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THE BOURGEOIS NOVEL
This kind of novel differed from the realistic novel as its features are characterization and psychological analysis. It usually based its detailed exploration of the characters’ emotions and states of mind on the epistolary technique; actually the letter form made the personal insight and the recording of the characters’ mental processes and feelings possible, so that it provided new ways of revealing the human character. The epistolary novel, which is told through letters exchanged between different characters, flourished in the 18th century in particular through Samuel Richardson.
Bourgeois novels [E1] [I1] [F1] [ES1] follow more or less the same pattern and present the same features:
- They are no longer based on a sequence of picturesque and fantastic episodes, but on a single story, made up of everyday events and complex emotional situations, which often offer a pretext to analyse the characters’ feelings and passions.
- These novels reveal psychological insight into human feelings (readers are taken inside the minds of the characters so as to share their innermost thoughts and feelings). Characters are usually far from being static as they gradually develop.
- Realism emerges in the minute recording of the characters’ mental processes and emotions.
- They are not set in exotic places, but in a domestic middle-class environment.
- Characters are now middle-class people; they are put at the centre of the novels with their private lives, their family problems, their ethics and their desires.
- They usually focus on love stories with happy or tragic endings.
- They have a moral message, as they aimed at entertaining and edifying at the same time
- They share the epistolary form: they are written through a series of letters exchanged between the main characters. This narrative device, using the first person narrator technique, adds realism to the story, since it provides detailed accounts of the characters’ thoughts, dreams and fears. Another great strength of the epistolary novel is its immediacy: characters reveal themselves with spontaneity and openness and as they read the letters readers are induced to believe that the letters are as they were in the very act of composition.
8/15
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