“Père Goriot” by Honoré de Balzac: Literary scholar finds the main character, Eugène de Rastignac, has “split personality”

Almost as soon as this character is introduced, the narrator, routinely and persistently, refers to him (and no other character) in two different ways:

“So she wrote a letter to this young woman, in the best old style, and handed it to Eugène, advising him that if he could get anywhere with the vicomtesse she’d also look up some other distant family members. Not long after his arrival home, Rastignac mailed his aunt’s letter to Madame de Beausésant. And the vicomtesse replied with an invitation to a ball she was giving the very next day” (1, p. 27).

I wondered if literary scholarship had anything to say about this, and I found that it did.

“Having discovered, in the course of a tutorial on Le Père Goriot, that at least one student who had attended lectures on the novel believed ‘Eugène’ and ‘Rastignac’ to be two different people, it occurred to me that some more rigorous research might be justified into Balzac’s practice of persistently using two names for his central character. While obviously not excusing the laziness of the student in question, an exploration of the text does suggest that as far as the novelist is concerned Eugène de Rastignac is indeed made up of two clearly defined characters, and that Balzac’s use of forename or surname at various points is not only persistent, but consistent in terms of implied meanings” (2).

The scholar then studied the context in which each of these two names is used throughout the novel, and found these two personality profiles:

Eugène: follower, victim, erroneous beliefs, asks questions, nervous perplexity, submissiveness, tender-hearted, gauche, feels inferior, honest.

Rastignac: leader, gives answers, assertive, confident, dominating, worldly.

“One can never know just how conscious this splitting of names was on Balzac’s part…” (2).

As I continue to read the novel, I will see if there is anything more to say.

1. Honoré de Balzac. Père Goriot [1835]. Trans. Burton Raffel. Ed. Peter Brooks. New York, W. W. Norton, 1994.

2. Trevor Field (1985). “The Split Personality of Eugène de Rastignac,” Romance Studies, 3:1, 167-181, DOI: 10.1179/ros.1985.3.2.167