The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [5]
The Belly of Paris has several examples of a smart, practical woman paired off with a good-natured, dreamy simpleton dependent on his woman's savvy, such as Lisa and Quenu and Cadine and Marjolin.
Few nineteenth-century novels portray women of the strength and complexity of Zola's women. Unlike those of Flaubert or Leo Tolstoy, Zola's are not so much the victims of an unfair society as women determined to be players. In The Belly of Paris Lisa scolds her husband for political activities, telling him, “If only you had asked my advice, if we had talked about it together. It's wrong to think that women don't understand politics … Do you want to know what I think? What my politics are?”
In both major and minor characters Zola shows an interest in the aspirations of women. When Clémence, herself a very minor character in The Belly of Paris, loses her job, she supports herself by giving French instruction to a young woman who is secretly trying to improve her education. We never learn anything more about this unnamed character, who is just a touch of set decoration in the picture he offers of society. Clémence herself holds her own in café political debates and is said to be manly.
Zola lived in a time when conservative politics and the Church supported the suppression of women while a new crop of progressives was denouncing the old ways. The subject fascinated young Zola, who continually wrote about it in letters to his friends. He seemed particularly influenced by the writings of Jules Michelet, a leading progressive who became a cultural hero of leftist youth after he was removed from his chair at the Collège de France because he refused to swear allegiance to the emperor in 1851. His books on women, L'Amour and La Femme, published in 1858 and 1859, when Zola was an impressionable teenager, called for a new role for women in society. To understand women, Michelet maintained, society had to free itself from the teachings of the Church and embrace science. Embracing science was the new religion of the time. Once women freed themselves of the slavery prescribed by the Church, they would become champions of progressive government, quite the opposite of Beautiful Lisa in The Belly of Paris, who proclaims, “I support a government that's good for business. If they commit acts of evil, I don't want to know.” But the freedom that the future held for women, according to Michelet, could be achieved only by a good marriage. Only through the progressive thinking of the husband could the wife be completed.
Despite the seeming simplicity of such theories, the women, the marriages, the relationships between men and women in Zola's novels are complicated. There is a great deal of fiction and a great deal of love. Zola prided himself on realism. As a young man Zola's letters were full of reflections on relations between the sexes. In 1860, shortly after the two Michelet books were published, Zola wrote to Cézanne, “A husband has been given a major project, to reeducate his wife. It takes more than sleeping together to be married, they must also think in tandem.” And that same year to a different friend:
It is true that it is rare to see a happy couple. But that is because married people only know love in a superficial way. They are still strangers to the heart, and if they remain that way they will be unhappy all their lives. But if you put together a young man and a young woman, they are beautiful and they have physical love, but this is not yet love. Soon they discover each other's qualities and deficiencies, and little by little their personalities do not compete, because there are no unforgivable faults, they love with their souls, truly and entirely.
Marriage in Zola's novels, as in life, is a complicated relationship full of pettiness but also love, stifling at times but at others comforting. In The