Simon Jarrett explores the ‘scientific’ world of the French writer Emile Zola (1840-1902)
The Conquest of Plassans (La conquête de Plassans) Emile Zola, 1874
Abbe Mouret’s Transgression (La faute de l’abbé Mouret) Emile Zola, 1875.
Emile Zola was a French writer who, at the end of the 19th century, wrote a series of 20 novels tracing the lives of two families, the Rougons and the Macquarts. These books became known as the Rougon/Macquart cycle, the most famous of which is Germinal, (1885), a grim story of deeply impoverished and brutalised mining families in northern France.
Zola was acutely interested in the new theories of natural science, psychology and psychiatry in his time, in particular ‘degeneration’ theories about hereditary madness, alcoholism, disease and disability.
The Rougon family were ‘respectable’ and highly moral, the Macquarts disreputable, promiscuous and often alcoholic. Zola was interested in the consequences for the two families of coming together and producing (illegitimate) children, and how this would play out over the generations. He saw himself as a literary scientist, observing and tracking the influence of heredity, environment and events on the characters he had created and brought together.
Child of nature
The belief of that time was that degenerate families with poor morals and ‘nervous’ minds would produce immoral, diseased, or disabled children. In one of the early books, The Conquest of Plassans, Desirée, an ‘idiot’ teenage girl, is the first character we meet.
‘Desirée clapped her hands. She was 14 years old and big and strong for her age, but she laughed like a little girl of five. “Mother! Mother!” she cried, “Look at my doll.”’
Desirée is different – big and strong for her age, but acting younger, a child of nature whose friendships are not with other people, but with dolls, animals and birds. As her mother says,
“Poor child… she can’t even do any needlework…she is fond of animals and that is all she is capable of”.
The irony of the novel is that as Desirée grows older she becomes tall and plump and spends her time contentedly gardening and keeping chickens and animals, while her family become more and more troubled and unhappy. As the whole family, including Desirée’s mother, sinks into madness and depression they reach the point where they cannot bear the sound of her laughter. Desirée has no friends apart from dumb animals, but it is she who is happy.
Without human friends
In Abbe Mouret’s Transgression, Desirée has become a grown woman looking after the farm animals. Still without human friends, she understands and loves the animals better than anyone else, and is more skilled than others at looking after them:
“… she understood their language far better than that of mankind, and looked after them with motherly affection… she seemed to know their good or their evil character at a glance…she astounded those to whom one chicken was exactly like any other”.
The animals love her as much as she loves them, and become upset when she leaves them. Once again her robust cheerfulness provides a direct contrast to the nervous depression and moral transgressions of her family.
Zola’s ‘scientific’ method shows us several classic examples of late 19th century thinking about ‘idiocy’: the happy, innocent ‘idiot’; the degeneration of families through ‘poor breeding’; and the unnerving space occupied by the ‘idiot’ person in some 19th century minds, somewhere between the human and the animal.
