Rhetoric, hypocrisy and greed: Utopian thought and its representations in six French and English novels of the nineteenth century

Intentionally or unintentionally, a work of realistic fiction provides a portrait of the culture in which it was written. That portrait may highlight aspects of the culture that are outside the bounds of mainstream history. This is a study of ways in which the philosophy and discourse of certain utopian philosophers are reflected in six nineteenth-century novels: Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811), Thomas Love Peacock's Melincourt (1817), George Sand's Horace (1841), George Eliot's Felix Holt: The Radical (1866), Gustave Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale (1869), and Emile Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames (1882). One purpose of this study is to use non-utopian fiction as a window into a time when philosophies that are now nearly forgotten were such common knowledge that they could be presented in popular fiction.; The first two chapters are an examination of utopian discourse from the publication of Sir Thomas More's Utopia in 1516 through the nineteenth-century apogee of the philosophies of Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen. The next three chapters are analyses of the novels, grouped chronologically two by two, so that Sense and Sensibility is compared with Melincourt, Horace with Felix Holt, and L'Education sentimentale with Au Bonheur des Dames. The concluding chapter includes examinations of the authors' visions of utopianism and of the dissonance between the idealism of utopian rhetoric and the reality of life in a utopian society.; Close readings of these novels show the authors' engagement with contemporary utopian and romantic rhetoric, as well as with the political issues underlying utopianism and romanticism. They also offer insight into the place of such rhetoric in class and gender conflict. The corruption of language and thought is an aspect of all six novels. None of these novels is a utopian novel: they were chosen to span as much as possible of the romantic-realist-symbolist spectrum of nineteenth century fiction. The presence of several different utopian philosophies in such a variety of nineteenth-century novels suggests that those philosophies were common currency in much everyday discourse throughout most of the nineteenth century.