Se marier (ou pas) : le mariage dans Rayons perdus de Louisa Siefert et Les Humbles de François Coppée

Abstract

Bourgeois marriage is considered ironically by the poets of the second half of the nineteenth century. It is precisely the symbol of a bourgeois ethos fully oriented towards material life, perfectly antinomic to a poetic ethos turned towards the quest for an ideal or an absolute. Marriage can no longer be a theme of poetry unless a poet wants to emphasize the most common reality. It’s the way of the Parnassian François Coppée in his work Les Humbles (1872), where he shows how much marital status - or lack of it - weighs on individual and social trajectories, leading to downgrading or exclusion. In a second time, we compare Coppée’s vision of marriage with that presented in another Parnassian work, Louisa Siefert’s Rayons perdus (1869).