The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality (review)

Michael Lucey's important book on Balzac is a welcome departure from studies of sexuality that focus obsessively on the construction and deconstruction of identity. In his detailed readings of a corpus of ten or so canonical texts of La Comédie humaine, sexuality is 'not in any primary way a place of selfhood or identity' (p. 223), and Balzac emerges as a 'sociologist of sexual forms' of some sophistication: a precursor of Durkheim in his approach to 'social facts', a critically astute analyst of his period rather than the accidental recorder of historical truths who derives from Lukács's influential account of a discrepancy in Balzac's writing between intentions and performance. Lucey draws on Bourdieu to track Balzac's understanding of 'the shifting social forms of sexuality […] in relation to the habitus of individual agents who both work within and do work on the social forms through which their sexuality comes to expression' (p. xxviii). The contingency of social forms is nowhere more evident than in the plethora of 'alternative families' to be found in Balzac's plots; thus Lucey explores negotiations of legal structures relative to adoption (Ursule Mirouët), inheritance (Eugénie Grandet), celibacy and reproduction (Pierrette) and, more extensively, same-sex relations in La Fille aux yeux d'or, La Cousine Bette, Le Cousin Pons and the Vautrin trilogy. A central 'interlude' on 'Balzac and Same-Sex Relations in the 1830s' convincingly demonstrates Balzac's personal and unproblematic familiarity with the subcultures of male and female homosexuality, while an epilogue, 'Vautrin's Progeny', follows the lead of Lucette Finas to trace the line of descent to Proust via the apocryphal Vautrin novels authored by Charles Rabou.

For Lucey, it is a mode of critical, sociological analysis of sexuality that Proust inherits from Balzac, and that fuels Proust's own 'nonnormative cultural efforts' (p. 237). This may seem an overly solemn and restrictive account of what was also, on the part of Proust, an aesthetic admiration for Balzac's exploitation of homosexuality, as well as of reappearing characters, in the context of a vast cycle of interconnecting novels. Although Lucey's analyses are generally original, interesting and tightly argued, they are perhaps too anchored in the specific plots they discuss at the expense both of literary strategies (such as irony in the preface to Pierrette, with which Lucey seems ill at ease), and of the wider context of other texts of La Comédie humaine, which might severely complicate the readings he offers. Lucey's forceful focus on family structures is strangely inattentive to the place of marriage within the historically contingent structures of alliance and inheritance he foregrounds, so that for all his analytical stress on the Napoleonic Code Civil, there is no mention whatsoever of the key Étude analytique that is La Physiologie du mariage, and almost no reference to the feminocentric marriage plots of Scènes de la vie privée. This is consistent with what for me is the main weakness of Lucey's study: that it does not adequately distinguish between male and female celibacy, or between male and female homosexuality. In the closing pages of his study, Lucey waxes lyrical about such 'strangely liminal characters' as Vautrin and Calvi, as Grandville, Sérizy, and Bauvan, as Rastignac and De Marsay. All, he claims, are tightly bound to their historical moment by their very liminality, and all defend 'their forms of intimacy' in the face of a hostile bourgeois social order that was more easily held at a distance, 'the more social, cultural, and economic capital one possessed' (p. 222). For a reviewer to suggest that some misfits fit better than others is obviously to invite more attention to the overall sexual politics of La Comédie humaine, and to the gendering of the contingent but very real power structures that underpin its storylines. As Balzac's vast network of...