'Pécher par omission': Censorship, Gender, and Narrative Logic in the Late NineteenthCentury French Novel

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My research focuses on the effect of censorship on the narrative logic of French novels in the second half of thenineteenth century. Maxime du Camp wrote that authors could draw censors' attention 'par omission,' indicating acomplex narrative interaction between the 'said' and the 'unsaid,' which enables literary subversion. Communicating withthe reader by omissions requires an appeal to shared discourses that exist elsewhere, and which could endure beyondthe passing of the law on freedom of the press in 1881. I will compare newspapers and magazines, official governmenttexts, trial reports, and authors' correspondence and newspaper articles with novelistic discourse and its omissions. Thiswill illuminate how realist novelists censored themselves, how 'unsaidness' functioned in this cultural-historical context,and how novelists integrated socio-political criticism into their novels by manipulating the mechanics of expression andrepression. My research asks: how did politically motivated 'unsaidness' foster the period's aesthetic fixation on femalesexual transgression? I propose that repressed criticisms of social and political trends were displaced onto female-codedproxies, particularly sexual transgression and hyper-fixation on the female body, which outlived the contexts ofcensorship in which they were created. I will foreground Flaubert's novels and the later work of George Sand, andanalyse the legacy of these authors on Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant.