Morgan Dennis and Dr. Scott Sprenger, French & Italian
Honoré de Balzac was one of the most prolific French authors in the 19th century, and scholars around the world publish numerous articles and books about his enormous collection of novels (known as La Comédie Humaine) every year. Despite the fact that religious symbols, references, and images abound through Balzac’s fiction and non-fiction writings, the religious dimension of his novels has largely been ignored because of the secular state of much of modern academics today. When I learned this in Dr. Scott Sprenger’s class during the winter semester of 2008 as we read several of Balzac’s novels, I decided to focus my term paper on the influence of Christianity on Balzac’s writings. After completing the paper, we decided there was much more study and analysis that could be done, and Dr. Sprenger agreed to help me expand the paper into an honors thesis.
Dr. Sprenger and I aimed in this research to analyze how Balzac used aspects of the life of Christ to create many of his characters and narrators. We wanted to find significant textual evidence through a range of novels to support this hypothesis that the biblical account was extremely influential to Balzac. The impetus for such a study came from writings of Balzac himself who referred to Christ as an “admirable model” for authors. Our goal was not simply to show that Balzac used Christianity to shape his stories, but also to attempt to explain how this Christian structure helped to portray his message for modern France. Balzac’s novels were written for a French audience who were in the process of secularizing society and closing the door on religion, and so our research especially aimed to answer the question of why Balzac (who was by no means a religious adherent) would use Christ as a model throughout his works.
Since there are over one hundred novels in La Comédie Humaine, we had to pick carefully the novels we would analyze. Under Dr. Sprenger’s direction I read and studied about ten novels and thoroughly documented evidence of Christian influence throughout them. As I read those, I also looked through hundreds of articles on Balzac’s writings and read about twenty-five scholastic articles relating to those particular books. Even though very few of these documents spoke directly of the parallel between Christ’s life and Balzac’s characters, as I read the novels the connection seemed evident. Balzac’s works abound with characters that experience both intense anguish and powerful metaphysical discoveries, and they ultimately are rejected from society. We made an analysis of three such novels the first part of our paper to show the link with Christ’s life in Balzac’s tales.
The second part of our hypothesis was that Balzac’s narrators often had a sort of resurrection experience like Christ before the telling of their stories, and this was much harder to show. It took careful reading on my part and much guidance from Dr. Sprenger as we discussed the books, but the more that I read the more I saw that this was indeed the case. I found in about half of the stories that I read that there was a narrator (whether the novel’s narrator or one who tells a lengthy story during the book) who had some sort of death-like experience before recounting his tale. For example, in La Peau de Chagrin a young man named Raphael was on the verge of committing suicide when he entered an antiquities shop and received a magic skin that completely revived him. Then, as a sort of resurrected man, he told the story of his life for nearly one-third of the novel. We found several clear examples of this type of death, revival, and telling of a story, and we attempted to show that this was not just coincidence. The second section of our paper carefully analyzed this book along with two others to demonstrate the similarities with Christ’s own death and resurrection.
When I started the project I had in mind basically how these first two parts of the paper would go, but I was much less clear on how we would answer the most important question: if Christ was indeed a model chosen by Balzac for his stories, why would he pick this structure? The best we could do was hypothesize, for there was of course no way to know exactly what Balzac’s aims were in writing. We decided to focus on the historical context of the novels which were all written in the aftermath of the revolution and a new French republic. Dr. Sprenger helped me to understand exactly how the political and religious climate of France was drastically changing at this time, and so we tried to frame our argument with this in mind. Again we carefully analyzed the texts to see if Balzac gave any clues about the relationship between his religious symbolism and modernity in France. This was by far the most difficult analysis. The best help was found in studying some of the writings of Balzac which note on the structural changes in society at this time. His commentary seems to support the idea that he was trying to propagate a social message through his fiction by using religious themes. We did our best to prove in our analysis that the spiritual aura in his works was the most compelling way to help his contemporaries understand the spiritual world they were leaving by accepting a secular state. The power of religious sentiment was the best way for him to show the powerful nature of societal changes in France in 1830.
I finished the thesis in February and subsequently defended and revised it. The fifty page paper was printed and placed in the Harold B. Lee Library with other honors theses, and hopefully it will be a resource to show at least why the religious nature of Balzac’s works should not be ignored. We only focused on one specific Christian theme in this work, but there are many more religious aspects of La Comédie Humaine that should be studied as Balzac’s enormous work of fiction continues to be read.