Abstract
The contrast in Julien Sorel between the parvenu and the âme tendre is a contrast between a social self and an ‘essential’ self, conceived as being prior to social determination, that Christopher Prendergast has referred to as “the untouchable Self”. The way the text plays with this distinction in its treatment of Julien's love affairs and the convention of the hero of uncertain birth seems to require us to read the ending as a celebration of the untouchable Self. However, the final chapters resist this sort of apotheosizing closure by insisting on Julien's inevitable sociality. The key figure here is Mathilde who intrudes on his dream of romantic inviolability and revives the ruthlessly calculating side of his personality. The novel's apparent drive to closure is thereby undermined by paradox: “we buy peace through cruelty, and disinterested love through self-interested calculation”. The sharpest paradox of all is Mathilde's final appropriation of Julien for history as a latter-day Boniface de la Mole.
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Place, D. Stendhal, Le rouge et le noir and the untouchable Self. Neophilologus 80, 377–384 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00312419
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00312419