[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.]

There is something suspicious about the deaths of Lisbeth Fischer and Valérie Marneffe. Bette dies outside of the narrative, parenthetically, of a “phtisie pulmonaire,” yet she is the title character; the scene of Valérie's death is rife with melodrama and moral symbolism. The awkward, expeditious elimination of these two principal female figures leads one to question the actual nature of their transgressive role in La Cousine Bette. Clearly, the theme of deviancy, linked historically to the rise of an acquisitive bourgeoisie and the erosion of traditional social values based on heredity, is central to Balzac's narrative. Few critics, however, have emphasized the textual evidence suggesting that such deviancy takes the form of a lesbianism that seeks to supplant the increasingly weakening patriarchal social structures, namely the Family and the Church. Bette and Valérie conspire, in effect, to legitimize their marginal sexual identification by vengefully taking control of all the men around them. The text exhibits a marked absence of vigorous, licit, heterosexual relationships; the only man who exudes any virulence is the Brazilian, Montès, and his function as such is critical to the possibility of a preserved patriarchy. The other men in the novel are characterized as either doddering philanderers (Hulot), ostentatious bourgeois (Crevel), infantilized and feminized objects of feminine desire (Steinbock), or exceedingly uninteresting (Victorin). From the perspective of the somewhat contrived expurgation of two dangerous women, the ironic and hasty recuperation of the “legitimate” values of the Family and the Church at the end of the novel merits some attention.

Balzac's wordplay with the name “Bette” and the word “bête” is clearly intentional. Repeatedly the title character, nicknamed “la Chèvre” by Baron Hulot, is the object of animalization. Her description is, moreover, diametrically opposed to that of her more socially anchored cousin Adeline who is painted in angelic tones; she is a “déesse” (La Cousine Bette. Paris: Gallimard “Folio,” 1972, 58). The deification of the young Hulot couple is set against the beastliness of “la Bette.” Adeline, one of those “caractères sublimes,” is likened to Venus and “notre mère Eve” (52), while the young Baron Hulot is “en homme, une réplique d'Adeline en femme” (53). This passage is clearly evocative of the biblical first family of Genesis; yet, curiously, here the male seems to be fashioned after the female. Man's difference springs from his original likeness with the woman, not vice-versa. This first suggestion of the inversion of sexual roles linked to the survivability of the Family will surface as a principal motivation of the narrative. Indeed, the Baron, “from the beginning,” is as godly as his wife, but the suggestion of which sex might be capable of “failing” or “falling” is subtly implied: “pour Adeline, le baron fut, dès l'origine, une espèce de Dieu qui ne pouvait faillir” (54). This sacrosanct rendering of the Family dominated by the Father unites later with the sober presence of another patriarchal social force, the Church.

The divine Hulots are thus staged to clash with the sullen portrait of Lisbeth Fischer who “était loin d'être belle comme sa cousine … Paysanne des Vosges, dans toute l'extension du mot, maigre, brune, les cheveux d'un noir luisant, les soucils épais et reunis par un bouquet, les bras longs et forts, les pieds épais, quelques verrues dans sa face longue et simiesque, tel est le portrait de cette vierge” (59). This is not the only simian description of Bette. Later Balzac states: “Parfois elle ressemblait aux singes habillés en femme” (65); and later, Valérie addresses her as “ma tigresse” (233). Bette is not merely one “bête,” but beastliness itself; she is a composite monster, at once goat, ape, and tiger. Although Bette's marginality is due in part to her provinciality, her low social rank and her homeliness, her status as a “monstrosity” derives for the most part from her “abnormal” sexuality, her celibacy. For Balzac, the virgin is invested with a singular reserve of nearly superhuman, unpredictable forces: “La virginité, comme toutes les monstrosités, a des richesses spéciales, des grandeurs absorbantes. La vie, dont les forces sont économisées, a pris chez l'individu vierge une qualité de résistance et de durée incalculable. Le cerveau s'est enrichi dans l'ensemble de ses facultés réservées” (138). The sexual monstrosity of virginity emerges from the shadows of the underworld; the action of “les gens chastes” is motivated by “une force diabolique ou la magie noire de la Volonté” (138). Patriarchal sexual norms are thus, from the first pages of the novel, pitted against the maleficent forces of sexual abnormality.

