The Misfit of the Family

by Lucey, Michael; Barale, Michele Aina; Goldberg, Jonathan; Moon, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780822331933
• ISBN10: 0822331934
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-09-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

In more than ninety novels and novellas, Honoreacute; de Balzac (17991850) created a universe teeming with over two thousand characters.The Misfit of the Familyreveals how Balzac, in imagining the dense, vividly rendered social world of his novels, used his writing as a powerful means to understand and analyze-as well as represent-a range of forms of sexuality. Moving away from the many psychoanalytic approaches to the novelist's work, Michael Lucey contends that in order to grasp the full complexity with which sexuality was understood by Balzac, it is necessary to appreciate how he conceived of its relation to family, history, economics, law, and all the many structures within which sexualities take form.The Misfit of the Familyis a compelling argument that Balzac must be taken seriously as a major inventor and purveyor of new tools for analyzing connections between the sexual and the social. Luceyrs"s account of the novelistrs"s deployment of "sexual misfits" to impel a wide range of his most canonical works-Cousin Pons, Cousin Bette, Eugenie Grandet, Lost Illusions, The Girl with the Golden Eyes-demonstrates how even the flexible umbrella term "queer" barely covers the enormous diversity of erotic and social behaviors of his characters. Lucey draws on the thinking of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu and engages the work of critics of nineteenth-century French fiction, including Naomi Schor, D. A. Miller, Franco Moretti, and others. His reflections on Proust as Balzacrs"s most cannily attentive reader suggest how the lines of social and erotic force he locates in Balzacrs"s work continued to manifest themselves in twentieth-century writing and society.

Author Biography

Michael Lucey is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments,	ix
Preface,	xiii
INTRODUCTION Balzac and Alternative Families,	1	(30)
CHAPTER ONE Legal Melancholy: Balzac's Eugénie Grandet and the Napoleonic Code,	31	(34)
CHAPTER TWO On Not Getting Married in a Balzac Novel,	65	(17)
INTERLUDE Balzac and Same-Sex Relations in the 1830's,	82	(42)
CHAPTER THREE Balzac's Queer Cousins and Their Friends,	124	(47)
CHAPTER FOUR The Shadow Economy of Queer Social Capital: Lucien de Rubempré and Vautrin,	171	(54)
EPILOGUE Vautrin's Progeny,	225	(14)
Notes,	239	(50)
Works Cited,	289	(14)
Index,	303