Welcome back. In our previous lesson, we examined Honoré de Balzac's methodical approach to characterization, seeing how he used "social types" to populate his literary universe and reveal the class structures of post-revolutionary France. We positioned him as a social historian, a "secretary" meticulously documenting his society. This is the foundation of his realism.
Today, we will complicate this picture. Our goal is to identify the residual romantic elements in Père Goriot and explain how they coexist with his realist aims. The clean lines we have drawn between literary movements are, in practice, much more blurred. Balzac stands at a crossroads, with one foot firmly in the emerging realist camp and the other still planted in the rich, turbulent soil of Romanticism. Understanding this duality is key to appreciating the unique power of his work and the evolution of the novel itself.
Romanticism: A Primer on the Age of Passion
Before we can find Romanticism in Balzac, we need a clear conception of what it is. Broadly, Romanticism was a major artistic and intellectual movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries that served as a powerful reaction against the Enlightenment's emphasis on reason, order, and classical restraint.
To get a quick and clear overview of its core tenets, please watch this short introductory video.
This video provides a concise definition of Romanticism, contrasting it with the Enlightenment and outlining its central themes.
Watch the entire video. Pay attention to the keywords used to define the movement: emotion over reason, the individual over the public, nature over the man-made world, and the idea of following one's passionate, turbulent heart.
As the video explains, Romanticism champions intense emotion, individualism, and the power of the natural or untamed world. Romantic art, literature, and music often explore themes of sublime nature, the supernatural, heroic rebellion, and extreme psychological states.
To see how these ideas manifest visually, we can turn to the art of the period. This lecture provides some powerful examples.
This lecture from "Art History with Travis Lee Clark" uses paintings by Goya and Géricault to illustrate key Romantic themes like passion, political engagement, dark emotions, and a new focus on contemporary events.
First, watch the section that defines Romanticism as the "age of passion." Next, observe how Romantic artists broke with neoclassical rules by focusing on contemporary subject matter, politics, and current events. Watch the analysis of Goya's work, particularly The Third of May 1808 and Saturn Devouring His Children, to see how Romanticism explored the grotesque, the violent, and dark emotions. Finally, pay close attention to the discussion of Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa. Note the focus on a scandalous contemporary event and the painter's commitment to uncompromising, even morbid, realism in depicting suffering.
With this framework in mind—a focus on intense passion, individualism, melodrama, and extreme states—we can now turn back to Père Goriot and see these very elements at play.
Balzac the Romantic: Passion, Monomania, and Melodrama
Despite his status as a founding father of realism, Balzac was, by temperament and influence, a Romantic. The critic W. Somerset Maugham makes this point directly in his essay on the author.
Maugham's essay offers a clear and insightful analysis of the romantic underpinnings of Balzac's work, which is essential for our current learning outcome.
Please read the first five paragraphs of the essay, starting from the beginning. Maugham directly contrasts the romantic and the realist, placing Balzac in the former camp. Focus on his explanation of how Romantics pursue strangeness and create intense, extreme characters. Pay special attention to the concept of a "ruling passion" that consumes a character to the exclusion of all else.
Maugham's concept of the "ruling passion" is the key to unlocking the romantic heart of Père Goriot. Balzac's most powerful characters are not the well-rounded, psychologically nuanced figures of later realism. They are forces of nature, personified obsessions. This is a form of monomania: a pathological obsession with a single idea or feeling.
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Père Goriot: He is the ultimate monomaniac, the "Christ of Paternity," as Balzac calls him. His love for his daughters is not a rational, balanced affection; it is an absolute, self-devouring passion that consumes his fortune, his dignity, and ultimately his life. It defies logic and societal norms. His final deathbed scene is not a quiet passing but an operatic explosion of curses and blessings—pure melodrama.
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Vautrin: The arch-criminal is a classic Romantic figure—the Byronic hero. He is a charismatic, powerful, and mysterious outcast who rebels against society's hypocritical rules. His speeches to Rastignac are not simple conversations; they are theatrical monologues, grand philosophical pronouncements from a "poet of Hell." He embodies the romantic fascination with the larger-than-life transgressor.
