On Ne Peux Pas Depasser L'Horreur De la Bourgeoisie

[poliphilo]

French provincial towns are the stuffiest, most stultifying provincial towns in the world.

Or so one would gather from a crash course in French literature and cinema.

The one word- bourgeois- says it all. We don't have an English equivalent.

I just watched Chabrol's Les Noces Rouges. God, but these people are dim; they commit two unnecessary murders because they can't imagine moving out of the ugly little town that accords them status.

We English have a different attitude. Cranford, Middlemarch, Barchester are well-loved places; quite lively really; no-one is stifled by them the way Emma Bovary is stifled.

I put it down to France being such a big country. English towns are all squashed up close together; escape is easier. French towns are cut off from one another by miles and miles of prairie.

Physical isolation breeds cultural isolation.

No English town is as deaf and blind to London as any French town is deaf and blind to Paris.

Comments

[frsimon.livejournal.com]

Jude the Oscure?

Wuthering Heights?

[frsimon.livejournal.com]

OK, so the latter actually to do with the isolation of a TOWN...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I think my answer would be along the lines that Hardy was deeply in love with his Wessex.

And the same goes for the Brontes and Yorkshire.

French artists have a contempt for the provincial that I just don't find in their English equivalents.

[frsimon.livejournal.com]

But these English artists, at least, realise that the provincial can be a two edged sword.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's true.