Le Jeu des familles dans le roman du XIXe siècle by Claudie Bernard (review)

In some sense a companion piece to Claudie Bernard’s Penser la famille au XIX^e siècle, 1789–1870, published in this series in 2007, the present work explores many of the same thematic obsessions and analytic categories; yet where the earlier book advanced with an almost encyclopedic maximalism, Le Jeu des familles proceeds through a series of close readings of novels by authors including Balzac (Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées, Ursule Mirouët), Bourget (L’Étape), the Goncourts plural (Renée Mauperin) and singular (Les Frères Zemganno), plus Zola, Sand, Sue, and Barbey, among others. The book’s four large sections, each containing two or three chapters, broach the questions of patriarchal nostalgia, post-Revolutionary paternalism, fraternity, and decadence — all, as Bernard demonstrates so well, central and hotly contested matters within the political imagination of the century. These macrocosmic concerns resonate within the taut, often intriguing close readings of individual texts within each chapter. Guided, as elsewhere in her work, by a close attention to language and etymology, Bernard deftly unpicks the complex threads of her chosen novels; her accounts of Balzac’s Mémoires and Sue’s Le Juif errant are particularly original and insightful. The book’s structuring metaphor, as indicated by its title, is the card game Happy Families—in French Le Jeu des familles (or des sept familles) — whose invention in the nineteenth century was not, as Bernard notes in her introduction, accidental. For Bernard, the game’s rigid patterning of the shape of the family and the individual roles within it testifies both to the nineteenth-century ‘remodelage’ (p. 9) of the family (its reimagining, that is, as indicatively nuclear, marital-biological, bourgeois, and private), and to the determination with which that new model, once achieved, was publicized and enforced within public and private ideological discourses. Alongside this ideological analysis, Bernard suggests that Le Jeu des familles also helps us conceptualize the stock narrative resources of the post-1830 novel in France — although fictional authors are, of course, more interested in how the rules of the game might be bent or broken, and in relationships that fall problematically outside those allowed for by the standard deck. As it goes, this metaphor is useful enough, although it can hardly be said to constitute a thesis in the strong sense; the individual chapters, even grouped into thematic sections, do not, therefore, obviously cohere into a single critical argument. Yet if the volume as a whole seems, in consequence, somewhat descriptive, the sharpness and richness of the individual chapters more than redeem it: this is a book about individual works and detailed analysis of language, and one that reminds us of how exciting a good close reading can be.