Thematic Instability in Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse

     The center of Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse is elusive. Though the book is a part of Balzac’s Scenes of Provincial Life a good part of the narrative occurs in Paris.  The family dynamics between Joseph, Phillipe, and their mother seem to be heart of the book until Flore appears and then Maxence with their designs on the Rouget money.

     The unusual instability of the novel’s title reflects this thematic ambiguity.  First published as Les Deux Frères in 1840, it became Un Ménage de Garçon in 1842 and then La Rabouilleuse in 1843.  The final choice is perhaps the most puzzling as Flore, la rabouilleuse herself, has a limited role and is clearly more a motive than an active agent in the plot.  In translation it has appeared as The Black Sheep in Donald Adamson’s version, as A Bachelor’s Establishment in Clara Bell’s, and as The Two Brothers in Katherine Prescott Wormeley’s. 

     Clearly these shifts in the title imply an uncertainty about the central theme of the story.  While the original title focuses on the comparison of Joseph and Phillipe, the second seems to turn primarily to Joseph as protagonist, though it remains uncertain whether the “bachelor” is Phillipe before his marriage, or Joseph whose ménage includes his mother. 

     Balzac’s comments in a brief avant-propos only complicate the question of the book’s primary subject further.  Balzac claims in a dedication to Charles Nodier that his principal theme is to point out the harm done by the weakening of patriarchy.  Few readers might have guessed.  He explains that his story carries “a great lesson for the family and for Motherhood” by calling attention to “the effects of diminished paternal authority.”  In fact, he finds a general decay of morality in modern society which he finds “based solely on the power of money.”  For Balzac as an orthodox believer, the remedy is obvious: the country must “return to the Catholic Church for purification of the masses by religious feeling” and all will be well. [1]

     All these highly conventional opinions seem to have little, though, to do with the narrative in spite of the author’s assertions.  Only in a harsh verdict on Agathe’s husbandless household and her acting the hapless woman by preferring her ne’er-do-well son to the dutiful one might “diminished paternal authority” be relevant to the plot.  Dr. Rouget, a strong husband of the previous generation, clearly errs in his mistreatment of his daughter.  Jean-Joseph, Phillipe, and Maxence are all “strong” male characters with far from exemplary behavior, while the laudable Joseph is quiet and unassertive.  Likewise, apart from the priest’s deathbed counseling of Agathe bringing her to the realization that she had been wronging her more virtuous son, the novel contains little to support the notion that regeneration must come from the Church.  Balzac, perhaps motivated by moralistic critics of his work, claims with little basis that the most respectable values underly his novel.     

     The theme of greed displacing ethics is, however, in a general way, appropriate, as the characters motivated by money or by money’s glow reflected in social prestige are depicted as amoral while those with more humane motivations behave better.  In the plot’s mainline clear patterns of retributive justice govern the paths of Joseph, the character most positively portrayed who finds success and even ennoblement in spite of his indifference to such rewards and the avaricious Maxence, Phillipe, and Flore  all of whom come to ruin.  The final miseries of Flore read almost like a medieval exemplum.  Yet, though she has no worldly ambition, Agathe is profoundly misguided in her treatment of her sons., while the community in general is neither pious nor wicked, [2] though often self-interested and gossipy. 

     This novel is only a small portion of Balzac’s grand project, La Comédie humaine, comprising ninety-one completed works and the planning for another forty-six over a period of two decades.   Balzac’s introductory note to the novel points out the thematic complexity allowed by his comprehensive plan.  His soldiers, he says, in this story indicate the “depravity” that “results from the exigencies of war in certain minds which dare to act in private life as they would on the field of battle,” but the reader can see that this is no general verdict due to the “fine characters,” motivated by “great and noble devotion” depicted in his Scenes of Military Life. 

     The conflicted focus implied by the multiple titles may, then, be an answer as well as a question.  As La Rabouilleuse is a single mosaic stone in a large composition in which every portion need not mimic the whole, the themes of one isolated portion need not agree with those of another.  Even the irreligious among Balzac’s nineteenth or twenty-first century readers may echo Dryden’s cogent praise of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales “Here is God's plenty.”  A certain exhilarating liberty emerges, allowing Balzac to compose without preconception. 

     Balzac’s approach to theme, nuanced far beyond his conscious, expressed values, is evident in the ambivalence of his political implications.  Though Balzac was himself a conservative royaloist, Marx and Engels had the highest regard for his work.  Marx had enough respect for the Comédie humaine to envision writing a major, full-length study of it, though he never completed this project.  Engels praised Balzac for writing that belied the conscious reactionary theme, often betraying (to a receptive reader at least) what looks quite like revolutionary implications. 

