Espaces clos, espaces éclos: Enclosure in French Literature from Les Fleurs du Mal to Germinal

Enclosures—spaces in which surroundings appear to close inwards—populate nineteenth-century French literature. Whereas scholars have generally characterized the nineteenth century as an era of great expansion, this dissertation investigates the diversity of enclosed spaces by elucidating how and why French writers persistently deploy them as narrative locations in their works. Enclosures during the mid- to late-nineteenth century cover a vast range of forms, from Jean Valjean’s famous flight through the Parisian sewers in Hugo’s Les Misérables to the locomotive that becomes a murder scene as it travels through a tunnel in Zola’s La Bête humaine. I argue that these dramatizations mark a shift in the operation of enclosed spaces from enablers of creativity during the Romantic period to anxiety-producing locations following 1850. This study examines the proliferation of enclosed spaces in French poetry and prose from 1857 until 1890, a roughly thirty-year period that spans most of the Second Empire and the beginning of the Third Republic. It is also during this era that the first medical definition of ‘claustrophobia’ emerges—and not incidentally—in Paris. Yet even before any medical definition, French writers conceptualize an emerging anxiety of confinement. Each chapter of this dissertation therefore examines texts by one of four major authors of the century—Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne and Émile Zola—in order to illustrate how this new conception of enclosed space materializes during an era that witnesses dramatic transformations to the urban and industrial landscape. The first chapter examines a selection of Baudelaire’s verse and prose poems from Les Fleurs du Mal and Le Spleen de Paris arguing that the first Modern poet establishes an ambivalent position vis-à-vis enclosure, one that distinguishes itself from his Romantic predecessors. The second chapter focuses on how the paradoxical combination of deception and movement characterize Hugo’s enclosures by concentrating on the depiction of quicksand in Les Misérables and the sea in Les Travailleurs de la mer. The third chapter treats locations in Verne’s Autour de la Lune, Voyage au centre de la Terre, Les Indes noires, and Vingt mille lieues sous les mers demonstrating that enclosed spaces permit enchanting and psychologically complex visions of underground, underwater, and outer space explorations. The final chapter analyzes the psychological effects of overcrowded and suffocating spaces in Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames, La Bête humaine, and Germinal in order to show how enclosed spaces destabilize the fixed categories of inside and outside, as well as human and non-human, arguing that enclosures are sites where Zola expresses profound anxieties related to industrial progress. Literary close readings of episodes from this diverse corpus therefore expand our understanding of mid- to late-nineteenth-century perceptions of space by foregrounding the ambivalence of space relations, and in so doing, reveal the symbolic value of enclosure as a mode of expression for a range of human sentiment