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Reconstructing Woman
From Fiction to Reality in the Nineteenth-Century French Novel
184 pages | 6 x 9 | 2007
ISBN 978-0-271-03266-5 | cloth: $65.00 sh
ISBN 978-0-271-03267-2 | paper: $25.00 sh
“Noteworthy for its exemplary clarity, this is a model academic book, well written and impeccably edited. Including an exceptionally detailed index, it will serve as an invaluable guide to these authors.” —A.M. Rea, Choice
“Reconstructing Woman is a very rich study, immensely suggestive, well researched, well written, and sophisticated in its scholarly approach. Because it is so elegantly argued and so intriguing, this study has the potential to open up new avenues of research.” —Mary Donaldson-Evans, University of Delaware
“Reconstructing Woman is a very rich study, immensely suggestive, well researched, well written, and sophisticated in its scholarly approach. Because it is so elegantly argued and so intriguing, this study has the potential to open up new avenues of research.” —Mary Donaldson-Evans, University of Delaware
Reconstructing Woman explores a scenario common to the works of four major French novelists of the nineteenth century: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and Villiers. In the texts of each author, a “new Pygmalion” (as Balzac calls one of his characters) turns away from a real woman he has loved or desired and prefers instead his artificial re-creation of her. All four authors also portray the possibility that this simulacrum, which replaces the woman, could become real. The central chapters examine this plot and its meanings in multiple texts of each author (with the exception of the chapter on Villiers, in which only “L’Eve future” is considered).
The premise is that this shared scenario stems from the discovery in the nineteenth century that humans are transformable. Because scientific innovations play a major part in this discovery, Dorothy Kelly reviews some of the contributing trends that attracted one or more of the authors: mesmerism, dissection, transformism and evolution, new understandings of human reproduction, spontaneous generation, puericulture, the experimental method. These ideas and practices provided the novelists with a scientific context in which controlling, changing, and creating human bodies became imaginable.
At the same time, these authors explore the ways in which not only bodies but also identity can be made. In close readings, Kelly shows how these narratives reveal that linguistic and coded social structures shape human identity. Furthermore, through the representation of the power of language to do that shaping, the authors envision that their own texts would perform that function. The symbol of the reconstruction of woman thus embodies the fantasy and desire that their novels could create or transform both reality and their readers in quite literal ways. Through literary analyses, we can deduce from the texts just why this artificial creation is a woman.
This book is a publication of the Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing, a collaboration of the Penn State Press and the Penn State Libraries.
This book can be read online at the Penn State University Library site by clicking here.
Dorothy Kelly, is Professor of French at Boston University.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Science of Control
1 Transformation, Creation, and Inscription: Balzac
2 Women, Language, and Reality: Flaubert
3 Rewriting Reproduction: Zola
4 Villiers and Human Inscription
Conclusion: The Power of Language
Bibliography
Index