Zola's Women: the Case of a Victorian 'Naturalist'
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Atlantis Vol. 10 No. 1 Fall/Automne 1984 Zola's Women: The Case of a Victorian 'Naturalist' Chantal Bertrand-Jennings University of Toronto (Scarborough) ABSTRACT EmileZola is remembered as the leader of French Naturalism, an opponent of prejudice, an enemy of the Church, a friend of the working-class and even of women. Through his aesthetic principles based on Science, Truth and Experimentation he claimed to strive for objectivity and proposed his fiction as a faithful reflection of the reality of his time. Yet, an analysis of his thirty-one novels shows that Zola, in fact, devised a new myth of woman, crowding his fiction with mythologized creatures, and creating a "new" idol strangely resembling the Virgin Mary. The study of Emile Zola's portrayal of female This has to do in part with the stand he took in characters is of particular interest to feminists as the famous Dreyfus case. Furthermore, Zola is it questions the major traditional assumptions seen as a friend of the working class whose about his works. oppression he exposes in his works, and even as a defender of women. One only need conjure up Firstly, Zola's claim to objectivity in his rend• images of the courageous and exploited Gervaise ering of reality as a Naturalist writer, his esthetic of L'Assommoir, La Maheude and Catherine of principles based on Science, Truth and Experi• Germinal or Francoise of La Terre to become mentation, his caution in carefully gathering immediately aware of Zola's sensitivity to the information and documentation on the subject plight of lower class women. In Au Bonheur des he was dealing with, all seem to make him Dames he even analysed with a great deal of immune to the extravagant extremes generally accuracy and foresight the systematic exploita• attributed to the Romantics in their delineation tion of both female clientele and the saleswomen of female characters. Indeed, Zola was a fierce by the department stores which had just begun denouncer of the Romantics and often attacked to emerge. In turning to his newspaper articles, the "ramblings" of their imaginations. In the it is clearer yet that, on the conscious level, Zola precise case of his novel Nana, for instance, he wanted to help introduce reforms in women's claimed to be offering a truthful picture of the favour. In the area of education, for example, he prostitute of his time, in opposition to her glori• persistently denounced what he perceived to be fication by such authors as Hugo, Dumas or the negative influence of the Church on girls and Murger, or her vilification by others such as women and expressed the desire to see them lib• Barrere, Thiboust and Augier.1 erated from the tyranny of religion by the acquis- tion of basic skills, which emphasized scientific Secondly, Zola is usually perceived as an disciplines in the lay public school.2 He also embodiment of justice and equity to a point proposed specific work legislation for the pro• where he was described by Anatole France as "a tection of saleswomen and social legislation for moment in the history of human conscience." that of single mothers.3 Thus, within the context of the bourgeois The Amazon takes her place alongside shrews society of his time, Zola seemed to stand almost and witches among the untamed women to be as a champion of women's rights and many have found in Zola's fiction, and represents but one of considered him as such.4 One would therefore the many aspects of the femme fatale. She is the expect his female characters to be revealed in a absolute Other inasmuch as, not having been perspective that shows the admitted desires and 'known' by man, the dangers which lurk within ambitions of their naturalistic and socially com• her have had no chance to be neutralised. Flora, mitted creator. In spite of his avowed theoretical a heroine of La Bete Humaine, is the best exam• principles, however, Zola's fiction is crowded ple of this type of woman in Zola's work. This with such mythologized figures as witches, mar• working-class Brunehilde is a strong, healthy tyred saintly virgins, and suffering holy mothers. and proud young woman; yet she always appears How can one deal with this obvious contradic• awe-inspiring to the hero, Jacques Lantier. His tion between these two opposite views of women? fearful premonition is right, as her love for him It will help resolve this contradiction if we look arouses her murderous jealousy. Single-handedly, at Zola's writing as a deep-seated subconscious, she stops a six-horse cart on the railroad tracks, or even unconscious, necessity, and analyse the thus causing the derailment of a train she function and meaning of his female characters thought was carrying Jacques' mistress. Her act within the system of his fiction rather