The interface of primal instinct and lofty ideal in Zolas Germinal - Essay Example

?The Interface of Primal Instinct and Lofty Ideal in Zola’s Germinal Emile Zola’s Germinal is a unique combination of historical record and literary saga, which allows us to glean rich insights into the portrayed society and its idea and embodiment of sexuality. Zola’s portrayal of sexuality in Germinal serves as a grounding force for the story. The physicality of the characters, thus enunciated, is a counterpoint to the revolutionary socialist ideas that suffuse the political and philosophical vision of the novel, with the political and poetic facets of the writing fortifying each other. Germinal was published in 1885. The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848, and the Russian Revolution took place in 1917- placing the publication of Germinal right in the midst of the political intensification of such revolutionary ideals. Germinal, the novel’s title, is a spring month from the French revolutionary calendar that falls somewhere around April.1 Zola wrote the novel during a time of much public debate about the nature of large feudal mining companies in French society, and Reid claims that the social impact of the novel on French society had as much to do with a “subversion of coal companies' self- congratulatory paternalist language” as with the depictions of workers’ hardships.2 It is clear that the plot revolves around these lofty concepts, yet these are ideals that can only be espoused by the educated, whereas the miners are truly proletariats. They toil in misery and in ignorance without considering their plight and exploitation in any grand terms until they are forcefully convinced to do so. Otherwise, they probably would have worked, copulated, argued, and gossiped unceasingly until the end of their existence- the miners are very primal physical entities. They ground the story and eventually provide corporeal flooring for the abstract revolutionary notions. Moreover, I would suggest that the subversion of the dominant paternalistic, moralistic language of the mining companies is, on the level of the miners, being carried out through their overtly immoral, brazen, and yet apathetic sexuality. While the socialist principles that drive the miners to strike are elusive concepts that they have trouble holding on to, their brute primal energy and connection to the earth, crude as it may be, is what keeps them going and living from day to day. Goldberg presents an apt analogy in saying that in the world of the miners, Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” becomes “I eat therefore I am.”3 This is the usurpation of the rational by the primal. The most primal of all urges is the sex drive, and the raw energy of sexual desire and appetite permeates the story of Germinal. Zola was quite adamant about carefully observing the phenomena he wished to record and setting his observations down in writing as a scientist would, rather than as an “artist”.4 The art in his work came from his detailed encapsulation of real life characters and setting down of social conditions. More accurately, Zola once said that he “wanted to study temperaments and not characters” and that he “chose beings powerfully dominated by their nerves and their blood, devoid of freewill, carried away by the fatalities of their flesh.”5 Zola’s realist style comes to fruition through the society he depicts. Allowing himself to organize his collection of facts and temperaments, therefore, Zola composed and narrated the greater picture that came together from the pieces of his collection. This greater picture enabled him to universalize his philosophical narrative. Germinal is a story of a failed uprising of miners, yet it is paradoxically considered a work full of hope and revolutionary sentiment. Etienne, the protagonist comes to work in the Voreux, a mine, and live in the small adjacent mining town, Montsou. As appropriate in an epic storyline, he meets his love interest, Catherine, and his rival for her love, Chaval, almost in the very beginning of the story. He is inspired by socialist principles to seek justice for the miserable, poverty stricken workers. Throughout the novel, we witness the worsening of conditions, until finally the miners are stirred to strike. The riots are quelled, the strike broken, and the workers return to their toil, blaming Etienne for the failure. The entrance to the mines, however, was wrecked by another character (Souvarine), thereby trapping Etienne underground with his love interest Catherine, and her lover Chaval. Eventually Etienne, in a rage, kills Chaval. Catherine dies before the rescue workers reach them. Etienne emerges from his interment, alone, but hopeful. He leaves Montsou, looking forward to the future. To understand the implications of sexuality in the story of Germinal, it is crucial to situate the plot and the characters into historical context and to