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Marie-Henri BeyleA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The climate of power as Stendhal expresses it is best captured in an odd fact of history. After the restoration of the French Bourbon monarchy in 1814, the new king of France is crowned Louis XVIII, but the last king before the revolution intervened had been Louis XVI. The intervening period is thus invented by the Restoration: there was no Louis XVII. Nevertheless, the return of the Bourbon monarchy was a willful forgetting of the past, which was overlaid with a false continuity. As scholar Sandy Petrey argues, at the root of this political climate is the arbitrariness of titles and the free use of language. (Petrey, Sandy. Realism and Revolution. Cornell University Press. 1989.)
Returning to the Italy of the book’s setting, Gina is made a Duchess by a false marriage, yet the title has meaning insofar as society agrees to it; Fabrizio becomes an Archbishop for a concatenation of reasons that have equally little to do with the office. In these instances and others, readers are given to feel that power is not based on anything that might be considered “real” but is rather conjured up by the arbitrary acts of linguistic naming and other forms of social consensus: what is true is what is agreed upon to be so.
Count Mosca serves as the novel’s mouthpiece for exposing the mechanisms of monarchical power even as he adheres to them, a fact that makes his essentially unchanged character a point of reference for the novel’s depiction of this political form. As Gina enters into Mosca’s way of thinking, she balks at the absurdity of her false marriage, but Mosca reasons thus: “Absolute power has the advantage that it sanctifies everything in the eyes of the people; now, what is an absurdity which no one perceives?” (131). This is the logic behind the novel’s many metaphoric explanations of power as a game (127); language, too, is a game, and Stendhal’s weaving together of the political and the individual in a character like Fabrizio, who deigns to be above politics, thus extends far beyond any single character. Human activity, like the novel itself, is made up of invented components, language chief among them. As Stendhal seems to indicate in comments from the narrator which echo Gina’s earlier warnings about criticizing a game of whist, the only choice one has is to describe the game as it’s played. Penetrating into the meaning of the rules is, in fact, something the novel never does, apart from through irony, which is itself a negative gesture of unveiling the game as a game and not a positive critique of principles. When Fabrizio attempts to perform such a critique in the contemplative scene by the lake, or in the church after his initial escape from the scene of his crime against Giletti, readers are given to see only what is missed from such attempts to penetrate behind the scene of the characters’ reality (242).
The frequently repeated character trait that singles out Fabrizio from those who are so oddly focused upon him is nothing less than a fierce and passionate imagination. This imagination begins as a belief in omens and spirals out into anxious forebodings in such scenes as the border-crossing into Austrian territory after the murder of Giletti: “The presence of danger bestows genius upon the man of reason; it raises him, so to speak, above himself; in the man of imagination it inspires romantic notions, bold it is true, but frequently absurd” (229). Absurd is also the word used by the narrator to describe Fabrizio’s reasons for joining Napoleon’s Army as the flowering of a tree and the flight of a bird. It appears in asides from the narrator on the “the Italian character”: “Italian hearts are, much more than ours, tormented by suspicions and wild notions afforded them by a volcanic imagination” (99). We see Fabrizio imagining his escape when he paces around the carriage outside Milan in Chapter 5 and on such moments, thoughts of what could be, bolstered by an avid reading of stories—the del Dongo genealogy, Tasso, Petrarch—overwhelm the scale or the actuality of the events at hand.
Against the oft-criticized and frequently patent absurdity of Fabrizio’s imagination, however, there stand equally frequent comments about its attractiveness—indeed its necessity—to characters such as Gina, and to some extent to the narrator himself whenever he sympathizes with the “volcanic imagination” of Italians as he describes them: “[T]heir joys are much more intense, and last much longer” (99).
Imagination is a process that follows from its root word, image, which is central to the novel in relation to political power, romantic heroism, and class identity. If Fabrizio’s wild imagination creates for this character the reality in which he decides to live, then images, too, create the novel’s fundamental realities: from monarchy, where the Prince’s statue cannot be harmed lest the system itself crumble in its essentially symbolic power, to the romantic heroism of Fabrizio, whose image covers the translated del Dongo genealogy and is adored by the common people of Parma. If all these image-based realities seem less then real, readers are nevertheless given to see that they are quite actual in the way that they shape the behavior of individual characters and whole populations. Entire political futures are shaped by the careful manipulation of image, as in Mosca’s false reportage of the hanged rebels as “on vacation,” among other staged events and cover-ups).