Bette's marginal social status as a monstrous virgin seems her lot. Hulot's efforts to “civilize” her by arranging acceptable candidates for marriage and by procuring her a position as a haberdasher's apprentice are wasted. Despite learning to read and write and becoming “une assez gentille, une assez adroite et première demoiselle” (60), Bette's jealousy of her cousin Adeline causes her to regress to her original social position—“elle redevint simple ouvrière” (60). Unable to ignore the imposing beauty and comfortable social position of Adeline, Bette is overcome by that burning jealousy that “formait la base de [son] caractère plein d'excentricités” (59). Bette is in fact far from the center of sociosexual norms. She inhabits the dismal fringe of Parisian society.

Set apart from a world where patriarchal structures demand strict gender identification, Bette seems to thrive on her difference, her resistance. She is at home in the “barbarie” of a “quartier en démolition,” in one of those houses “envelopées de l'ombre éternelle … noircies … par le souffle du Nord” (80-1). Her marginality is willfully sustained—“elle aimait son chez soi” (65). It is significantly in this infernal quarter that Bette will first encounter Valérie Marneffe. Bette embraces and nurtures her eccentricity, consciously opposing herself to the sacred Hulots. She is no longer one of them, she has intentionally demarcated the boundary of her difference: “Cette fille perdit alors toute idée de lutte et de comparison avec sa cousine” (61). The seed of revolt has been sown, for “l'envie resta cachée dans le fond de son cœur, comme un germe de peste” (61).

Reinforcing thus her status as a feminine anomaly, Bette becomes the antithesis of the woman “comme il faut.” She will not agree to marriage, even if “maintes fois le baron avait résolu le difficile problème de la marier” (61). Cognizant of her difference, Bette will not allow men to penetrate her unsocial circle, to dominate her. She is unable to regard herself as an object of male desire; she wants to be a dominator of men: “[elle] eût aimé à protéger un homme faible” (62). Indeed, Bette possesses attributes which are more masculine than feminine and, in an effort to de-feminize her appearance, she defaces the finery given to her by Adeline. She is too much a man to take on the traditional role of the passive, servile wife. As a masculinized woman, Bette desires a feminized man. Her virginal monstrosity is only accentuated by the fact that she “possédait … des qualités d'homme” (68). For many characters in the novel, there is an irresolvable vacillation between their actual and their functional gender. For example, Bette, as an actual female, functions as a male and desires another actual male, Steinbock, himself functioning for a time as female. In turn, Steinbock will function as a male in relation to Hortense, but once again as a female for Valérie. Bette's functional gender is also seen to slip from male to female as her desire shifts from Steinbock to Valérie. This slippage prohibits a comfortable gender identification and inaugurates the sexual confusion to come.