analyze the symbolic vein in the plot. Various critiques of Zola’s oeuvre bring up the fact that his characters appear to be lacking an interior world.6 Indeed, he may eschew introspection and profound rumination in his characters in favour of a stronger plot, but this only serves to strengthen the impact of the greater picture that he presents. In Germinal, this translates into a masterpiece of social and political commentary that has strong mythological aspects. This is especially notable in the treatment of sexuality. The novel is overwhelmingly about the clash of male and female, or perhaps more accurately the corruption of the feminine by the masculine, with an emphasis on female sexuality. The novel is suffused with references to the body, sex, and sexuality. The references range from physical descriptions (mostly of the female body) and varied gender allusions, to crude fornication and illustrations of unbridled reproduction. All of the linguistic decisions in description of relations between men and women are quite telling. The word choice indicates a consistent language of possession. The male is conveyed as intended and expected to possess the female. The numerous female characters in Germinal represent different archetypes of sexuality, but the one constant that runs through all of the characterizations is their submission, willing or not, to the masculine. At first, Catherine is pure and innocent. At the beginning of the novel she has not yet matured. She lacks the prominent characteristics of a woman, leading Etienne to initially mistake her for a boy. When he realizes his mistake, Etienne reassesses her thus, “he felt that her body was virginal, with the virginity of a child delayed in her sexual maturity by the environment of bad air and weariness in which she lived.”7 So even in her purity, the process of corruption threatens her, always hovering near by, latched onto the poverty and degradation of her environment. As this assessment set in, Etienne also realized that he was turned on and disturbed by her masked femininity. It seems that he felt the urge to continue and drive home the slow progress of corruption and ruination that had already been predestined for Catherine. A certain modesty or timidity stopped Etienne from pursuing his desires. What Etienne refrained from doing to Catherine, Chaval unremorsefully performed. The part that describes Chaval’s seduction, or rather rape, of Catherine uses depersonalized language to convey that it is more than a description of an individual scene; it is the template for a standard social practice within the world of the story. Chaval becomes “male” and Catherine a representative of all the girls of her station in life that yield to the male before their time.8 This is reinforced by a later description of the common lot: “violence behind the pit-bank, a child at sixteen, and then a wretched household if her lover married her.”9 When scolded for her behaviour by her mother, she replied simply that she was obliged to want what Chaval wanted, for he was her man, and he was the stronger one. Here is the plain illustration of a woman subdued and dominated by her man, but the relation is not portrayed as an independent case. It is the way things are it is a part of the scheme. Catherine and Chaval are merely another permutation of the same scenario, perhaps a slight variation to Lydie and Jeanlin or Philomene and Zacharie. Nevertheless, Catherine is not a pathetic victim; there is something to her character that is a combination of frail innocence and wanton sexuality. It is this that seemed to both tempt and disgust Etienne who “had for her a feeling, half of friendship and half of spite,”10 an interesting formulation of romantic love! To return to the linguistic choices that denote ownership and possession, it is important to make a note of the names of the women in Germinal. While most of the young girls in the story have a first name and an independent identity, the older wives are merely presented as the other half of their men. This is why they are all referred to by the feminized version of their husbands’ names. They are the females that have been fully corrupted, used, and worn out. They no longer have any potential or hope; they are stuck with their lot in life. Maheude, Catherine’s mother, is the fulfilment of Catherine’s potential. She is the fullest illustration in the novel of the unfortunate best-case scenario for the girls in this world. She is portrayed in a manner that emphasizes her animal nature. She is a poor beast, worn out from decades of child bearing and nurturing. Once she was attractive, but then she lost her figure and her attraction “like a good female who had produced too much.”11 She is constantly suckling Estelle, the baby, and at one point when the baby has fallen asleep and she neglected to stow away her breast, it hung “free and naked like the udder of a great cow.”12 Maheude is denoted