Nineteenth Century French Studies, vol. 37, no 1-2 (automne-hiver 2008)

Nineteenth-Century French Studies provides scholars and students with the opportunity to examine new trends, review promising research findings, and become better acquainted with professional developments in the field. Scholarly articles on all aspects of nineteenth-century French literature and criticism are invited. Published articles are peer-reviewed to insure scholarly integrity. The journal has an extensive book review section covering a variety of disciplines.

Vol. 37, no 1-2 (automne-hiver 2008)

Lise Schreier
Invisible, illisible, endeuillée: Madame de Lamartine en voyage en Orient

Joseph Acquisto
Digesting Les Fleurs du Mal: Imaginative Spaces and Liquid Modernity in Baudelaire
The 1857 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal constructs images of consumption and digestion in ways that introduce questions of metaphysical or theological significance through the body, which mediates between the poetic word and transcendent reality. The physical act of internalizing matter becomes a vehicle for rethinking Baudelaire's relationship to the body and the transcendent world. Zygmunt Bauman's concept of "liquid modernity" illuminates the notion of fluidity, strongly present in the "pre-urban" 1857 Fleurs, where poetry freely circulates between inside and outside spaces and thus succeeds in mediating between the physical and the metaphysical through its negotiation of the quotidian and cosmological.

Ross Chambers
Heightening the Lowly (Baudelaire: "Je n'ai pas oublié . . ." and "A une passante")
Framed by a concept of fetish æsthetics that links Baudelaire and Proust's fictional painter, Elstir, the article examines the evolution of Baudelaire's fetishizing understanding of "modern beauty." It does so by asking the question: why was "Je n'ai pas oublié . . ." moved in 1861 to the new "Tableaux Parisiens" section of the Fleurs du Mal? and by proposing that the proximity of "Je n'ai pas oublié . . ." to "A une passante" figures the disharmony introduced into Baudelaire's fetishizing metaphysics by the events of 1848–51. Thus, the latter poem is itself an allegory of history as the devestatingly preteritional "passing by" that permits a glimpse of eternity as the manifestation of le mal. The statues of "Je n'ai pas oublié . . ." ("cachant leurs membres nus") and the statuesque woman of "A une passante" ("avec sa jambe de statue") together motivate an examination of the statue as fetish figure in post-1851 Baudelaire and of the "noisy chiasmus" as his new figure of a world awry – one constructed fetishistically as an x-like meeting-place where an encounter with the not-known can result only in alienated knowledge.

Alain Toumayan
Violence and Civilization in Flaubert's Salammbô
This essay argues that in Salammbô Flaubert marks a rigorous cultural distinction between the civilized Carthaginians and the barbarous mercenaries that is based on particular practices of violence specific to each one. In drawing this distinction, in maintaining an equivalency in the capacity of each for atrocity, excess, and depravity, and in conferring emblematic status to this conflict, Flaubert disallows any privileging of one cultural order over the other. In this way, Flaubert undermines the principles, tools, and strategies of historical analysis or understanding and figures the events of the story in such a way as to maintain their essential otherness and to situate them at the limits of our conceptual horizon.

Margot Irvine
Spousal Collaborations in Naturalist Fiction and in Practice
Artistic collaborations between spouses were becoming more frequent in the early years of the Third Republic. Literary representations of such collaborations are found in the fiction of Émile Zola ("Madame Sourdis" 1880), Guy de Maupassant (Bel-Ami 1885) and Alphonse Daudet (Femmes d'artistes, 1878), with disastrous results in each case. They were shown in a more positive light in the women's magazine, Femina, and provided a way for women, like Daudet's own wife and collaborator, Julia A. Daudet (1844–1940), to launch literary careers of their own. The polemics that spousal collaborations inspired reflect changing notions of authorship and gender roles in the late nineteenth century.

Marie-Sophie Armstrong
"Le chapitre de Jenlain," ou la mise en abyme fantasmatique de Germinal
Fait remarquable dans Germinal, le "chapitre de Jenlain" (chapitre 6, quatrième partie) se désinteresse au plus haut point de la question sociale, substituant à l'évocation de la grève des mineurs et de ses enjeux des pages pleines de ludisme et de fantaisie (méfaits de gamins, partie de crosse). L'on aurait toutefois tort de se désintéresser de ces épisodes d'aspect anodin. C'est que le message politique et social du roman fait place à un message qui engage l'oeuvre en profondeur. L'espace de quelques pages en effet, le souffle de l'inconscient remplace celui de la révolte tandis que la fantaisie, comme dans l'univers onirique, recouvre le fantasme. Pierre d'angle du roman, le chapitre de Jeanlin se révèle comme le garant de la cohérence psychique de Germinal, sinon même, de la série.

Marc Smeets
Osmazômes (Huysmans)
Scholars of Rachilde have rarely taken into consideration her novels published after 1900 because of their sentimentality. For instance, La Femme Dieu is a conventional remake of La Princesse des ténèbres, which is conversely an unsentimental response to Émile Zola's The Rêve. On the other hand, L'Homme aux bras de feu subverts the traditional romance by eluding the popular reading codes. Nevertheless, the sentimental plots and characters in the Rachilde's works are the standard (or ironical) narrative borderline which puts an end to the underlying anarchic or colonial discourse of her unsentimental novels written between 1890 and 1940.

Dominique Laporte
Une Négociation stratégique du discours littéraire et du discours social: Le Dévoilement des dessous (in) humains dans l'oeuvre romanesque de Rachilde

Barbara Pauk
Contesting National and Gender Boundaries: Flora Tristan's Promenades dans Londres
This article shows how the French feminist and socialist Flora Tristan uses discourses on nationality and ideas of foreignness and exclusion to challenge contemporary gender ideologies in Promenades dans Londres (1840). She casts herself in the role of a disinterested and invisible observer and knowledgeable narrator who describes another nation, England, whose population is marked as "other" and inferior, particularly in her description of her visit to the houses of Parliament. Tristan aligns herself with English travellers such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and orientalises the houses of Parliament, thereby simultaneously endorsing and overturning notions of civilisation and superiority, the basis of Western patriarchy. At the same time, by adopting the role of a victim and accusing the members of Parliament of inappropriate behaviour and disrespect, Tristan conceals her own transgressions and establishes an alternative set of social rules. This strategy is repeatedly adopted in her work.