SOURCE: "The Earnest but Skeptical Questor: Gautier's Albertus and Mademoiselle de Maupin," in Romantic Irony in French Literature from Diderot to Beckett, Vander-built, 1989, pp. 83-95.

In the following essay, Bishop discusses the use of a complex, romantic irony which Gautier employed for humorous effect and for the fuller treatment of serious themes.

No French author has better epitomized the romantic dilemma than Théophile Gautier. His lifelong yearning for the ideal was accompanied by a career-long pessimism that told him his frantic search was futile. He suffered the agonizing dual awareness that, on the one hand, the human condition was intolerable and, on the other, transcendence was impossible. One tries to spread one's wings, says the heroine of Mademoiselle de Maupin, but they are weighed down by slime, the corrupt body anchors the soul to earth. Critics have spoken of Gautier's Gnostic and Manichaean dualism, of his view...