Sarrasine

Although France was one of relatively few European nations to decriminalize relationships between men prior to the 20th century, such relationships still carried a significant social stigma during Balzac’s lifetime. This meant that any depiction of gay romance or desire—even inadvertent or indirect, as in Sarrasine’s case—was inherently subversive. However, Balzac did not shy away from such controversial topics, and several characters in La Comédie Humaine had implied or confirmed relationships and liaisons with members of the same sex. Balzac’s work was also notable for its nuanced depictions of women and its explorations of gender at a time when strict gender roles were enforced by both law and convention. In Sarrasine, these two threads combine in a critique of gender roles, particularly in sexual/romantic relationships.

Balzac first establishes the “norm” through his use of a framing narrative. The unnamed narrator is an everyman character who takes on the stereotypically masculine role of pursuer in his romantic relationship with Madame de Rochefide, who is herself described as an archetypal high-class lady of the era. She is capricious, easily frightened, coquettish, and conventionally attractive, all stereotypically feminine traits. Her relationship with the narrator would be adulterous and therefore technically illicit, but in practice, affairs were common in 19th-century high society. This couple therefore presents a baseline heterosexual couple with firm distinctions between the masculine and feminine against which to explore the characters of Sarrasine and La Zambinella. 

As a castrato, La Zambinella is presented as a figure who defies the gender binary both physically and socially. Sarrasine sees him as embodying all the traits typically associated with a woman; La Zambinella is an “ideal beauty” who shows “maidenly modesty” in her interactions with Sarrasine. Even traits that might objectively be seen as negative become glorified in their association with idealized femininity: “The involuntary shudder of that thoroughly feminine temperament was interpreted by the amorous artist as indicating extreme delicacy of feeling. This weakness delighted the Frenchman. There is so much of the element of protection in a man’s love!” (Paragraph 115). The passage highlights how Sarrasine’s infatuation with La Zambinella affirms his own identity as a masculine heterosexual man, illustrating the relationship between traditional gender roles and heterosexuality while foreshadowing Sarrasine’s violent reaction to the truth. 

However, his violence is not simply a reaction to perceived threat. Rather, Sarrasine claims that learning of La Zambinella’s true identity disillusions him to womankind in general, figuratively “[sweeping] all women off the face of the earth” (Paragraph 182). In other words, Sarrasine has come to recognize femininity as a performance even when performed by women is so thoroughly invested in a fantasy of what womanhood is that he cannot imagine ever finding romantic happiness with a woman now that he knows the “truth.” The return to the frame story extends this critique, as Madame de Rochefide comments, “[A]re not all human sentiments dissolved thus, by ghastly disillusionment?” (Paragraph 198), framing the events of the main narrative as part of a broader pattern. She goes on to highlight the particular dangers of such disillusionment for women—wives and mistresses are “betrayed” or “abandoned”—underscoring its relationship to a system of rigid, artificial gender roles.