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French Studies 2003 57(2):167-180; doi:10.1093/fs/57.2.167
© 2003 by Society for French Studies
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Skeletons in the Closet: Homosocial Secrets in Balzac's La Comédie Humaine

Diana Knight1

1 University of Nottingham

This article explores the potential for a reading of Balzac of the interrelated critical concepts of the ‘open secret’ (D. A. Miller, 1985) and the ‘epistemology of the closet’ (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1990). They are used to establish a connection between the content of Balzac's realist representations of homosociality, homosexuality and homophobia in La Comédie humaine and the epistemological status of the secrets that circulate within this vast fictional cycle and typically structure its narratives. I argue that Balzac plays ironically with the heterosexual conventions of stage farce (notably the adulterous lover in the closet) to expose, in La Cousine Bette, the homosocial underpinning of what is literally a social charade. The position within these structures of the key figure of Rastignac is then traced through three novels: La Maison Nucingen, Le Père Goriot and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes.


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