Romantic novel

One can distinguish three great news romantic forms.

One will quote initially the " novel of the âme" , that it is with the " first personne" (confused narrator and main character) or with the " third personne" (narrator distinct from the character). This type of novel represents the subjectivity of an individual in rupture with the surrounding world. For example, Rene of Châteaubriand, Corinne of Mrs. de Staël, Oberman of Senancour… The difference between the individual and the world results then often in a pathology which can be described in an objective or distanciée way (like the impotence of the hero in Armance of Stendhal or the weakness of character in Adolphe of Benjamin Constant). In these novels, the interest of the reader relates thus to the subjective singularity of an individual who, well far from being presented in the form of a more or less heroic model, seems primarily different from the others because of a " disease of the âme" (like the Mélancolie of Rene or the madness at Nerval) which moves away it from the other men.

A second original romantic form is the realistic novel whose two large representatives are Stendhal and Balzac. At Balzac, the objective world in its diversity and its characteristics becomes an essential component of the romantic representation: description then will stick to external details (gestures, attitudes of the characters, clothes and modes to be, decorations…) who can appear unimportant at first sight but in which the novelist discovers a hidden direction, a " harmonie" who reveals the masked interiority of the characters. Stendhal stresses as for him the explanatory dimension of the behavior of the characters (in particular in Red and the Black ): it analyzes the various factors which weigh on the individual behaviors, that it acts of the personal history, the social position, the interindividual relations or even of the random course of the events. It thus reveals with the reader what the various characters are unaware of is themselves (because the individual stendhalien knows himself only partly) that is to say the different ones (of which it sees only the external reactions). Realistic novelists, Balzac and Stendhal are characterized thus by their " omniscience" , i.e. their capacity to describe the objective world in its multiple dimensions, but also to say the direction of this world which however escapes the individuals who form part of it.

The third great romantic form is that of a fiction which emerges from any species of probability to the profit of an imaginary deployment which will be able to go until the fantastic one. Victor Hugo in Notre-Dame de Paris for example will plunge the reader in a world different, worrying, in the Middle Ages dark and terrifying. With Théophile Gautier, the fantastic one will be assumed like such, and especially it will be to the reader to face an unreal world (for example the hallucination in the Club of Hachchins or a Morte in love in the news with the same name) and to give him a direction which will not be necessarily shared besides by the other readers. Thus, this type of novel undoubtedly rests less on the division of certain values morals and intellectual (it does not have nor " there; message" to transmit nor model of behavior to be admired) that on an emotional identification where mixes at the same time the rejection (since the reader is confronted with the otherness) and fascination (since one guesses nevertheless human passions there).

In these three types of novels, the reader is confronted either with characters who are close for him as at the XVIIIe century (because pertaining to the same social world or sharing the same values as in the News Héloïse to Rousseau) but to different characters, with a human otherness, psychological or social.

Sources

Michel Cop, '' social Genesis of romantic individualism, Tübingen, Niemeyer (Mimesis), 1989

Jacques Dubois, novelists of reality , Paris, Threshold (Points), 2000.

Philippe Van Tieghem, French Romanticism , Paris, University Presses of France, 1957 (chapter V).

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