SOURCE: "Taking the Woman's Part: Stendhal's Armance" in The Male Malady: Fictions of Impotence in the French Romantic Novel, Rutgers University Press, 1993, pp. 114-35.

In the following excerpt, Waller analyzes Armance as a male writer's reworking of the traditionally femaleauthored sentimental novel.

By the 1820s, the mal du siècle was no longer primarily a phenomenon to which a certain number of writers alluded in the prefaces to their novels. The male malady, a literary commonplace, had become a recognized social phenomenon. In the salons of Restoration France, young noblemen had begun to bear their aristocratic privilege as a burden and wear their melancholic dissatisfaction as a badge of honor, which, for some observers, such as the bourgeois and liberal Stendhal, made them an object of ridicule. Writing from Paris as a correspondent for several English magazines in 1825, Stendhal attributed the "vague, melancholic feelings, which many rich young...