SOURCE: Rinsler, Norma. “Fromentin's Dominique.” In Studies in French Fiction in Honour of Vivienne Mylne, edited by Robert Gibson, pp. 243-61. London: Grant & Cutler Ltd., 1988.

In the following essay, Rinsler considers various interpretations of Dominique and concludes that Fromentin's richness of language and structure allows the work to be viewed from many different aspects.

There are books which are so familiar that they become invisible. Dominique has been one of those books for the present writer, remembered, in Empson's phrase, as a ‘taste in the head’, and offering at a recent re-reading a profoundly surprising appearance of completely unremembered (or unobserved?) complexity. The ‘taste in the head’ had been chiefly elegiac; quite different from the taste of Romantic melancholy or Baudelairean spleen, it was measured, classical, harmonious and a trifle vague. I cannot have read it very well. Revisited, it seems not at all vague, but precise and...