The Fortune of the Rougons: The Origins of Les Rougon-Macquarts

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms.

This extract is taken from the final paragraph of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1851). It is perhaps the most famous nineteenth-century description of the implications of evolutionary theory — the interconnectedness of all living things and the inescapable importance of our genetic inheritance, yet still the potential for variation from what has come before and the relationship between death and extinction and survival.

Emile Zola suggested that an alternative title to The Fortune of the Rougons (1871), the first in a 20-novel cycle involving the Rougon-Macquart family, might be Origins. The novel deals with the emergence of this multi-branched family in the fictional town of Plassans (based on Aix-en-Provence) at the nascence of the Second Empire, Louis-Napoleon’s coup d’etat in 1851. In keeping with his Naturalist preoccupations, Zola traces the origins of the Rougon-Macquarts’ hereditary weaknesses — their cowardice, greed and susceptibility to nervous attacks or mental illness — that will form the basis of the nineteen later novels. In The Fortune of the Rougons, the Rougon portion of the family rises to pre-eminence in the chaos of social unrest, but only through spilling the blood of others — rivals, random strangers and, of course, relatives.

The family tree of the Rougon-Macquarts

The foil to the scheming of the novel’s long list of characters is an innocent pair of teenage sweethearts — Silvere and Miette — caught up by the idealism of the Republican insurgents. The novel opens with the lovers meeting at the Aire Saint-Mittre, a piece of land that bears a resemblance to Darwin’s ‘entangled bank’, a former graveyard now teeming with life:

The thick vegetation and the eerie stillness of the old cemetery can still be seen and felt in this lane, where the walls are covered in moss and the ground seems like a woollen carpet. On the hottest days you can feel the warm, voluptuous breath of the dead rising from the old graves. Around Plassans there is no spot so exciting, more alive with emotion, so heavy with warmth, solitude and love. It is a wonderful place for lovers. When the cemetery was being cleared the bones must have been piled up in this corner, for even today people feeling in the grass with their feet often kick up fragments of skull.

No spot is more promising for the fecundity of love than the resting place of former generations but Silvere and Miette are doomed to die before the consummation of their match. Why? Silvere simply lacks the requisite survival instincts of his crueller, more decisive, more fertile Rougon-Macquart relatives. Here’s how Miette’s death is described:

In the hour of her agony, in the terrible struggle between death and her sanguine nature, she regretted her virginity. Silvere, as he bent over her, understood the bitter tears of this passionate girl. He heard the distant cry of the old cemetery bones; he recalled their caresses and their burning kisses in the night, by the side of the road; he remembered how she had thrown her arms around him, yearning for his love, but he had not understood, and now he was letting her go forever, a virgin, grieving at the thought of never having tasted the deep pleasures of life.

Emile Zola (1840-1902)

It is back in the graveyard that Silvere meets his end, passive until just before the crucial moment, unlike his peasant companion who fights ‘like a pig being slaughtered’. Only the appearance of Miette’s cruel cousin Justin causes Silvere to long for survival:

[He] felt a surge of anger, a sudden desire to go on living. It was the last revolt of his blood, just for a second.

It is too little, too late. Silvere is not enough like his uncles to survive and second later he is shot, his ‘skull burst open like a ripe pomegranate’.

In the Rougons’ drawing room, the survivors feast, all marked out by the blood of those they have crushed in their desire for advancement. This is how the novel concludes:

But the strip of pink fastened to Pierre’s buttonhole was not the only splash of red that marked the triumph of the Rougons. A shoe with a bloodstained heel lay forgotten under the bed in the next room. The candle burning at Monsieur Peirotte’s bedside, on the opposite side of the street, shone in the darkness with the lurid redness of an open wound. And far away, in the depths of the Aire Saint-Mittre, a pool of blood was congealing on a tombstone.

What nineteenth-century novel would you like to see the Secret Victorianist read next? Let me know — here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Maggie and Family: A Litany of Violence

Stephen Crane’s 1893 novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets shocked with its realistic portrayal of nineteenth-century New York tenements and the life of a girl, Maggie, who suffers a difficult childhood, loses her virtue and is ultimately murdered.

But Maggie is also a fascinating example of naturalism in American literature. With his journalistic eye, Crane records in detail the appalling conditions for New York’s poor and then uses his powers as a storyteller to argue for the causal connection between Maggie’s sorry upbringing and her moral and physical downfall.

Most famously propounded by the French novelist Emile Zola (1840-1902), naturalism is concerned with determinism—the idea that humans are governed by natural laws—and so intergenerational inheritance is a key theme that Crane, Zola and other writers, like Thomas Hardy, often dwell on.

