Chérie Reading Order

Chérie (1884) by Edmond de Goncourt is his last novel and, in his own view, the fulfillment of the Naturalist project applied to the most intimate subject: the interior psychological life of an adolescent aristocratic girl from birth to death. Chérie Haudancourt is raised in the aristocratic world of the Second Empire, surrounded by luxury, by the love of her grandfather, and by the complete absence of meaningful activity or intellectual content — and the novel traces, with clinical precision, the way this combination of material abundance and spiritual emptiness produces the nervous disorder that kills her. The method is the most extreme application of the Goncourt 'writing of the nervous system' (écriture artiste) to a single consciousness: rather than a social world observed from the outside, Chérie is an attempt to render the interior experience of a hypersensitive consciousness from the inside. Chérie is rarely read now, but it was important in the development of the psychological novel: Edmond de Goncourt's preface, in which he defends the novel's interior method and its refusal of external plot, is the most direct statement of what would become the central claim of the psychological novel against the social novel — that the most interesting subject is not what happens but what is felt.