Acasă Articole RTR Plot străin, structură de clasă locală: frica de slugi și realismul semiperiferic
Plot străin, structură de clasă locală: frica de slugi și realismul semiperiferic
Rezumat
Foreign Plot, Local Class Structure: The Fear of Servants and Semiperipheral Realism
Abstract: This article examines the transformation of class relations into narrative form in semiperipheral realist and naturalist fiction, focusing on the shifting role of servants and lower-class characters in Gustave Flaubert, Eça de Queirós, Sofia Nădejde, and finally Liviu Rebreanu. Starting from the canonical model of Madame Bovary, where the servant remains largely part of the realist apparatus surrounding Emma’s drama, the article follows the way peripheral and semiperipheral adaptations of realism displace narrative agency toward socially subordinate figures. In Eça de Queirós’s Cousin Basílio (1878), Juliana turns domestic invisibility into blackmail, violently reversing the relation between mistress and servant. In Sofia Nădejde’s Passions (1903), however, the servant Casandra opens a different problem, connected to the contrast between women dependent on status and women exploited through labor yet endowed with practical autonomy. The Balzacian, Flaubertian, or Zolian observing eye, traditionally anchored in bourgeois rationality and social confidence, is displaced in semiperipheral fiction by unstable, compromised, or socially marginal observers: servants, clerks, provincial intellectuals, and impoverished women. This displacement is especially visible in Liviu Rebreanu’s fiction of the 1920s.
Keywords: semiperipheral realism, class analysis, fear of servants, bourgeois narrator.
Bibliografie
Acknowledgement: This work was funded by the EU’s NextGenerationEU instrument through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of Romania – Pillar III-C9-I8, managed by the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalization, within the project entitled “Networks of (Dis)similarities: The Circulation of Western Romance Literatures in Eastern Europe (NETSIM)”, contract no. 760075/23.05.2023, code CF 292/30.11.2022.
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