Restaging the Eighteenth Century: Intertextuality in Balzac‘s La Cousine Bette

Authors

  • Paul Young

Abstract

Honoré de Balzac‘s La Cousine Bette (1846-7), offers readers numerous references to eighteenth-century French literature, artistic movements, architecture, and historical figures. This novel, like its companion piece, Le Cousin Pons, bears witness to Balzac‘s fascination with the eighteenth century, which had reached a kind of apex in the period 1846-1848. I argue that in this novel, Balzac offers a rereading and a re-writing of certain moments from eighteenth-century French fiction, for a dual purpose. Through these echoes of well-known works, Balzac places his own work within a lineage of some of the previous century‘s best writers—assuring himself a place in this canon, even as he functions to create it. On the other hand, Balzac‘s frequent references to the eighteenth century serve to offer a scathing dismissal of the culture of the July monarchy. Through this comparison, this “new regime” appears as a cheap and pale imitation of the glory years of the Ancien Régime.

Author Biography

Paul Young

Paul J. Young is an Associate Professor of French at Georgetown University, and the author of “Seducing the Eighteenth-Century French Reader: Reading, Writing, and the Question of Pleasure” (Ashgate, 2008), and articles on eighteenth-century French libertine literature, and eighteenth-century women writers.

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Published

2018-08-15

Issue

No. 112 (2018)

Section

Articles