From Old Paradigms to New: Champfleury, Feydeau, Flaubert

Abstract

Before the novel of female adultery can come into its own, marriage must be given its orthodox bourgeois weight. This is in sharp contrast to the Romantic confession, in which marriage plays only a background role, and in which the focal relationships are between actual or virtual kin: siblings in the two works by Chateaubriand (René and Amélie, also Atala and Chactas, daughter and adoptive son of Lopez); son and mother-figure in Adolphe and Confession of a Child of the Century. Though all these texts except Musset’s Confession suggest that to marry is a man’s social duty, and though all, without exception, imply that female sexuality must be controlled, none of the four gives marriage more than a nominal role. Surprisingly, perhaps, Mérimée offers greater potential for marriage in his two rescensions of the seduction narrative. Although the marriages, each arranged, in both stories are wholly empty, in The Double Mistake Julie Chaverny dies from her adulterous encounter with the man she believes, too late, she should have married; and Arsène Guillot hints that the lovers who are united at the end might better have been partners in a marriage than in a liaison, In Balzac, as The Physiology of Marriage demonstrates plainly at the start of his career as a serious writer, marriage is much more significant.