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  THE DREAM

  Émile Zola was born in Paris in 1840, the son of a Venetian engineer and his French wife. He grew up in Aix-en-Provence, where he made friends with Paul Cézanne. After an undistinguished school career and a brief period of dire poverty in Paris, Zola joined the newly founded publishing firm of Hachette, which he left in 1866 to live by his pen. He had already published a novel and his first collection of short stories. Other novels and stories followed, until in 1871 Zola published the first volume of his Rougon-Macquart series, which was subtitled ‘Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’ and set out to illustrate the influence of heredity and environment on a wide range of characters and milieus. However, it was not until 1877 that the seventh novel in the series, L’Assommoir, a study of alcoholism in the working classes, brought him wealth and fame. The Dream, the sixteenth novel in the series, published in 1888, offers an unusual hybrid of realism and fairy tale, and tells the story of a young girl, a penniless embroideress given to flights of mysticism, who falls in love with a young nobleman. The last of the Rougon-Macquart novels appeared in 1893 and Zola’s subsequent writing was far less successful, though he achieved fame of a different sort in his vigorous and influential intervention in the Dreyfus case. His marriage in 1870 had remained childless, but his extremely happy liaison in later life with Jeanne Rozerot, initially one of his domestic servants, gave him a son and a daughter. He died in 1902.

  Paul Gibbard is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Western Australia. He has worked previously as an editor of the Complete Works of Voltaire at the Voltaire Foundation, Oxford, and at Monash University and the University of New England.

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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  ÉMILE ZOLA

  The Dream

  Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

  PAUL GIBBARD

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom

  Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

  © Paul Gibbard 2018

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2018

  Impression: 1

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  Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Data available

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018938825

  ISBN 978–0–19–874598–3

  ebook ISBN 978–0–19–106306–0

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Translator’s Note

  Select Bibliography

  A Chronology of Émile Zola

  Family Tree of the Rougon-Macquart

  THE DREAM

  Explanatory Notes

  Introduction

  Those who do not wish to learn details of the plot may prefer to read this Introduction as an Afterword.

  Readers who pick up a copy of The Dream having finished one of Zola’s better-known novels, such as L’Assommoir, Germinal, or La Bête humaine, may have an impulse, as they wade deeper into it, to double-check the name of the author on the title page. The Dream, the sixteenth of the twenty novels that make up the Rougon-Macquart series, is the least ‘Zolaesque’ among them. Although it is, like the others, a naturalist novel set in Second Empire France, and linked to them by the lineage of its main character, it is at the same time a fairy tale, a romance between naive young lovers that unfolds in the shadow of a medieval cathedral. The story opens during a snowstorm on Christmas Day, when the young heroine, Angélique, takes shelter beneath a cathedral porch. She is found by a childless couple, a pair of humble embroiderers, who take her in and raise her as their own. From these beginnings, fairy-tale elements multiply. Angélique falls in love with Félicien, a lord’s son, and their attachment develops chastely, Zola choosing to steer them away from the sort of frank sexual encounters he had described in some of his earlier novels. The Dream was partly intended by Zola to show critics who had accused him of obscenity that he could in fact portray the psychology of more sensitive characters. Rather like an actor playing against type, Zola enjoys the freedom that this new approach affords him. He places his characters in a setting suffused with a mood that owes much to the Middle Ages—a period he had long been fascinated by, and which he evokes through his descriptions of castle and cathedral architecture, embroidery, stained glass, and heraldry. He creates in Angélique an unusual heroine, a girl initially dominated by her passions, who is gradually reformed through the influence of her environment. He also hints at his own private anxieties, rarely voiced in the Rougon-Macquart series, concerning his childless marriage. Radically different from its predecessors, this novel, a hybrid of antagonistic genres, interweaving realism with fairy tale, reveals a new side to Zola’s art and contains hints of the softening to come in his naturalist stance.

  When The Dream was published in 1888, reviewers reacted in markedly different ways: there was confusion, disappointment, and scorn—but also a certain amount of admiration. Those who welcomed this ‘poem of grace’ tended to find points of continuity between it and the lyrical qualities in Zola’s earlier works.1 Some, though, were troubled by the new direction Zola had taken, and found it difficult to classify exactly what it was they were reading. Was The Dream a novel or a fairy tale, a prose poem or a piece of whimsy? asked Charles Bigot.2 Another critic, Jules Lemaître, admitted to feeling bewildered by this ‘naturalist fairy tale’—a fantasy composed by Zola using the same painstaking research methods he had deployed for his earlier novels.3 Anatole France, though, was forthright in his disdain, suggesting that, in this attempt to portray a world of innocence and purity, Zola’s talent had deserted him. To the ‘winged Zola’ of The Dream, France much preferred the earthy Zola who went around ‘on all fours’.4 What, then, had propelled Zola to soar free of the tawdry realities of life, which many critics considered his natural element? Why had he written a novel that seemed so uncharacteris
tic?

