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Narrating Hospitality: Salons in French Fiction, 1789–1848 https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.113835 Lepper, Ellamae White, Claire Sugden, Rebecca This thesis calls for renewed attention to the space of the salon – the primary site of hospitality in an aristocratic or haut-bourgeois household – in early nineteenth- century French literature, particularly within feminist scholarship. It considers fictional discourse on the salon through Derrida’s theory of hospitality, and through feminist deconstructions of the figure of the hostess in Western narrative. Through chapters on three authors – Mme de Staël, Stendhal, and Balzac – the thesis maintains a focus on the salon as signifier of hospitality’s inevitable failures and contradictions, counter to its more usual reputation as symbol of an idealised French conversation culture, and argues that hostesses provide a focal point for literary anxiety about hospitality. Identifying Staël as a surprisingly non-nostalgic commentator on Parisian salons, it suggests that this room’s most important function in her novels is as a space in which to critique France’s neglect of key ethical values, prompting questions about what nuances we risk erasing from her thought by rhetorically situating her career entirely within the salon. A chapter on Stendhal digs deeper into the hostess’s structural relationship with masculine self-mastery and identity; aiming to soften some past assessments of his fiction as misogynist, while noticing the limitations of his wish to see hospitable women valued more highly. Finally, the third chapter explores three texts from Balzac’s Comédie humaine, asking whether even Balzac’s most eulogistic writings on the salon do not in fact do the work of ensuring its obsolescence, positioning the Realist narrator as successor to the salon hostess in allowing access to the monde. Each of these novels represents a key nineteenth-century instalment in the story of the salon as told by France to itself; this project aims to enrich our understanding of that narrative as narrative, with implications for an evolving cultural imaginary of the socially powerful woman. University of Cambridge 2024-05-02 Thesis Doctoral Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) eng The Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholarship Programme https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/376720 embargo 2025-11-29 https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/c53566be-81da-46b7-9f3c-f9730494b3b8/download 87eda9de84448d1f82354d60eee3eb5f https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/dcf30091-6345-4f02-b0c8-079cdf891cf5/download c6f10c98a5b65cb1a472e9726a394d38 https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/ Literature France Salons Hospitality Novels Mme de Staël Stendhal Honoré de Balzac The Nineteenth Century