Tough Love, Hard Bargains: Rape and Coercion in Balzac

This article explores representations of rape in the fiction of Honoré de Balzac, in an attempt to understand how both the event and the threat of rape acquire a peculiar and distinct significance in Balzac’s writing. A distinction is made between the simplistic depictions of rape in Balzac’s earlier "Romantic" novels, and its complex signifying potential in the more developed Realist period. There, rape appears first as a form of homosocial communication; then as a performance which might be used to (re)assert masculine identity; and finally, in the face of the failure of that assertion, as a desperate, pathological repetition of the violence which is inseparable from masculine subjectivation and from patriarchal ideology. These questions are understood through the various works of Luce Irigaray, Eve Sedgwick, and Slavoj Žižek. (AC)