Blurred Humanity: The Grandparental Fantastic and the Values of Aging

Within storytelling economies of nineteenth-century France, grand-parental authors and narrators operate ambiguously, often relegated to the outworn periphery of social life but still central to the circulation of inheritable tradition and cultural wealth. Further, Charles Nodier suggests, grandparents' age gives them privileged access not so much (or not only) to the heights of wisdom but also to the strangely "intermediary" and often devalued realm of the fantastic. This article sets off to explore Nodier's suggestion by means of five tales—by Clémence Robert, Delphine de Girardin, Madame de Ségur, George Sand, and Victor Hugo—in which encounters with the nonhuman push the grandparental fantastic to scrutinize the unstable values of intergenerational exchange.