Wenceslas Steinbock, of course, becomes Cousin Bette's “homme faible,” at least temporarily. Bette is fifteen years his elder, however, and her love for him is more parental than sexual. She tells Wenceslas, “Eh bien! je vous prends pour mon enfant” (95); but he becomes in effect her “esclave” (102). Bette dominates Wenceslas because he feels indebted to her for having prevented his suicide and taking him under her wing. Because she is homely, she would doubtfully have been loved by him as a “woman.” Her control of him is only through a parental tyranny; Bette, the manly, sexless virgin becomes the “entreteneuse” of Wenceslas, who here is characterized at once as a woman-child and as Bette's “homme faible.” Just as Bette is both motherly and masculine in her relationship with Steinbock, so is he a feminine man. Balzac acknowledges this peculiar blurring of sexual roles: “on aurait pensé que la nature s'était trompée en leur donnant leurs sexes” (89). This gender whirligig serves to inform the dynamics of the entire narrative, and it is the unfixed functioning of sexual roles which threatens to destabilize the moral constancy of patriarchy. Bette, for example, undertakes to subvert traditional sexual conventions by forming this “unnatural” bond with Wenceslas. The relationship defies the sanctity of the patriarchal model in that the identity of the male has become ambiguous. In fact, Bette and Wenceslas have come to represent the very opposite of traditional expectations of man and woman. Thus Balzac consciously qualifies their relationship with atypical adjectives: “le mariage de cette énergie femelle et de cette faiblesse masculine, espèce de contresens” (92). This “contresens” (which can be read as “contrary/wrong meaning” or “contrary/wrong direction”) marks the union of Bette and Wenceslas as sexually aberrant and forebodes the subsequent disorder.

As Bette's protégé, Steinbock is initiated into her marginal universe and is himself, to some extent, animalized. Bette brags to the inquisitive Hortense that the name “Steinbock” means in German “animal des rochers” (70), as though such a quality should make him compatible with her. She strives to neutralize their differences, to see him as she is seen by others. The young Pole is more reticent, however, to consummate “cette alliance bizarre” (90), to submit to the “tyrannie d'une mère” (90). Bette fails, ultimately, to realize a union founded on the disregard of sexual conventions which demand gender stability between a male and a female. Wenceslas loves “real women”; Bette accuses him, “Vous aimez les femmes …” (90), as though she were not one herself. In short, Bette is too manly for him, and he is too much a part of the socio-sexual mainstream. He will not commit to this inversion of the norm. Bette is forced consequently to withdraw completely from this attempted semblance of normalcy, semblance because Steinbock is, at least by appearance, of the opposite sex.

Steinbock's marriage to Hortense Hulot marks Bette's definitive break with conventional feminine sexuality. Here begins the “transformation de la Bette” (138). This transformation involves more the sexual clarification of the object of Bette's desire than her own gender identity. Embracing completely now her monstrous self, she transfers her “energie femelle” from Steinbock to Valérie Marneffe. There is no longer any need to feign the necessity of forming a licit heterosexual relationship. Bette's vengeance takes the form of a conscious plot to undermine the patriarchal, heterosexual social order in favor of love between women. Unable to belong to the world of the Father, Lisbeth sets out to create a counter-universe founded on a dominant femininity. Bette's pursuit to legitimize a feminine love can easily be read as a mere “compensatory” lesbianism, which threatens the demise of the Family so dear to Balzac, and which, therefore must be eradicated. Yet, as we will see, this menacing homosexuality represented by Bette and Valérie seems nearly to succeed in spite of itself.

Homosexual relations between Lisbeth and Valérie are far from explicit in the text. Yet, several passages demand that this aspect of their friendship be reckoned with. In the first phase of this homosexual bond, the two women enter into a secret pact against the Hulot family. Valérie's objective is clearly social elevation. It is Bette who is obsessed with ruining the Hulots, wreaking her vengeance for having lost Steinbock, and founding a “licit” homosexuality. Both take as their common enemy and the means to their end, the moneyed men around them. As their scheme progresses, the emotional bond between them strengthens and Valérie becomes “une jeune femme qui, pour elle [Bette], avait des semblants d'amitié, qui lui disait tout, en la consultant, flattant et paraissant vouloir se laisser conduire par elle, devint donc en peu de temps plus chère à l'excentrique Cousine Bette que tous ses parents” (127). For Bette, familial values, the values of heterosexuality represented by the Hulots (and especially by the righteous Adeline), are subsumed by her relationship with Valérie. Even Valérie, whose stunning beauty does not exclude her from “normal” social circles and a licit sexual life, scorns familial responsibility; one can recall the description of her bedroom in that bleak quarter of the Louvre “où l'enfant abandonné à lui-même, laissait traîner ses joujoux partout” (85). Not only is Valérie an apparently ineffective mother, she confides to Bette that she much prefers her company to that of her husband:

—Mon Dieu, comme vous disposez de moi! … dit alors madame Marneffe. Et mon mari?

