Zola’s Octave Mouret Novels Nicholas White THE LOST HEROINE OF ZOLA’S OCTAVE MOURET NOVELS Critics rarely read Pot-Bouille at all. —Marcus, Apartment Stories 169 Heterosociality In Naomi Schor’s already classic account of George Sand and the roman idéaliste, she describes the limits of mimesis such that realist and naturalist writing, for all of their claims to social critique, nevertheless fnd it very dif- fcult, in philosophical terms, to impose the “ought” of how things should be onto the “is” of how things are. In other words, mimesis is held within the referential logic of the copy, however energetically irony works against what are literally terms of reference. What I suggest is that in the frst decades of the Third Republic, it is the interweaving of generic issues of mimesis and issues of gender ideology that prevent canonical male writers such as Zola and Mau- passant from venturing too far into a post-heterosexual world of heterosocial modernity, where men and women might interact in the “social,” indeed pub- lic, domain of work. Vital to this transition from the location of large numbers of women within the French family to their exploration of the public sphere (of which we start to see avant-garde glimpses at the end of the nineteenth cen- tury with the emergence of the frst few women doctors, lawyers, and so forth, as well as the many schoolmistresses) has of course been the role of women’s education, developed within mass society in its homosocial and heterosocial permutations ever since the frst decades of the Third Republic.1 This language of the homo and the hetero, and of the social and the sexual, allows us to speak back to another landmark book, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, frst published 1. Excessively binaristic gender analyses of public and private spheres have rightly come to be viewed as notoriously simplistic, as are historical accounts that overlook earlier examples of the public roles of women, not least of aristocratic and proletarian ones (i.e., salonnières and ouvrières). The Romanic Review Volume 102 Numbers 3–4 © The Trustees of Columbia University 370 Nicholas White in 1985. On the opening pages of the original introduction to her book, Sedg- wick writes: “Homosocial desire” is a kind of oxymoron. “Homosocial” is a word occasionally used in history and the social sciences, where it describes social bonds between persons of the same sex; it is a neo- logism, obviously formed by analogy with the “homosexual,” and just as obviously meant to be distinguished from “homosexual.” To draw the “homosocial” back into the orbit of “desire” is to hypothesize the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual—a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted. [. .] My hypothesis of the unbrokenness of this continuum is not a genetic one—I do not mean to discuss genital homosexual desire as “at the root of” other forms of male homosociality—but rather a strategy for making generalizations about, and marking historical differences in, the structure of men’s relations with other men. (1–2) In the preface written for a subsequent reissuing of this now classic account, Sedgwick makes clear the sexual politics, not least for gay identities, of decon- structing the representational history of what she labels “the available mirror of the atomized, procreative, so-called heterosexual nuclear family of origin” (ix). On the one hand, she demonstrates the collusion between heterosexual norms and homosocial bonds (not least the homosocial bonds between men that subtend the practices of patriarchy).2 As she argues, patriarchal homo- sociality must repress the structural continuum that connects it to homo- sexual counterculture. In the matrix of permutations made possible by the homo/hetero and social/sexual distinctions, there should be four basic terms: the homosexual and the homosocial (on Sedgwick’s repressed continuum), the heterosexual (naturally, or rather, normatively), and the heterosocial. To transpose Sedgwick’s defnitions, while remaining conscious of all the pitfalls in refecting homo and hetero back onto each other as unproblematically inverted images, we might say that “heterosocial” is a word that describes social bonds between persons of the opposite sex; it is a neologism, obviously formed by analogy with “heterosexual” and just as obviously meant to be distinguished from “heterosexual.” Just as Sedgwick and many historians of gender have pointed to the norma- tive role of male homosocial relations within nineteenth-century patriarchy, 2. For an account of nineteenth-century homosocial bonds that are not patriarchal, see Marcus, Between Women, whose very title plays knowingly on Sedgwick’s. Zola’s Octave Mouret Novels 371 and yet their structural (rather than genital or genetic) relation to a homo- sexual counterculture, so too do I point to the avant-garde or progressive potential of heterosocial