Study on the Formative Era of Modem Society in France - Women's Situation in Naturalist Novels

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The aim of this study is to examine the problem of class and gender in modem capitalist society in France, through the reading of french naturalist novels, especially Emile Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart.The eighth novel of the cycle, Une page d'amour, forms a sort of tritogy with the seventh, L'Assoamair, and the nineth, Nona. While L'Assommoir deseribes the world of labor class where the norm of sexuality is ambiguous, Une page d'amour deals with and conservative bourgeois class where the women are circumscribed within the narrow bounds of their home. The spaces of Nona is those of moierrdy where class and gender interface in critical ways, in that they are the spaces of sexual exchange (Griselda Pollock). Zola placed these three novels in different spheres of Paris and tried to examine aspects of women's sexuality and psychosisin each sphere.The eleventh novel of the cycle, Au Bonheur des Dames, features a department store, leading place of modemity. Here too, classes are mingled bourgeois ladies as consumers and wording class women as shop girls. Zola admits that te shop girls form a neutral class between working class and bourgeoisie because of their daily contact with a luxury. But low paid, they have to take a lover or to prostitute themselves, encouraged by their proximity with commodities they are selling. In the consumer capitalist society where exchange values surmounted use values, everything becomes merchandise. Denise, heroine of the novel, who declines every seduction and who conquers the patron Mouret with the only power of her patient and intelligent "femininity" represents the ideal woman under the capitalist reign. Her role seems to give a touch of humanity and morality to it.The characteristic of this study is to have remarked these women's motifs in common with those of impressionist painters like Manet, Monet, Renoir or Berthe Morisot