The Mother Figure in Emile Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart: Literary Realism and the Quest for the Ideal Mother by Susie Hennessy (review)

Book Reviews1 85 Anne de La Roche-Guilhen, a Huguenot from Normandy, frequented the community of French exiles in England and permanently emigrated in 1 786 after the revocation of the Edit de Nantes. In 1677, her comedy-ballet Rare-entout , was performed for the English court at a birthday celebration for King Charles II. This play juxtaposes the bellicose, self-interested absolutism of Louis XIV with the enlightened and generous reign of Charles II. Rare-en-tout praises the arts, especially music, as a universal language that can promote intercultural communication and peace. In her tragedy Genséric, performed at l'Hôtel de Bourgogne in 1680, Mme de Deshouilères subverts the literary conventions of her time. While the play finds its source in the novel L Astrée, Deshouilères underlines the cynicism and ambition of its characters rather than the importance of love. Instead of focusing on the heroic and moral values of her protagonists à la Corneille, Deshouilères sacrifices the virtuous characters to the triumphant tyrant. Théâtre des femmes de l'Ancien Régime, XVIIe siècle is a well-edited and well-documented anthology of plays by French women. The critical apparatus highlights the variety of women's theatrical production in seventeenth-century France, as well as the innovative nature oftheir plays and their importance to the history of French theater. Cecilia BeachAlfred University Hennessy, Susie. The Mother Figure in Emile Zola 's Les Rougon-Macquart: Literary Realism and the Quest for the Ideal Mother. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006. Pp [i]-vii; 152. ISBN 0-7734-5521-3. $99.95 (Cloth). Professor Susie Hennessy discusses the representation of the maternal figure in Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart, aiming to fill what she considers a void in Zola scholarship and to examine the lack of mothers as protagonists in these novels. Hennessy limits her study to the Rougon-Macquart because it "shows the primacy of the mother figure in the evolution of the twenty novels" (9). Hennessy analyzes the paradoxical characteristics of mothers in the RougonMacquart , focusing on what she calls "the conflicted maternal body" (139). In the process, Hennessy raises numerous questions about how to define the significance of mothers in the Rougon-Macquart, paying particular attention to their structural, narrative and symbolic roles; the mother's body as "sign and site of meaning, of heredity, and of reproduction" (35); what they tell us about Zola and his time, and what sacrifices they must make to ensure the survival of the future generation. Starting with a brief overview of classic and current scholarship about women in Zola, Hennessy continues with four thematic chapters: "Fecundity and Heredity," "Motherhood as Alienation," "Mothers and Industrial Society," and "Motherhood and Sacrifice." Each chapter is divided into several sections, 1 86Women in French Studies in which Hennessy performs persuasive close readings. The conclusion, "Keeping Mum," deals with Zola's "ideal woman," Clotilde Saccard of the last Rougon-Macquart novel, Le Docteur Pascal. Here Hennessy discusses the possibility of reconciling the contradictory representations of the figure of mothers throughout the series, positing that silence is the "central tenet of the maternal narrative...the mother's role is to keep forever quiet" (146). Hennessy's bibliography is extensive and varied. She cites not only classic but also contemporary works about women in Zola such as Anna Gural-Migdal's 2003 L 'Ecriture duféminin chez Zola et dans lafiction naturaliste. Although Hennessy grounds her discussion in close reading, she also pays attention to the historical, political and social context of the Rougon-Macquart. To that end, Hennessy considers the impact of capitalism and industrialization upon women in nineteenth-century France and cites historical texts from and/or about this time period such as Jules Michelet's 1859 La Femme and Bonnie Smith's more recent Ladies ofthe Leisure Class. Hennessy also employs psychoanalytic and feminist theory (including Freud, Lacan, Chodorow and Kristeva, among others) as well as hermeneutics and structural analysis in her approach to Zola. She applies feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey's notions of the masculine gaze, scopophilia and the female's tobe -looked-at-ness to Eleonore Jousserand, the "monstrous mother" in PotBouille (56...