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  • In the Court of the Pear King: French Culture and the Rise of Realism
  • Lawrence R. Schehr
Petrey, Sandy. In the Court of the Pear King: French Culture and the Rise of Realism. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2005. Pp. XIII + 178. ISBN 0-8014-4341-5.

Sandy Petrey's new book on the beginnings of the realist movement in France starts with an apparent historical hapax relating to the dissemination of caricatures portraying the French king, Louis-Philippe, as being shaped like a pear. This image was circulated widely throughout France in various forms and became known far and wide. For Petrey, this seemingly incidental event is the signature of the nascent movement of realism because of the ways in which the equivalences play out between representation and reality: "Like the pear that became a portrait, like the revolution that became a monarchy, realism has as its armature representation's power to make and unmake reality" (36). This then is the crux of the analogical argument at the heart of Petrey's study of the beginnings of realism: "the pear is so striking an analogue to realist reality" (150).

After this long introduction, the second chapter of the book is a study of Balzac's famous allegorical story about aesthetics and madness, "Le Chef d'œuvre inconnu." Reading this work as a self-reflecting mise-en-abyme of the aesthetic problems associated with mimesis and representation, Petrey posits a complicated relation between what we might perceive as verisimilar representation – a portrait of a woman that looks like a woman – and Frenhofer's actual production of a seemingly non-representational modernist figure. That modernism, or what we perceive as the non-representational features often associated with modernism, is born at the same moment as realist representation is an insight second to none in this book. Petrey is suggesting, as others have, that the famous divide between Balzac's realism and Flaubert's illusions, provoked by Madame Bovary, is itself illusory: the pear king was already part of the modernist, proto-dadaist aesthetic and, in the Balzac story, the author offering an illustration of and a warning about this strange teratology. The rest of this chapter is devoted to a meticulous reading of Balzac's Le Colonel Chabert, – is the protagonist alive or is he not? – in which Petrey skillfully uses the details of the plot to illustrate [End Page 400] aporias worthy of Schrödinger's cat.

In chapter three, Petrey offers a clever reading of George Sand, whom he sees as a gender-bending activist eager to question the categories imposed on her. As he writes so succinctly: "Madame and Monsieur name social constructions, not Platonic essences" (77). Petrey's reading of Sand follows the debunking of essentialism in Sand's novel Indiana. For Petrey, it is definitely le monde à l'envers, with Don Juan becoming Caspar Milquetoast (83). Petrey offers a compelling thematic reading of the novel that takes its strength from the twists and turns of the plot as well as from character formation and psychology. The following chapter is devoted to an analysis of the aftermath of the July Revolution with a reading of Delacroix's famous painting of Liberty Leading the People. For Petrey, this allegorical figure of "Delacroix's whore" or "a woman of easy virtue" (101) rises up above the crowd to be the inspiration for and the sometime raison d'être of the era. Turning from painting to opera, Petrey shows how the story of Meyerbeer's Robert le diable (with a libretto by Scribe and Delavigne) is itself (following Heinrich Heine's analysis) analogous to the dualisms of the July Revolution.

In chapter five, Petrey offers a reading of the figure of "1830" in Stendhal's novel Le Rouge et le noir. Even though parts of the novel had already been written before the July events, for Petrey, the novel does indirectly speak of the revolution to "the extent to which Julien believes in the comedy he is playing" (129). Dupe of circumstances, Julien is a cynic in the first half of the novel, but in the second part, he seems to fall utterly under the sway of the...

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