as “good” because she is carrying out the duties expected of her- reproduction and nurture- not too different from the expectations an owner would have for his sturdy cattle. Catherine and Maheude are exemplars of the low class feminine and reflect the source and termination of the mass of their peers. Their counterparts in the bourgeois class are Cecile and Madame Hennebeau. Both the case of Cecile and that of Madame Hennebeau are devices that Zola uses to undermine the power and apparent masculinity of the boss men in relation to the miners. Cecile, like Catherine, is also innocent and pure. However, since she comes from the privileged class, she is perhaps even overly so. The first time she is described in the text, she is characterized as “too healthy” and over-developed.13 The comfortable and spoiled life has created an opposite extreme, a female that is vulgar in her very propriety and idleness. Cecile ended up trapped outside and was attacked and exposed by the mob of miners during the riot. Despite the fact that she escaped relatively unharmed and with virginity in tact, the rude and public exposure of her bottom was a grave defilement of her dignity, and revealed the helplessness of her class and the impotence of her men, who failed to protect her. This infringement apparently tainted her, for her story climaxed on a much eerier and more uncanny note with her strangulation by the supposedly incapacitated Bonnemort. Zola portrays the scene where Cecile was left alone with the invalid Bonnemort, whose name ironically means “good death”, by contrasting her clean, healthy and fresh appearance with his hardened, blackened and ugly debilitation. She was a paramount of bourgeois femininity and he the epitome of the prostrate and beaten working man. Despite all outward appearances and expectations, however, he managed to overpower and destroy her. Madame Hennebeau on the other hand was corrupted to the core from the very moment that she was introduced into the story, but remained undefeated. She is apparently shamelessly promiscuous like the lower class women, yet she refuses to succumb to the one man to whom she is lawfully expected to submit to. It is her unassailability, and her husband’s inability to penetrate and subdue her that drives his passion for her. He wished she would give herself to him as she does to others, but when he sensed that she denies herself to him completely he dared not even try: “when she looked at him with her cold eyes, and when he felt that everything within her denied itself to him, he even avoided touching her hand.”14 Her evasion of her husband’s affections discredit his masculinity, for a cuckolded man who cannot even embrace, or possess his own wife is not perceived as very masculine at all. An enlightening historical detour may serve to aptly contextualize an aspect of the now obsolete view of female sexuality and how Zola’s understanding of it is reflected in his work and more specifically, his characters. Zola was tirelessly devoted to his scientific method of literature, and his scientific beliefs also made their way into his writing. In this vein, more than most other writers of his time, Zola bestowed a position of primary importance to heredity in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, of which Germinal is the thirteenth volume.15 Moreover, he believed in a now obsolete theory called telegony, which states that: “a woman is biologically marked by the first male member to penetrate her. Her germ is thus impregnated or infected by her first consort, and all her offspring from any subsequent male will bear the genetic inheritance of the first lover.”16 In other words, this is saying that the man who first penetrates a woman, somehow permanently marks her. The first instance of sexual intercourse then becomes the ultimate act of possession. This attitude is reflected in Catherine’s behaviour towards Chaval after he has become her lover. Despite her romantic indifference to Chaval and obvious preference for Etienne, she now believes herself inextricably linked to Chaval. He owns and dominates her, and her luckiest option is for him to eventually marry her. Zola’s ascription to the belief in telegony also delineates the importance of the episode when Catherine returns from the riot with blood on her dress. The onset of puberty and her first menstruation indicates that only now she has become fertile and is capable of impregnation. The flood of her menstrual blood can be interpreted as a symbolic cleansing of her acts with Chaval for it is only what she will do henceforth from that point that will mark her future seed. The theme of heredity, which fluidly connects with that of fertility and reproduction, demonstrate the novel’s essential connection of female sexuality to the earth and the forces and cycles of nature. The title, Germinal, is itself a reference to spring, to germination, fertility, hence reproduction. The