It’s almost December, and conference notifications are coming in for the spring. And so I’ve heard from the Nineteenth Century Studies Association. It’ll be my fifth year in a row presenting there (the first time was when the conference came in Boston, 2015).

I don’t happen to have any photos from 2015, but I did make an effort to take a few while walking around downtown Lincoln.

The 2016 theme was “New and Novel.” A set of secondary themes emerged from this first. I believe the head of the Dickens Project from UC Santa Cruz was there, along with a number of graduate students and senior scholars working in the field, so I overheard a lot of talk about Our Mutual Friend. The novel came up on the first day, in Dr. Daniel Pollack-Pelzner‘s plenary lecture. Later, Dr. James Mussell, from the University of Leeds, who joined a group of us at lunch (we didn’t know he was the speaker and were a little surprised when he popped up to run to the podium), gave a wonderful presentation on the bitter legal battle over ownership of the name Chlorodine. Mussell works in the Digital Humanities (University of Nebraska, I later learned, is a huge center for the field), and I found it fascinating to see how he could trace the narrative of the dispute, using advertisements pulled up from the archives. Almost by coincidence one of these ads for the medicine (I use that term under advisement) was printed inside a serial installment of Dickens’s aforementioned novel. There was also a wonderful presentation that first afternoon, by Megan Hansen, on ophthalmology in Dickens’s Bleak House.

There weren’t too many French specialists at the conference, or other foreign languages represented that year, though there were a few, including the two other people on my panel (both working in Spanish). My presentation was early on Saturday morning, and I spoke about the the similarities between Maupassant’s “Première neige” and his first novel, Une Vie. (Abstract below.)

Here are a few impressions of what I saw while I was there.

If you continue to follow me, you’ll see that my picture taking improves somewhat over the next few years. Or at least I’d like to think it does.

Here’s the abstract from my presentation:

Beyond Marriage or Death: A Comparative Reading of Guy de Maupassant’s Une Vie and “Première neige”

In his notes to the Pléïade edition of Guy de Maupassant’s first novel, Une Vie (published serially in the spring and early summer of 1883), Louis Forrestier notes similarities and connections to nearly four dozen of Maupassant’s other writings. It is odd that he does not mention “Première neige,” a short story published in December of 1883, whose plot and principal character bears a striking resemblance to the heroine of Une Vie. This presentation, taken from ongoing dissertation research, examines the similarities between the novel and the short story, and asks the question as to why the novel and short story, though similar in many ways, have radically different endings. While the difference in endings is partially a formal necessity, the larger issue at stake is the question of what spaces belong to a woman remains the same in both texts. While other authors of the period, Zola in particular, see the natural world as representative of femininity, and social convention sees the domicile as belonging to women, Maupassant instead signals that men control both the exterior world and the domicile. While his position is arguably bleak, the final chapter of Une Vie explores the possibility that women might escape beyond the male-dominated sphere and create spaces and family structures that are entirely their own.