than as provokes the "hatred," the "horror" (RM IV, reflections of reality. From this new perspective, 1269), the "terrified repulsion one feels for a female characters will be considered mostly in monster" (1271) in Jacques, who himself is their relationship to men, and perceived in their meant to be the neurotic assassin in the novel. specificity, i.e., as signifying Sex and the Other according to the theory developed by Simone de Usually older than the amazons, shrews and Beauvoir in The Second Sex. As the Other, witches carry their revolt against male supre• women characters often embody a rival con• macy one step further, despising male love, jeer• science and constitute a particular danger. As ing at men's powers, flouting the patriarchal signifiers of Sex, they become the place around order. A harpy whose enormous body terrifies which all male fantasms crystallise no matter both husband and household, Mme. Josserand how contradictory. of Pot-Bouille is Zola's prototype of the shrew. In addition to their customary conjugal tor• As an apparently rather puritanical product of menting these characters usually show a haughty, the Victorian era, Zola seems to have harboured a icy attitude toward their mates. In Pot-Bouille, catastrophic view of sexuality. Love is never all the wives in the bourgeois residential build• approached in his novels without tragic conse• ing which is the center of the action, whether quences. As to sexual relations, the little plea• faithful or adulterous, are frigid, a fault which is sure they seem to bring is but a miniscule com• made to appear as an insult to the virility of their pensation for the suffering they cause. Hence husbands or lovers. Zola richly invested his female characters with libido, and projected frightful anguish onto It is the older characters, no longer considered them. In fact, whether they refuse their male possible love partners, who are most negatively companions, revolt against their law or, on the presented. The mother in Therese Raquin and contrary, express desire for them, Zola's female Mme. Chanteau in La Joie de Vivre expect to characters are inevitably linked with evil and regulate and judge the character of their sons. death. Indeed, they often represent the very prin• Martine and Felicite of Le Docteur Pascal, ciple of evil. respectively the hero's too credulous servant and his scheming mother, aim at nothing less than destroying his prestigious scientific work in an pire. Florent's nightmares of being engulfed in attempt to "kill his genius." In one scene they womanly flesh echo the writings of Schopen• are described as "witches activating a diabolical hauer on women as nature's trap, and fore• fire, for some abomination, the martyrdom of a shadow Freud's description of the fear of castra• saint" (RM V, 1203). They are another incarna• tion. tion of the castrating mother. This figure is best represented in Zola's work by La Brule of Ger• To be a woman is also to be ill, mentally or minal, both because of her unusually nightmar• physically, in Zola's fiction, for criteria of health ish dimensions, and the explicit nature of her are implicitly male and not to be male is not to be act. During the famous strike scene, she plays well. The source of all the miseries suffered by leader to a "group of galloping furies" (RM III, the Rougon and Macquart families is their 1454), who, "teeth and nails out like bitches" ancestor, Adelaide Fouque, who was locked up (1443) castrate the shopkeeper's body and parade in an insane asylum for her sexual aberration; the shreds of his mutilated flesh in a grotesque the "fault" 5 has been passed on by her female procession. From Flore to La Brule, from youth descendants to her entire lineage. Moreover, to old age, an increase in viciousness is easily Zola's women seem predisposed to undefined discernable; yet the same resistance to masculine diseases of no specific origin which are perceived hegemony is evident, making of these characters as 'typically feminine.' 6 Thus, all the female cathartic images of femmes fatales. inhabitants of the Pot Bouille house suffer from vague and varied 'feminine' ailments as neuro• Even when they are not specifically rebelling sis, chlorosis, imbecility, neurasthenia, anaemia, against men's rules, the female characters in etc. What is more suprising is that the only really Zola's novels most often embody fertility and are healthy character in the whole household is the therefore judged negatively, for their contact is sole representative of the doomed Rougon-Mac- perceived as a sordid entrapment in materiality, quart family, Octave Mouret. which provokes uneasiness, repulsion, anxiety or outright flight in the male characters. The It is precisely at puberty that girls start exhibit• painter in L'Oeuvre, Claude, refuses to see his ing symptoms of nervous illness.