The Anxiety of Dispossession: Jealousy in Nineteenth-Century French Culture (review)

The green-eyed monster provides Masha Belenky with a wonderful topic to explore in The Anxiety of Dispossession. As she ably demonstrates, jealousy haunted the cultural imagination of nineteenth-century France. It drove the plots of most major novels of the period; it was a recurrent theme for painters and sculptors; and for moralists, journalists, medical writers and social commentators alike it was a constant focus of interest. Belenky's starting point is to ask what stories nineteenth-century French culture tells about itself through its many and varied narratives of jealousy. Jealousy is thus viewed not as a timeless psychological phenomenon but as a social force – a culturally-determined concept that had particularly strong resonances in nineteenth-century France. Belenky considers it as "a manifestation of a culture in crisis over different forms of social change, including the emergence of bourgeois values, mutating concepts of marriage, revisions of family law and marital practices, and new questions surrounding construction of masculinity" (19). In a fascinating first chapter, "The Physiology of Jealousy," she establishes the background to contemporary views of jealousy by surveying a wide range of non-fictional nineteenth-century texts such as medical dictionaries and marriage manuals, and by providing a useful account of the Civil and Penal Codes relating to marriage. Belenky shows that such views were constructed around changing notions of ownership, property and propriety that mirrored legislative changes introduced in the years following the Revolution; she argues in particular that changes to the laws governing the definition of illegitimacy and the inheritance rights of illegitimate children gave rise to new anxieties about paternity which triggered an obsession with jealousy. Jealousy at this period is shown to be clearly gendered. Whereas the jealous wife was perceived as a dangerous and destabilising figure, embodied by the recurrent figure of Medea, the jealous husband was socially sanctioned, his jealousy seen as not only a right but a duty: "jealousy was construed as a shield that protected the wife's virtue, safeguarded the integrity of the husband's property, and thus contributed to social health" (41).

The literary texts discussed by Belenky tell a rather more complicated story, however. As she points out, the jaloux who feature in works by Hugo (Notre-Dame de Paris), Musset (La Confession d'un enfant du siècle), Feydeau (Fanny) and Balzac (Ferragus) undermine the conception of the jealous husband as a socially beneficial figure of power. Instead, the inability of the fictional jaloux to see the truth, his persistent misinterpretation of evidence, and his failure to win back the object of his desire together signal a profound crisis of masculinity. In these novels, Belenky argues, "the jealousy plot is inextricably bound up with the narrative of the generational conflict. Young men's anxiety about generational dispossession and social impotence is mapped onto the fear of sexual loss" (83).

Balzac also provides a rich source of examples of female jealousy. Unexpectedly, discussion of La Cousine Bette is relegated to a footnote and Belenky instead concentrates primarily on his Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées, Le Lys dans la vallée and Wann-Chlore in order to show how he effectively pathologises his jalouses by appropriating contemporary medical discourse on jealousy. She interprets this as Balzac drawing on the authority of the medical establishment to set out a strategy for containing disruptive female desire, since the jealous female "sought to appropriate the male privilege of possessing the object of passion, and thus threatened to unsettle and disrupt a culture premised on male rationality and on man's presumed exclusive right to ownership" (106). Moving deftly between medical textbooks and Balzac's fiction, she argues that whereas doctors believed they could control excessive female passion by finding a cure, the novelist contained the dangerous jalouse by killing her off. Women's writing of the period rarely touches on female jealousy and has little place in this book, but in a...