The Lost Heroine of Zola’s Octave Mouret Novels

Abstract

Critics rarely read Pot-Bouille all. --Marcus, Apartment Stories 169 Heterosociality In Naomi Schor's already classic account George Sand and roman idealiste, she describes limits mimesis such that realist and naturalist writing, for all their claires to social critique, nevertheless find it very difficult, in philosophical terms, to impose ought how things should be onto how things are. In other words, mimesis is held within referential logic copy, however energetically irony works against what are literally terms reference. What I suggest is that in first decades Third Republic, it is interweaving generic issues mimesis and issues gender ideology that prevent canonical male writers such as Zola and Maupassant from venturing too far into a post-heterosexual world modernity, where men and women might interact in social, indeed public, domain work. Vital to this transition from location large numbers women within French family to their exploration public sphere (of which we start to see avant-garde glimpses end nineteenth century with emergence first few women doctors, lawyers, and so forth, as well as many schoolmistresses) has course been role women's education, developed within mass society in its and permutations ever since first decades Third Republic. (1) This language homo and hetero, and social and sexual, allows us to speak back to another landmark book, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men. English Literature and Male Desire, first published in 1985. On opening pages original introduction to her book, Sedgwick writes: is a kind oxymoron. Homosocial is a word occasionally used in history and social sciences, where it describes social bonds between persons same sex; it is a neologism, obviously formed by analogy with homosexual, and just as obviously meant to be distinguished from homosexual. To draw homosocial back into orbit is to hypothesize potential unbrokenness a continuum between and homosexual--a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted. [...] My hypothesis unbrokenness this continuum is not a genetic one--I do not mean to discuss genital homosexual desire as at root of other forms male homosociality--but rather a strategy for making generalizations about, and marking historical differences in, structure men's relations with other men. (1-2) In preface written for a subsequent reissuing this now classic account, Sedgwick makes clear sexual politics, not least for gay identities, deconstructing representational history what she labels the available mirror atomized, procreative, so-called nuclear family origin (ix). On one hand, she demonstrates collusion between norms and bonds (not least bonds between men that subtend practices patriarchy). (2) As she argues, patriarchal homosociality must repress structural continuum that connects it to homosexual counterculture. In matrix permutations made possible by homo/hetero and social/sexual distinctions, there should be four basic terms: homosexual and (on Sedgwick's repressed continuum), (naturally, or rather, normatively), and heterosocial. To transpose Sedgwick's definitions, while remaining conscious all pitfalls in reflecting homo and hetero back onto each other as unproblematically inverted images, we might say that heterosocial is a word that describes social bonds between persons opposite sex; it is a neologism, obviously formed by analogy with heterosexual and just as obviously meant to be distinguished from heterosexual. …