UC Berkeley

Abstract

Reflections on “Idealist” Literature: Sand, Balzac, Arnim (1830-1865)

by

Paul de Morais

Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature

Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Michael Lucey, Chair

This dissertation examines the notion of “idealism” as a literary genre, primarily as it pertains to the classification of novels by George Sand and designates the antithesis of Balzac’s literary practice, during the 1830s and early 1840s in France. I argue that the opposition between realism and idealism, as conceived in the latter half of the nineteenth century, obscures the complexities and nuances within Sand’s and Balzac’s writing practices, even as that opposition has remained tenacious leading into the twenty-first century, and continues to inform readers’ perceptions of these two authors. The opposition between realism and idealism was imposed retrospectively as a classificatory schema for making sense of literary history, but this opposition fails to fully take into account the concerns informing Sand’s and Balzac’s literary practices during this period of the July Monarchy in France. Idealism occurs in the works of both authors, and the form of its manifestation usually depends on each author’s ideological and political orientation.

My first chapter illustrates the ways in which Sand and Balzac experimented with generic form by analyzing Sand’s novels Simon and Horace, and Balzac’s novel L’Interdiction. I show how a particular aspect of French Romanticism, the emphasis on formal experimentation and the blending of genres, informs the structures of Simon and L’Interdiction. Additionally, this chapter shows how the use of the “ideal” in L’Interdiction and Horace deviates from preconceived notions about idealism and realism engendered by the literary criticism seeking to maintain the two as oppositional genres.

If idealism as a genre is bound up with fantasies about social progress, my second chapter demonstrates Sand’s critical approach to the notion of progress as conveyed through the narrative form of her novel Le Compagnon du Tour de France. I also show how the notion of progress informs the form of Balzac’s novel Le Médecin de campagne, in which the central character’s ideological alignment with Balzac’s own values gives rise to an idealized portrayal usually reserved only for Balzac’s minor characters.

The third chapter concludes the dissertation by showing how two authors typically classified as “idealists,” Sand and Bettine von Arnim, critically evaluate the idealist aesthetic philosophies of writers like Victor Hugo and Friedrich Schiller. Through discussions of Arnim's letter book Die Günderode and Sand's Promenades autour d'un village, as well as her response to Hugo's William Shakespeare, this chapter seeks to complicate the misrepresentation of Sand’s and Arnim’s thought as conventionally idealistic by demonstrating their critical and often sober responses to the extravagant idealisms of their male contemporaries and predecessors.