1 ‘The Return of the Repressed’: Uncovering Family Secrets in Zola’s Fiction. An Interpretation of Selected Novels Name: Rita Codsi Student Number: 100233187 Thesis Submitted for Doctoral Degree in the Humanities, School of Modern Languages, Department of French Studies, Royal Holloway University of London. Egham, United Kingdom. January 28. 2015 2 Declaration of Authorship I Rita Codsi hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: ______________________ Date: ________________________ 3 Abstract This project differs from characteristic expectations of Zola’s fiction. It takes a different direction in the analysis of selected novels. This study considers that the novelist kept secrets which he obliquely represented in the narratives of the chosen novels. It shows that the secrets are embodied in the Rougon-Macquart and other novels. This examination investigates La Fortune des Rougon, La Curée, La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret, La Bête humaine, le Docteur Pascal as well as Thérèse Raquin, Madeleine Férat and Vérité and demonstrates that these novels belong to the author’s sexual anxiety and insecurities. These novels provide a wealth of information and merit to be placed in the realm of psychoanalytical criticism because the language they engage with opens the door to the ‘return of the repressed’. This project adopts principally four psychoanalytical theories and shows how they operate in Zola’s language: it applies Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s theory of psychic development, essentially the concept of the phantom, as well as Sigmund Freud’s and Jacques Lacan’s theories of infantile sexuality. 4 Acknowledgments I wish to thank the French Department at Royal Holloway University of London for its kind help and understanding during those seven years of research. I would also like to show my special appreciation to my supervisors Dr. Hannah Thompson and Professor Colin Davis for their help and support throughout the academic years and for believing in my theory on Zola. This project is dedicated to my late parents, Irma and Maurice Oghia, without whom I would not have achieved all that I have thus far. Not least, I would like to thank also my husband Alexander, and my children, Claudia, Stephanie and Nathalie for putting up with me during those years and for supporting me throughout. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1 Section 1: Presentation and Summary of the Work Proposed 8 Section 2: A Review of Some of Zola’s Critics 21 Section 3: An Appreciation of Psychoanalysis in Relation to Zola’s Language 31 Section 4: The Function of the Unconscious, or the Dual Unity 38 4.1: The Role of the Narrator 39 Section 5: Organisation of the Chapters 44 Conclusion Chapter 2 La Fortune des Rougon, Thérèse Raquin, and Madeleine Férat 50 Part 1: La Fortune des Rougon and Thérèse Raquin: The Purpose of L’aire Saint-Mittre and Le Passage du Pont-Neuf 51 1.1: L’aire Saint-Mittre, Le Passage du Pont-Neuf and the Return of the Repressed 57 1.2: The Dynamics of Language in the representation of Thérèse and Marie 63 1.3: Marie and the Return of the Phantom 67 1.4: The Relationship between Miette and Silvère 78 Part 2: Thérèse Raquin and Madeleine Férat 82 2.1: Separation as a Form of Anxiety 87 2.2: The Death Drive 89 2.3: Voyeurism as Part of Infantile Sexual Development 90 Chapter 3 The Function of Dreams in La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret and La Bête humaine 94 Part 1: The Hallucinatory Phase of Dream Formation 96 1.1: Serge’s Dream: The Oral Stage 101 6 1.2: Serge’s Fantasy World 112 1.3: Ideational Representations of Objects with Female Genitalia 115 1.4: Jacques’s Dream: The Oral Stage 120 Part 2: The Phallic Stage or the Alienation Process 132 2.1: Serge’s and Jacques’s Narcissistic Personality Disorder 134 2.2: Albine and Séverine: Zola’s Aesthetic Victims 138 Chapter 4 La Curée and Nana 142 Part 1: La Curée and Nana: Empirical Observations of a Decadent Society 143 Part 2: Sadomasochist Injunctions in La Curée and Nana 155 2.1: Renée’s Bacchanalias 160 2.2: Nana, The Story of the Golden Fly 169 23: Nana’s Body as her Trading Commodity 176 2.4: Nana’s Relationship with Love and Death 180 2.5: The narrator’s Role in La Curée and in Nana 183 2.6: The Mechanism of the Sexual Drive 191 2.7: Sadomasochism as the Narrator’s Auto-Erotic Games 193 2.8: The Nature of Fetishism in La Curée 196 Chapter 5 Le Docteur Pascal or the Secret Exposed 203 Part 1: Zola as Pascal 204 1.1: Emile Zola in Medan/Pascal Rougon in La Souleiade 205 Part 2: The Connection Between Gestation and Heredity 209 2.1: Pascal’s True Objectives in his