘inculte’, ‘flétris’, ‘rougis’, ‘brouis’, ‘rongeés’, ‘pourri’, ‘tombée de véstusté’, ‘rabougris’ (pp. 71-2); the walls are covered in dank rotting plants and at the steps leading to the garden door, buried by overgrown plants, we have an image of encrypting proper to Eugénie's melancholy (and to Kristeva's first figure of female melancholy):

Enfin les huit marches qui régnaient au fond de la cour et menaient à la porte du jardin, étaient disjointes et ensevelies sous de hautes plantes comme le tombeau d'un chevalier enterré par sa veuve au temps des croisades

the image of a widow in mourning for a knight buried in the religious wars. Her sexual awakening and the glimmers of hope which enter the narrative with it, such as sunlight on the blighted garden, is coded by this central image of mourning and by references to a melancholic lack of self-regard against the background of the male gaze and most specifically the terror of her father. For at the very moment that Eugénie might break out of that fusional relationship with her mother she is literally terrorized by the figure of an all-powerful father: ‘Eugénie se sauva dans le jardin, tout épouvantée en entendant trembler l'escalier sous le pas de son père’ (p. 74), and this because the mother's sexual position in the Oedipal triangle is masked by what Kristeva calls ‘l'activité débordante de la mélancolie’, a perversion which consists in the implacable devotion to duty, destiny, fatality (Kristeva's second figure of female melancholy).

Melancholic imprisonment is the maxim governing this implacable narrative. After falling in love with Charles, Eugénie is unable to take the opening to metaphoric activity implicit in romance. Bound to her mother in melancholy, introjection is impossible for her and contemplation of the loved object precipitates feelings of inadequacy and reveals both the disturbance of self-regard intrinsic to inexpressible melancholy and the fantasmatic destruction of metaphoric activity on which that hinges.

Melancholic identification with her mother means that with the awakening of her desire for her cousin Eugénie feels terrorized by her father. He represents destruction: ‘Pour la première fois, elle eut dans le cœur de la terreur à l'aspect de son père, vit en lui le maître de son sort’. This terror is a measure of her imprisonment in the Oedipal triangle. Grandet's ‘arrêt paternel et souverain’ signifies patriarchy, capitalism, but also the law of the father necessary for her survival. This is the symbolic order she denies herself, locked in a semiotic world of maternal fusion, a dead-end. So when Eugénie looks at herself in the mirror, she is confronted with the image of her father looking at her. He is the master of her fate because she herself has no means of identification with this parent nor with the order he represents; she is defenceless because without what Kristeva calls those arms necessary for a daughter's survival, obtained through identification with the symbolic father. Nor, despite her infatuation with her cousin, does she have any desire for another than her mother, for ‘un partenaire imaginé capable de dissoudre la mère emprisonnée en moi en me donnant ce qu'elle a pu et surtout ce qu'elle n'a pas pu me donner … une nouvelle vie’.¹¹ Eugénie's love for Charles is a form of idolatry. He is an angel, a phoenix, an unattainable ideal creature. Moreover, with the death of Charles's father, in Charles she loves an image of melancholy which corresponds to her self-image: ‘Il ne jouait pas la douleur, il souffrait véritablement, et le voile étendu sur ses traits par la peine lui donnait cet air intéressant qui plaît tant aux femmes. Eugénie l'en aima bien davantage’ (p. 104).

Melancholy is the province of femininity in this novel, and with various sententiae, Balzac underpins his representation.

la femme a cela de commun avec l'ange que les êtres souffrants lui appartiennent (…) En toute situation, les femmes ont plus de causes de douleur que n'en a l'homme, et souffrent plus que lui. L'homme a sa force, et l'exercice de sa puissance: il agit, il va, il s'occupe, il pense, il embrasse l'avenir et y trouve des consolations (…). Mais la femme demeure, elle reste face à face avec le chagrin dont rien ne la distrait, elle descend jusqu'au fond de l'abîme qu'il a ouvert, le mesure et souvent le comble de ses vœux et de ses larmes. Ainsi faisait Eugénie. Elle s'initiait à sa destinée. Sentir, aimer, souffrir, se dévouer, sera toujours le texte de la vie des femmes.

(p. 139)

Realism and the alienating powers of capitalism cannot be linked causally, in a simplistic way with the real preoccupation in Eugénie Grandet, ‘le texte de la vie des femmes’. It cannot be denied that, for as long as women remain objects of exchange between men in patriarchal societies, their access to the symbolic order remains severely limited. It may indeed be culturally expedient for men that women remain trapped in this position. Just where this problem overlaps with female melancholy is the crucial question here, for melancholy hinges on the denial of access to language as metaphor, to ‘l'exercice de la puissance’, to language as a transformative even healing power. This access depends on the figure of the mother, and furthermore it is the mother who for the child, and metaphorically for culture at large, embodies the interrelation of social and psychic structures to which I referred at the beginning of this essay. The mother must initiate the passage into culture, to the symbolic, represented by the father. Eugénie's lack of self-regard at the moment of her falling in love is a symptom of melancholy fostered by her melancholic mother and an indication of the impossibility for her of identification with the symbolic, with culture.

Eugénie Grandet's mother leaves her no access to symbolic activity. She dies from identifying literally with her daughter and her physical vulnerability before the blows of her terrible father. She leaves her daughter with the words, ‘Mon enfant, (…) il n'y a de bonheur que dans le ciel, tu le sauras un jour’ (p. 163). Eugénie endures her cousin's silence for nine years during which she is visited by predatory provincial neighbours anxious for her marriage and money. After her father's death and the loss of Charles to a marriage of convenience, with now the priest as master of her fate she is proposed two possible paths: marriage or voluntary celibacy, ‘obéir à votre destinée terrestre ou à votre destinée céleste’ (p. 180) and she makes no hesitation but with her mother's dying words as a measure of her destiny chooses death in life, ‘je vais dire adieu au monde et vivre pour Dieu seul dans le silence et la retraite (…) la mort promptement, monsieur le curé, dit-elle avec une effrayante vivacité’ (p. 181).

