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Character-Types of Scott, Balzac, Dickens, Zola
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
To attempt any definition of the novel has become an increasingly risky business. Yet many an otherwise cautious student finds license to treat that genre as though it were synonymous with the character sketch. This attitude reaches its extreme in the preparation of “repertories” or “ditionaries” of a novelist's characters. There are, for example, the May Rodgers and M. F. A. Husband dictionaries of the Waverley characters, and the Cerfberr and Christophe repertory of the Human Comedy; there are no less than three Dickens dictionaries—those of Philip and Gadd, A. L. Hay ward, and Pierce; and there are J. G. Patterson's and F. C. Ramond's repertories for the Rougon-Macquart series. These works are eloquent of industry, patience, and enthusiasm. They show that each of the four novelists has to his credit some 2,000 characters. They offer, too, an admirable list of names, titles, professions, and activities, all from the brain and pen of one creator. Although these dictionaries afford pleasant moments to their authors and readers, beyond that they do not offer much answer to a student's queries. They do not tell of the function of each character in a story which was also the creation of the novelist.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1947
References
1 La Recherche de l'absolu, Le Lys dans la vallée, Eugénie Grandet.
2 Béatrix, César Birotteau, La Peau de chagrin.
3 Recherches sur la technique de Balzac: le retour systématique des personnages dans la Comédie humaine (Paris: Les Presses Universitaires, 1926).
4 The latter makes his entrance rather late in the story—as do many of Scott's historical personages.
5 Ethel Preston, op. cit., ch. v.
6 C.-A. Sainte Beuve, Portraits contemporains (3 v., Paris: Michel Lévy, 1870), ii, 343.
7 The confounding of Uriah Heep; the finale of Woodstock; Balzac's “boarding-house” technique in Le Père Goriot, Le Colonel Chabert, Un Début dans la vie.
8 These characters in Eugénie Grandet, César Birotteau, Le Cousin Pons.
9 Compare Dickens' Poll Sweedlepipe (Martin Chuzzlewit).
10 Dickens did refine the playlul process. He stands by his earlier heroes, like Nicholas Nickleby, with a pointer, and only in Great Expectations foregoes the “illustrated lecture,” allowing his hero to reveal himself without intervention. This is his most “naturalistic” novel.
11 The essay entitled “Dickens: the two Scrooges,” in The Wound and the Bow (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1941).
12 Scott's “Shakespearian” nobility is properly the subject of another study: the novelist as “prompter” of his characters.
13 Joseph Warren Beach, The Twentieth-Century Novel: Studies in Technique (New York: Century, 1932), p. 542.
14 Brothers or husbands of Betsey Trotwood, Oliver Twist, Miss Pross, Little Nell, etc.
15 See Walter C. Phillips, Dickens, Reade, and Collins, Sensation Novelists: a study in the conditions and theories of novel writing in Victorian England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1919).
16 This character just misses being a success: he gets lost in the story, somewhat like the murderer Rudge in Barnaby.
17 Note the gesture of “beating his hand upon the iron paling until the blood ran,” and compare with typical Brontë gestures.
18 See the writer's “The Art of the Flashlight: Violent Technique in Les Rougon-Macquart,” PMLA, December, 1942.
19 The heroines of Le Rêve, Au bonheur des dames, L'Argent.
20 Heroines of La Curée, L'Argent, La Joie de vivre.
2l Waverley, Rob Roy, Castle Dangerous, Count Robert of Paris, The Surgeon's Daughter, Heart of Midlothian, Anne of Geierstein, Peveril of the Peak.
22 Mme Rabourdin in Les Employés and the “superior women” in Les Deux Poëles and La Muse du département.
23 Compare Miss Wade of Little Dorrit.
24 The boots Bailey in Martin Chuzzlewit, or “Trabb's Boy” in Great Expectations.
25 The treatment of youth in Le Père Goriot, Eugénie Grandet, La Grenadière, Un Début dans la vie. And his idea of the “ages of man” in the Avant-propos to the Human Comedy.
26 The Novel of Adolescence in France: the study of a literary theme (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), p. 103.
27 Edward Waverley and Roland Graeme and the unaccountably neglected figure of the apprentice Turnstall. A great deal is made of this youth in the early pages of The Fortunes of Nigel, after which he drops out of the picture.
28 Dickens attempted years later to revive this brute in Dolge Orlick, the blacksmith-murderer of Great Expectations; but his is a minor role.
29 Note the character “Cabuche” in Le Ventre de Paris.
30 Maupassant, Pierre et Jean, ch. ix.
31 He has a pale counterpart in La Débâcle.
32 The cloister in Redgauntlet, Black Dwarf, Waverley, Pirate, Saint Ronan's Well; America in Heart of Midlothian, Peveril of the Peak.
33 Régis Messac, Le “Detective Novel” et l'influence de la pensée scientifique (Paris: Champion, 1929), p. 403.
34 Frank Wadleigh Chandler, The Literature of Roguery (2 v., Boston, New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1907), ii, 527.
35 Only two of Zola's novels actually end with marriage: Au bonheur des dames, which was Pamela over again, and Le Rêve, which Anatole France found less a dream than a nightmare—La Vie littéraire (4 v., Paris: Calmann-Lévy [1903]), II, 284 ff.
36 It was not absent even from the “he-man” Kipling (the character of the “rounder” in The Phantom Rickshaw); and Mr. James Hilton has exploited it thoroughly of late.