Research 212 2.2: Clotilde’s Sexuality 214 2.3: The Return of Marie 215 2.4: Pascal’s Documents 218 2.5: The Œdipus Complex in Relation to Incest 222 Part 3: Pascal as Zola’s Split Ego 225 7 3.1: Guilt as Part of Masochist Desire 226 Chapter 6 The Nature of Truth in Vérité 229 Part 1: Vérité and National Trauma 230 Part 2: The Presence of trauma and the Narrator Discourse 245 2.1: Zola’s Truth 247 2.2: Zola’s Crypt 249 2.3: The Spectre of Things Past 250 2.4: Catharsis and Vérité 256 Chapter 7 Conclusion 258 Bibliography 271 8 Chapter One This chapter sets out the purpose of the thesis and is divided into five sections: the first section gives a summary of the work and explains the reasons for adopting the theory proposed herein. The second section presents a literary review of Zola’s critics. The third section offers a perspective on four psychoanalysts’ theories, those of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan in the examination of the chosen novels. In the fourth section, a close analysis of Zola’s language is presented. Finally, the fifth section provides a resume of each chapter and shows how they relate to each other. Section 1 Presentation and Summary of the Work Proposed This thesis explores selected novels from Zola’s fiction and suggests that their creation is mediated by a repressed sexuality. This theme constitutes the subject matter of this work because it relates to the unconscious and thus influences the ways the novels under examination operate. It examines how the repressed functions in the texts under consideration and proposes that a mystery related to female sexuality pervades the narratives of La Fortune des Rougon and Thérèse Raquin. It argues that this is silently transmitted in Madeleine Férat, La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret, La Curée, Nana, and La Bête humaine, and is exposed in Le Docteur Pascal and in Vérité. 1 La Fortune des Rougon contains a mystery which is transmitted to the rest of the novels under consideration in this work. In La Fortune des Rougon, Marie’s tombstone and its origin are fundamental to the choice of arguments presented in this work since her death 1 Emile Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart, ed. by Armand Lanoux and Henri Mitterand, 5 vols, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard 1960-1967), I, II, IV, V. Emile Zola, Thérèse Raquin, ed. by Robert Abirashed (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). Emile Zola, Vérité [1903] (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993). Emile Zola, Madeleine Férat (Montréal: Mémoire du Livre, 1999). 9 highlights a secret which lies in the catacombs of the Saint-Mittre cemetery and is connected to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s theory of the crypt (see section 3). In Thérèse Raquin, while there is a secret in the plot which is related to Camille’s murder and to Thérèse’s betrayal, there is also another one which is hidden below the surface of the text and is arguably linked to the mystery of Thérèse’s origin. Indeed, in this novel the narrator is not precise about Thérèse’s character: through the words of the fleeting character, ‘Capitaine Degans’, Thérèse’s father, the narrator simply tells the reader that she was brought from Algeria after her mother died. The narrator does not develop the circumstances as to why Thérèse is brought to her aunt for adoption, although it could be argued that as a single parent Capitaine Degans could not look after Thérèse and so favoured his sister as his daughter’s adoptive parent. Nevertheless, the tone of voice of Capitaine Degans is short, sharp, distant and austere in presenting his daughter to his sister: ‘Voici une enfant dont tu es la tante […]. Sa mère est morte […]. Moi je ne sais qu’en faire. Je te la donne’ (Thérèse Raquin, p. 39). Capitaine Degans’s tone of voice, his brief and furtive appearance in the narrative and his hasty action in disposing of his daughter suggest that he is keeping a secret which he does not wish to reveal. This is supported by the subsequent actions of Madame Raquin who tacitly takes the child, hardly questioning her brother about her niece’s origin, only to be given a vague answer by the narrator: ‘Elle [Madame Raquin] sut vaguement que la chère petite était née à Oran’ (p. 40). I suggest that the mystery of Marie which pervades La Fortune des Rougon and that of Thérèse in Thérèse Raquin are silently transmitted in the rest of the texts under consideration (even if the latter novel does not belong to this series) because they (the texts) respond to the causes and effects which originate from the dramas of Adelaïde and Thérèse.