final paragraph of Germinal describes the rich and fruitful potential of the earth in beautifully poetic and anthropomorphic terms reminiscent of a fertile, mature woman: the sun was warming the “pregnant earth,” from whose “fertile flanks” life was leaping, and the sound of the overflowing sap was mixed with the sound of the germ “expanding in a great kiss.” Moreover, the mine into which the workers disappear day by day is a typically Freudian example of a womb. It is dark, confined, buried within the ground. It swallows the labourers and regurgitates them in a repeating loop, reminiscent of the repetitive penetration of the sex act. Hence, the defilement of nature that is laboriously performed by the labourers during their workday is continued during their leisure hours in a different medium. “Mother Earth” is just another harlot to be bent into submission, until she stands up and shows them otherwise, which is of course what happens when the mine implodes. The forces of nature were unleashed, and the miners where struck down- subdued. Concurrently, Etienne succumbed to the forces of his hereditary nature and unleashed his violent urge to destroy, resulting in his murder of Chaval. His release was then completed when he finally made love to Catherine, marking her and potentially sowing his proverbial seed. In this setting, it is poignant how much the liaison between Etienne and Catherine stands apart from the rest. Catherine and Etienne’s relationship is the unsuccessful combination of libidinous physical desire and idealized love. It displays the interface that exists in Germinal between the two realms of low physical reality and high conceptual abstraction- for what can be more abstract and elusive than the confused amalgamation of feelings that comprise love? Just as the unsuccessful front between the two realms resulted in much loss and despair for the miners and the worsening of their condition with no tangible improvement, so does the mutual affection of these characters, which eventually fosters a tender consummation in the confines of the collapsed mine, culminates in nothing. The eruption of the forces of nature allows Etienne to release much of the obstructive energy that was welling up inside him. Until the end, he did not allow himself to succumb to his urges. In the mine, in the recesses of the earth, he finally did. The initial demonstration of this was the first time in the narrative that Etienne is shown to think of Catherine as a possession rather than an individual, when he watches her and thinks, “She would belong to the one who lived longest; that man would steal her from him should he go first.”17 Eventually, he forced his rival into submission by going into a rage and killing Chaval. Then he claimed the woman for himself, like a prize. He finally had her at the moment when they both submit together to death, though in the end only Catherine passes away. Nevertheless, the story ends on a positive note. Everything that transpired in the depths of the earth stays there and Etienne emerges alone, cleansed of his sins and hopeful for the future. In Zola’s Germinal, the characters’ sexuality is the manifestation of their primal physicality. It is their connection to the earth and to each other. In the face of their hardships, it is the driving life force, and yet it is also keeping them back from attaining loftier heights. Etienne’s experiences in the depths of the earth, however, purge him of his brute animal force and sexuality, allowing him to represent the pure potential for an unhampered future. Bibliography Bellos, D., ‘From the Bowels of the Earth: An Essay on Germinal.’ Forum for Modern Language Studies vol.15, 1979, pp. 35-45. Caplan, P. (ed.), The Cultural Construction of Sexuality, London, Tavistock Publications Ltd, 1987. Carlson, M., ‘Ibsen, Strindberg, and Telegony’ PMLA, vol. 100, no. 5, 1985, pp. 774-782. Goldberg, M.A., ‘Zola and Social Revolution: A Study of Germinal’ The Antioch Review, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 491- 507. Hennessy, S. S. ‘Maternal Space and (Re)Production in Les Rougon-Macquart, By Emile Zola’ ­Neophilologus, vol. 82, 1998, pp. 209-220. Lehan, R., ‘American Literary Naturalism: The French Connection’ Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 38, no. 4, 1984, pp. 529-557. Pasco, A.H., ‘Myth, Metaphor, and Meaning in Germinal’ The French Review, vol. 46, no. 4, 1973, pp. 739-749. Petrey S., Realism and Revolution: Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, and the performances of history, New York, Cornell University Press, 1988. Petrey S., ‘The Revolutionary Setting of Germinal’ The French Review, vol. 43, no. 1, 1969, pp. 54-63. Reid, D., ‘Metaphor and Management: The Paternal in Germinal and Travail’ French Historical Studies, vol. 17, no. 4, 1992, pp. 979-1000. Zola, E. Germinal, trans. H Ellis, E-book. Available from manybooks.net, (accessed 30 July 2011). Read More