9. After the Rougon-Macquart

‘After the Rougon-Macquart’ considers the final novel of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, Doctor Pascal. This novel explores the themes of science and religion, renewal and rebirth. The latter theme was of personal significance to Zola, as he had recently fathered two children with his mistress, Jeanne Rozerot. Zola’s later fiction is discussed in the context of the climate of ideas in France in the fin de siècle. The writer’s involvement in the Dreyfus affair brought him glaringly into the public eye, and may indeed have led to his death: he died from carbon monoxide poisoning, suspected to be the result of foul play. His remains were interred in the Panthéon alongside Voltaire, Rousseau, and Victor Hugo.

3. The fat and the thin

‘The fat and the thin: The Belly of Paris’ evokes the violent beginnings of the Rougon-Macquart family during Louis-Napoleon’s coup d’état of December 1851. The novel tells the story of Florent, who is unjustly imprisoned and exiled following the disturbances. On returning to Paris, he finds it transformed beyond recognition by the Empire’s burgeoning capitalist economy, epitomized by the prosperous butcher’s shop owned by Florent’s half-brother Quenu and his wife Lisa. A temple of gluttony, the shop is situated close to the great new food markets, Les Halles. The novel turns on Florent’s malaise in, and eventual expulsion from, this monstrous world of food.

7. Down the mine

‘Down the mine’ considers the role of the mining community on Zola. The bloody events of the Paris Commune of 1871, when a revolutionary uprising of citizens declared the city independent from the government, convinced Zola that he should write a novel that addressed revolutionary activity in a contemporary setting. Germinal describes a strike in a mining community in northern France, led by Gervaise Macquart’s son Étienne Lantier. The novel was influenced by the socialist ideas that were becoming widespread, with characters representing militant, moderate, and anarchist ideals. Germinal depicts a moment in history when the workers begin to find a political voice. But the strike fails, and the ending is ambiguous, with Étienne leaving for Paris to continue his struggle there.

6. The dream machine

‘The dream machine’ looks at the role of the 'machine' in the writing of Zola. Many of Zola’s novels are organized round a machine (like the distilling machine in L’Assommoir) or a great central image or entity that functions like a machine (the food markets in The Belly of Paris, the coal mine in Germinal). In The Ladies’ Paradise the ‘machine’ is the department store, inspired by the Bon Marché, Paris’s first such store. A symbol of capitalism, the Second Empire, and the modern city, it is emblematic of consumer culture and contemporary changes in gender attitudes and class relations, representing modernity and ‘progress’. Shopping became a new leisure activity, allowing middle-class women to venture into public spaces and enjoy the new culture of the commodity; but in the process they were themselves commodified. Octave Mouret, the store’s owner-manager, masterfully exploits the desires of his female customers. But when he falls in love with his salesgirl Denise Baudu, he discovers that she resists commodification.

2. Before the Rougon-Macquart

‘Before the Rougon-Macquart’ examines the author’s early life as the child of a French mother and Italian father, originally named Zolla. The death of Zola’s father when his son was 7 thrust the boy and his mother into near-destitution and helped foster his self-reliant spirit. While employed by the publishing house of Hachette, Zola gained skills and contacts that served him well in building his own reputation. On leaving Hachette after the publication of his first novel, Claude’s Confession, he became a full-time journalist and writer. As a journalist he championed Manet and the Impressionists against the arch-conservatism of the art establishment. His art criticism caused a sensation. Like Manet in his paintings, he built his 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin, a lurid tale of adultery and murder, on brutal contrasts. The novel (described as ‘putrid literature’ by one critic) was a succès de scandale. Meanwhile, Zola made a marriage that would sustain him for life.

Introduction

The Introduction looks at the life and career of Émile Zola as a whole. In total he wrote thirty-one novels and five collections of short stories and produced a large body of art, drama, and literary criticism, several plays and libretti, and a prodigious number of articles on political and social issues spanning from 1865 until 1881. Zola is above all a narrative artist: a craftsman, a storyteller, and a fabulist. It is the lyrical and mythopoeic qualities of his work, and the sheer energy and inventiveness of his writing, that make him one of the great figures of the European novel.

5. The man-eater

‘The man-eater’ turns to Nana, the ninth volume in the Rougon-Macquart cycle. Nana is the story of Gervaise Macquart’s daughter Anna/Nana, a street prostitute turned actress and courtesan. Her spectacular life, (she becomes the most celebrated courtesan in Paris, an almost mythical figure) is a metaphor for the hedonistic Second Empire; she humiliates and destroys all the men she encounters, and eventually dies of smallpox on the day of the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. Zola plays to remarkable effect on male fear (including his own) of the ‘natural’ woman, and in particular on fear that prostitutes might transgress established social boundaries and infiltrate the bourgeoisie and upper class.

8. The Great Mother

‘The great mother: earth’ looks at the novel Earth, Zola’s favourite among his novels. Lyrical descriptions of the countryside and of the eternal cycle of nature and the seasons contrast with the violent human actions depicted. The story centres around another outsider, Jean Macquart, a former soldier and carpenter who tries to retire to the country, and Fouan, an elderly farmer who, like King Lear, divides his inheritance among his children who humiliate and reject him. Zola’s dark vision of the peasant world, existing beyond all civilized values, and the prominence in the novel of explicit sex and bodily functions, provoked an uproar, bringing to the fore once again the controversy that had always informed critical responses to naturalism.

4. ‘A work of truth’

‘A work of truth’ looks at the novel L’Assommoir, the first to represent how the workers—the new French industrial proletariat—really lived. The story of Gervaise Macquart, a washerwoman whose modest desires are thwarted by unreliable men, a predisposition to drink, and a hostile environment, caused an uproar. Zola uses contemporary slang to replicate working-class speech; and an effect of empathy is created by his innovative use of narrative voice, whereby the lines between the characters and the narrator become blurred. It is as if the workers themselves tell their own story. L’Assommoir made Zola famous. Ironically, given its subject matter, it also made him rich.

1. Zola and the art of fiction

‘Zola and the art of fiction’ argues that how Zola wanted to align his work with contemporary scientific discourse, which saw human behaviour as determined by heredity and environment. Zola’s insistence on the ‘scientific’ nature of his work has encouraged people to read his novels on the basis of his theoretical writings (e.g. The Experimental Novel) rather than in terms of the texts themselves. It is still necessary to stress that Zola is above all a narrative artist: a storyteller, a fabulist. It is the lyrical and mythopoeic qualities of his work, and the sheer energy of his writing, that make him one of the great figures in the European novel.