This is a mystical solution prefigured by her mother's dying words but after being given time for reflection she chooses a middle path between life and death, a boundary state proper to her melancholy. She chooses both marriage and voluntary celibacy. Naomi Schor has argued that this choice points to the evolution of Eugénie Grandet's narcissism for it enables her to remain poised between the imaginary—in which she is the heroine of undying love for her cousin Charles, and the symbolic—in which she submits, for her survival, to the social restrictions of marriage while nevertheless being able to guard intact her image of that undying love.¹² So Eugénie chooses to carry on loving Charles and, I would argue, only enters into the symbolic order of marriage to enable this. We might describe her act, after Kristeva, as ‘entrer en [mariage] comme on entre au couvent’. She attaches her melancholy to a structure in the social order which is surely a means of ensuring its survival. She protects her libidinal position with this, in effect, homosexual gesture, and libidinal positions, as Freud notes in Mourning and Melancholia,¹³ are never willingly abandoned.

So Balzac has linked the bourgeois tragedy to a certain structure of femininity, a fantasmatic structure whereby the subject closes in on itself self-protectively against entering into culture:

Telle est l'histoire de cette femme qui n'est pas du monde au milieu du monde, qui, faite pour être magnifiquement épouse et mère, n'ai ni mari, ni enfants, ni famille.

(p. 189)

In ‘Rereading Irigaray’, which precedes her book Luce Irigaray,¹⁴ Margaret Whitford elucidates Irigaray's account of female melancholy. Whitford argues that Irigaray's work is a response to the masculinist bias of Western metaphysics which traps femininity in an unrepresentable, melancholic position and women as objects of exchange in the male imaginary. According to Irigaray the female imaginary has to be inscribed into culture, into the symbolic order because in Western culture women remain trapped in a pre-Oedipal mother-daughter relationship. The problem is that a language does not exist which adequately represents and mediates this relationship. Irigaray points out that many of the characteristics of melancholia are in Freud mapped on to his description of the little girl's psychic development. Whitford explains with reference to Irigaray:

The girl-child in certain respects remains in a state of melancholia; she can never accomplish the work of mourning, the loss of the object, because she has no representation of what has been lost. As a result, ‘the little girl's separation from her mother and her sex, cannot be worked through by mourning’.¹⁵

This is what Irigaray calls a state of ‘dereliction’ and Balzac has seized upon this emotional reality in his representation of Eugénie Grandet and her mother; but his novel cannot provide the female symbolic which Irigaray demands. The work of introjection, of primary metaphorisation, required to lift such melancholia, is a massive cultural task demanded of women, which will enable in turn the long reparative work of mourning. But the novel remains pinned to Balzac's sententiae, ‘sentir, aimer, souffrir, se dévouer, sera toujours le texte de la vie des femmes’. Eugénie Grandet is in no position to rescue herself from this. The irreducible melancholic texture of the text remains as a nostalgic reminder of and important return to a libidinal position we must relinquish, albeit symbolically, for a place in culture;

elle reste face à face avec le chagrin dont rien ne la distrait.

(p. 139)

Notes

1. Balzac, ‘Avant-propos de la Comédie humaine’ (Paris: July 1842) in Préfaces (Paris: 1953), pp. 367-83.

2. For a discussion of Balzac's strategies of realism cf. Michel Butor, ‘Balzac et la réalité’, Répertoires 1 (Paris: Minuit, 1960), pp. 74-93.

3. The ‘semiotic’ is a key word in Kristeva's critical and psychoanalytic vocabulary. She first used it to describe the poetic text's pulsional infraction of the established order of language in La Révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1974). More recently it has been attached to the notion of the child's pre-Oedipal fusion with the mother, and most recently to the language of the ‘affect’, of rhythms, sounds and colours, which is in effect a return to that position, and which in different degrees, traverses the symbolic order of language.

4. Balzac, Eugénie Grandet (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1964), all references are to this edition and are included in the text.

5. cf. Kristeva, ‘Approche de l'abjection’ in Pouvoirs de l'horreur (Paris: Seuil, 1980).

6. Kristeva, Soleil noir, Dépression et mélancolie (Paris: Gallimard, 1987).

7. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, ‘Deuil ou mélancolie’, in L'Écorce et le noyau (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1978), pp. 259-74.

8. ‘Deuil ou mélancolie’, p. 261.

9. ‘Mourning and Melancolia’ in the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. James Strachey (London, 1963-74), vol. 12, p. 246.

10. ‘Figures de la dépression féminine’, Soleil moir, pp. 79-99.

11. ‘Figures de la dépression féminine’, p. 89.

12. Naomi Schor, Breaking the Chain, Women, Theory and French Realist Fiction (Columbia University Press, 1985), ‘Eugénie Grandet, mirrors and melancholia’, pp. 90-107. Schor's essay emphasizes the centrality of Eugénie Grandet's narcissism; it is the factor which permits her to decide her fate and the novel to imagine her survival. I think Schor valorizes the heroine's entry into a loveless marriage as a triumph for her narcissism, whereas I see it as a self-affirming gesture only insofar as it protects her melancholic position.

13. Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. James Strachey (London, 1963-74), vol. 12.

14. Margaret Whitford, ‘Rereading Irigaray’ in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Teresa Brennan (Routledge, 1989), pp. 106-26.

15. Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray, Philosophy in the Feminine (Routledge, 1991).