Winter 2001
Volume 27, Number 2

To be thoughtful does not signify merely to be contemplative, lost, as it were, in one's thoughts. It also signifies preoccupation and fullness of care. Uneasy rests the pensive soul. Thoughtfulness arises at moments of tension in the narrative, which are often linked to sexuality and seduction. The pensive character--most often a female or an effeminate male protagonist--hesitates on the verge of a fall; pensiveness corresponds to a lack of desire, a moment of aphanisis. But, above all, pensiveness in Balzac draws its meaning from its implicit opposition to the prestigious domain of thought, which is reserved for Balzac's thinkers and geniuses, and these thinkers and geniuses are all male: for example, Louis Lambert (Louis Lambert), Raphael de Valentin (La Peau de chagrin), and d'Arthez (Lost Illusions). As it is noted in parenthesis in the Grand Dictionnaire Encyclopédique Larousse, the feminine form of thinker, penseuse, is rare.4 Indeed. Among the numerous cartoons that have lampooned le penseur over the years, the representation of The Thinker as "la penseuse" attests to the absurdity of such a figure. In a culture where Woman is identified with irrationality and unbridled emotionalism, the figure of a woman cannot be substituted for that of the male Thinker without evoking laughter.

If thought is a male prerogative and the thinker necessarily male, as an abstract idea and a feminine noun, la pensée, it is like so many abstractions allegorized as female. Hence Rodin's 1886-89 marble sculpture Thought (La Pensée) represents thought as a female head, indeed the head of Camille Claudel, Rodin's model, disciple, and mistress, emerging in her neoclassical purity from a roughly hewn marble base. Prefiguring The Thinker's odd shock of matted hair, Thought wears a wavy bonnet on her hair, as though these head coverings were quite literally thinking caps. There is however a crucial difference between Thought and The Thinker: whereas the marble Thought is represented by a severed head, in keeping with Rodin's aesthetic of the body in parts, the bronze Thinker is embodied in one of RodinŐs rare fully articulated human forms.

Now I will surprise no one if I affirm that pensiveness goes hand in hand with femininity--which is to say the feminine not femaleness-- while thought is aligned with masculinity, in short that thought and pensiveness are fully gendered states. In Balzac there are pensive male characters, but there are no female characters gifted with thought. Similarly there is no need to demonstrate that Balzac's own thought constitutes a field that has been thoroughly explored by critics such as Ernst Curtius, Alain, and Per Nykrog, the author of a significant contribution to Balzac studies, La Pensée de Balzac. To speak of Balzac's thought is above all to speak of Balzac's thought about thought, as it was conceived in the romantic era under the joint influence of Lavater, Bichat, and Swedenborg. To speak of thought in Balzac is to speak of his thoughts about or of something. To think can be an intransitive verb, whereas thoughtfulness is only a purely reflexive state without content or direct or indirect object.

4. See Grand Dictionnaire Encyclopédique Larousse, s.v. "penseur, -euse," p. 4133.

Naomi Schor is Benjamin F. Barge Professor of French at Yale University. She is author of, most recently, Bad Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular (1995) and George Sand and Idealism (1993) and coeditor, with Elizabeth Weed, of Feminism Meets Queer Theory (1997).