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Le vin des pauvres chez les frères Goncourt et Zola
| Summary: | In Germinie Lacerteux, which Preface is the starting point of naturalism in 1864, Jules and Edmond de Goncourt deal with the fall and the double life of a servant, who first follows the paths of mystical devotions, and then, for the sake of love, falls into alcoholism and hysterical debauchery. In Mes Haines, Zola enhances the emergence of the people in the novel, whose physiology is described in a clinical and precise manner. In 1876, he writes L’Assommoir, a great novel of social misery. Should we see, in those pictures of alcoholic despair due to love, a mere naturalistic vision, an outraging « bas-fond manie », as it enhances too vividly the miseries and immoralities of the people? Concerning a hysterical madly erotic woman, was this fiction built as the realistic description of a pathology, in discrepancy with the romantic idealisation of women? Or should we read it as noire poetry, which transformed this feminine fury in search of the absolute in an esthetical metaphor, just as Baudelaire did? |
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| Subject: | transfiguration fatalité généalogique vin des pauvres yearning for the absolute hysteria genealogical fatality the wine of the poor hystérie soif d’absolu |
| Country: | Portugal |
| Document type: | journal article |
| Access type: | Open |
| Associated institution: | Carnets, Revista Electrónica de Estudos Franceses |
| Language: | French |
| Origin: | Carnets, Revista Electrónica de Estudos Franceses |
| Summary: | In Germinie Lacerteux, which Preface is the starting point of naturalism in 1864, Jules and Edmond de Goncourt deal with the fall and the double life of a servant, who first follows the paths of mystical devotions, and then, for the sake of love, falls into alcoholism and hysterical debauchery. In Mes Haines, Zola enhances the emergence of the people in the novel, whose physiology is described in a clinical and precise manner. In 1876, he writes L’Assommoir, a great novel of social misery. Should we see, in those pictures of alcoholic despair due to love, a mere naturalistic vision, an outraging « bas-fond manie », as it enhances too vividly the miseries and immoralities of the people? Concerning a hysterical madly erotic woman, was this fiction built as the realistic description of a pathology, in discrepancy with the romantic idealisation of women? Or should we read it as noire poetry, which transformed this feminine fury in search of the absolute in an esthetical metaphor, just as Baudelaire did? |
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