Recommendations
Books Like Yvette
Best books to read after Yvette by Maupassant
Readers who respond to Yvette's portrait of innocence destroyed by the social world's corruption, its treatment of the demi-monde, and Maupassant's characteristic irony will find the wider tradition of French Naturalist fiction about women and social class.
- 1Buy
Bel-Ami
by Guy de Maupassant
Bel-Ami (1885) is Yvette's essential companion: where Yvette shows the demi-monde from the perspective of the innocent daughter who doesn't understand it, Bel-Ami shows it from the perspective of the man who uses it for his own advancement — together they constitute Maupassant's complete study of the demi-monde's social function.
- 2Buy
Nana
by Émile Zola
Zola's great novel about a woman of the demi-monde who destroys the men who consume her is the most powerful treatment in the French Naturalist tradition of the same social world that Maupassant shows in Yvette: where Yvette shows the daughter of the demi-monde as innocent victim, Nana shows the woman of the demi-monde as predatory survivor.
- 3Buy
La Traviata (novel source)
by Alexandre Dumas fils
Dumas fils's novel La Dame aux camélias (1848), the source of La Traviata, shows the woman of the demi-monde from the sentimental perspective: Marguerite Gautier, like Yvette, is a victim of the social world into which she was born, but where Maupassant's Yvette accepts her fate with resigned irony, Dumas's Marguerite dies of romantic tuberculosis.
- 4Buy
Une vie
by Guy de Maupassant
Une vie (1883) shows the same female vulnerability to male abandonment that Yvette shows, but in the provincial respectable world rather than the Parisian demi-monde: Jeanne de Lamare's gradual deterioration parallels Yvette's forced accommodation to her world, and both novels trace the same pattern of female expectation and male disappointment.
- 5Buy
Germinie Lacerteux
by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
The Goncourts' 1865 novel about a servant who leads a secret life of sexual abandon is the most extreme Naturalist treatment of the same hidden social world that Yvette's mother inhabits: both novels show the respectable surface and the corrupt reality of the same Second Empire and Third Republic social world.
- 6Buy
Miss Harriet
by Guy de Maupassant
Miss Harriet (1884) shows Maupassant's treatment of innocent femininity destroyed by the social world from a different angle: Miss Harriet is the religiously innocent woman who drowns herself when she discovers that the painter she loves has kissed another — the same innocence that Yvette represents, but in the alien social world of the English visitor to Normandy.
- 7Buy
La Maison Tellier
by Guy de Maupassant
Maupassant's 1881 short story collection includes 'La Maison Tellier,' the story about a provincial brothel whose employees attend a First Communion and are transformed by the experience — the most celebrated of Maupassant's treatments of the demi-monde from the inside, and the essential companion to Yvette's outside view.
- 8Buy
Sister Carrie
by Theodore Dreiser
Dreiser's great American novel about a young woman who comes to the city and rises within its commercial and theatrical world is the closest American parallel to Yvette's story: both novels analyze the relationship between female innocence, social mobility, and the institutions that determine women's fate.
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