This interest in extreme psychological states and melodrama was a hallmark of the Romantic era, connecting Balzac's literary project to the dramatic and often disturbing paintings of artists like Théodore Géricault. The academic Michael Fried explores this connection in his analysis of another Balzac novel, La Recherche de l'absolu (The Quest of the Absolute), which features a protagonist, Balthazar, who is a monomaniac scientist. His insights apply perfectly to Goriot.
From Géricault’s Monomanes to Balzac’s La Recherche De L’absolu – Nonsite.org
This scholarly text provides a deep, philosophical framework for understanding Balzac's use of monomania and melodrama, linking it to the artistic concerns of the Romantic period.
First, read the paragraph that establishes the connection between Balzac's novels and the revival of "drame" (drama). Note the mention of melodrama and the idea that nothing is "too excessive to be dramatically credible." Next, jump to the section detailing the effects of Balthazar's obsession. Read the paragraphs describing his "frenzy" and how his condition develops into monomania. Note the language used: "dogged fixity," "frenzy," "tragic spectacle," and "symptoms of insanity." This provides a powerful vocabulary for analyzing the character of Père Goriot, who is driven by a similarly all-consuming passion.
The "ruling passions," the melodramatic plot twists, and the larger-than-life characters like Vautrin are all profound romantic elements. They prioritize emotional intensity and dramatic effect over the quiet verisimilitude we might expect from a purely realist text. The illustration below, a contemporary depiction of a scene from the novel, captures this dramatic, emotional, and theatrical quality perfectly.
This romanticized vision stands in sharp contrast to the work of artists like Honoré Daumier, a contemporary of Balzac, whose caricature of Goriot presents a starkly realistic image of a broken, somber old man.
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A Union of Opposites: How Realism Grounds Romanticism
How, then, do these two seemingly contradictory impulses—the realist's desire to document and the romantic's desire to dramatize—coexist in a single novel?
The answer lies in how Balzac stages his drama. He constructs a meticulously detailed, physically and economically grounded realist world to serve as the container for his characters' romantic passions.
- The Setting as a Laboratory: The Maison Vauquer, which we analyzed as a microcosm of Paris, functions like a social laboratory. Its grimy walls, foul smells, and rigid hierarchy of floors create a high-pressure environment. Balzac uses this realist setting to study what happens when extreme passions are subjected to an indifferent, money-driven world.
- Passion as a Social Force: Goriot's monomania is not just a personal psychological quirk. It becomes a powerful tool for social critique. His willingness to sacrifice everything for an unreciprocated love is a tragic, irrational act in a world where, as Balzac shows, every relationship is a transaction. His passion, in its extremity, highlights the cold, cash-based reality of the society that destroys him.
- Realism Validating Melodrama: Vautrin's cynical philosophy and melodramatic plotting would seem fantastical on their own. However, because Balzac has so thoroughly detailed the corruption and hypocrisy of the "high society" that Rastignac wishes to enter, Vautrin’s brutal logic feels less like romantic villainy and more like an honest assessment of the situation. His rebellion is a logical, if extreme, response to the world Balzac has so realistically rendered.
In essence, Balzac uses romantic characters as engines of his realist project. Their larger-than-life passions and desires drive them to collide with the social structures he wants to expose, laying bare the mechanics of his society in a way that more moderate characters could not.
Conclusion
In this lesson, we have explored the dynamic tension between two major literary movements within Balzac's Père Goriot. While we have previously established his realist credentials, we now see that his work is animated by a powerful romantic spirit.
Here are the key takeaways:
- Romantic Elements: Père Goriot is filled with romantic characteristics, including characters driven by a single "ruling passion" or monomania (Goriot), the presence of a rebellious Byronic hero (Vautrin), and a plot that relies on melodrama and extreme emotional states.
- A Hybrid Form: Balzac is not a pure realist. He grounds his romantic elements within a meticulously detailed, scientifically observed social and economic world.
- Coexistence and Purpose: The romantic passions of the characters are not merely decorative. They serve a realist purpose by acting as powerful forces that test the limits of the social structure, revealing its underlying cynicism, corruption, and materialism more starkly than a purely observational approach might allow.
This look at Balzac's hybrid style provides a perfect bridge to our next module. We will turn to Gustave Flaubert's masterpiece, Madame Bovary. Flaubert, in many ways, represents the next stage in realism's development. Reacting against Balzac's romantic "excesses," he sought to perfect a new kind of realism—one based on authorial impersonality, stylistic precision, and an even more rigorous exclusion of melodrama.