ABSTRACT
Balzac's La Comedie humaine, on the other hand, is fertile ground for those feminist critics who make up the second of our two strands, since the concept of paternity is at the centre of his representation of the contemporary world. At the same time, the reader is introduced to an unprecedented range of female types that provides abundant explanation as to why Balzac should have been known to his age as primarily 'le romancier de la femme'. Moreover, there is no doubt that Balzac consciously raises the issue of the condition of women in the new, bourgeois age. After a compelling account of Eugenie's narcissism and melancholia, Schor concludes that Balzac's heroine, while remaining a victim of patriarchal law, achieves a 'lucid romanticism', based on 'a refusal to decide in the terms offered by the culture'.
