Absorption and Theatricality: Tableaux of Toil in Balzac’s Une double famille

Abstract

This article is a close analysis — using art-historical concepts drawn from the work of Michael Fried — of the series of metaphorical tableaux that structures the descriptive opening pages of Balzac’s Une double famille. A complex interplay of beholding takes place through the apartment windows of two working-class women: while an attractive young seamstress gazes doggedly at her embroidery, her ageing mother, on the look-out for a protector for her daughter, seeks the attention of a procession of men who pass along the narrow street on their way to and from work. While ‘absorption’ and ‘theatricality’ are shown to have a thematic function that is grounded in Balzac’s exploitation of perspective and visual effects, Fried’s distinctive approach to ‘painting and beholder’, followed through to his discussion of Courbet’s Les Casseurs de pierre, underpins my argument that the aesthetic and the ideological cannot be separated in Balzac’s representation of alienated female labour.