Narratives of confession in France from Musset to Zola

This thesis argues that the novel of confession was a highly significant genre in early-to-mid-nineteenth-century France. This genre has identifiable traits, which are echoed in multiple novels, and even, at times, parodied. The thesis analyses these traits through a close and comparative study of both canonical and non-canonical writers, including Jules Janin, Alfred de Musset, Frédéric Soulié, Xavier de Montépin, Champfleury, Arnould Frémy, Mme du Saule, Marie Garcia, George Sand and Émile Zola. It argues that the genre both draws on the models of autobiographical confession offered by St Augustine, Rousseau and De Quincey (translated into French by Musset in 1828), and engages in an irreverent dialogue with Catholic confession, around which a polemic was raging in the period. The thesis takes the story as far as 1865, a pivotal year in which Zola's La Confession de Claude — an uneasy hybrid between confessional discourse and what the Goncourts call enquête sociale — signals the end of a chapter in the genre's development. The first chapter — 'The Transgression, or What is Confessed?' — argues that the novel of confession consistently breaks Catholic rules about sinning and redefines the sphere of confession away from wrongdoing towards suffering and selfhood. The second chapter — 'The Self, or Who is Confessing?' — argues that the novel of confession centres around protagonists who are unsure of their (emotional, and sometimes, actual) identity, presenting characters who are fragmented within themselves, often on the point of suicide or madness. Far from confession resolving these characters' problems of selfhood, it tends to fragment the self further. The third chapter — 'The Confession(s)' — argues that these novels repeatedly stage acts of confession, in both religious and secular contexts. In so doing, they invariably challenge the principles of both Catholic confession and autobiographical confession, consistently showing acts of confession that 'fail' according to the models from which they draw. The novel of confession is thus a disruptive genre, which unmakes the act by which it is defined.