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.

Teaching (Victorian) Literature; or the True and Lamentable Story of Literary Murder

Along with Shakespeare, the Victorian novel is perhaps the greatest victim of the British schooling system. For many, the only nineteenth-century novel they will ever read is a Bronte, Dickens or Hardy ‘ploughed’ through over months of tedious class group reading and beaten to death through ridiculous exercises and slavish commitment to assessment objectives. During my time in school English classrooms I liked literature despite (not because) of how it was taught and, several years on, here are some personal reflections on what works and what doesn’t when introducing students to weighty, complex but rewarding texts.

A schoolroom

 Don’t pretend English is Maths:
I can imagine this stroke of ‘genius’ as it came to my disgruntled, disillusioned GCSE teacher. Her students hated English, hated her, and seemed certain to hate the selection of Victorian stories on the supernatural we were to tackle for coursework - H.G. Wells’s The Red Room (1894), Wilkie Collins’s The Ostler (1855), Charles Dickens’s A Confession Found in a Prison (1840-1) and Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839). What if she could only harness our superior attainments in Mathematics! We were soon set to work on graphs, designed to chart how suspense was created and varied throughout a short story, mapping how key moments in plot affected our (hopefully equally susceptible) nerves.

The results were disastrous. Some science-loving students had their suspicions that English was far from academically rigorous confirmed as people bickered over whether a door slamming was a 6, 7 or 8 out of 10. Our teacher muddled her terms, as war erupted over labelling the x and y axes. And most of the room couldn’t even remember the events we were meant to be ranking from the Poe, they had found the prose so impenetrable.

An alternative: Talking about the ways suspense can be created could be really fruitful, but only talking about plot ignores the very language students are meant to be learning to analyse. Why not show students a suspenseful scene from a modern movie dealing with the supernatural and then get them to write it in the first person, using some techniques employed by the authors of these (first person) stories? Concentrating on what language can add – what it is, rather than what it isn’t – is the way to explain its value.

Don’t tell students the ‘answer’:

‘Why does Eustacia marry Clym?’ (in Hardy’s The Return of the Native, 1878), ‘How does Tennyson feel about war?’ and ‘Are we meant to like Nelly?’ (E. Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, 1845-6) were all questions with set answers, which could be neatly bullet-pointed and forcibly ingested ahead of exam time, when I was first asked to consider them. This isn’t fun for anyone, especially not the teachers who have taught the same set texts for years, and it’s not reflective of the moral questioning and skilful ambiguity which pervades much of the writing of the period.

An alternative: Encourage debate, get students to argue a point both (or even more than two) ways and suggest how this potential for discussion can be a strength, not a fault of great writing. This will help those approaching literature academically for the first time get better at differentiating between tones, recognising subversion and appreciating nuances of expression.

Don’t ‘do context’: 

Students who are perfectly capable of A Level standard history work, are routinely fed the kind of facts about Victorians which decorate the walls of primary schools as soon as it comes to adding ‘context’ to their English essays. Apparently, Victorians treated women badly, liked trains, were upset by Darwin, were very uptight about sex and that’s about it (okay, well maybe the last one wouldn’t be included in a younger children’s collage).

The alternative: Context isn’t an extra in English. Historical and social contexts should inform how students read and interpret literature at every point. The best way to approach this is by simply reading more – about the period or just from within the period. Rather than focussing on one novel the whole time, the more successful students will read around the subject. You will perform better if you’ve read more than one novel by the author you’re studying or by one of his or her contemporaries - not because you can name drop, but because you’ll have imbibed more about the time.

What were your experiences (good and bad) of nineteenth-century literature at school? Scarring? Inspiring? And, if you’re a teacher, how do you approach long and difficult novels with your classes? Let me know below, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist. And if you enjoy the blog, please VOTE for the Secret Victorianist in the UK Blog Awards!

Review: In a Glass Darkly, Sheridan Le Fanu (1897)

This collection of short stories from Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu varies in length, narration and style. They deal with vampires in Styria, legal malpractice in London, a strange man stalking his victim through the streets of Dublin. What unites them all is play with the supernatural and uncanny. Initial scepticism and a trust in the ‘scientific’ is increasingly unsettled and undermined as Le Fanu leaves us with no clear answers. These are ‘ghost’ stories which linger both in their telling and in their effect. Don’t expect horror movie shocks and twists. But draw up to the fireside this December to be more disturbed than entertained.

Sheridan Le Fanu

For general readers: In a Glass Darkly is an uneven experience and its strange narrative structure, as a series of loosely connected stories collected by a shadowy doctor (Dr Hesselius), may be off-putting to readers used to more traditional Victorian novels, but there is much here to interest a non-academic audience. The scepticism about the supernatural which pervades the novel, almost in spite of its content, is readily recognisable to modern reader, while the connection between the conscience or subconscious and the onset of hallucination and mania which the stories often suggest is one which is easily recognisable, even if this means the stories lose something of their ground-breaking edge. ‘Carmilla’ will probably have the widest popular appeal, dealing as it does with a form of vampirism with overtly erotic lesbian overtones. It’s the kind of story which confounds common misconceptions about the ‘Victorian’. The other longer story, ‘The Room at the Dragon Volant’, has similar character interest, especially given its hero’s actions are far from morally uncomplicated.

For students: As well as being an interesting read, ‘Carmilla’ will also be of interest to students of the Gothic and Bram Stoker in particular, predating as it does Dracula (1897), for which it provided some inspiration. Those interested in the impact of Swedenborgism on literature should turn to ‘Green Tea’, the first story in the volume, where the apparition of a phantom monkey also suggests interesting Darwinian contexts. And comparison with Charles Dickens’s short stories could also work, both in terms of structure (see my earlier discussion of MrsLirriper) and in some cases content – the judgement undergone by Justice Harbottle here makes the ghostly apparition which appear to Scrooge in A Christmas Carol seem almost cuddly.

