Familial descent: Realism, naturalism and the domestic solution (France, Honore de Balzac, Emile Zola, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens)

This dissertation examines the historical relationship between nineteenth-century literary realism, naturalism and domesticity in France and England. I argue that the terms in which realism has acquired its paradigmatic status have kept scholars from considering the genre's crucial role in modernizing the family and in reorganizing social conventions to accommodate bourgeois customs and values. In short, by neglecting realism's role in shaping the family, critics have neglected how bourgeois culture has reproduced itself so successfully. This oversight has also perpetuated the notion that late nineteenth-century naturalism is merely a degraded sub-category of realism that does not participate in the arena of social history. By contrast, I read naturalism as a genre whose historical significance rests in the way that it modifies and challenges realism's domestic discourses. Although my project is initially indebted to the work of Georg Lukács, it draws from a variety of recent literary and cultural criticism in order to reread Lukács' notion of decadence in the context of the tradition of domestic fiction. This dissertation focuses primarily on the following canonical texts: Balzac's La Cousine Bette , Dickens' Dombey and Son, Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Zola's Nana. In analyzing these works, I show how representations of the feminine body participate in a general narrative process whereby households and various cultural material are transformed and re-evaluated according to a normative model of domesticity and modern liberal humanism. By focusing on realism in France and England, my project is fundamentally comparative, and seeks to illuminate how such seemingly different literary traditions simultaneously define themselves against one another and maintain important ideological continuities.