Description
Book SynopsisIn more than ninety novels and novellas, Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) created a universe teeming with over two thousand characters. This book reveals how Balzac, in imagining the dense, vividly rendered social world of his novels, used his writing as a powerful means to understand and analyze - as well as represent - a range of forms of sexuality.
Trade Review“Michael Lucey’s Balzac is not the Balzac they taught you in college, or even in graduate school. His resourceful readings introduce us to a social universe to which oddballs and misfits are entirely germane because queerness is its norm. Now I understand why Proust so loved Balzac and what Baudelaire learned from him: that the bizarreness of beauty offers a clue to the form of heroism that is truly characteristic of the modern age.”—Ross Chambers, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan
"Michael Lucey's fine literary analysis, rigorous theorization of sexualities, attention to culture as a contested field, and nuanced historiographical reconstructions show how Balzac’s
Comédie humaine, long viewed as the domain of social climbers thrusting aside residual forms of sociabilities, in fact offers a panorama of ‘misfits’ negotiating the instabilities and faultlines of the family as it is being reinvented in post-Revolutionary France. Lucey's compelling reflection on how literature is emmeshed with the historical construction of private life reveals queer paradigms as central to a genealogy of French modernity."—Margaret Cohen, New York University
“The Misfit of the Family is an impressive fruition of theory precisely mobilized to decipher as never before the remarkable flowering of queer sexualities in Balzac’s epochal œuvre. We come to see why sexuality is so often liminal, marking as it does those crucial points where one form of capital wants conversion into another. Readers of this remarkable book will not be able to ignore the astonishing machinery of queer sexuality in the formative decades of our modernity.”—James Creech, Miami University
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Preface xiii
Introduction: Balzac and Alternative Families 1
1. Legal Melancholy: Balzac's
Eugénie Grandet and the Napoleonic Code 31
2. On Not Getting Married in a Balzac Novel 65
Interlude: Balzac and Same-Sex Relations in the 1830s 82
3. Balzac's Queer Cousins and Their Friends 124
4. The Shadow Economy of Queer Social Capital: Lucien de Rubempré and Vautrin 171
Epilogue: Vautrin's Progeny 225
Notes 239
Works Cited 289
Index 303
