Eugénie Grandet: A Woman in Transition

Eugénie Grandet: A Woman in Transition Wendell McClendon and Diane Wood Texas Tech University In the first pages ofhis novel, Balzac makes ofEugénie Grandet a "degré zéro" personality (Gale, "Sleeping Beauty" 29 and Jardin 199), almost a stereotype ofearly nineteenth-century provincial womanhood. Reared by an oppressive father and a meek, submissive mother, Eugénie seems destined to concede her future to the patriarchy.1 How she develops into a person capable of standing up to familial and societal pressures, and oftaking and wielding power on her own terms, is a matter ofconsiderable interest to the modern reader. Of interest, too, is how her victory, which demands the sacrifice of her personal happiness and makes of her life a kind of "living death" (Gale, "Sleeping Beauty" 33), can represent real triumph. We will claim that Eugenie's success in dealing with the dominant male culture, albeit costly, makes her an exceptional character in nineteenth-century fiction. These dealings lead her to take responsibility , to pay the price for social change, and to reap the rewards, such as they are, of her actions. She is not able to resolve wholly the conflicts that mark her for life, but she does manage to retain control over her body and therefore to break some of the chains of exploitation that bound women of her time and place. As a consequence ofthis hard-won control, she will have no opportunity to pass her new power on to a daughter, but she will come to serve Balzac's readers as a strong model ofresistance to domination. This essay traces the development ofEugenie 's personality from unthinking acquiescence—the zero degree to which Gale refers—through rejection of her father's value system, to ultimate and irrevocable refusal to compromise her own values. We begin with a presentation of her model for femininity, her mother. Madame Grandet was what everyone expected: timid and insecure but hardworking in her family's interests, she was utterly subservient to her husband—even to the point of sacrificing her own and her daughter 's material well-being to his parsimony. Lacking in physical beauty, she was desirable to Monsieur Grandet only for her wealth; in fact, like most wives ofher time, even at her wedding she had been no more than a medium of exchange between father and husband.2 Her submissiveness moves the narrator to attribute to her "une résignation d'insecte 199 200Rocky Mountain Review tourmenté" (1046). Just existing, in a kind of spiritual suspended animation where nothing would happen until Charles arrived, Madame could do no better than to lead a life which anticipated that ofher daughter . Yet, even this meek woman, who is also described as possessing "une douceur angélique" (1064, 1161), was capable ofprotesting in the cause of her only child. She had studied her oppressor, Monsieur Grandet, she had acquired some skill in manipulating him (Mozet, "Introduction" 1014), and she eventually rose up in angry rebellion against his injustice. Like that tormented insect to which she is compared, however, she would eventually and inevitably be crushed by overwhelming forces: the obstinacies of both her husband and her daughter. The mother was able to take a stand only when faced with death (1161); the daughter will take a stand in order to live and to love. Madame Grandet never experienced passion but was content in her peaceful, busy domestic sphere and in the warm and nurturing relationship she had with her daughter.3 While the husband/wife relationship was fraught with tensions characteristic of relations between masters and slaves, the mother/daughter dyad resulted in a close relationship—the only truly intimate one in the novel4—which gave the mother the courage finally to defend the child against the father. Eugénie will be capable of passion , perhaps because ofher mother's warmth and caring, and will take an earlier stand, and a more difficult one. She will as a consequence be different from her mother, in denying herself motherhood and the only real satisfactions her mother had; but she will differ most of all in managing to exact a greater measure ofjustice, not from one individual alone but from...