Families in Jeopardy: Regulating the Social Body in France, 1750-1910

Abstract

Offering a radical new approach to family and textuality in the field of cultural and literary studies, the author argues that the new print culture - from domestic manuals to fiction - promoted new norms of behaviour. Through analyses of novels by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Sue, Balzac, Sand, Zola and Gide, the author demonstrates that the peculiar force of the French novel resided in its power to reach a wide, newly literate audience and to inscribe new identities and desires through the reading process. Finally, the book proposes the provocative thesis that because of tales of threatened or failed family life the domestic conjugal household has never 'worked' even down to our time; it has always been dysfunctional, in crisis, and under threat from outside forces and thus in constant 'need' of protection and renewal.

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