Sarrasine

Sarrasine is one of many works that Balzac set within a fictionalized version of 19th-century French society to create his La Comédie Humaine series. This body of work cemented Balzac’s reputation as one of the greatest French writers of the modern era and was a landmark in the development of the Realist movement. Realism was a reaction against the drama and sentimentality of the preceding Romantic movement and aimed to depict a more accurate portrayal of life, including the internal worlds and perspectives of characters. Balzac’s work is characterized by lengthy, detailed depictions of characters and settings, which combine to provide a vivid account of events. Descriptive language appears throughout Sarrasine, but particularly in the opening paragraphs of the frame narrative, where it establishes the scene of the de Lanty family ball, and during Sarrasine’s first encounter with La Zambinella at the Italian opera, where it conveys the performance’s intense impact on him. 

Another literary device that features frequently in Sarrasine is antithesis, as Balzac establishes dichotomies between opposing elements to create tension or express particular themes. One of the most prominent examples involves life and death, which the first paragraph of the novella juxtaposes, comparing a tableau of bare trees to the “Dance of Death” (a genre of medieval allegory) and then describing the ball as the “dance of the living” (Paragraph 1). Another pair of opposites is male and female, although Balzac later subverts the perceived binary through the character of La Zambinella, whose castrato status places him in an intermediary position.

Sarrasine’s misapprehension that La Zambinella is female is the primary source of tension and conflict in the main plotline, particularly since the reader does not learn the truth until Sarrasine’s own moment of anagnorisis. The novella foreshadows this sudden revelation throughout, including in La Zambinella’s timid attempts to rebuff Sarrasine’s affections, in the conflation of masculine and feminine in the artworks modelled on La Zambinella, and in the malicious mirth of the other performers. The moment of revelation is therefore cathartic because it dispels the tension and mystery in a single conclusive and coherent stroke.

Balzac’s use of a frame story allows him to set the more dramatic tale of Sarrasine and La Zambinella in late 18th-century Italy, a location often coded “exotic” in more northern and western Europe, while contextualizing it within the more familiar world of contemporaneous France. The juxtaposition of locations thus supports the novella’s critique of social and cultural norms—particularly The Artificiality of Gender Roles. Balzac establishes these norms through the narrator and Madame de Rochefide only to explore and subvert them in the relationship between Sarrasine and La Zambinella. The crux of the critique centers on the performative nature of gender roles, which La Zambinella’s quite literal performance of femininity exposes. Sarrasine’s violent despair after learning the truth is an extreme example of what can happen when a particular construction of femininity becomes synonymous with “real” womanhood, but it is not the only critique the novella offers. For example, the offhand comment that marriages are often made between such disparate figures as Madame de Rochefide and the aged La Zambinella reflects a society that treats women chiefly as decorative objects. 

In conjunction with its critique of gender roles, the novella also examines sexual mores. For example, the novella implies that Cardinal Cicognara is La Zambinella’s “protector,” a contemporary euphemism implying a romantic/sexual relationship between an older, more powerful man and a castrato. There’s irony (and hypocrisy) in the fact that the Catholic Church is responsible for much of the social stigma against LGBTQ individuals, even as its representative in the story actively participates in a relationship with another man. Similarly, the Church implemented prohibitions against women performing on stage to uphold traditional religious moral standards, but it is this very prohibition that results in La Zambinella dressing as a woman and thereby inadvertently drawing Sarrasine’s attention.  

Another significant theme is that of The Dangers of Obsession. The narrator characterizes Sarrasine as excessively passionate and impulsive, with a predisposition to antisocial behavior and fixations. In the novella’s framing, such traits are linked to his uncommon artistic genius, and they prove to be his fatal flaw as he becomes infatuated with La Zambinella. His fall from a position of security and prestige—a celebrated artist with no major vices—to a violent and ignoble death is reminiscent of classic tragedy. He also shares many traits with an archetypal Romantic hero, although the novella undercuts the pathos of his story by giving it elements that would have been seen as absurd at the time—most notably, falling for a castrato rather than a woman. 

La Zambinella receives less character development than Sarrasine, but the reader’s knowledge and understanding of him does grow over the course of the narrative. Though the novella relies heavily on the perceived luridness of La Zambinella’s profession, it otherwise frames him sympathetically, particularly with respect to his powerlessness in both his life and his dealings with Sarrasine. Although he has prestige and fame in his career, La Zambinella is clearly unhappy. His speech is full of pathos-laden language, and he experiences the trauma of both Sarrasine’s violence and of witnessing Sarrasine’s own violent end. The revelation that La Zambinella is one and the same as the elderly man at the de Lanty soiree—a figure the novella depicts as spectral and grotesque—creates a further level of tragedy by showing La Zambinella’s fall from youthful beauty and fame. 

La Zambinella is also key to Balzac’s exploration of the theme of Art and the Impact of Representation on Identity, as he becomes both the subject and creator of his own art when he performs. Furthermore, La Zambinella inspires the art of not only Sarrasine but also subsequent artists who base their work on the sculpture. The statue that Sarrasine creates symbolizes the artist’s obsession with a non-existent ideal woman, which he imposes over the reality of La Zambinella, whose real identity disappears amid the various depictions of him.