scholarly journals THE LIFE OF GERVAISE MACQUART AS A LOWER WORKING CLASS WOMEN UNDER FRENCH SECOND EMPIRE IN THE NOVEL L’ASSOMMOIR BY ÉMILE ZOLA

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 119
Author(s):  
Teguh Basuki ◽  
Arifah Arum Candra H.

The industrialization which developed in the 19th century France had brought both positive and negative impacts. Some of the negative impacts are the rising number of labors, the emergence of inter class conflicts, social problems such as prostitution, and the oppression of lower class women. This research will discuss about the life of lower class women depicted in the novel L’Assommoir by Émile Zola, as the portrayal of the reality in the French Second Empire. The analysis uses qualitative descriptive technique and applies Foucaults’s theory on social exclusion, Beauvoir’s theory of second sex, and also gender theory. The analysis shown that Zola criticize the inequalities in the life of lower class women under Second Empire. It also shows that lower class women excluded from the ‘grand’ discourse in French society. The exclusion process which is done by society and supported by the State at that time regarded as a normal thing and ‘taken for granted’.

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-144
Author(s):  
Sabina Pstrocki-Sehovic ◽  
Sabina Pstrocki-Sehovic

This article will present the extent to which literature could be viewed as means of social communication – i.e. informing and influencing society – in 19thcentury France, by analysing the appearance of three authors at different points:  the beginning, the middle and the end of the century. The first is the case of Balzac at the beginning of the 19th Century who becomes the most successful novelist of the century in France and who, in his prolific expression and rich vocabulary, portrays society from various angles in a huge opus of almost 100 works, 93 of them making his Comédie humaine. The second is the case of Gustave Flaubert whose famous novel Madame Bovary, which depicts a female character in a realist but also in a psychologically conscious manner, around the mid-19th century reaches French courts together with Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire and is exposed as being socially judged for its alleged immorality. The last is the political affair of Dreyfus and its defender Emile Zola, the father of naturalism. This case confirms the establishment of more intense relations between writer and politics and builds a solid way for a more conscious and everyday political engagement in the literary world from the end of the 19th century onwards. These three are the most important cases which illustrate how fiction functioned in relation to society, state and readership in 19th century France.


2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanafiah Azmi Dan Teguh Basuki

During the Second Empire, the development of educational field commenced the development inother fields, such as economics and politics. These could not be separated from the influence of theChurch which at that time had a close relationship with the State. The emergence of a new social class,Bourgeoisie, had changed the life style of the society which initially oriented from the Lord to secular.They wanted a freedom of life from the control of the Church. The dominant role of the Church at first,it gradually shifted along with increasing role of the new social class. This research discussed about thelife of the society during the Second Empire, represented by Émile Zola on the novel La Faute de l’AbbéMouret through the life of the clergyman. The problems which arised from himself (internal) and of thesurroundings (external), pushed the main character to leave his life in the Church and took off his statusas a clergyman.


Author(s):  
Emily Bowles

Emile Zola was a key figure in French realism and a leading figure of the naturalist movement. A prolific novelist, journalist, and theorist, he is best known for his reflections on contemporary French society in the ambitious twenty-novel Les Rougon-Macquart cycle, a series focussed on the fortunes of one family over several generations. Zola sought to express new scientific ideas about heredity and environmental factors in the development of human behavior, as well as to use his fictional family to represent the paradoxical nature of a corrupt yet dynamic society, emerging out of the Second Empire. Over more than twenty years, Zola’s novel cycle examined nineteenth-century French society through social, political, and artistic lenses, causing controversy within the literary establishment for his representations of the working class, changing morality and sexuality at the end of the century, and the emerging concerns of modernity. These themes were also more broadly expressed in Zola’s thirty-one novels, five short-story collections, diverse literary criticism, several plays, and a long journalistic career. His political writings culminated in Zola penning the infamous "J’Accuse…!" open letter regarding the Dreyfus Affair to the President of France, as the final move in his campaign on behalf of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer who was wrongly convicted of communicating French military secrets to Germany in 1894.


2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-89
Author(s):  
Mareike Schildmann

Abstract This article traces some of the fundamental poetological changes that the traditional crime novel undergoes in the work of the Swiss author Friedrich Glauser at the beginning of the 20th century. The rational-analytical, conservative approach of the criminal novel in the 19th century implied – according to Luc Boltanski – the separation of an epistemologically structured, institutionalized order of “reality” and a chaotic, unruly, unformatted “world” – a separation that is questioned, but reestablished in the dramaturgy of crime and its resolution. By shifting the attention from the logical structure of ‘whodunnit’ to the sensual material culture and “atmosphere” that surrounds actions and people, Glauser’s novels blur these epistemological and ontological boundaries. The article shows how in Die Fieberkurve, the second novel of Glauser’s famous Wachtmeister Studer-series, material and sensual substances develop a specific, powerful dynamic that dissipates, complicates, crosslinks, and confuses the objects and acts of investigation as well as its narration. The material spoors, dust, fibers, fingerprints, intoxicants and natural resources like oil and gas – which lead the investigation from Switzerland to North Africa – trigger a new sensual mode of perception and reception that replaces the reassuring criminological ideal of solution by the logic of “dissolution”. The novel thereby demonstrates the poetic impact of the slogan of modernity: matter matters.


