Medical Examinations: Dissecting the Doctor in French Narrative Prose, 1857-1894

3. Miasmatic Effluvia: L'Assommoir and the Discourse of Hygiene

3 Miasmatic Effluvia L’Assommoir and the Discourse of Hygiene
In Les Romanciers naturalistes (1881), published some twelve years after Madame Gervaisais, Zola expressed the opinion that the Goncourts’ work could not properly be called a novel but was, rather, the simple “study of a woman.” Because he underestimated the importance of PierreCharles (“hardly the outline of a child”), Zola did not appreciate the subtlety of the final scene. On the contrary, he felt that it weakened the novel’s effect. To temper his criticism, Zola found other aspects of Madame Gervaisais praiseworthy, and in the words he chose to express that praise we find a strong link with his own novelistic practice and specifically with L’Assommoir: “Madame Gervaisais is saturated with that Catholic perfume, that Roman scent that provokes a kind of religious epidemic. Little by little, she is penetrated by it. The Goncourts studied with an infinite art the slow progress of religious contagion.”1 For Zola, the Goncourts’ heroine was a victim of her milieu. The olfactory allusions (“that Catholic perfume,” “that Roman scent”), associated with the notion of disease transmission (“religious epidemic,” “religious contagion”), suggest that even in the Pasteurian era during which he wrote, Zola’s imagination was still stimulated by the outdated notion of dangerous miasma. But Zola’s comments on Madame Gervaisais also bear witness to his belief in the concept of “moral contagion” (a concept that would be explored with particular intensity by the medical profession in the 1880s and 1890s) and to his tendency to conceive of nonmedical phenomena in medical terms.2 Like the Goncourt brothers, Zola drew miasmatic effluvia 75 heavily on medical science in his creation of literary characters and their environment. Unlike them, he is not generally suspected of having an antimedical bias, and indeed, a writer who compared the practice of his art to that of the physician is unlikely to express a resistance, however subtle, to medical hegemony. Yet a reading of L’Assommoir reveals just such a resistance. In this novel, a still-docile Zola, making abundant use of stereotypes culled from the medically inspired hygienist discourse of his time, emphasizes their role in the degradation of his heroine, Gervaise Macquart. Since its publication in 1877, L’Assommoir has been the object of numerous critical articles and monographs, many attempting to come to grips with the question of whether Zola was intending to imply that the working class was responsible for its own fate, a question that arose at least partly from Zola’s bold decision to represent the workers in their own words, through dialogue and free indirect discourse. David Baguley links the protagonists’ demise with their abandonment of the three cardinal virtues promoted by the novel’s bourgeois discourse: work, cleanliness, and abstinence. Colette Becker, on the other hand, believes that the novel offers a catastrophic vision of working-class life as “an inescapable sinking.” And Sandy Petrey concludes, after analyzing the novel’s “discourse of labor,” that Zola’s message runs precisely counter to bourgeois ideology: “The text describes work, not as a step in the climb towards happiness, but rather as the beginning of a fall towards misery, madness and death.”3 The heroine’s metamorphosis from an appetizing young woman to a repulsive clocharde (vagrant) has attracted particular attention. While it is clear even to the casual reader that this transformation owes something to both heredity and environment, the precisereasonforGervaiseMacquart’sdecline,andthemomentatwhich it begins, are a subject of some debate. Most critics see in Coupeau’s fall from the roof a turning point, and Gervaise’s hereditary alcoholism is assigned an important role. Kathryn Slott believes Gervaise to be a victim of gender oppression: “The true focus of L’Assommoir is less how Gervaise’s weakness ruins her life than how alcohol brutalizes men who in turn abuse women.”4 Joy Newton, while avowing multiple factors in her decline, first lays the responsibility at her own door (“Her ambition 76 miasmatic effluvia to have her own business is the cause of the drama and the tragedy that follow”), then, in a subsequent article, exonerates her, attributing her degradation to “a combination of three . . . factors for which she is in no way responsible: accident, crippling fatigue, and loneliness.”5 Marcel Girard accuses Gervaise of weakness and gourmandise,6 and Jacques Dubois, without denying the influence of environment, asserts that, “from beginning to end, the...