 

Well, Balzac was politically a Legitimist; his great work is a constant elegy on the inevitable decay of good society, his sympathies are all with the class doomed to extinction. But for all that his satire is never keener, his irony never bitterer, than when he sets in motion the very men and women with whom he sympathizes most deeply - the nobles. And the only men of whom he always speaks with undisguised admiration, are his bitterest political antagonists, the republican heroes of the Cloître Saint-Méry, the men, who at that time (1830-6) were indeed the representatives of the popular masses. That Balzac thus was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favourite nobles, and described them as people deserving no better fate; and that he saw the real men of the future where, for the time being, they alone were to be found - that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of Realism, and one of the grandest features in old Balzac.

   Engels to Margaret Harkness April 1888

 

     The same authorial freedom that allowed Marx and Engels to see their notions of French society reflected in Balzac’s epic canvas also enables the reader without a partisan view to see large and complex patterns in this narrative world which, like those we observe in life, offer in general no easy answers and include many shades between the extremes, even now and then to revealing the unexpected. 

     The liberty that enables ambiguity need not result in randomness.  Balzac employs observations of unprogrammed lived experience mixed with literary conventions, and he has no difficulty in developing incidents that suggest generalizations that might be called themes.  Rather like some painters who chose to work en plein air claiming to reproduce their sense impressions on canvas, but in fact propelling art in new directions, Balzac’s pose as a scientifical observer of society allowed him to construct fictions in a new vein.

     La Rabouilleuse, a novel that has met more blame than praised from critics, [2] has at any rate a gripping story, punctuated with dramatic incident and scenes of pathos.  The reader who hunts after a theme reducible to a single line may be missing both that simple narrative excitement and the grander sense, based on Balzac’s life’s work, that his novels provide access to a complete and coherent scene of human life, one as subjective as individual as any writer’s.  The specific correspondence to historical moments in France during the author’s life seems almost immaterial, in spite of the references to documented events.  In the end La Rabouilleuse and the entire Comédie humaine are, not because of topical or documentary detail, but by virtue of the specifically Balzacian imagination they record, as resistant to reductive formulae and sometimes as enigmatic as life itself. 

 

 

1. The passages quoted in Clara Bell’s rendering are in the original French: “grands enseignements et pour la famille et pour la maternité; “des effets produits par la diminution de la puissance paternelle;” “puisse une société basée uniquement sur le pouvoir de l'argent;” and “puisse-t-elle recourir promptement au catholicisme pour purifier les masses par le sentiment religieux.”  “Assez de beaux caractères, assez de grands et nobles dévouements brilleront dans les Scènes de la Vie militaire, pour qu’il m’ait été permis d’indiquer ici combien de dépravation causent les nécessités de la guerre chez certains esprits, qui dans la vie privée osent agir comme sur les champs de bataille.”

2.  In  his introduction to the entire Comédie humaine, Balzac notes that in his view “Man is neither good nor bad” (“L’homme n’est ni bon ni méchant”).

3.  A number of negative judgements are mentioned at the outset of Allan H. Pasco, “Process Structure in Balzac's ‘La Rabouilleuse,’" Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1/2 (Fall and Winter 2005-2006).

 

 

 

 

Note of an Accidental Bibliophile

     Feeling I have enough to do to attend to the authors’ words, I don’t seek out rare editions of books, but now and then I happen across an interesting old title in a Salvation Army or library book sale, and I am quite willing then to enjoy a volume’s particular qualities.  My English copy of La Rabouilleuse, titled A Bachelor’s Establishment, was published by J. M. Dent in 1896, translated by the indefatigable Clara Bell and introduced by George Saintsbury, part of his twenty-volume edition of the Comédie Humaine.  (The Times reviewer, grandly named E. Irenaeus Stevenson, welcomed the set on June 25, 1898 in a piece “Balzac in English” which began by noting that Balzac “is not even yet read and measured nicely by all those men and women quick in perception [and] broad in cultivation.”  “It may be doubted,” he goes on, “whether in English translation and with Anglo-Saxons, Balzac will ever attain a much more general circulation that his masterpieces today receive.”

     The design of my copy has charm in its art nouveau cover lettering and decoration, deckle edges and irregular signatures, thick, palpable pages, and engraved illustrations by the Scots painter and printmaker D. Murray Smith.  While not memorable art, they and their inlaid protective tissues grace the book.