Author(s):  
Émile Zola

Thérèse Raquin is a clinically observed, sinister tale of adultery and murder among the lower orders in nineteenth-century Paris. Zola's dispassionate dissection of the motivations of his characters, mere ‘human beasts’ who kill in order to satisfy their lust, is much more than an atmospheric Second Empire period-piece. Many readers were scandalized by an approach to character-drawing which seemed to undermine not only the moral values of a deeply conservative society, but also the whole code of psychological description on which the realist novel was based. Together with the important ‘Preface to the Second Edition’ in which Zola defended himself against charges of immorality, Thérèse Raquin stands as a key early manifesto of the French Naturalist movement, of which Zola was the founding father. Even today, this novel has lost none of its power to shock. This new translation is based on the second edition of 1868. The Introduction situates the novel in the context of Naturalism, medicine, and the scientific ideas of Zola's day.


Author(s):  
Émile Zola

Did possessing and killing amount to the same thing deep within the dark recesses of the human beast? La Bete humaine (1890), is one of Zola’s most violent and explicit works. On one level a tale of murder, passion and possession, it is also a compassionate study of individuals derailed by atavistic forces beyond their control. Zola considered this his ‘most finely worked’ novel, and in it he powerfully evokes life at the end of the Second Empire in France, where society seemed to be hurtling into the future like the new locomotives and railways it was building. While expressing the hope that human nature evolves through education and gradually frees itself of the burden of inherited evil, he is constantly reminding us that under the veneer of technological progress there remains, always, the beast within. This new translation captures Zola's fast-paced yet deliberately dispassionate style, while the introduction and detailed notes place the novel in its social, historical, and literary context.


Author(s):  
Andrew Kahn

The Short Story: A Very Short Introduction charts the rise of the short story from its original appearance in magazines and newspapers. For much of the 19th century, tales were written for the press, and the form’s history is marked by engagement with popular fiction. The short story then earned a reputation for its skilful use of plot design and character study distinct from the novel. This VSI considers the continuity and variation in key structures and techniques such as the beginning, the creation of voice, the ironic turn or plot twist, and how writers manage endings. Throughout, it draws on examples from an international and flourishing corpus of work.


Revue Romane ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 282-293
Author(s):  
Margareth Hagen

The first chapters of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio were printed in 1881, the same year as the publication of the novel I Malavoglia, Giovanni Verga’s masterpiece of verismo. While every critical reader of Verga’s realism has pointed out his particular narrative interpretation of evolution, Collodi’s has novel very seldom been connected to the theories of evolution, even if Darwin’s ideas were highly present in the public debate in Florence during the last decades of the 19th century. The reasons for this silence are primarily to be found in the genre of Pinocchio, in the fact that it is children literature, and therefore primarily related to the narrative mechanisms of the fairy tales and pedagogical literature. Focusing on Pinocchio, the article discusses to which degree Darwinism can be traced in Collodi’s literature for children, and questions if the continuous metamorphoses of Pinocchio can be read also in connection with the naturalist conception of the literary characters as unstable, in continuous evolution, and not only as part of the mechanisms of fairy tales and mythological narratives.


Author(s):  
Halyna Bokshan

The study examines the features of the strategies of mythologization and mystification used by Yurii Vynnychuk in creating his literary version of Ivan Vahylevych’s biography in the novel “Liutetsiia”. First of all the paper emphasizes the writer’s inclination to play with historic material characteristic of postmodernism, manifesting itself in most of his works and in the novel under study, in particular. The research pays special attention to the original interaction of mythological and cultural-historical aspects in the fictionalized biography of the renowned public figure of the 19th century, famous for his activity in Ruska Triitsia. It considers the specific features of the literary visualization of Ivan Vahylevych character in the relation to Ivan Franko’s essay representing the epistolary of the figures of the historical epoch depicted in the novel. The study determines the correlation between the personages in “Liutetsiia” and the characters and motives of the Celtic mythology. It identifies the specificity of the reminiscent relations of the main character with the archetypal figure of Don Juan. The conclusions highlight the use of irony, grotesque and comic modus by Yurii Vynnychuk as the manifestation of the neo-mythological device of deheroization. It also accentuates that the strategies of mythologization and mystification in “Liutetsiia” reflect the manner of interpreting cultural-historical material characteristic of the author.


2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 91-100
Author(s):  
Anna Kaczmarek-Wiśniewska

Therese Raquin, Zola’s first important work, is based on the modern version of the old physiological theory of “temperaments”, e.g. the combination of four cardinal “humours” that determine a man’s physical and mental constitution. Through the story of two murderers, an adulterous woman and her lover who kill the woman’s husband, the author shows the mutual influence of two temperaments considered in the 19th century as more important than all the others: sanguine and melancholic (or nervous). The novel intends to “verify” a theory dealing with the consequences of each type of temperament for people’s behaviour, their relationships and their internal life.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document