Women, Narration and Transgression in Novels of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola

UNDER HOUSE ARREST: WOMEN, NARRATION AND TRANSGRESSION IN NOVELS OF BALZAC, FLAUBERT AND ZOLA by CAROL A. BOYLE A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School – New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in French written under the direction of Professor Josephine Diamond and approved by ____________________________ ____________________________ ____________________________ ____________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey May 2008 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Under House Arrest: Women, Narration and Transgression in Novels of Balzac, Flaubert & Zola by CAROL ANN BOYLE Dissertation Director: Professor Josephine Diamond This dissertation studies the narrations of the domestic spaces assigned to nineteenth-century bourgeois women in Eugénie Grandet, and La vieille fille by Balzac, Madame Bovary by Flaubert, and L’assommoir and Une page d’amour by Zola. The female protagonists in these novels are represented in relation to the houses they inhabit, and architectural elements—doors, windows, stairs—stage the boundaries and the tense association between the women and their domestic environments. Since I primarily use phenomenological analysis in this study, I focus on the various narrative perspectives which introduce the reader into domestic spaces meant to remain private. The narrators, often unnamed but distinctly present in the text of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet and La vieille fille, relate the situation of unmarried, provincial women whose houses embody the possibility of inheritance or the transmission of a fortune. The houses become prisons. Eugénie Grandet submits to the authority of a possessive father, while Rose Cormon loses her autonomy as the owner of her venerable home and submits to the rule of her financially ambitious and vulgar husband. In Madame Bovary, a provincial married woman, caught between domesticity and a desire for a more expansive life, is represented through various narrative focalizations, including the perspective of female neighbors who function as a moral police, watching her every ii move. Windows, in this novel, articulate a privileged vantage-point. In L’assommoir, Zola, through a narrative eye that functions as a voyeuristic camera, exposes the permeability of the public and the private spheres in a working-class context; and, in Une page d’amour, he reveals the dramatic strategies of upper bourgeois women to adapt to the stifling interiors of their Parisian apartments. I show in my analysis of these novels how narrators penetrate private domestic spaces, and how efforts on the part of the female protagonists to reconfigure or escape the confinements of the male guardians of the home, result in frustration and failure. iii Dedication To Tony Acknowledgements I am enormously grateful to the members of my committee, Professors Josephine Diamond, Derek Schilling, Mary Shaw, and Janet Walker for their helpful comments throughout the period of writing, and their patience, especially in the final stages of my preparation of the dissertation. Most especially, I cannot overstate my indebtedness to Professor Josephine Diamond without whom I could never have completed this long journey. To my daughter Madeleine, whose computer skills proved invaluable, a hearty thank- you. Finally, my greatest regret is that my dear husband Tony who provided so much help and support over the years of my endeavor was unable to see the fruition of my efforts. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………………………………………… ii DEDICATION & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………………. iv INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………………………………… 1 CHAPTER 1: In the House of the Father: Problems of Patriarchy and Patrimony in Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet ………………………………………….. 15 CHAPTER 2: Rose Cormon and the House of Glass…………………………………………………………………… 45 CHAPTER 3: Between the Window and the Hearth: Emma Bovary and the Moral Police ………………………………………………..……………………. 73 I. Flaubert’s Implied Narrators………………………………………………………………… 74 II. The Function of Windows and Doorways …………………………………………….. 80 III. Moeurs de Province ……………………………………………………………………………. 99 CHAPTER 4: The Laundry in the Camera Obscura: Narrative Techniques in L’assommoir……………………………………………………………………………. 114 CHAPTER 5: The Staging of Bourgeois Domesticity in Zola’s Une page d’amour………………………… 151 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………………………… 182 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………………………... 188 CURRICULUM VITAE…………………………………………………………………………………………. 194 v 1 Introduction The literature of French nineteenth-century realism and naturalism features many housebound women. The social and political environments of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet and Rose Cormon, as they struggle against the increasingly repressive patriarchy established in the wake of the Revolution, differ greatly from each other and even more so from Flaubert’s Emma Bovary as she languishes in domestic captivity. Written respectively in 1833 and 1836, Eugénie Grandet and La vieille fille view the effects of the Restoration of the Monarchy of 1814 from the perspective of the ever more restricted and bourgeois-dominated régime of Louis Philippe, the so-called Citizen King. First published in 1857, at the height of the Second Empire, Flaubert’s novel takes place some twenty years earlier. Zola’s Gervaise Macquart (in L’assommoir) and Hélène Grandjean (Une page d’amour) inhabit the Paris of Louis Napoleon but in circumstances that are worlds apart. What these female characters all have in common is an inherited social system that confines them to a domesticity that is well-nigh inescapable. This state of affairs grew directly out of the post-Revolutionary move away from a traditional, elitist, exclusive absolutist sphere toward a rule of laws, established specifically by men, bourgeois men, in a new competitive, masculine, capitalist society which depended for its success on the submission of wives, and their willingness to forgo their own property and their own personal advancement, in the service of what Joan Landes has called the Gendered Republic.1 However, the domestic arena, although constructed to foster the 2 notion of the Angel in the House, was from the start an unsustainable Republican ideal, and one that was constantly under siege both from without and within. After the enormous social upheaval of the Revolutionary era, in the years between 1789 and 1793 there was a brief period in which women participated in public life; this period effectively came to an end when the National Convention decreed all women’s clubs and associations to be illegal.2 With the establishment of the First Republic, women were increasingly vilified for appearing in public debate. The greatest efforts were made to silence women; attempts by women to apply to women the principles of universal equality resulted in attacks on their character and reputation for daring to seek the civil status accorded to men. Such attacks typically centered on the women’s demeanor and dress, as a way of side-stepping their very reasonable requests that there should be the same rights and status for citoyennes as for male citizens. In 1790 it was possible, for instance, for Etta Palm to petition the Confédération des amis de la vérité for civil and legal reforms to protect women from domestic violence and in favor of divorce. As the new constitutional compromise between the monarchy and republicanism took hold, the prevailing régime moved away from traditional monarchical authority toward a rule of law, with some success for women; for example, the adoption of marriage as a civil contract and divorce institutionalized on an equal basis for men and women.3 However, it was the implementation of the Napoleonic Code that dramatically changed women’s position for the worse. For the majority of women the 3 increased regulation following the Civil Code of 1804 meant a loss both of power and personal independence. The importance of the rule of law, and specifically the Civil Code’s strictures on married women’s property, play a very real part in Eugénie Grandet. Although women’s public participation had been a major feature of the earlier, more liberal revolutionary period, the severely masculinist, emergent society in 1815 determined to curtail women’s activity in the streets, in commerce and in public life generally. The very real effect of the new legislation was women’s ever greater seclusion within the domestic sphere. Balzac’s project in La comédie humaine was to portray every aspect of the new society, but he was particularly sensitive to the place of women in the bourgeois order, as we see in such titles as Le contrat de mariage, La femme de trente ans, La femme abandonnée, to mention only a few. Later, Flaubert, in Madame Bovary focuses on a woman confined to the house of a provincial doctor, and Zola, in L’assommoir explores the precarious domesticity of the working-class woman and, in Une page d‘amour, the lot of a middle-class widowed mother, which, for all her better material station, is scarcely more fulfilling than that of the laundress. My concern in this dissertation is to examine how a woman’s domestic situation is portrayed in Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet and La vieille fille, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Zola‘s L’assommoir and Une page d’amour. My approach is twofold: firstly, to show how strongly the woman is identified with her home and defined by the spaces she inhabits, and secondly, to investigate the narrative 4 techniques used by the

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