Of Dignity and Ridicule: Virility from Mosca to Muffat

In an era (ours) in which the (current) symbol of male potency may be found in small blue pills, one can rightly muse about the line between maintaining dignity and risking ridicule in the domain of male virility. In order to so muse, I propose to look briefly at constructions of masculinity and virility in several figurations of the troisième âge in nineteenth-century French fiction. I suggest that just as our contemporary trope of virility has taken on particular modes of expression and risks of ridicule, the desiring impulsion that both makes and undermines male virility and dignity is a subject in nineteenth century French fiction that has been taken as a given rather than problematized fully. Focusing on two characters among many likely examples—the count Mosca from Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma), and the count Muffat from Zola's Nana—, I consider briefly how these figurations crisscross the fine line between dignity and ridicule, and to what narrative ends.