Misogyny and Cultural Denial (Balzac’s Autre étude de femme)

Misogyny and Cultural Denial (Balzac’s Autre étude de femme) Ross Chambers A UTRE ÉTUDE DE FEMME is not much favored either by “ ordi­ nary” readers or by professional critics of La Comédie Humaine, the reason being doubtless that, as a text, it is oddly resistant to conventional aesthetic expectations, especially those of narrative cohe­ sion. 1Balzac in fact cobbled it together, without bothering much to con­ ceal the seams, from three different kinds of material: the narrative of a group of Parisians swapping stories after having stayed late at a boring raout; a “ physiologie” of lafemme comme ilfaut, which he rewrote as dialogue so as to fit it into the former; and finally the short story pre­ viously published as “ La Grande Bretèche,” and still so readily separable from the whole that it is often anthologized under the same title. There is a semblance of unifying theme, provided by the text’s characteristically and conventionally misogynistic representations of what is referred to (210)2as women’s “ innocent jésuitisme,” representa­ tions to which the women present at the gathering seem to accede, whether by occasional comments and demonstrations of embarrassment, or by a strategic retreat that puts an end to the evening’s conversation, and with it the text: “ quelques-unes d’entre elles avaient eu quasi froid en entendant le dernier mot” (262). In short, the so-called “étude de femme” reads more like the story of an extended exercise in making women suffer, like Hamlet with Gertrude, by holding up to them the realistic “ mirror” of their allegedly duplicitous nature. My thinking about Balzac has been guided lately by a hypothesis that derives in part from a reaction to Fredric Jameson’s view that, in contra­ distinction to the individualism of bourgeois literature, the fiction of what is called the Third World requires to be read as “ national allegory.” 3The universalism of its title notwithstanding, CH is to my mind clearly readable as a kind of national allegory; indeed it forms part of a vast effort that was carried out in the fiction of the time, but also in the new feuilleton literature, the new social theories and the new “ head­ less” historiography4—an effort summarized in the title of the famous series “ Les Français peints par eux-mêmes.” In the way that contem­ porary post-colonial societies need to reflect, in part through the vehicle Vol. XXXI, No. 3 5 L ’E spr it C r éa teu r of fiction, on the historical status of their community, so the French were led, after the upheavals of the Revolution and the Napoleonic era, to question the nature of the social formation in which they found them­ selves, one that, even or especially under the Restoration, functioned in ways startlingly different from the ancien régime that many still remem­ bered. Whereas the old society had been, at least nominally, ordered and hierarchized under the central authority of the king, the new formation, with its weakened monarchy, had become—to use Foucault’s word—a place of “diffuse” power, or as I would prefer to say, of visibly mediated relations. A theory of culture became necessary in order to account for this universal mediation of “ reality,” but in the absence of such a con­ cept,5 the perception was that control had become more a matter of “ representation” than of (divine) right. By this I mean that duplicity was perceived to have become, both consciously and unconsciously, the com­ mon modus operandi, but also that power had now become a matter of majorities, and hence of minorities, the “ majority” being less an effect of statistical preponderance (recall that the middle class was only about 5% of the total population) than of the ideological ability of controlling groups to represent themselves as representing the society as a whole (a figment produced by concepts such as the “ people” or the “nation” ). Balzac does not know the concept of “ ideology,” but he notes sourly (and conservatively) in the “Avant-propos” of 1842, that “ l’Election” (read: forms of parliamentary democracy) “ ne représente pas d’imposantes minorités aux idées, aux intérêts desquelles...