Stendhal's forebears (1)

By Tracy

I started an earlier series of blog posts called "Stendhal's heirs", looking at later texts that seem modelled on his The Red and the Black in connection with fictional crimes committed by characters who are social climbers or parvenus. This one instead considers a predecessor, Marivaux's Le Paysan parvenu (literally the peasant-parvenu or parvenu-peasant; the peasant made good, upstart peasant... though it's been published in English under completely different titles such as Up from the Country and The Fortunate Peasant).

Marivaux was a prolific playwright, but he also wrote novels. This one is unfinished but still substantial enough to have been influential -- and a good, rollicking read. The protagonist, "Jacob" (it's told in the first person & this is the name the narrator is willing to use!) is a handsome young peasant from a wine-growing village who's sent to Paris with deliveries and falls under the aegis of various older and better-off ladies.

It's not a novel in the sense that Stendhal's later masterpiece is, but it's one of those prototypical narratives (begun 1735) that must have influenced him: many of the basic elements are in place, and the "triangular desire" René Girard traces in Stendhal's novel is repeatedly made explicit in Marivaux's tale. Curiously, rather than committing a crime, Marivaux's Jacob is arrested for a crime he did not commit, so that we have prison and judicial scenes even though he's not strictly speaking a "criminal parvenu". (I won't tell the outcome; even an unfinished story can suffer from a spoiler...)

Part of my continuing research on these narratives is to ask why so many of these narratives of upward mobility have their "heroes" commit a crime. In earlier instances it tends to lead to courtrooms and prisons; in contemporary ones they may get off scot-free... on one level.

Is the criminal turn sometimes the result of a conservative ideological bent in the text? (They will be punished for their class-transgression, which makes them intrinsically criminal anyway; their true nature will be revealed as base; they will fall because they tried to rise?)

Or is it in fact something subtler and potentially progressive, critical of social inequality? (The very rigidity of the social and economic structures requires its transgression; the parvenu is criminal because a superior being, outside laws and mores?)

Or is it both? I'll keep you posted on what I uncover.

I've got my eye on another couple of early texts, but later than Marivaux's, which may be even more rollicking reads: Restif de la Bretonne's Le Paysan perverti (1775) and La Paysanne pervertie (1784) -- companion his-and-hers stories that are more directly about the moral corruption of peasants-who-go-to-Paris. The titles probably speak for themselves without translation. (Apparently the word "rétifisme", meaning shoe fetishism, comes from his name -- also spelled Rétif)...