relations in late nineteenth-century society, while recalling their structural relation to heterosexual norms. We might say that such relations between men and women unfold in the space between Between Men and Between Women. Of course, this matrix’s will-to-defnition is a place to begin rather than a place to end, as the joyfully problematic complexities of novelistic plots show only too well. So we should be aware of the dangers in this terrain. The last thing I want to do is to hypostasize, reify, or idealize the heterosocial to the disservice of other terms in the four-term matrix I have just described. But on we go. Caroline Hédouin: Pivot or Afterthought? Let us now turn to the pattern of encounter one fnds in a particular type of novel of the 1880s. Zola’s Pot-Bouille was published in Le Gaulois and by Charpentier in 1882, and his Au bonheur des dames appeared the very next year in Gil-Blas and by Charpentier. In the summer of the following year (1884), Maupassant started to write his novel Bel-Ami, published in the same newspaper, Gil-Blas, and by Havard in the late spring of 1885, precisely 100 years before Sedgwick’s Between Men. For all their differences, there are striking similarities between the lives of the two male protagonists who dominate these novels. Both novelists pursue the time-honored narrative of the young man arriving in Paris and making his way in the world: Zola’s Octave Mouret traveling to the capital from the south to make his way in the world of commerce, and Maupassant’s Georges Duroy returning to Paris after service with the army in North Africa and fnding his niche in the world of journalism. As so often is the case, this tale of male Bil- dung involves romantic and sexual endeavors too, and the shape of these plots is determined by the interaction of sexual and professional aspirations. Both men have the seductive powers of the Don Giovanni and yet fnd themselves (in both Zola’s Second Empire setting and in Maupassant’s more recent set- ting of the mid-1880s) confronted by women on the edge of the public sphere (Caroline Hédouin and Madeleine Forestier) who do not immediately fall into their arms (even if they do eventually fall into their arms, in a manner con- sonant with Naomi Schor’s account of the ideological circularity of mimesis, critical in its attitude to society and yet at the level of plot duplicative of its norms). Once these powerful women do fall, they become dispensable and are dispensed with by heroes and plots. If Maupassant places Georges’s two weddings at the end of each part of the novel, Zola cannot resist the wider canvas and situates Octave’s two weddings 372 Nicholas White toward the end of consecutive novels. Indeed, Octave’s domestic and public plots are stretched out across two novels, in a manner that for Zola is so unusually Balzacian as to be conspicuous (Zola’s characters reappear in later novels, but rarely do they dominate more than one). One could caricature the frst novel as nearly 400 pages of deeply sexualized prevarication and pro- crastination, which postpones the fulfllment of Octave’s ostensible bildung- sroman dream of self-assertion in the world of commerce until Au bonheur des dames, named of course after the department store in which he triumphs commercially over the women of Paris, just as he has tried to dominate them sexually in Pot-Bouille. In one of the richest modern readings of the novel, Sharon Marcus continues the epigraph with which we began above: Indeed, critics rarely read Pot-Bouille at all, although the novel enjoyed great popularity during its serialization and upon initial publication; 30,000 copies were in print in 1883, compared to 27,500 copies of Nana in 1881. (Apartment Stories 169) She concludes this chapter, and indeed her book, by highlighting the resistance to interpretation of two easily overlooked characters: one, the unnamed writer on the second foor, through whom “the novel creates a thoroughly idealized fgure of its own representational activity” (197); the other, Caroline: Only one other character remains as impenetrable to scrutiny: Mme Hédouin, the one female character in the novel whose nudity is irreproachable because her perfectly unruffed interior admits no cracks on its surface. [. .] Unlike the other female charac- ters, whose facades collapse, who become surfaces with no depth, and who do not carry themselves well but turn themselves upside down, Mme Hédouin has a truly opaque and secure interior; yet that very quality [. .] posits a consistency that defes narrativiza- tion—“when one carries oneself so well, it’s no longer interesting.” (197–98) Taking this marginalization as a challenge, this article proposes that, in a nar- rative enactment of the cliché that “behind every great man there is a great woman,” the veritable pivot between these two novels is in fact Mme Caroline Hédouin, and that her narrative trajectory is indeed well worth tracking.