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    A Study Guide for Honore de Balzac's "Pere Goriot"
    A Study Guide for Honore de Balzac's "Pere Goriot"
    A Study Guide for Honore de Balzac's "Pere Goriot"
    Ebook44 pages34 minutes

    A Study Guide for Honore de Balzac's "Pere Goriot"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Honore de Balzac's "Pere Goriot," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535830751
    A Study Guide for Honore de Balzac's "Pere Goriot"

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      A Study Guide for Honore de Balzac's "Pere Goriot" - Gale

      10

      Le Père Goriot

      Honoré de Balzac

      1834

      Introduction

      Honoré de Balzac's Le Père Goriot is one of the most enduring novels of world literature, a chronicle of ambition and despair to touch any but the stoniest heart. Initially criticized as poorly written because it did not conform to rigid standards of poetic style, the novel has nonetheless been continuously in print since its serial publication in the Revue de Paris in the winter of 1834 and 1835. Balzac wrote the novel in the autumn of 1834 to satisfy his creditors—from whom he was literally in hiding. Perhaps as a consequence, Le Père Goriot is above all else concerned with money: specifically, the vast social and economic changes that occurred in France between the French Revolution of 1789 and the July revolution of 1830. These were tumultuous decades in France, marked by high political intrigue, wild swings of economic fortune, and level of social mobility never before seen.

      Set in Paris in 1819, only four years after the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, Le Père Goriot focuses on the intertwined characters of Eugène de Rastignac, an ambitious young man from the poorer rural nobility; Vautrin, a criminal mastermind; and Jean-Joachim Père Goriot, an old man eking out his last years in increasing poverty. The novel involves characters from a variety of economic classes competing for money, power, and social recognition—much as in the real France of the time. Le Père Goriot is just one small part of Balzac's massive lifework, La Comédie Humaine, or The Human Comedy, which includes well over one hundred interwoven novels, stories, and essays. Nonetheless, this small part is a particularly important one; it was with Le Père Goriot that Balzac first began systematically to write about the same characters from novel to novel and story to story. Rastignac, here a young man, had appeared previously in La Peau de chagrin (1831) as an elderly man. His mode of social climbing resonated so deeply with readers that his name became literally synonymous with social opportunist.

      Author Biography

      Honoré de Balzac was born May 20, 1799, to Bernard-François and Anne-Charlotte-Laure de Balzac, in what was then the small town of Tours in France's Loire Valley. His parents put him out to nurse (that is, sent to a lactating woman who nursed him until he was past infancy) within hours of his birth. Hence Balzac's earliest experiences of the world were, by and large, not with his parents at their home, but rather with a nurse whom he later described as a gendarme, a policeman, with whom he was left until he was four years old. Certainly,

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