In the case of Maggie, her inheritance is violence. When she first speaks in the novella it is to upbraid her brother for fighting (“Ah, Jimmie, youse bin fightin’ agin”) and her complaint is founded on the idea that the run of violence will continue:

“Youse allus fightin’, Jimmie, an’ yeh knows it puts mudder out when yehs come home half dead, an’ it’s like we’ll all get a poundin’.”

Maggie is a victim but also has the potential to be dangerous herself. She is described as a ‘tigress’ as a child. Fighting—for survival, but also as a way of life—is the favoured collective pastime in these slums, where gender is initially no indicator of who will beat and who will be beaten:

“Eh, Gawd, child, what is it dis time? Is yer fader beatin’ yer mudder, or yer mudder beatin’ yer fader?”

Yet as the story continues, and Maggie matures, being a woman marks her out as a particular target. Her love for Pete ruins her and, just before her death, the man who presumably kills her is shown noticing her feminine features and height, indicative of her physical vulnerability:

His small, bleared eyes, sparkling from amidst great rolls of red fat, swept eagerly over the girl’s upturned face.

What’s more Maggie’s family and neighbours can’t conceive of an afterlife where this run of violence will not continue:

“She’s gone where her sins will be judged,” cried the other women, like a choir at a funeral.

All that lies in store for Maggie is punishment, for crimes she was born, and raised, to commit.

Are there any other works set in nineteenth-century New York you’d like the Secret Victorianist to discuss? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Art Review: Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty, MoMA, New York City

The last exhibition I saw that was dedicated entirely to the works of nineteenth-century French artist Edgar Degas was Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement, at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2011.

The Jet Earring (1876-7)

That exhibition was dedicated to the well-known and well-loved Degas paintings that I’d been familiar with since my childhood ballet lessons—canvas after canvas of dancers bending, twirling or tying their shoes in studios and on stage—along with his forays into sculpture, movement captured in impossible frozen poses.

The Ballet Master (c.1874)

The MoMA’s 2016 Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty though is dedicated to a whole new side of the artist—his love for printmaking and the monotype process. The dancers are still here but the pastels are replaced with a new darkness, visible from the artist’s very first experiment in the form in The Ballet Master (c.1874). As his proficiency with the technique develops, monotype allows Degas to explore texture and shadow, creating a much more intimate relationship with his subjects. In Actresses in their Dressing Rooms (1879-1880) each panel allows for experimentation with the possibilities of the form, while the voyeuristic subject matter is suited to the shade.

Actresses in their Dressing Rooms (1879-1880)

But printmaking also allows Degas to dabble in other subjects (some familiar, some less so)—brothels, which he only ever represented using these techniques (some of these prints I had seen previously at the d’Orsay exhibition I reviewed this January), bathers and other nude females, pictured in domestic environments, and the busy streets of late nineteenth-century Paris, where the versatility of printing techniques allows him to blur out facial features, a study in the anonymity of crowds.

Heads of a Man and a Woman (c.1880)

Also on display are Degas’s etchings to accompany writer Ludovic Halévy’s La Famille Cardinal (1883) and prints of women ironing (a favourite subject) accompanied by a discussion on the connections between the artist and his contemporary Emile Zola.

Woman Reading (c.1885)

If you find yourself at a loose end this holiday weekend in New York or can make it to MoMA on the (free!) Friday afternoons/evenings then the exhibition, running until July 24, is well worth checking out.

Do you know of any other NYC exhibitions you’d like the Secret Victorianist to review? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Theatre Review: Thérèse Raquin, Roundabout Theatre Company, Studio 54, New York City

Émile Zola’s 1867 novel of exclusion, passion, adultery and murder has come to life this season in a dark and gripping production on New York’s Broadway.

Gabriel Ebert, Matt Ryan, and Keira Knightley [Photo: Joan Marcus]

Hollywood star Keira Knightley is entirely believable as Thérèse throughout.

She starts the play as the awkward outcast, bullied by her aunt (Judith Light) and eventually married off to her self-centred and hypochondriac cousin, Camille (Gabriel Ebert). She has few lines and is rarely centre stage, sat or stood in corners with her head downcast. But she draws our eye from the beginning, partly due to Keith Parham’s lighting, but also because of how interesting it is to watch her reactions. Her slight movements carry to the very back of the balcony, exciting audience sympathy and making it tricky to concentrate on what the other actors are saying at all.

Keira Knightley and Judith Light [Photo: Joan Marcus]

In the middle portion of the play, Knightley plays a role that is more recognisable from her – the impassioned lover. Fatally attracted to her husband’s friend Laurent (Matt Ryan), Thérèse embarks upon a doomed affair and is transformed in the process.