—Cette guenille?

—Le fait est qu'auprès de vous c'est cela … répondit-elle en riant.

(129)

To consummate their bond, the two women move into the same house to form, in the words of Bette, their own “ménage”: “Dès lors, mon petit ange, ma véritable vie, mon vrai ménage sera rue Vaneau” (129). The suggestion of homosexuality between Bette and Valérie finds even stronger support in this provocative dialogue between the two women, alone in Valérie's bedroom:

—Es-tu belle, ce matin! dit Lisbeth en venant prendre Valérie par la taille et la baisant au front. Je jouis de tous tes plaisirs, de ta fortune, de ta toilette … Je n'ai vécu que depuis le jour où nous nous sommes faites sœurs …

—Attends! ma tigresse, dit Valérie. …

(233)

First, the sexual tone of the verb “jouir” colors the passage and suggests that Bette takes pleasure from Valérie as she does with her many male lovers. Bette derives pleasure vicariously from the money Valérie acquires because of her physical beauty. Valérie's body becomes, at least symbolically, the locus of Bette's only erotic pleasure. Bette's embracing gesture and kiss, as well as Valérie's use of the word “tigresse,” accentuate the sexual undercurrent of the passage. Furthermore, the word “sœur” serves to mark both as functionally female. Pierre Barbéris, in a note on this passage in the Gallimard “Folio” edition, cautiously proposes that the evidence here of at least a latent homosexuality supports the notion of a feminine conspiracy:

Valérie est sensuelle et débauchée. Bette est vierge. Mais Bette jouit par personne interposée. De plus Bette et Valérie s'entendent pour exclure et juger les hommes. Elles vivent toutes deux dans un univers particulier, fait d'intérêts communs mais aussi d'une sorte de complicité féminine. Balzac a-t-il voulu suggérer l'existence entre Bette et Valérie sinon de relations homosexuelles concrètes au moins de tentations?

(493)

Whether merely “tentations” or true homosexuality, Balzac is clearly staging the illicit nature of Bette and Valérie's relationship as the primary threat to patriarchal society. Whatever the case may be, the two women conspire, Bette as the monstrous virgin whose “dissimulation est impénétrable” (in the sexual sense?), and Valérie as a prostitute whose relations with Hulot and Crevel are a mere ploy to acquire wealth and social status. One will argue that Valérie's love for Steinbock and for Montès is sincere. Indeed it is. She confesses to Bette that she loves Wenceslas “à en maigrir” (190), and to Crevel: “Je crois bien que je l'aime, mon petit Wenceslas! … je l'aime au grand jour comme si c'était mon enfant!” (411). Just as in Bette's case, however, Steinbock functions as female and childlike. He is also for Valérie an “homme faible,” a coddled, infantile artist. In effect, Balzac says of Polish men in general that they “se parent comme des femmes” (252). Valérie's love for Steinbock is more homosexual, given his overall feminine characterization. His inability to be an effective husband for Hortense supports his function as a female figure and serves to affirm Bette and Valérie's proclivity for the feminine sex.

