Narrating Hospitality: Salons in French Fiction, 1789–1848
This thesis calls for renewed attention to the space of the salon – the primary site of hospitality in an aristocratic or haut-bourgeois household – in early nineteenth- century French literature, particularly within feminist scholarship. It considers fictional discourse on the salon through Derrida’s theory of hospitality, and through feminist deconstructions of the figure of the hostess in Western narrative. Through chapters on three authors – Mme de Staël, Stendhal, and Balzac – the thesis maintains a focus on the salon as signifier of hospitality’s inevitable failures and contradictions, counter to its more usual reputation as symbol of an idealised French conversation culture, and argues that hostesses provide a focal point for literary anxiety about hospitality. Identifying Staël as a surprisingly non-nostalgic commentator on Parisian salons, it suggests that this room’s most important function in her novels is as a space in which to critique France’s neglect of key ethical values, prompting questions about what nuances we risk erasing from her thought by rhetorically situating her career entirely within the salon. A chapter on Stendhal digs deeper into the hostess’s structural relationship with masculine self-mastery and identity; aiming to soften some past assessments of his fiction as misogynist, while noticing the limitations of his wish to see hospitable women valued more highly. Finally, the third chapter explores three texts from Balzac’s Comédie humaine, asking whether even Balzac’s most eulogistic writings on the salon do not in fact do the work of ensuring its obsolescence, positioning the Realist narrator as successor to the salon hostess in allowing access to the monde. Each of these novels represents a key nineteenth-century instalment in the story of the salon as told by France to itself; this project aims to enrich our understanding of that narrative as narrative, with implications for an evolving cultural imaginary of the socially powerful woman.
Literature, France, Salons, Hospitality, Novels, Mme de Staël, Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, The Nineteenth Century
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