Reading the Restaurant: Social Class, Identity, and the Culture of Consumption in the Nineteenth Century French Novel
Item
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Title
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Reading the Restaurant: Social Class, Identity, and the Culture of Consumption in the Nineteenth Century French Novel
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:f1cc43874288:12084
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identifier
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12763
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Creator
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Rienti, Joseph J. B.
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Contributor
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Caws, Mary Ann
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Date
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2013
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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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France
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French Literature
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Nineteenth Century
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Paris
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Restaurant
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Abstract
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The restaurant, like so many of the institutions of French modern society, developed at a very particular moment in history. In this project, I tell the story of the maturation of the restaurant and study its unique role in the social history of Paris during the nineteenth century. By examining the restaurant as a site of modernity, I illuminate its important role in precipitating class distinctions, locating the emerging consumer culture, highlighting gender differentiation, challenging prevailing views of domesticity, and revealing a debate over public and private space.; Through a close reading of the realist novel as a discourse on daily life, I intertwine cultural history and literary theory to look at some of the critical questions about the nineteenth century restaurant. I examine a sampling of novels in which the restaurant is integral to the author's narrative project. I demonstrate how Balzac uses the restaurant in <italic>Père Goriot</italic> as a signifier of one's social status and how Maupassant uses the restaurant in <italic>Bel-Ami</italic> to differentiate gender roles. In my analysis of Flaubert's <italic>Madame Bovary</italic> and <italic>L'Éducation Sentimentale</italic> and of Henry Céard's <italic>Une Belle Journée</italic> I write about the restaurant's unique role as both a public and private space in French society by highlighting its ability to simultaneously satisfy many "appetites." I read Balzac's <italic>Le Cousin Pons</italic>, Dujardin's <italic>Les Lauriers sont coupés</italic>, and Huysmans' <italic>À Vau-l'eau</italic> through the lens of an anxious bourgeoisie trying to navigate the emerging restaurant culture of Paris. In my final chapter, I address the social issues that rose to the surface as a result of the emergence of a nineteenth century consumer society focused around the restaurant through an analysis of Baudelaire's poem "Les Yeux des pauvres" and Zola's <italic>Le Ventre de Paris</italic>.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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Rienti_minarees_0046D_12763_DATA.xml
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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French
