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L'Esprit Créateur sentation of the self from the viewpoints of feminism and psychoanalysis in Colette, de Beauvoir, and Duras. For each author, she chooses particular "motifs"—mourning and jealousy for Colette, complicity and silence for de Beauvoir, and orality and specularity for Duras—to examine "as symptoms which articulate what is often unsaid about the mother-daughter relationship" (7). Her ultimate goal, she states, is "to explore what brings women together, how their identities can be both separate and joined, and in what ways their differences can strengthen the bonds between them" (9). Unfortunately, Professor Corbin offers little that is new in any of the areas she addresses. Though she manipulates with a certain assurance the vocabularies of feminism and psychoanalysis , her readings of all three novelists/autobiographers are regrettably superficial, and thus her conclusions are necessarily weak. The theorists that she brings to bear on the works are the expected ones—Freud, Kristeva, Irigaray—yet she does not engage with them to elucidate her texts or themes; Corbin needs to understand that citation is not demonstration, and that the juxtaposition of quotations with primary texts does not constitute literary analysis. More distressing is the amount of research on the three novelists themselves that has simply been overlooked. It is not sufficient to state that each of these women writers maintained complex and ambiguous relationships with their mothers and that these ambiguities are reflected in their work. This is a starting point for critical analysis, not the conclusion Corbin would like it to be. She would have been better served to have limited her study to a single author, replaced speculation with scholarship, and eschewed the feminist platitudes. The topic, not to mention the infuential writers Corbin studies , deserved better. Renée Kingcaid St. Mary's College Anne-Marie Baron. Balzac ou l'auguste mensonge. Paris: Nathan, 1998. Pp. 239. Here is a book that one cannot praise too highly. Anne-Marie Baron brings to bear on her subject a profound knowledge of Balzac (the correspondence and the early works as well as the Comédie humaine) and a wide knowledge of psychiatric theory. She also knows more than most about writing elegant sentences and constructing arguments that are both clear and subtle. Her book is a delight to read. The title is borrowed from the Avant-Propos of the Comédie, "Le roman doit être le monde meilleur... Mais le roman ne serait rien si, dans cet auguste mensonge, il n'était pas vrai dans ses détails." This is, however, not an examination of the tricks of a realist, not an attempt to prove that "the truest poetry is the most feigning." Baron takes a psychoanalytical approach, understanding Balzac's creativity as a drive to compensate for the inadequacy of his mother's love. A first chapter uses the correspondence to present a portrait of the young Balzac and draw out four main motifs which are developed later. The second chapter offers a penetrating analysis of the Balzac family, its hypocrisies, the pain experienced by the young child, the attempts to save appearances. Here, says Baron, is a true "vie privée" ("private life"—or "deprived life"). In society (chapter three) all is appearance. The first of the four headings is play, whereby Balzac early learned to atone for the lack by inventing a persona; this became the double process of identification and projection by which (rather than by observation) Balzac was able to create and people a rich world. The second is illusion . Balzac saw that illusion is not always negative (as it was for Lucien); it can be positive, teaching an invaluable lesson if one is to survive (Rastignac). The third, bad faith, is applied principally to coquettes, not all of whom are women. Here Baron brings out well how the novelist manipulates his readers in a similar way to the coquetry of the characters he creates from his own substance. "Lies" are put in a separate category. Lying is Balzac's central theme, as he unmasks 86 Summer 1999 Book Reviews the hypocrisy of all society. Again, Baron underlines the positive value lies can have, and shows that they form part of the...

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