La creación de la nouvelle femme en El paraíso de las damas, de Émile Zola

Este artículo analiza la novela El paraíso de las damas, de Émile Zola, desde el marco de la modernización de París durante el Segundo Imperio. Se estudia, fundamentalmente, la transformación del ser social y la creación de un nuevo personaje: la nouvelle femme, encarnada, en la novela, por Denise Baudu. El artículo expone el marco irónico de la novela y dialoga con la teoría del hombre nuevo de Henri de Saint-Simon. Se argumenta que Zola propone, desde este personaje femenino, que un cambio en el entorno es propicio para el desarrollo de mujeres y hombres naturales; la nouvelle femme es el nuevo elemento capaz de crear un gran cambio social a través del trabajo y la virtud.

Forms of Building, Forms of Living: Viollet-Le-Duc’s Entretiens sur l’architecture and Zola’s Pot-Bouille

This article examines the historical and theoretical connections between architect Eugène Viollet-Le-Duc (1815-1879) and Émile Zola (1840-1902). By analyzing the ways in which Viollet-Le-Duc’s theory on domestic architecture in his Entretiens sur l’architecture (1863-1872) resonates in Zola’s Pot-Bouille (1882), this study illustrates how Zola’s text depicts the correlation between architectural form and ways of living. In light of the work of Viollet-Le-Duc, the particular characteristics of domestic architecture in Pot-Bouille are imagined to mould the personalities of the inhabitants, thereby shaping their domestic values. First, the ways in which Viollet-Le-Duc’s theory overlaps with naturalism are introduced. Then Zola’s own interest in architecture and his knowledge of Viollet-Le-Duc are documented. Finally, the article argues that, in Pot-Bouille, domestic architecture has an influence on the characters’ domestic lives and that a study of Entretiens provides a better cultural understanding of Pot-Bouille and the ways in which architecture was imagined to impact on people’s personalities.

“Les Hypothèses Trop Hasardées”

This essay argues that the difficulties Émile Zola faced in closing the Rougon-Macquart novel cycle reveal a political imaginary whose notion of a clean line of progress depends on a technical supplement it disavows. At critical points Zola’s method exposes the disavowal of this technical supplement that functions as the prosthetic by which man overcomes a hereditary deficiency, his original psychosis in Zola’s account, and is also the means by which he allegorizes history as progress. But this supplement must also disappear from view, or operate as a vanishing mediator. Because, for Zola, the immediate political problem of engendering the right kind of political subjects for the Third Empire must be integrated into a larger evolutionary history, the rational overcoming of the original psychosis takes the form of a necessary and indeed automatic process. What is at stake here is not the inhumanism of generalizing the “Anthropos,” which has come under recent scrutiny, but the inhumanism integral to any humanism that imagines itself as teleologically or historically oriented—the inhumanism in humanism that subtends any imaginary of evolution or progress, because such a humanism must have recourse to technical prosthesis.

Émile Zola and the Literary Language of Climate Change

On 7 February 1861, John Tyndall, professor of natural philosophy, delivered a historical lecture: he could prove that different gases absorb heat to a very different degree, which implies that the temperate conditions provided for by the Earth's atmosphere are dependent on its particular composition of gases. The theoretical foundation of climate science was laid. Ten years later, on the other side of the Channel, a young and ambitious author was working on a comprehensive literary analysis of the French era under the Second Empire. Émile Zola had probably not heard or read of Tyndall's discovery. However, the article makes the case for reading Zola's Rougon-Macquart as an extensive story of climate change. Zola's literary attempts to capture the defining characteristic of the Second Empire led him to the insight that its various milieus were all part of the same ‘climate’: that of an all-encompassing warming. Zola suggests that this climate is man-made: the economic success of the Second Empire is based on heating, in a literal and metaphorical sense, as well as on stoking the steam-engines and creating the hypertrophic atmosphere of the hothouse that enhances life and maximises turnover and profit. In contrast to Tyndall and his audience, Zola sensed the catastrophic consequences of this warming: the Second Empire was inevitably moving towards a final débâcle, i.e. it was doomed to perish in local and ‘global’ climate catastrophes. The article foregrounds the supplementary status of Tyndall's physical and Zola's literary knowledge. As Zola's striking intuition demonstrates, literature appears to have a privileged approach to the phenomenon of man-induced climate change.

THE THREAT OF DISEASE ON FEMALE IDENTITY IN EMILE ZOLA’S NOVELS

Disease and its effect on the body and personal autonomy, as well as its influence on the social position of the diseased person, are among the key themes in the novels of the 19th century French writer Émile Zola. When it comes to female characters, illness has a multifold impact, having both physical and psychological effects, erasing in extreme cases female identity itself. The aim of this article is to offer insights into how sickness is depicted as a menace that leaves female characters deprived of any power they might have by affecting their appearance, which is the main indicator of their social identity and the key instrument they can use to establish and maintain relationships, and by taking away their ability to control themselves and how they are seen by others.

Trabajo, género y clase en Au Bonheur des dames de Émile Zola

En aquest article proposo una lectura d’Au Bonheur des dames d’Émile Zola, atenta a las representacions construïdes al voltant del progrés i les transformacions en la la vida urbana europea decimonònica. Hi desenvoluparé un estudi dels personatges, els vincles que creen, de manera que la botiga, més que com un mer escenari, és un gran protagonista, cor de la metamorfosi de la vida social i material. Hi trobem els qui tenen èxit i els exclosos, un espai per a la «carrera oberta al talent», no només per al burgès, sinó també per als treballadors del comerç que, a diferència dels industrials, podien assolir l’èxit juntament amb el patró. Per acabar, faig una breu referència a la sèrie The Paradise, com una reescriptura de la novel·la de Zola al segle XXI.

