French and Francophone Literature Commons^™

Precarious Provenance: Legitimacy, Surrogacy And Betrayal In The Value Of Art And Family In Honoré De Balzac's Le Cousin Pons And Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, Ryan Coburn

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on the problematic nature of art valuation, more specifically concerning the ideas of use-value and exchange-value in Honoré de Balzac’s Le Cousin Pons and Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. Written in nineteenth-century France, Balzac’s novel paints a bleak portrait of what he believes to be a morally corrupt society obsessed with the lesser things in life such as money and status rather than what is truly important: culture and art. In her novel, which bears a striking resemblance to Balzac’s, Tartt presents her perception of present-day United States, also plagued with moral corruption and disregard for the …