As for Valérie's love for Montés, his case is also exceptional. Montès functions as a catalytic character in the novel. His presence ultimately serves (along with that of Victorin as we will see) to effect the necessary dismantling of the feminine conspiracy. His relationship with Valérie is justified mostly because of his vast fortune. She fully intends to exploit him as she does Hulot and Crevel. It is symbolically important that Montès, unlike the other men of the novel, exhibits a certain virility and that Valérie is attracted to him as a man since he will be the agent of her death and the ultimate unravelling of the conspiracy. Montès reconciles in a way the reconstitution of a male order and the inevitable installation of wealth, not name, as the determining factor of social status. It is in this role that Valérie is able to “love” Montès; she never loves for love's sake. She admits herself that her liaison with Montès is pure “fantaisie” (233). Indeed, she even unemotionally considers abandoning Montès observing, “Montès est Brésilien, il n'arrivera jamais à rien” (232). Bette reminds her, however, of the times they live in: “Nous sommes, dit Lisbeth, dans un temps de chemins de fer, où les étrangers finissent en France par occuper de grandes positions” (232). Clearly, her primary aim is not to establish a heterosexual relationship with Montès but rather to revel in the possibility of an exotic wealth and a higher position in a burgeoning bourgeois social structure.

The episode in which Valérie persuades Wenceslas to execute the sculpture of Samson and Delilah is an allegory for the sexually subversive mission of the two conspirators. The sculpture posits not only a dominant femininity, but precisely the designs of Valérie and Bette, to wrest power from male order in a moment of vulnerability. Samson's emasculation as he lies sleeping signifies the cutting off of traditional masculine power—represented by a symbolically phallic extension of the male body, hair or money—by the woman. Valérie explains to Steinbock:

Il s'agit d'exprimer la puissance de la femme. Samson n'est rien là. C'est le cadavre de la force. Dalila, c'est la passion qui ruine tout … voilà comment je comprends la composition. Samson s'est réveillé sans cheveux … elle a dû aimer Samson devenu petit garçon … Ce groupe … [sera] la femme expliquée.

(256-7)

Delilah's passion empowers her as it nullifies the force of the male. This passion is clearly that for another woman, that is, the emasculated (castrated), childlike Samson. Valérie demands that she be the model for this monument to the founding of a new femininity that emerges beside the corpse of male domination.

How is this sexual rebellion put into action in the narrative? How can homosexual love between women be legitimized in a society structured after the Family and the Church, a society literally generated out of heterosexual love? It is by controlling the substance that is, in the careless hands of Balzac's male characters, a measure of virility, or the lack thereof: money. Money, in fact, comes to represent the vulnerability of masculinity as it becomes more and more a force controlled by women. Bette and Valérie set out to usurp the nascent social power of money traditionally reserved for men. Like a life source, money flows rapidly to the side of the woman. It is thus that Valérie and Bette sap Hulot's power and force him to abandon his family. They also succeed in disintegrating the Marneffe family and plot the fall of Crevel and the ultimate, interested union with Montès. This brutal attack on the Father is reinforced as Valérie's promiscuity puts into question the paternity of the child she is carrying. This situation forebodes the death knell of the Father since the cornerstone of any patriarchy is certainty of identifying the legitimate father.

The two conspirators seem on the verge of accomplishing the dissolution of the Family's hegemony. Bette's thirst for vengeance is being satisfied, both against the constant Adeline, the religious incarnation of pure and legitimate family values, and against Hortense, who took Steinbock from her to form another “ménage légitime” (233). Yet, even though Bette and Valérie nearly succeed in annihilating the Hulot family their feminine universe must remain an anomaly, at least according to a narrative that must somehow recuperate the Balzacian Family. Theirs is an order based on immorality, illegitimacy, and sexual sterility. Such female perversions must be expunged, or, as is the case with the symbolic Atala, “civilized” and reinstituted into the patriarchal system.

The restoration of the Family is brought about, ironically, by Victorin, son of the absent father Hulot and thus his logical replacement, and, as we have already seen, Montès. Although not a virulent figure like Montès, as a lawyer and a representative of the Law, Victorin is at least master of his money. It is he who saves the Hulots and re-establishes them on rue Plumet. He replaces the original father and in so doing puts an end to the feminine plot with a little plotting of his own. Regaining control of the family fortune, Victorin is victorious also through the power of well-managed money. Fifty thousand francs to madame Nourrison finishes once and for all the cunning of the female accomplices and punishes them in the process. Money is back in the hands of man; masculinity can now be “rightfully” restored.

