Inheritance in Nineteenth-Century French Culture: Wealth, Knowledge, and the Family by Andrew J. Counter
2012; American Association of Teachers of French; Volume: 85; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tfr.2012.0393
ISSN2329-7131
Autores Tópico(s)Literature and Culture Studies
Resumobetween speaker and addressee that is foundational to the notion of the firstperson as perpetual stranger in language. Within the past few years, Gaspar’s work has given rise to several editions, conference proceedings, and monographs , the most notable including the work edited by Daniel Lançon (2004), the issue of Europe directed by Madeleine Renouard (2005), the book in the Seghers “Poètes d’aujourd’hui” series by Jean-Yves Debreuille (2007), and the recent Lorand Gaspar, en question de l’errance (2010), by Maha Ben Abdeladhim. The collaborative effort by Allaire and Tenne takes its place among these studies, offering complementary approaches that promise to reward all readers interested in the work of one of the most prominent French poets of our age. Calvin College (MI) Glenn W. Fetzer COUNTER, ANDREW J. Inheritance in Nineteenth-Century French Culture: Wealth, Knowledge, and the Family. London: Legenda, 2010. ISBN 978-1-906540-75-3. Pp. x + 205. $89.50. This study takes as its point of departure the question that serves as the title for the final chapter of Balzac’s La rabouilleuse: “À qui la succession?” As Counter notes in his introduction, this expression queries not just who will inherit, but who should or can inherit, and thus situates inheritance as a social as well as a personal phenomenon. His analysis, which is solidly based in cultural and legal history, applies these public/private questions to a series of nineteenth-century fictional works, some canonical, some all-but-forgotten, and arrives at a number of insightful interpretations and original comparisons with British texts as diverse as Hamlet, Ben Jonson’s Volpone, and Jane Austen’s Emma. Looking beyond materialistic explanations for nineteenth-century France’s preoccupation with inheritance, Counter examines how literary interpretations of inheritance “reveal, posit, denounce, and nuance models of family life and organization” (20) while providing insights into the transmission of family knowledge as well as capital. The first part of the book consists of two chapters, which provide an overview of the representation of inheritance in nineteenth-century France. In the opening chapter, Counter focuses on legal and political discourse and presents, in a succinct yet nuanced manner, the major provisions of the Civil Code of 1804, explaining how they broke with pre-Revolutionary values and practices and examining the range of conservative polemics they engendered. In the following chapter, he contrasts the two major paradigms of inheritance—the paternal and the avuncular. As concerns the latter, he analyzes the difference between oncles à succession and oncles d’Amérique, maintaining that in both cases, avuncular succession forefronts non-conformity, challenges idées recues about the nuclear family, and relativizes the traditional patrilinear paradigm. The second part of the book consists of 4 chapters, three devoted to the works of specific authors (Balzac, Maupassant, Zola) and the other focused on the works of a variety of women writers, some familiar (George Sand), but mostly middle-class, socially conservative authors who never achieved critical prominence. In chapter 3, the avuncular inheritance at the center of Balzac’s Ursule Mirouët is analyzed as an example of “ironic paternalism” (102), suggesting that the failed structures of pater familias (and thus paternal inheritance practices) typical of Balzac’s fiction can actually be functional if manipulated by Reviews 547 uncles (i.e., non-fathers), who can selectively adopt an heir. In chapter 4, Counter provides a reading of several Maupassant texts, including Bel-Ami, Pierre et Jean, and “Le Testament,” focusing on the ways in which wills, when read, are a source of previously hidden knowledge (usually of adultery or illegitimacy) that, when revealed, is disruptive to normative family relations. Chapter 5 looks at the manner in which most women writing fiction involving inheritance did not, as might have been expected, rebel against injustices in the Civil Code but tended to treat women’s inheritance “as a metaphor for a self-sacrifice which must be accepted with resignation, where it is not welcomed with religious fervor” (135). Chapter 6 proposes that the parricide in Zola’s La terre was not, in fact, the inevitable result of Fouan’s donation entre vifs nor of Buteau’s biological inheritance of violent tendencies, but...
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