Knightley lets her words spill out over each other, moves at a faster pace about the small claustrophobic apartment that is the set for much of the play, and centres all her reactions on Laurent, making it clear where her attention is focussed from his very first entrance. She and Ryan work well together, although the affair seems more a product of Thérèse’s long-standing loneliness, than any particular attractions on Laurent’s part, beyond his sexual experience. Their on-stage sexual encounters are always brief, and clothed, although expect some bodice-ripping staples – tumbling hair and loosened necklines.

Keira Knightley and Matt Ryan [Photo: Sara Krulwich]

In the final portion of the play, the lovers face the most difficult challenge – depicting the disintegration of their relationship, and their minds, after the murder of Camille. Knightley undulates beautifully between restraint and collapse, and sanity and madness here, while the unusual set of circumstances the couple finds themselves in is also played here like many abusive and unhappy domestic relationships. Ryan puts in a stronger performance I think in his hate than in love, and Light comes close to stealing the show in these final scenes with her harrowing performance as Camille’s broken mother, destroyed by grief, a stroke, and, finally, the understanding of what Laurent and Thérèse have done.

Director Evan Cabnet’s production of Helen Edmundson’s adaption is also notable for its set (designed by Beowulf Boritt) – including an onstage river. We are first introduced to Thérèse against a bleak and open stage, dominated by the water – one of the play’s most striking images – and the murder, later, is able to appear more realistic, and less ridiculous than it might have done on-stage, as the three (Camille, Laurent, Thérèse) are in fact in a small and rocking row boat.

Keira Knightley as Thérèse Raquin [Photo: Mikael Jansson, Vogue]

Some may object to Knightley’s casting as a character who is meant to be half-Algerian, but there’s no denying she does a stellar job at capturing Thérèse in all her complexity. It’s an incredible Broadway debut, and one well worth buying a ticket for.

Thérèse Raquin is currently in preview. The play opens October 29 and runs until January 2016. Tickets are available here.

Do you know of any other NYC productions of nineteenth-century plays the Secret Victorianist should watch? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Review: Esther Waters, George Moore (1894)

George Moore

Esther Waters is a novel which has a kitchen maid as its heroine, morality as its subject, and a distaste for hypocrisy at its core. It is a novel which discusses what other nineteenth-century texts only hint at and appears strikingly modern, while still being embedded in its time (the slang of the race track, the conversation in the public house, journeying through London streets at night). Working class orphan Esther raises her illegitimate child alone in a world which is deeply hostile to her – but she is no Tess Durbeyfield. She faces poverty and homelessness, while never becoming a tragic figure, and exposes the faults of those around her through her forthright honesty and pragmatic approach to leading a moral life. 

For general readers: Esther Waters has an immediacy which is appealing to modern readers and its focus on working class characters is also attractive, given our interest in servants and worker characters, from TV shows like The Mill and Downton Abbey, to our tastes in Victorian stage comedy. Don’t expect pages of lengthy description or narrative exposition – this feels raw and real.

Yet the reading experience is a little uneven. Long sections of dialogue about racehorses can be hard work, even if our confusion is meant to mirror that of the initially naïve and unworldly Esther, brought up by the Plymouth Brethren, and so entirely ignorant of gambling. And there are leaps in time which can be a little unsettling, especially given it still seems something of a surprise for little Jackie, an illegitimate child in a novel, to survive his infancy.

The passages I found most affecting were those which dealt with the physical and emotional consequences of Esther’s pregnancy (dealt with in a previous post), the terrible position of wet nurses, divided from their own children to nourish richer women’s, and Jackie’s confusion when caught between his two parents. Esther’s response to the unexpected return of an absentee father rings very true, alternating between her possessive and protective feelings towards her child. 

For students: Esther Waters naturally complements the study of ‘fallen woman’ literature, nineteenth-century censorship, the influence of French novelists, especially Zola, and the move in the 1890s towards writing we may consider ‘modern’ in bent. But there are other topics worthy of critical attention.

The treatment of Esther’s fellow servant Sarah in the courtroom, tried for stealing from her employers to fuel her partner’s gambling addiction, is an interesting point of contrast to the treatment of more aristocratic and middle-class women in my earlier series looking at women in the dock and witness box.

The kind of healing companionship between women which the novel deals with, in Esther’s partnerships with Miss Rice and Mrs Barfield, could also prove fruitful for study. These pairings are unequal (with Esther always definitively in the role of servant) but offer an alternative to the suffering incurred by male/female sexual relationships, and reminded me of the conclusion to a later novel which similarly deals with illegitimacy (yet here where sexual relations cross class lines) – E.M. Forster’s 1910 Howards End.

Which lesser known nineteenth-century novel would you like the Secret Victorianist to review next? Let me know here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!