One need not look far in the novel for instances of images, from the fact that Parma is known for its fine paintings (104) to the Prince’s imitation of the visage captured in a portrait of Louis XIV that hangs on his wall (135). The characters themselves become images to one another and, unlike Gina and Fabrizio, only Mosca has the ability to see things—including himself—always from the outside. It takes Gina until the end of the novel to see herself as others have always seen her—that is, as an object of envy (479). Fabrizio never sees himself that way; although he is given the chance in the portraits commissioned for him, only Mosca keeps a steady eye on appearance. Costumes change, but readers never see an ultimate reality behind them, even if they are compelled to see Fabrizio’s Napoleonic uniform, his soutane, and his portrait as so many changing images. If Mosca is a point of reference for the novel, then the problem with image, like that of imagination, is not that it constitutes the main mechanism by which the affairs of the world turn, but only that one may forget—like Fabrizio seems often to do—that he is, in fact, imagining.
Not unlike the book from which Fabrizio del Dongo derives his own sense of self, The Charterhouse of Parma can be read as a genealogy—a story of the origins of a nobleman. As for what constitutes a nobleman, the novel has its own answer, but to begin with the historical context, nobility is a ‘class’ which is better described by the word ‘estate’ as a term of a social group that derives its identity not from access to wealth—this is modern class—but from a set of pre-determined obligations and privileges vis-à-vis monarchic power and relative to other groups. Nobility held titles like Baron, Duke, or Count, with various degrees of privileges, but all nobility were granted access to Court, which meant the seat of power. Unless they were born into dynastic lineages like the Prince of Parma had been, they could not officially hold such major positions of power, but they could, like Mosca and Gina, hold considerable sway over those in power. Regardless, nobles held land and most made their fortunes from landownership. This group had the most to gain from a preserving a monarchy, and in Stendhal’s native France the nobility was split over whether they were willing to accept a constitutional monarchy with a Parliament, modeled after the British government at the time.
The term “birthright” is key to the understanding of noble identity as opposed to bourgeois identity as they are juxtaposed in the novel, which pits Gina, Mosca, and above all Fabrizio against non-nobles like Rassi, who is a member of the bourgeoisie. These latter characters are distinct from lower class characters like Giletti, whose ignoble birth—he is a theatre player likely from peasant stock—is repeatedly invoked by Gina to describe Fabrizio’s crime in killing him as “not a crime at all.” Unlike the Gilettis and Ludovics of the novel, the bourgeoisie have power; this is clear in the position of Rassi and of Archbishop Landriani—although many clergymen in feudal systems were considered noblemen, not all were. Unlike nobles, they are insecure in that power, with Landriani made utterly submissive over any sign of rank: Mosca explains, “hence I always wear my full uniform around him,” (167). Meanwhile, Rassi is made compliant by the promise of ennoblement. Yet, it is the novel’s great irony that nobles, too, ought to be insecure in their power, which is something that no lesser character than the Marchese Crescenzi makes plain when he elbows his own way up the ranks in court and, at the same time, feels safe from a Republican uprising only with his money. One character tells him, “[E]ven if the Republicans managed to suppress the Court, and the nobility as well, your husband would still be the richest man in the country!” (554). Fabrizio is the magnetic center of the novel, but he is a dying breed—perhaps even an impossible one, the novel suggests, in his 16th-century behavior and his ultimately otherworldly demeanor: there is no place for him anymore. The ambiguity of the novel’s relationship to the noble legacy is evident in Fabrizio’s oddly distant comportment to his changing 19th-century world. The world is his, in a way, for he is its beloved hero, but he is only this, perhaps, because he is a remnant of something already lost.
The revolutions that rocked Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries were in part bourgeois revolutions, meaning that an up-and-coming class of non-nobles were accruing power because they were accruing money. The birth of the bourgeoise is thus inextricable from the birth of capitalism, which was taking place across Europe to varying degrees during this time; by 1839 when the novel was written, industrial capitalism was the major economic mode in France and England. In contrast to these changes, Fabrizio has an inborn sense of his own worth: no amount of rank promotion, money accrual, or accolades from others can bolster his worth, and no fall in stature, deprivation, or derision can disturb it.
If the bourgeois characters have very little ground to stand on, their base being the windfalls and losses of mere money or rank, republicans, or those of any class who believe in ideals of a representative government, have the solid ground of their ideals. (Etymologically, republic comes from the Latin Res publica, or ‘a public affair,’ ‘public’ being interpreted in different ways.) Only republicanism is equal in stature to a noble sense of self, which is why the only real Republican character in the novel—other than Gina’s first husband—is also the only man Gina claims understands her, the poet Ferrante Palla. Gina brings together the formidable aspects of a nobleman like Fabrizio, whose disdain for a new world that would embroil him in government renders his nobility otherworldly; a nobleman like Mosca, who maintains his nobility but will readily change with the times, and finally one like Palla, who spearheads the change that will, some fear, outpace them all. The missing piece in Gina’s circle of mutual admiration is the bourgeois, a clue to this group’s exclusion from a story about the legacy of noble values. This also contributes to the regretful sense in the novel, with its many narratorial comments about the emptiness of money; it is the bourgeoisie that has already triumphed by 1839, in a world “dyspeptic and obsessed with making money” (19).
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