Yvette Reading Order

How does Yvette compare to Bel-Ami?

Yvette (1885) and Bel-Ami (1885) were published in the same year and address related aspects of the same social world — the demi-monde and its relationship to respectable bourgeois society — from opposite perspectives. Bel-Ami follows the rise of a man who uses women as instruments of his social ascent, treating the demi-monde as a resource to be exploited by masculine energy and calculation. Yvette follows the destruction of a woman who is born into the demi-monde without understanding it, and who discovers that there is no exit from the social world into which she was born. The two works together constitute Maupassant's most comprehensive treatment of gender and social class in the Third Republic: Bel-Ami shows how a man can use the social system to his advantage by understanding its rules; Yvette shows how a woman is trapped by those same rules regardless of whether she understands them. Bel-Ami's Georges Duroy succeeds because he has no illusions about what the social world values; Yvette fails because she had too many illusions — but the novel also suggests that Yvette's survival will depend on losing her illusions and accepting the life she was born to, which makes her eventual accommodation as morally complex as Duroy's success.