Adeline, the saint of family values, aids in this recuperation through her constancy as an example of a femininity that recognizes its “proper” place in the patriarchy. Her devotion, in the baron's absence, is transferred from the Family to that other prototypical patriarchal institution that enters near the end of the narrative in the stead of the familial Father, that is to say the Church. The role of the Church is central to both the official re-valorization of the Family and the obligatory termination of the feminine conspiracy. The dénouement is predictable, yet it is markedly telescoped. The female antagonists are too precipitously disposed of. The narrative has nearly become a juggernaut of outlaw femininity. Balzac resorts hastily to contrivance and melodrama to meet the demands of his patriarchally motivated text. Valérie's death, of which Montès (virility) and Victorin Hulot (money) are the agents, is caused by her ingestion of an exotic viral brew. But, as though this narrative stratagem were not enough, Balzac infuses the scene with a heavy-handed symbolism that is difficult to swallow. Valérie's body, the instrument of her sexual rebellion, rots with infection. As her beauty is transformed into pain she is suddenly brought to concede to the “rightful” patriarchal authority and she voices to the attending vicar her desire to repent, to be saved from fiery perdition. This rather abrupt capitulation to the Church tests the limits of verisimilitude; however, it serves to identify Valérie and Bette's plot as “wrong,” as a transgression of the Law and enables Balzac to regain control of the plot, to eliminate the female threat, and to recuperate the Family, all in just a few pages.

Lisbeth is left in the lurch by Valérie. As she enters the scene of Valérie's death, she is horrified, repulsed by the presence of the Church: “[elle] resta pétrifiée … en voyant un vicaire de Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin au chevet de son ami, et une sœur de la charité la soignant” (446). The sober and imposing image of religion is used to drive home the reality of the defeat of aggressive femininity and homosexuality. Heterosexuality, the basis of patriarchy represented here by the Church, inevitably prevails: “le sentiment le plus violent que l'on connaisse, l'amitié d'une femme pour une femme, n'eut pas l'héroïque constance de l'Eglise. Lisbeth, suffoquée par les miasmes délétères, quitta la chambre” (448). The violence caused to society by love between women is put aright; Valérie becomes another “âme à sauver” (447), while, with supreme irony, Bette's “phtisie pulmonaire” is brought about spontaneously by the sight of this heroic constancy of the Church.

The absence of a death scene for Cousin Bette is therefore highly significant and, in light of such melodramatic closure, conforms to the logic of the narrative. Bette must merely disappear. Rejecting conversion like her friend and “déjà bien malheureuse du bonheur qui luisait sur la famille” (466), she dies, appropriately and literally, in the margins. Steadfast in her difference, she cannot occupy much space at the end of a story that, by its formula, seeks to demonstrate the infallibility of the Family. Thus Bette's passing is merely reported, she dies out of narrative sight. The spotlight is filled by the happy “retour du père prodigue” (464); the narrative closes, naturally, with the celebration of a blissfully regained patriarchy: “On arriva naturellement à une sécurité complète. Les enfants et la baronne portaient aux nues le père de famille …” (467). Homosexuality is perfunctorily eclipsed by the heterosexual family unit reinstituted by the Church and the power of money in the hands of dependable men. Only heterosexuality, that is the love sanctioned by Nature and heredity, can be self-regenerating and is thus the only tolerable expression of love and the only safeguard of patriarchy. The sterility of lesbianism and its threat to virility as the foundation of social power necessitates this natural, final, fatherly security. The incursion of an exclusive femininity is, at least temporarily, stalled by renewed hope in a virile, procreative order. The vulnerability of the Family, however, remains interestingly visible as the novel trails off with the black humor of Hulot's marriage to Agathe the cook and the death of the angelic Adeline.