The obscene bachelor: Humor and horror in Guy de Maupassant's writings
Item
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Title
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The obscene bachelor: Humor and horror in Guy de Maupassant's writings
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:0538a058e9bb:10730
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identifier
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11079
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Creator
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Hamilton, Benjamin M.,
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Contributor
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Julia Przybos
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Date
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2011
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Romance literature | French literature naturalism
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Abstract
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In his novels, novellas and short stories, Maupassant presents a diverse caravan of characters: unhappily married women, privileged single men, hardy peasants, urban prostitutes and some indomitable free spirits. Such eclecticism distinguishes Maupassant's fiction from that of many of his contemporaries, especially the naturalists. Yet his social and professional life was different, too. Maupassant's youth could be described as fairly comfortable, and after service in the Franco-Prussian War as a noncombatant, he drew a modest salary in the French civil service. He dabbled in erotic poetry and began to write racy chroniques for newspapers. Once his novella Boule de Suif was published in 1880, when he was thirty, he began to earn a handsome living as one of France's most popular writers. He thus saw his era through the prism of a pleasant Norman childhood and an affluent Paris bachelorhood, eschewing all notions of marriage and family. He thoroughly reveled in his bachelorhood, which provided emancipation as well as amusement and vice. It brought in its wake a dynamic range of family ties, close friendships and intimate relationships. This dissertation seeks to approach Maupassant's bachelorhood as an important factor---and marker---in his fictional imaginary, as lighthearted and lively a place as it is unsentimental and forbidding. Moreover, Maupassant is given to hectoring and moralizing in his writings, and some of this, too, can be linked to the writer's wide-open observation from his worldly experiences. In his tales of humor and horror, Maupassant presents a worldview that is naturalistic but not always dark and hopeless. The narrators in Maupassant's writings---often identified by him as unmarried men---present a constantly changing landscape of human struggle and mettle. And everywhere there is a strong dose of the erotic, in which human instinct can be a tragic but also joyful player in his characters' lives. It is the erotic that binds his early poems (many of them unpublished for years) to his popular and published chroniques, novels and short stories. Maupassant is a bold but sensitive eyewitness as he takes stock of the world around him. And his own rarefied bachelor cosmos---parts bourgeois, bohemian and libertine---must be acknowledged, for I believe its role in his works is significant. In acknowledging and observing this milieu, the reader might better discover the sensuous man and cultivated writer who embraced it.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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French