What should the Secret Victorianist read next? Let me know here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

'This Genealogical Passion': Hardy, Incest and Degeneration

Gemma Arterton as Tess in the BBC's 2008 adaptation

‘He seemed to have such prescriptive rights in women of her blood.’

A brief plot summary of Thomas Hardy’s The Well-Beloved (1897), published in its original form as a serial in 1892 as The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved, is enough to convince most of the oddity of this novel, which reads like a perverted fairytale with less pretence to realism than Hardy’s more famous works. Jocelyn Pierston, the protagonist, falls in love with three generations of the same family of women across a forty-year period – the original Avice Caro, her daughter, and then finally her granddaughter, with the repetition of events being a fuelling reason for his passion. Yet this strange novel, with its concentration on familial ties, genealogical inheritance and potential incest brings to light themes which dominate throughout Hardy’s more canonical novels.

The above quote brings to issue many of these concerns. Jocelyn’s ‘rights’ stem in part from his kinship with the women of the Caro family – the original Avice is his first cousin. Cousin marriage was a fraught topic in the period and one which is dwelt on at various points by Hardy. Marriage between first cousins was legal in Britain, as it remains now, and far from frowned upon. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were cousins, and intrafamilial marriage was a useful tool for keeping property in the family for both the aristocratic and middle classes. But the emerging field of genetics, combined with an increasing interest and belief in evolutionary theory, meant that some were concerned about the potentially negative impact of a lack of variation within family lines. Anthropologist John Lubbock tried (unsuccessfully) to have a question on cousin marriage included on the 1870 census, and Charles Darwin’s uneasiness on the topic, due to his own marriage to first cousin Emma Wedgwood is made clear in his The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868). Darwin writes on the problem:

‘Before turning on to Birds, I ought to refer to man, though I am unwilling to enter on this subject, as it is surrounded by natural prejudices.’

From Walter Paget's illustrations for The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved

In Hardy, both sides of the argument are made clear. Take Sue and Jude – a pair of first cousins from the more famous Jude the Obscure (1895). For Jude, at least, part of their attraction stems from their sameness, which is clear from when he first sees Sue’s picture and later when he sees her in his own clothing:

‘Sitting in his only arm-chair he saw a slim and fragile being masquerading as himself on a Sunday.’

Yet the couple’s offspring are weak compared to the child produced by Jude with the genealogically distinct and biologically robust Arabella. Sameness isn't straightforwardly attractive or desirable. Jocelyn’s relationship with the first Avice demonstrates similar reservations. He does not marry her, but abandons her for Marcia – the daughter of a different family, the enemy of his own, and thus the most perfect example of exogamy. Their difference is what drives their attraction – ‘But hereditarily we are mortal enemies, dear Juliet’, Jocelyn tells her playfully – yet, not only is their happiness is short-lived, but part of their sexual play is to elide this familial difference, posing as brother and sister in order to enjoy their first night together.

Confusion over the desirability of cousinhood continues in The Return of the Native (1878) and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). In the former, it is hard to doubt Mrs Yeobright’s conclusion that it would have been better for her son Clym to have married his docile first-cousin Thomasin than the outsider Eustacia. And yet, in Tess, the suggestion of kinship between the lowly Durbeyfields and the d’Urbervilles is the precipitating event of the heroine’s ruin.

The repeated nature of Jocelyn’s romantic obsession however goes further to raise issues beyond those surrounding cousin marriage. His involvement with Avice the first and second goes some way to rendering his marriage to the third incest by affinity (the religious law forbidding sexual relationships with connections through marriage as well as through blood). Concern over the biological consequences of potentially incestuous relationships is therefore paired with the moral dubiousness of having sex with those too closely connected to a previous partner, casting a hint of uneasiness over Angel’s companionship with Tess’s sister Liza-Lu at the end of the 1891 novel. Marriage with the deceased wife’s sister was not legalised until 1907, meaning that ‘incest’ with those who are not blood relations is potentially more worrying than repeated intermarriage within a family, in a way which seems very alien from our modern ideas.

Finally, Jocelyn’s obsession with the blood link between all three Avices (‘it was the historic ingredient in this genealogical passion – if its continuity through three generations may be so described – which appealed to his perseverance at the expense of his wisdom’) mirrors Hardy’s own with the larger narratives at work in his fictions. These are the macro-narratives of landscape, whether the rocky peninsula of The Well-Beloved or the unchanging wilderness of Egdon Heath, as well as the narratives of human inheritance. While landscapes remain unchanged however, the story of human life is one of degeneration and loss. Just as each successive Avice fails to live up to the first, Hardy’s fiction is filled with the idea that, whoever we marry, the race is deteriorating. In The Return of the Native, Hardy writes:

‘Physically beautiful men--the glory of the race when it was young--are almost an anachronism now; and we may wonder whether, at some time or other, physically beautiful women may not be an anachronism likewise.’

And he leaves it to Tess to suggest that, beyond the physical deterioration and even extinction which could result from natural processes of evolution, the grand narrative of history could make all stories repetitions (like Jocelyn’s), which are ultimately futile:

‘Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row only—finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that's all. The best is not to remember that your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands' and thousands', and that your coming life and doings 'll be like thousands' and thousands.’

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Further Walter Paget illustrations from the novel available from Victorian Web.