The Beast Within - Emile Zola [14]
travelling rugs, luncheon baskets, ‘ladies only’ compartments and even the steam engines themselves, will appear rather antiquated. Even for readers of the novel in 1890 there may have been an outmoded feel to some of the scenes depicted, for Zola is attempting to describe things not as they were at the time the novel was first published but as they had been twenty years previously. Despite this, he is at pains to emphasize the modernity and the modernizing impact of the railways. The railways are seen as changing long-established patterns of living.14 Séverine is able to travel from Le Havre to Paris and back in a day. The young businessman from Le Havre travels to Paris every week. His fellow passenger, an American, professes to make the journey from New York to Paris every three weeks. This is no doubt an exaggeration, yet it points to the future. Rail travel, along with faster, steam propelled ocean-going liners, one of which is launched in Le Havre amid great festivities on the day after Grandmorin is murdered, is bringing the towns and cities of the world closer together and making access to them easier. The happy young mother who comes close to being murdered by Jacques in the train to Auteuil tells how, the previous summer, she and her family had enjoyed a six-week holiday in a remote part of Brittany, followed in September by a four-week stay at her father-in-law’s in Poitou, and how she now plans to spend the rest of the winter at Cannes. Such a pursuit of fresh air and sunshine would hardly have been possible a generation earlier. For Monsieur Dabadie, the stationmaster at Le Havre, the railway is an instrument of international commercial exchange. ‘He took little interest in the running of the passenger station, concentrating instead on the dock traffic and the enormous transhipment of cargo that passed through the goods yard. He was in constant touch with major companies in Le Havre and all over the world’ (III). Zola draws attention to the new architecture that the railways engendered - the spacious halls of glass and steel at the Gare Saint-Lazare - and to the new mechanics of locomotive engineering. The novel conveys an exhilarating sense of what a journey by train in 1869 might have been like - the unprecedented speed of travel, the new experience of being whisked across rivers, carried over viaducts high above the landscape, rushed through tunnels and seeing whole towns pass by the window in less time than it takes to draw breath. The influence of the railways is suggested in more subtle ways: in the heightened sense of life being measured by the clock and even in the availability of certain sorts of food and drink - Roubaud’s Gruyère cheese and tin of sardines and Jacques’s bottle of Malaga wine. In ways such as these the railway is presented as the agent of change from the old to the new. The image of technological advance and material progress was one which the Second Empire, not without some justification, was happy to show to the world. Within the thematic topography of Zola’s novel, the railway as a symbol of progress stands at the opposite extreme to the atavistic killer instinct that dogs his central protagonist. This alignment of opposing principles underpins the whole novel.
But the novel also places question marks against the modernizing influence of the railway. Aunt Phasie can make little sense of the endless succession of trains that rushes past her window. The trains are crowded with people who seem to be in a great hurry to get somewhere, but she has little idea where they come from, where they are going to or what their purpose might be. Aunt Phasie cannot relate to the frantic pace and restless urgency of the world that the railway seems to typify. She is puzzled by the fact that each train that passes so close to her house contains more people than she has met in the whole of her life, yet she knows none of them and realizes that none of them are even aware of her existence. For Aunt Phasie the railway has created a disturbing sense of a world that is anonymous and depersonalized. The