La Fille Elisa critique de prisons

Edmond de Goncourt wrote La Fille Elisa for the purpose of stirring the public conscience into action against the practice of continuous silence customary in the prisons of his days. The author's thesis holding continuous silence responsible for the cases of insanity encountered in these prisons is weakened by his characterization of the protagonist. The novel remains, however, a powerful plea for prison reform and a document of Edmond de Goncourt's social conscience despite his reputation as aesthete and writer preoccupied chiefly with finding a new form of expression for the novel. (In French) (HM-D)