ABSTRACT
In many respects, the novel is resistant to summary by virtue of the fact that both commercial and literary imperatives made for a protracted, digressive and episodic type of narrative (what Umberto Eco calls its 'sinusoidal' structure). But, in brief, one of the more important questions about the place of Eugene Sue's novel in this crossing of histories concerns the exact relation between melodrama and ideology. As already noted, the theoretical openness of the novel to the influence of reader-responses was a matter not just of its temporal mode of publication but also of the structural mode of composition that was the natural correlative of serialization. It is no accident if Sue's novel ends, in our last glimpse of the popular classes before Rodolphe and Fleur-de-Marie disappear into the 'pure' rural retreat of Gerolstein.
