Dysfunctional communication in Balzac's family systems

Within the past ten to twenty years, Balzac's representation of family systems has been studied by various critics in terms of the Freudian implications for character development. To the Freudian critic (Peter Brooks, Shoshona Felman, Naomi Schor), Balzac's "family plots" represent the arena in which the oedipal drama unfolds. In Dysfunctional Communications in Balzac's Family Systems I open another avenue into the study of Balzac's families--one which reduces the importance of the father figure and integrates him into the workings of the family as a system. By using the theories of social biologist Gregory Bateson as well as psychoanalyst Alice Miller (to name a few) I create a link between the modern family and that family which Balzac chose to depict in his fiction. In fact Balzac's fictional portrayals resemble in many ways the modern family, as both are replete with addictive behavior and transgenerational pathology. I indicate how this pathology is inherent in the family as a functioning system and not the result of thwarted oedipal drives in which the father's power reaffirms itself. Similarly, pathology can be cured once we no longer deny its roots in the "family as a system." My dissertation contributes a differing point of view, one which examines the total family system depicted in several novels and short stories included in the author's voluminous opus La Comedie Humaine. To this end, I have chosen works which have elicited Freudian interpretations: Eugenie Grandet, La Peau de Chagrin and La Fille aux yeux d'or. My ultimate purpose in undertaking this type of study is to reverse the trend which divorces literature from life both in terms of the content of a particular work and its effects on the reader. Therefore, while the Freudian critic studies the inner drives of the literary text and its characters as isolated from environmental considerations, my own reading of Balzac stresses not only the feedback between all family members, but the relationship between the reader and the text--itself a mimesis of dysfunctionality.