  The Reaction against Naturalism

  By late 1887, when Zola began preparatory work on The Dream, it seemed that naturalism had reached a point of crisis. As he mulled over his plans for the novel, he decided that his new book would have to take into account the ‘reaction against naturalism’ and the current mania for mysticism.5 Zola’s previous novel, Earth, published in serial form between May and September 1887, had depicted the harsh lives of the peasants of northern France, and it provoked a critical storm. On 18 August 1887, even before the work had appeared in its entirety, a group of young writers published an open letter to Zola on the front page of Le Figaro, attacking Earth, its author, and naturalist doctrines. They accused the movement’s leader of immorality and obscenity and ridiculed his grandiose artistic theories: the naturalist method for which he had made such great claims in fact offered no advancement, they said, on the realist techniques developed by Balzac, Stendhal, and Flaubert. They announced their separation from the movement: ‘the naturalist label, which is automatically stuck onto any book grounded in real life, does not suit us any longer’.6 In the wake of this letter, other writers and critics ganged up against Zola. Anatole France criticized him for lacking any conception of the inner life of humanity:

  Within man, there is an infinite need for love, which exalts him. Monsieur Zola does not understand this. Desire and modesty sometimes mingle with delightful subtlety in the soul. Monsieur Zola does not understand this. […] There are on earth magnificent forms and noble thoughts; there are pure souls and valiant hearts. Monsieur Zola does not understand this.7

  Ferdinand Brunetière also condemned Zola for his unfeeling presentation of the peasants. The novel’s characters appeared merely in outline, more like ‘shop dummies’ than nuanced human beings, because Zola, like other naturalists, neglected to deal with questions of ‘psychology’. The publication of Earth, Brunetière suggested, marked the final failure of the naturalist movement.8 Although Zola tried to shrug off these attacks, it is clear that he took them to heart, and still had them in mind as he began to flesh out his ideas for The Dream. A few years later he confirmed to an interviewer that he was trying to free himself from ‘overly rigorous theories’ and adopt ‘a more sympathetic […] acceptance of life’.9

  Zola had first declared his affiliation to naturalism in his preface to the second edition of his novel Thérèse Raquin (1868), which features a pair of lovers who carry out a murder, are plagued by remorse, and finally commit suicide. Defending the novel against accusations of indecency, he claimed: ‘My goal has above all been a scientific one […] I have simply carried out on two living bodies the investigation which surgeons perform on corpses’, and went on to place his faith in ‘the methodical, naturalist school of criticism’, aligning himself with an existing ‘group of naturalist writers’.10 He conceived of literary naturalism as a more rigorous form of realism, in which the writer applied a scientific style of observation and analysis to the craft of fiction. He situated his theory in the positivist tradition of the philosopher Auguste Comte and extolled the writings of the literary critic Hippolyte Taine, who had analysed literary works as a product of their author’s heredity, environment, and period. Alongside Thérèse Raquin, the Goncourt brothers’ Germinie Lacerteux (1865) and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education (1869) are usually counted among the notable works of early naturalism. In the later 1870s, a group of naturalist writers formed around Zola, with Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Paul Alexis, Henry Céard, and Léon Hennique gathering regularly with ‘the Master’ at his house in Médan, to the north-west of Paris. Together they published, in 1880, an influential collection of stories entitled Evenings at Médan. That same year, Zola, drawing heavily on Claude Bernard’s Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865), published his most elaborate naturalist theorizings in The Experimental Novel, in which he explicitly compared the novel to a scientific experiment. It was an analogy quickly ridiculed by both critics and friends. In the last decade of his life, Zola began to distance himself from naturalism, relinquishing his professed naturalist objectivity in favour of a more socially engaged stance that emerged in his trilogy The Three Cities (1894–8) and his unfinished quartet The Four Gospels (1899–1903). The Rougon-Macquart cycle, however, published between 1871 and 1893, had explicit naturalist ambitions. The series claimed in its subtitle to be a ‘Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’, its dual purposes scientific and sociological. Paying particular attention to the interplay between heredity and environment, Zola traced the spread of degeneracy through the different branches of a family whose members diffused into all strata of French society. In the ‘ravenous appetites’ of this family, he believed he was capturing the general tendency of the age, ‘a strange period of human folly and shame’.11 To present such a broad expanse of French society convincingly, Zola recognized the imperative of carefully observing and researching his subjects. By late 1887, however, as Zola began composing The Dream, he faced a strong current of critical opinion that openly denounced the aims and methods of naturalism.

