The politics of seduction : comparing Balzac and Sand / Deborah Lyn Houk.

Format:

Book

Manuscript

Microformat

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Houk, Deborah Lyn.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Penn dissertations--Romance languages.

Romance languages--Penn dissertations.

Local Subjects:

Penn dissertations--Romance languages.

Romance languages--Penn dissertations.

Physical Description:

vi, 221 pages ; 29 cm

Production:

1997.

Summary:

This dissertation analyzes representations of seduction in a broad selection of novels and short stories by Honore de Balzac and by George Sand. Given the forces of desire, power and sex that converge in the realm of seduction, juxtaposing a male and a female author is particularly illuminating. This comparative study underscores the differences and similarities between Balzac's and Sand's approaches to seduction, revealing how the writers' perspectives were influenced not only by their gender but also by other factors such as ideology and their conception of the novel. Furthermore, most of the texts comprising this study are set in or written during the periods of the Restoration and July Monarchy, thereby providing a context for exploring private sexual politics during a time of public social upheaval.

Seduction uses theatricality and fantasy to create an intersubjective relation between seducer and seduced. I draw on psychoanalytic notions of desire and narcissism to reveal how seduction operates as the performance of an identity self-consciously created to bridge the chasm between self and other. Within the realm of seduction, Balzac and Sand configure relations of power, desire and gender in ways that sometimes subvert nineteenth-century stereotypes of sex roles. I demonstrate that in these works seduction allows for a reversible and fluid relationship between oppositional positions--active and passive or dominant and submissive--which are conventionally associated with masculinity and femininity. Moreover, Balzac's and Sand's politics of seduction are infused with social issues of the post-Revolutionary era, as their characters' class and economic status shape, and at times even motivate, the course a seduction takes.

Through its analysis of Balzac's and Sand's representations of seduction from the perspective of feminist, psychoanalytic and cultural studies, this dissertation sheds light on the workings of erotic relations and on their embeddedness in wider issues of subjectivity and the political and social structures of the nineteenth century.

Notes:

Thesis (Ph.D. in Romance Languages) -- University of Pennsylvania, 1997.

Includes bibliographical references.

Local Notes:

University Microfilms order no.: 97-27237.

OCLC:

187470336