SOURCE: "Setting: Reference Beyond Signification," in Realism and the Drama of Reference: Strategies of Representation in Balzac, Flaubert, and James, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988, pp. 13-22.

In the following excerpt, Steele analyzes the setting of L'Education sentimentale in order to examine the problematic nature of representation in this Realist text.

The setting of L 'Education sentimentale has all the features of the realistic novel. It is set in a historical place (Paris), in a defined historical period (1840-51, with an epilogue in 1867), and there are many details about the social environment without the suggestion of a transcendent realm beyond the positivistic world of sensations and facts. For the most part, the narrator generates the setting without reference to the narrative instance (e.g., use of first or second person or adverbs that refer to time of narration) and thus emphasizes the forces of disengagement, of reference. Neither...