  ‘A book that no one expects of me’

  As he made his preparatory notes for The Dream, Zola jotted down three aims:

  I would like to write a book that no one expects of me. First of all, it must be suitable to be placed in anyone’s hands, even the hands of young girls. So no violent passions then, a simple idyll […]. I’ll redo Paul and Virginie. What’s more, since it’s said that I can’t do psychology, I’d like to force people to admit that I’m a psychologist. So a bit of psychology then, or what passes for such(!) That is, a moral struggle, the eternal struggle between passion and duty […]. And, finally, I’d like to work into the book something of the supernatural, the dream, the unknown, the unknowable.12

  The criticisms of Brunetière and Anatole France seem to be at the forefront of Zola’s mind. Firstly, he will avoid any hint of obscenity: the love affair described will be as pure as that found in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul and Virginie (1788), the tale of a boy and a girl who are raised by their mothers side by side in the tropical wilds of the Isle of France (Mauritius) and fall chastely in love. Secondly, the plot will not be typically naturalist. In Zola’s novels, characters are generally condemned to their preordained ends by the inexorable action of a particular environment on a particular temperament. There is no free will; determinism prevails. But in The Dream Zola will show the mind of a character struggling against her degenerate temperament, trying to exert her will and shape her own fate—a drama, then, of psychology. And, thirdly, he will respond to what he saw as the mood of the time, the contemporary fascination with mysticism, common to symbolists, occultists, and many in the Catholic Church, and portray the fantasies of a young girl preoccupied by things beyond the material world. Such, at least, were Zola’s intentions.

  Zola prided himself on the efficiency of his planning for the Rougon-Macquart series. The Dream, however, did not feature in the initial outline that Zola drew up in the late 1860s, and its heroine Angélique did not appear on the Rougon-Macquart family tree published in 1878. In response to questions from a Dutch journalist, Jacques van Santen Kolff, as to why Angélique had been left out, Zola admitted that she was a ‘new shoot’ he had ‘grafted on’.13 A colleague, Paul Alexis, offered an explanation for the gaps in Zola’s plan: the author, he explained, deliberately left spaces into which he could insert less ambitious novels. For example, between two major works, L’Assommoir (1877) and Nana (1880), Zola had published A Love Story (1878), a novel narrower in scope. This sort of work served as a sort of pause, a moment of respite, in the onward march of the series. Such interludes also allowed Zola to take advantage of momentary inspirations.14 When Zola first mentioned his new novel, The Dream, to van Santen Kolff in a letter of 14 November 1887, he described it as ‘an enormous surprise, a fantasy, a flight of fancy, which I have been thinking over for a long time’.15 Later Zola suggested to the same journalist that he had conceived
it as a counterpart to The Sin of Abbé Mouret (1875), not wanting that earlier novel about the religious fantasies and sexual awakening of a young priest to appear thematically isolated in the series. As he explained:

  A place was set aside for a study of the supernatural […], but it’s difficult for me to say exactly when. The ideas remain vague until the moment I execute them. But you may be sure that none of this was unplanned. The Dream arrived at its appointed moment, just like the other parts of the series.16

  While the germ of the idea may have predated the furore that greeted Earth, The Dream only began to take on concrete form in late 1887, with Zola reacting at least in part to the recent savaging he had received at the hands of the critics.

  A Mid-Life Crisis

  The subject matter of The Dream was shaped by other concerns of the moment as well. Its composition coincided with a crisis in Zola’s life, brought on by age, obesity, and an unhappy marriage. During his years of success Zola had indulged his culinary appetites and grown fat, but in the latter stages of 1887 his despair over his appearance reached a pinnacle. In November, he placed himself on a strict diet, banishing wine, bread, and sweets from his table. By March the following year, he had lost 14 kilograms in weight, much to the astonishment of literary Paris, and he began to look more like the svelte young man he had been in his twenties. His bouts of anguish recurred, and in early 1889 he confided to van Santen Kolff: ‘I’m going through a crisis, the crisis of middle age no doubt […]. For weeks and months on end I’m racked by turmoil, a storm of longing and regret.’17 His distress arose at least in part from his deep dissatisfaction with his marriage to Alexandrine. They had met and become lovers in 1864 and lived together from the following year. They had married shortly after Zola’s 30th birthday in 1870, but their marriage remained childless. Alexandrine, though, had borne a child before she met Zola. In 1859, when just 17, she had given birth to a daughter Caroline out of wedlock, but, lacking the means to support the infant, had given her up to a foundling hospital. It seems that Alexandrine and Zola tried to track down the child in 1877, and learnt that she had been placed in the care of a wet-nurse and taken to Brittany, where she had died aged just three weeks.18