L'Éternelle jeune fille. Une ethnocritique du Rêve de Zola (review)

Marie Scarpa's 2000 reading of Le Ventre de Paris blazed a new trail for ethnocritical analysis in Zola studies, yet Le Rêve, a novel noted for the simple and mystical note which it strikes within the complex materiality of the Rougon-Macquart series, seems at first consideration an unlikely candidate for such an approach. The author quickly dispels all reservations in her rich 2009 work, however, as her re-reading of the character of Angélique opens a variety of cultural perspectives relating to initiation and rites of passage. Her point of departure, and the centre of her unfolding analysis, is the main protagonist's symbolically-charged and (until now) insufficiently-discussed status as an embroideress.

Historically, embroidery carries worthy connotations as the ideal occupation for a developing young woman. In representing a symbolic domestication and regulation of the impulses of adolescence, and in thus preserving the purity of the girl, needlework provides an appropriate channel into fully-sexualized but "safe" womanhood. Scarpa furnishes a detailed and fascinating overview of the role of needlework in the raising of young women throughout centuries of European history, before underlining Le Rêve's central and critical impasse: the character of the claustrated and "hyper-regulated" Angélique Rougon, whose pure white thread seems to "recouvrir jusqu'au rouge de son nom et de son sang" (53), is nevertheless still (genetically) marked by ardour and excess. She is too gifted and attentive an embroideress to be able to pass beyond this phase of her development, too obsessive a reader, also, of Jacobus de Voragine's Golden Legend and of the livret d'assistance publique (which literally weighs her down). These excesses, diversions of her constricted impulses, stall her full and physical becoming, the completion of her initiation; she is thus left in limbo as the eternal virgin, her female destiny blocked and her death narratively inevitable. As Scarpa shows, many are the novel's evocations of interrupted or confused rites of passage within the Zolian universe of impasses and blockages-a universe in which Angélique appears, then, as a particular kind of bouc émissaire.

Scarpa illustrates these impasses by proposing a homology between rite of passage and narrative, examining and problematizing Le Rêve and its heroine through the prisms of genres such as hagiographic legend and folk tale, and even bringing the forms of freudian dream narrative to bear on her able demonstration. What emerges with progressively increasing force from all parts of the study is the generic uniqueness and "hybridity" of Le Rêve, and the image of Angélique as a "specialist of dreams" (as of embroidery) whose incurably liminal and marginal position allows her most effectively to "opére[r] les médiations entre la vie et la mort" in the novel. Placed, it seems, in the most extreme culturally-symbolic positions of all of Zola's young women, the doomed Angélique is the only jeune fille éternelle in the series.

Nearly a decade separates the publication date of this volume from that of its predecessor Le Carnaval des Halles. Une ethnocritique du Ventre de Paris de Zola, yet Scarpa's reasons for biding her time are clear. Far from providing a continuation of the earlier work, L'Éternelle jeune fille, with its bold and unexpected choice of subject matter, represents a new departure and an important new perspective on Le Rêve within the Rougon-Macquart series. This elegantly- and densely-written volume, with its twenty-two pages of bibliography and full three-part index, will be of considerable interest to scholars both of Zola and of ethnocriticism in particular.