Birth and death in nineteenth-century french culture

261 Pages·2007·1.418 MB·English

by  Nigel Harkness & Lisa Downing & Sonya Stephens

Birth and Death
in
Nineteenth-Century French Culture
FAUX TITRE
301
Etudes de langue et littérature françaises
publiées sous la direction de
Keith Busby, M.J. Freeman,
Sjef Houppermans et Paul Pelckmans
Birth and Death
in
Nineteenth-Century French Culture

Edited by
Nigel Harkness, Lisa Downing,
Sonya Stephens and Timothy Unwin
AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2007
Anne-Louis Girodet De Roussy-Trioson, ‘Scène de déluge’, Musée du Louvre,
Paris (Photo courtesy of Réunion des Musées Nationaux © René-Gabriel Ojéda)
Maquette couverture / Cover design: Pier Post.
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of
‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence’.
Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions
de ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents -
Prescriptions pour la permanence’.
ISBN: 978-90-420-2260-7
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007
Printed in The Netherlands
Contents

Acknowledgments 8

Introduction 9

ON TEXTUAL GENESIS, TRANSLATION AND
RESURRECTION

Claudine Grossir
George Sand: la genèse des fins de romans 17

Stephen Goddard
Flaubert, Apuleius and Ovid: The Genesis of a
Recurring Theme 35

Larry Duffy
Perdue en traduction: Translation, Betrayal and Death
in Mérimée’s Carmen 49

David Evans
Le Tombeau de la Poésie: Strategies of Textual
Resurrection in Mallarmé and Banville 63

NARRATIVES OF BIRTH AND DEATH

Peter Cogman
Wilde’s Salomé: Tenses, Tension and Progression in
Salomé’s Final Monologue 81

Isabelle Michelot
Figures de l’artiste et comédiens du réel: de la difficile
naissance à l’implacable mort dans La Comédie humaine 97
6 Contents

Barbara Giraud
Soeur Philomène ou comment la mort s’invite à l’hôpital 109

Kiera Vaclavik
Death for Beginners: Nineteenth-Century Katabatic
Narratives for Young Readers 127

PROBLEMATIZING MATERNITY AND FEMININITY

Maria Scott
Stendhal’s Rebellious Mothers and the Fight Against
Death-by-Maternity 139

Catherine Dubeau
La Mort de Madame de Vernon et les deux dénouements
de Delphine: invention romanesque et réminiscences
maternelles chez Madame de Staël 153

Carmen K. Mayer-Robin
Midwifery and Malpractice in Fécondité: Zola’s Fictional
History of Problematical Maternities 173

Nathalie Dumas
L’Érotisme cristallin de Théophile Gautier: étude de la
figure de la ‘morte amoureuse’ dans les contes fantastiques 191

AESTHETICIZING BODILY DEATH

Philippe Berthier
L’Évangile de la pourriture selon Saint Huysmans:
Lydwine de Schiedam 201

Isabelle Droit
Une esthétique de la mort au dix-neuvième siècle:
Alphonse Daudet 215
Contents 7

Pascal Caron
Selon Max Nordau: le poème naturel du corps de Mallarmé 227

Claire Moran
The Aesthetics of Self-Skeletonization in James Ensor 239

Notes on Contributors 253

Index 257
Acknowledgments

The essays contained in this volume were first presented at the third
annual conference of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, which took
place at Queen’s University Belfast in April 200 5. The editors would
like to express their thanks to the Service Culturel of the French Em-
bassy for providing funding for the conference, and to the Department
of French at Queen’s University for hosting it. We would also like to
acknowledge the contribution of colleagues who willingly agreed to
referee essays for us: Richard Bales, Sarah Capitanio, Peter Dayan,
Kate Griffiths, Richard Hobbs, Rachel Killick, Robert Lethbridge,
Katherine Lunn-Rockliffe, Mary Orr, Roger Pearson, Paul Rowe,
Marion Schmid, Michael Tilby, Alexandra Wettlaufer, Nick White
and Jennifer Yee.
L I SA D OWNIN G , N IGEL H ARKNES S ,
S ONYA S TEPHENS AND T IM U NWI N
Introduction

The nineteenth century is commonly perceived as an age of new life
and rebirth. It is the epoch that witnessed an efflorescence of industrial
and artistic progress, the “birth of the individual” and the birth of the
novel, and the creation of an urban population in the major demo-
graphic shift from the rural provinces to Paris. At the same time, how-
ever, it is the century of Decadence and degeneration theory, marked
by a prominent morbid aesthetic in the artistic sphere and a fascination
with criminality, moral decay and the pathologization of racial and
sexual minorities in scientific discourses. It is also the century in
which reflection on processes of artistic creation begins to problema-
tize concepts of mimetic representation, the function of the author and
the status of the text. In the context of the dialectical quality of nine-
teenth-century French culture, caught between an obsession with the
new and innovative and a paranoid sense of its own encroaching de-
cay, the twin themes of birth and death open onto a variety of issues –
literary, social, historical, artistic – which are explored, interrogated
and reassessed in the essays contained in this volume.
In her study of narratives of birth in nineteenth-century French
literature, Carol Mossman draws a stark conclusion about the varying
literary fortunes of birth and death:
Never through the ages have art and literature shrunk from the depiction of
death, often reveling, or so it seems, in the full palette of its violence. Of the
violence required for one human being to emerge on the outside from within
the body of another, aesthetics has had very little to say1.

1 Carol Mossman, Politics and Narratives of Birth (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-