Balzac's Cousin Bette: Rage, Revenge, and Ruin in Nineteenth Century Paris
LIT4-10-Mon3
Hollie Harder
This course will take place in person at 60 Turner Street. The room will be equipped with a HEPA air purifier.
September 9 - November 18
(No Class October 14)
Balzac's Cousin Bette, published five years before the author's death in 1851, is often considered to be the crowning achievement of the writer's magnum opus, The Human Comedy. Set in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, the novel recounts the story of Bette Fischer, a poor relative of the Hulot family who has always been jealous of her beautiful cousin, Adeline. When Bette, still single at 42, rescues a young sculptor from a suicide attempt and takes him under her wing, she claims to have finally taken a "lover." But after the sculptor marries Adeline's pretty daughter, Bette plots her revenge on the Hulot family for the wrongs that she has suffered.
In crafting this modern fable, Balzac offers readers an engaging portrayal of human passions, especially those of desire and vengeance, as well as an astute analysis of how this social and moral degradation mirrors the political decline of the nation and its hollow materialism. Characters' choices reflect their own personal interests, and their success depends on the shrewdness of their words rather than on the integrity of their actions. At the same time, the hypocrisy of Louis-Philippe's July Monarchy accentuates the loss of past Napoleonic glories, while laws seem to promote money as the ultimate measure of all things. In the end, Cousin Bette, the story of an obsession that destroys fortunes, lives, love, and even honor, is one of Balzac's most powerful works and one of his darkest.
More facilitated discussion than lecture.
Cousin Bette by Honoré de Balzac translated by Kathleen Raine
introduction by Francine Prose Modern Library Classics / Random House Publishing Group
2002 496 pages (including introduction and notes) ISBN: 978 0375 7590 79. Additional materials will be provided on a class website or by email links.
Participants will read 45-50 pages of the novel per week. Additional materials will be available on the course Google Sites page.
Hollie Harder is Professor of French and Francophone Studies and Director of the language programs in French and Italian in the Department of Romance Studies at Brandeis University. In addition to teaching courses on French language, culture, and literature at Brandeis, she has published articles on Proust, Balzac, Houellebecq, and Zola. She also leads a discussion group at the Boston Athenaeum on Proust's seven-volume novel, In Search of Lost Time.