Book dossier

The anxiety of dispossession

by Masha Belenky

"In nineteenth-century France an obsession with jealousy swept the culture as a whole. Virtually every major French novelist employed it as a central plot device. At the same time, jealousy became a key theme for a broad range of medical, journalistic, and moralist authors interested in the study of contemporary mores. In The Anxiety of Dispossession: Jealousy in Nineteenth-Century French Culture, Masha Belenky argues that it was through narratives of jealousy that writers grappled with the crises of political and moral authority, anxieties surrounding changing gender roles, and new ideas about marriage that defined post-Revolutionary France. Focusing on male-authored texts, Belenky demonstrates that this obsession with sexual jealousy conveys both patriarchal anxiety over disempowerment stemming from social upheaval and a male desire for social and sexual control over the female body and mind. Bound up with the male prerogative of ownership, jealousy was assigned an explicitly public role in guarding a man's property and propriety." "This book considers portrayals of jealousy by major authors such as Balzac, Hugo, and Zola alongside a broad range of works by medical writers, journalists, and moralists who wrote for popular audiences." "Covering the years 1818 to 1898, the book shows how the subject of jealousy was used as a projection screen for social and cultural debates in the decades between the French Revolution's radical challenge to religious and political authority and the advent of psychoanalysis at the century's end." "By examining the many layers of meaning that underpan numerous and often dissonant representations of jealousy across a wide range of literary and historical texts, The Anxiety of Dispossession provides a new understanding of the society that made jealousy a central obsession."--Jacket.