Quest of the Spirit: From Suffering to Acceptance

115. Tragic Love that Destroys: Balzac's Pere Goriot!

                                     Balzac's Pere Goriot: A Christ Among Fathers

         "There was more than human grief on his face. To paint it as it should be painted the face of this Christ among fathers, we would need to search among the images created by the princes of the palette to depict the agony suffered on the world's behalf by the Savior of mankind." This passage from Honore de Balzac's Pere Goriot suggests the intensity of the suffering and anguish that Father Goriot experiences in sacrificing his heart and soul for his two daughters. Like Christ, he endures the persecution, privation, and humiliation associated with the ultimate gift of life; and like Christ, he suffers rejection by friends and family. Pere Goriot serves as a sacrificial figure through which Balzac indicts the hypocrisy of early nineteenth-century French society. The author uses the concepts of fate and irony to create a tone of tragic loss.

            Balzac also uses fate and victimization in a social tragedy in Pere Goriot. Father Goriot lives in lodging with gossiping tenants who speculate about his initial wealth and subsequent deprivation. His two daughters visit him, yet the lodgers believe they are his mistresses (57). Following his wife's death, Goriot focuses all of his attention on them. As he tells young law student Eugene de Rastignac, "My life is in my two daughters" (132). Goriot encourages them to marry prosperously; however, their husbands refuse to let him live with them or visit them openly. Rejected, Goriot throws "himself into the lodging house as a consequence of the despair that seize[s] him" (94). The hero then seeks voluntary exile "in his own poverty" (81), sacrificing his entire life savings in order to maintain their affluent lifestyles. His preoccupation with them becomes his sole happiness. In his frustration, he asks Rastignac, "So long as they enjoy themselves and are happy and smartly dressed, and can have carpets to walk on, what does it matter what rags I wear or the sort of place I sleep in?" (132). Goriot exiles himself in much the same manner as Hamlet surreptitiously exiles himself under the assumed cloak of madness. Ironically, the daughters even rival each other in the fierceness of social competition, much like King Lear's daughters who quarrel over their unwillingness to care for their father. The most tragic aspect, however, occurs when the sisters abandon him completely. Goriot exclaims, "There's a God in Heaven! He avenges us fathers in spite of ourselves . . . It was my fault; it was I who taught them to trample me underfoot" (259). Goriot says his daughters were his "vice," and that he "loved them so much that he "went back to them again like a gambler going back to the gaming tables" (258). Balzac's realism is harsh, yet true, as he suggests the dual tragic aspects of the story. The daughters' obsession for social prestige and the father's preoccupation with their happiness lead to tragic consequences in both cases. On his deathbed Goriot sends letters requesting his daughters' presence one last time, but even then, they refuse. As Rastignac tells the countess at an afternoon call, "This father had given everything. For twenty he'd given his life, his blood, his love; he'd given his whole fortune away in one day. And once they'd squeezed the lemon dry, his daughters threw the peel in the gutter" (81). In torment, the dying man exclaims, "Ah, my friend, never marry, never have children! You give them life, and they give you death. You help them into the world, and they drive you out of it" (256). The sisters only desire his money, and Goriot learns that social status, to them transcends love and affection. This is Balzac's commentary on the snobbery of nineteenth-century French society. Ironically, a medical student, not his children, "undertakes to place the old man in a pauper's coffin . . . without form or ceremony" (272-273). Balzac here suggests that in a world of misplaced values, there exist no place for nobility of character or mind. Eugene realizes, as he waits for the daughters to occupy their places at Goriot's bedside, "Finer spirits can't stay long in this world. And how indeed can deep feeling reconcile itself with a society so shabby and petty and superficial?" (253). In essence, Balzac describes French society as "nothing but an ocean of mud" from which anyone "who ventured a foot into it would be plunged into it up to his neck" (243). In closing, however, Christophe acknowledges that Old Goriot was "a good, honest man" who "never raised his voice" or "harmed nobody" (274). Goriot truly serves as Balzac's hero, rising like the phoenix about the cruelty of this world, where Eugene's tears would ultimately find him, "reaching to heaven" (275).