Balzac's Sarrasine: the Sculptor as Narcissus

Balzac's tale of a sculptor's deluded passion for his model, a castrato-singer, is a retelling of Ovid's Narcissus myth as an allegory of the failure of the artist whose attachment to material beauty keeps him from using his creative imagination to achieve his ideal. Balzac's nineteenth-century sources are stories by E. T. A. Hoffmann and the writings of the Neo-Platonic mythographer Friedrich Creuzer, and of Henri de Latouche. Diderot's and Falconnet's ideas on attaining ideal beauty in sculpture are also important to Balzac's tale. Using the Renaissance literary love theme of the Banquet of sense, Balzac traces the downfall of Sarrasine through the sensual gratification of his passion for his model. Balzac anchors the story to the painting Sleep of Endymion by Girodet, his favorite painter, whose feminized image of Endymion reveals the sexual ambiguity of the model. (HOB)