YMMV / Eugénie Grandet

• Angst? What Angst?: Balzac does not record Eugénie's emotions at the time of her kind, loving mother's death. Odd considering that when her selfish father is at the point of death, which father's actions caused both Eugénie and her mother such grief and directly or indirectly contributed to the mother's death, the author does depict Eugénie as shedding tears and tenderly asking for his blessing.
• Fair for Its Day: The novel does a great job of exposing the underlying injustice of avarice, self-centeredness and domestic tyranny, as well as the hypocrisy of exploiting religion and patriarchal values to extort tolerance of and compliance with such behaviors from meek wives and daughters. It does not, however, attack the church as an institution or explicitly condemn the aforesaid patriarchal religious values, and in fact there are some indices to the effect that the author is a proponent of sincere, heartfelt Christian beliefs and virtues.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Not too many modern women, even conservative Christian ones, would be as slavishly submissive and deferential to the male head of the household as Eugénie and her mother were.
  • Being a bankrupt, while certainly not a positive thing, would probably not bring the kind of disgrace to oneself and one's family in today's society that it did in this story.
  • Eugénie wishes to marry Charles, who is her first cousin. This may not sit well with modern readers.
• The Woobie: Eugénie and her mother, who live under the yoke of a very wealthy but extremely miserly and despotic father and husband and are too kind-hearted and religious to take a real stand against it. Eugénie ends up falling in love with her cousin Charles and giving him her gold coin collection, but he never comes back to marry her; she only succeeds in getting her father angry enough to banish her indefinitely to her room; her mother falls ill from the shock of his reaction and dies shortly after he finally ends Eugénie's punishment. Eugénie ends up inheriting her father's (and later - supposedly - her husband's) wealth, but alone in the world.