La maison où « voir, c’est pis que toucher »
Approaching Eugénie Grandet through the “special props” (a theatrical term) which are its decor and its furniture allows us to detect a temporality other than that suggested by the development of the action. Under the loving gaze of the daughter of the house, the fustiness of the past, which imbues...
Enregistré dans:
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Langue: | Français |
| Publié: |
2024
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| Accès en ligne: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Résumé: | Approaching Eugénie Grandet through the “special props” (a theatrical term) which are its decor and its furniture allows us to detect a temporality other than that suggested by the development of the action. Under the loving gaze of the daughter of the house, the fustiness of the past, which imbues both decor and furnishings with the same dull colourings, thereby recovers its former lustre and gives new life to all its potential meanings. Then, by deliberately linking these objects to heredity over three generations, on Madame Grandet’s side of the family, Balzac makes the discreet wife of the house the heroine of the palimpsest -- and that despite herself. By emphasizing the ritualistic, legalistic nature of the digression, the author inscribes furnishings and significant features of the Grandet house within a refreshed reading where the invention of inherited treasures reveals a particular family history and gives Eugénie the illusion of authentic love. These cultural properties of the past, all redolent of history, enable Balzac to elucidate paternity and family heritage both from the perspective of the reader’s psyche and via the pictorial technique of anamorphosis – a process which is particularly relevant for him in the second half of 1833. Eugénie Grandet definitely offers one of the most developed treatments of the medium of furniture so often illustrated in La Comédie humaine. |
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