The Aesthetics of the Human Beast: A Comparative Study of Zola’s L’Assommoir, Galdós’ La Desheredada and Crane’s Maggie

The concept of the human beast is assigned to the French novelist, Émile Zola, who is the first to codify principles of Naturalism, against which all future naturalist works would be compared. In his novels, especially in the saga Les Rougon-Macquart, the human beast, «la bête humaine», appears as a literary character embedded in the lower social strata, who, due to harsh working and living conditions in the French capital during the Second Empire, acts according to its most basic instincts. The actions of a human beast are violent and brutal and its behavior conditioned by limited education. In his novels, Zola applies the doctrines of biological determinism as well as the laws of heredity attained from scientific readings that were very popular among the intellectuals of the period. However, the theoretical principles recollected in Le roman expérimental (G. Charpentier et Cie Éditeurs, 1880) were not equally applied in other countries due to different literary precedents as well as diverse socio-historical and philosophical backgrounds. This paper aims to examine the nuances in the aesthetic representation of the human beast in Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877), Galdós’ La Desheredada (1881) and Crane’s Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1843), delving into the behavioral patterns which shape the unique characteristics of their human beasts.

The Paris Commune of 1871 in Selected Texts of French Prose Fiction

<p>The thesis consists essentially of a consideration of the Paris Commune of 1871 as represented in the following texts: l'Apprentie by Gustave Geffroy; l'Ami de l'Ordre by Jerome and Jean Tharaud; Bas les Coeurs and l'Epaulette by Georges Darien; la Colonne and Philemon vieux de la vieille by Lucien Descaves; les Massacres de Paris by Jean Cassou. With two exceptions (Bas les Coeurs (1889) and les Massacres de Paris (1935)) these works appeared during the opening fifteen years of the twentieth century. In addition to its obvious function of introducing the principal authors discussed, the Introduction provides background information to (and attempts to set the tone for) material examined in the main body of the thesis. Chapters one and Two, devoted to Gustave Geffroy and the Tharaud brothers respectively, consider the commune primarily in terms of its effects upon, and consequences for, individuals and families at the time. Georges Darien's savage denunciation of the bourgeois order - an indictment in which the Paris Commune serves an essential purpose - is considered in chapter Three. The fourth chapter (centred upon la colonne by Lucien Descaves) entails discussion of the commune's repudiation - through the toppling of the vendome column - of warmongering and chauvinism. In Philemon vieux de la vieille, the Commune is seen essentially in terms of its continued significance for former communards looking back, during the early l900's, to the seventy-two days' and the years of exile. Jean Cassou's characterisation of leading participants in the Commune notably Louis Rossel, Louise Michel and Jaroslaw Dombrowski - provides the principal focus for discussion in chapter six. Sources used by both Descaves and Cassou are considered in the relevant chapters. To complement material in Chapters One to Six, appendices relating to three texts (Un Communard by Leon Deffoux; le Mur by Maurice Montegut; la commune by Paul and Victor Margueritte) are included. Throughout the thesis, references are frequently made to, and comparisons drawn with, other writers who have portrayed the commune: notably Emile Zola, Leon Cladel and Jules Valles.</p>

The Paris Commune of 1871 in Selected Texts of French Prose Fiction

<p>The thesis consists essentially of a consideration of the Paris Commune of 1871 as represented in the following texts: l'Apprentie by Gustave Geffroy; l'Ami de l'Ordre by Jerome and Jean Tharaud; Bas les Coeurs and l'Epaulette by Georges Darien; la Colonne and Philemon vieux de la vieille by Lucien Descaves; les Massacres de Paris by Jean Cassou. With two exceptions (Bas les Coeurs (1889) and les Massacres de Paris (1935)) these works appeared during the opening fifteen years of the twentieth century. In addition to its obvious function of introducing the principal authors discussed, the Introduction provides background information to (and attempts to set the tone for) material examined in the main body of the thesis. Chapters one and Two, devoted to Gustave Geffroy and the Tharaud brothers respectively, consider the commune primarily in terms of its effects upon, and consequences for, individuals and families at the time. Georges Darien's savage denunciation of the bourgeois order - an indictment in which the Paris Commune serves an essential purpose - is considered in chapter Three. The fourth chapter (centred upon la colonne by Lucien Descaves) entails discussion of the commune's repudiation - through the toppling of the vendome column - of warmongering and chauvinism. In Philemon vieux de la vieille, the Commune is seen essentially in terms of its continued significance for former communards looking back, during the early l900's, to the seventy-two days' and the years of exile. Jean Cassou's characterisation of leading participants in the Commune notably Louis Rossel, Louise Michel and Jaroslaw Dombrowski - provides the principal focus for discussion in chapter six. Sources used by both Descaves and Cassou are considered in the relevant chapters. To complement material in Chapters One to Six, appendices relating to three texts (Un Communard by Leon Deffoux; le Mur by Maurice Montegut; la commune by Paul and Victor Margueritte) are included. Throughout the thesis, references are frequently made to, and comparisons drawn with, other writers who have portrayed the commune: notably Emile Zola, Leon Cladel and Jules Valles.</p>