SOURCE: Smith-DiBiasio, Anne-Marie. “‘Le Texte de la Vie des Femmes’: Female Melancholia in Eugénie Grandet.” Nottingham French Studies 35, no. 2 (autumn 1996): 52-9.

In the following essay, Smith-DiBiasio considers the singularity and universality of the protagonist in Eugénie Grandet against the background of the debate about Balzac's realism and analyzes the text itself in terms of female melancholia.

This essay begins with the text, Eugénie Grandet, and looks at it initially against the background of La Comédie Humaine and in the context of critical debate about Balzac's realism. This in turn raises questions about the function and composition of character, character as type and character as case and my reading attempts to analyse the singularity of Eugénie Grandet, which leads inevitably to considering the universal aspects of this singularity. The specificity of Eugénie Grandet emerges from Balzac's description of a life and the text...