“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”.
It’s debatable whether the famous aphorism that opens Anna Karenina is true to life. But it certainly tells a truth about story-telling. The daily doings of a generally happy family are a sort of common coin of existence: what is happening when nothing is happening. That does not mean that they are dull to experience, but it does mean that they are not the stuff of stories: stories are about crises. Hence the fairy-tale ends when the hero marries the princess and they live happily ever after. That ever-after is not itself the stuff of stories, until crisis comes to trouble it.
Yet the formation and travails of families are of necessity the essential material of the bourgeois realist novel, as it emerged in the nineteenth century. Those novels replaced the far-flung escapades of the eighteenth-century picaresque, and the picturesque medieval past of Walter Scott, with the world of their own readers, which was one centered on family life, on its struggles and emotions. The heroes and heroines of these books are either aspiring to, or already living within bourgeois domesticity. Their resting state, even if it is never achieved, is that of the happy family, and their story is that of some crisis impeding their attainment of that state, or troubling it once attained.
The formation and travails of families are of necessity the essential material of the bourgeois realist novel.
The novelists devised a huge variety of crises to introduce story-telling into this bourgeois sphere. Money, notably, is almost a main character in many nineteenth-century novels. This essential role of money was a novelty, matching the rise of the bourgeoisie, a class whose members were widely liable to become either much poorer or much richer than their parents. Yet the bourgeois novelists also constantly resorted to the two oldest stories that there are to tell about families: their foundation, in the formation of marriages, and their deepest perturbation, in adultery. In the tradition inherited from ancient literature, these were, respectively, the stuff of comedy and of tragedy. A marriage is—we always hope—a promise of happiness. Adultery is a violent breaking of that promise.
Before the Russians’ late entry into the scene, almost all the great novels of the nineteenth century were written in only two nations: England and France. Each of these two nations then showed a marked preference for one of the two stories: English novels are about the formation of marriages, and French novels are about adultery. By the same token, and in line with the inheritance of ancient literature, the English novel (until Thomas Hardy) is almost always in part comic, and the French novel tragic. One can of course cite many exceptions and variations to these rules, but the basic pattern holds. Jane Austen’s honourable, marriageable heroines and their suitors set the tone for the English novel, and Balzac’s desperate philanderers and adulteresses for the French.
This was not merely a question of taste, but of mores. On the one hand, both in life and in letters, the English had a much more robust tradition of love matches, rather than arranged marriages, than the French. On the other, nineteenth-century French society was, after the Revolution, in a state of dizzying flux, while English society, which had avoided revolution, was seeking to adjust to the changes of the industrial age while maintaining much of its older social and religious order. The two nations were due to converge towards the paradoxical alliance of bourgeois moralism and libertinage that marks our own age, but that was still in the future in the great decades of the nineteenth-century novel. At that time, adultery was an apt image for France’s whirlwinds of chaos, and the happy love match for the order and peace to which England aspired.
Adultery was an apt image for France’s whirlwinds of chaos, and the happy love match for the order and peace to which England aspired.
Hence the great vice of the English novel is sentimentality, and that of the French novel is cynicism. To quote another aphorism: “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means”. It is certainly what fiction meant for Jane Austen, and still, albeit with more hesitation, for Dickens and George Eliot. But in the French novel at its most accomplished—in Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert and Zola—almost no one is much good, and woe betide the innocent: they are sure to be corrupted or crushed.
English novelists did not idealize their societies: they would hardly still be worth our while if they had. But they wrote against the background of an ideal, of decency and harmony, in which they believed. The French novelists taught that such ideals could not survive the earthquakes of modernity: that they would have to die, or make martyrs of those who cleaved to them. It is tempting to judge that the twentieth century gave the last word to the French. Yet the nineteenth-century English novel is no less loved and admired now than it was before the horrors of the twentieth century. For everything that we have wrecked and abandoned, few of us have, after all, given up on seeking to form or nurture a happy family.
