The anxiety of dispossession : jealousy in nineteenth-century French culture / Masha Belenky.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Belenky, Masha, 1968-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

French literature--19th century--History and criticism.

French literature.

Jealousy in literature.

Jealousy.

Physical Description:

173 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Lewisburg : Bucknell University Press, [2008]

Summary:

In nineteenth-century France an obsession with jealousy swept the culture as a whole. Virtually every major French novelist employed it as a central plot device. At the same time, jealousy became a key theme for a broad range of medical, journalistic, and moralist authors interested in the study of contemporary mores. In The Anxiety of Dispossession: Jealousy in Nineteenth-Century French Culture, Masha Belenky argues that it was through narratives of jealousy that writers grappled with the crises of political and moral authority, anxieties surrounding changing gender roles, and new ideas about marriage that defined post-Revolutionary France. Focusing on male-authored texts, Belenky demonstrates that this obsession with sexual jealousy conveys both partiarchal anxiety over disempowerment stemming from social upheaval and a male desire for social and sexual control over the female body and mind. Bound up with the male prerogative of ownership, jealousy was assigned an explicitly public role in guarding a man's property and propriety.

This book considers portrayals of jealousy by major authors such as Balzac, Hugo, and Zola alongside a broad range of works by medical writers, journalists, and moralists who wrote for popular audiences.

Covering the years from 1818 to 1898, the book shows how the subject of jealousy was used as a projection screen for social and cultural debates in the decades between the French Revolution's radical challenge to religious and political authority and the advent of psychoanalysis at the century's end.

By examining the many layers of meaning that underpin numerous and often dissonant representations of jealousy across a wide range of literary and historical texts, The Anxiety of Dispossession provides a new understanding of the society that made jealousy a central obsession.

Contents:

1 The Physiology of Jealousy 28

2 The Anxiety of Looking: Jealousy, Voyeurism, and the Crisis of Masculinity 57

3 The Pathology of Jealousy: Illness and Female Passion in Balzac 85

4 Female Trouble: Jealousy, Desire, and Violence 107

Epilogue: Proust and Jealousy 132.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 159-168) and index.

ISBN:

9780838756904

0838756905

OCLC:

173243911