The Dream (Oxford World's Classics) Read online

  While Zola did not usually offer personal reflections in his preparatory notes for his novels, he gave vent to his unhappiness in those he compiled for The Dream. The initial outline of its plot featured a lonely scientist of 40 who, tormented by a sense of wasted years and physical decline, falls in love with a girl of 16. The true subject of this story was, in fact, as Zola made clear: ‘Me, work, a life consumed by literature, upheaval, crisis, the need to be loved.’19 After further reflection he decided that the age difference between the protagonists would overcomplicate matters, and so he opted in The Dream for two young lovers closer together in age.

  Zola’s yearning for new love found an object in July 1888, just as he was completing the final chapters of The Dream. A 21-year-old maid, Jeanne Rozerot, entered the Zola household, and the writer soon became infatuated with her. When she left their service in October, Zola installed her in a flat in Paris as his mistress. She bore him two children, Denise in 1889 and Jacques in 1891. Alexandrine discovered their liaison only after Jacques’s birth and, once her initial rage had subsided, she reluctantly permitted the two households to continue to coexist. The delight Zola took in fatherhood prompted him in the following decade to erect ideas around family and fertility into principles for the regeneration of society—a project he sets out in his novel Fecundity (1899). The plot Zola had originally sketched for The Dream, about a learned man falling in love with a much younger woman, was incorporated into Doctor Pascal (1893), with Zola explicitly identifying Jeanne and himself with that novel’s two main characters, the young Clotilde and her ageing lover (and uncle), Dr Pascal. Although Zola’s involvement with Jeanne was still to come as he planned The Dream, some of the emotions that drew him into this liaison were already present. Zola’s frustrations with Alexandrine are perhaps reflected in his portrait of the ‘profoundly chaste’20 relations between Hubert and Hubertine in a ‘house made melancholy by their childless sorrow’ (p. 12). And when he touches on Angélique’s experiences in the foundling hospital, thoughts of Alexandrine’s daughter could not have been far from his mind.

  Several critics suggested that Zola’s decision to people his novel with innocent and virtuous characters arose from another of his concerns of that period: his desire to gain election to the Académie Française. It was a charge he stridently rejected:

  It has been said that when I published The Dream it was to compel the Académie to take pity on me, that writing it was a way of saying: ‘Look, I’ve become nice and quite reasonable, admit me on the basis of this ad hoc book I’ve just put out!’ It would have been a wretched thing to do, and unworthy of me.21

  The accusation does not, in any case, make much sense, as in his next novel, La Bête humaine (1890), Zola promptly returned to matters of violence and criminality: its protagonist is a psychopathic killer.

  Angélique and the Passions

  Zola characterizes Angélique as a girl of strong passions: even as a young child she is quick to anger and hates and loves with great intensity. These passions serve several important structural functions in the novel. To create dramatic tension in what might otherwise have been a simple idyll, Zola places an obstacle in the lovers’ path, in the form of a refusal by Félicien’s father to give his consent to their proposed marriage. Zola then has the opportunity to show that he can write as a ‘psychologist’ by presenting the conflict within Angélique’s mind as she is torn between her passions and her growing sense of duty. Her passions also serve to link this novel to the rest of the Rougon-Macquart series—they constitute Angélique’s inheritance from her degenerate forebears. As in the other novels in the series, Zola explores the influence of environment on temperament, but in this case, in a surprising variation, the environment is thoroughly benign.

  When Zola devised the Rougon-Macquart series in 1868–9, his ideas were strongly shaped by two works of medical science, Prosper Lucas’s Philosophical and Physiological Treatise on Natural Heredity (1847–50) and Charles Letourneau’s Physiology of the Passions (1868). In Lucas’s treatise, Zola found the structuring principle of the series: heredity—the process by which mental as well as physical traits could be transmitted from one generation to the next. The main characters in the novels all descend from Adélaïde Fouque (known as Aunt Dide), who has one legitimate child by her husband Rougon, a farm labourer, and two illegitimate children by her lover, the drunkard and smuggler Macquart. Aunt Dide’s descendants are governed to different degrees by their inherited characteristics, which range from fierce ambition and neurosis on the Rougon side to alcoholism, vice, and murderous tendencies on the Macquart side.

  Lucas set out the complicated mechanisms by which traits supposedly passed from generation to generation in processes such as ‘election’ (one parent supplying the majority of traits to the child), ‘mixture’ (separate traits from both parents passing to the child), or ‘combination’ (two dissimilar traits in the parents combining to form a new one in the child).22 Lucas never doubted that the passions were just as transmissible as physical features or criminal instincts.23 Letourneau’s focus in the Physiology of the Passions was on the way that the passions (or appetites) were produced in the body and he rejected the idea that they came from an intangible source such as the soul. While he felt able to explain how the ‘nutritive’ passions (to do with circulation, digestion, and respiration) and the ‘sensitive’ passions (relating to sex and the senses) had their origins in organs and nervous tissues, he admitted that the mechanism by which the nervous system produced the ‘cerebral’ (moral and intellectual) passions was less well understood. Zola learned from Letourneau that emotions could be understood as ‘short-lived passions’, and his interest was piqued by Letourneau’s suggestion that bodily processes gave rise to emotions and phenomena such as pride, love, and religion.24 When Zola came to create Angélique’s character for The Dream, investing her with a predisposition towards anger and religious fervour, the theories of these two medical authorities underlay his grasp of the physiological origin and transmission of the passions.

  Angélique’s mother, Sidonie Rougon, had featured as a minor character in The Kill (1872), the second novel in the series. When Hubert catches sight of her in The Dream, she appears as ‘a thin, pale woman, of uncertain age and rather sexless, wearing a threadbare black dress covered in all sorts of stains from her dubious activities’ (p. 31). She has made ends meet in Paris by selling fruit, olive oil, lace, raincoats, and pianos, among other things, and has found work as a shady sort of go-between, procuring husbands for pregnant girls and girls for lustful men. She is, as her brother recognizes in The Kill, a ‘true Rougon’, possessing the ‘hunger for money, the longing for intrigue, which [are] the hallmark of the family’.25 After her husband’s death, Sidonie gave birth to a daughter ‘without knowing exactly where she had got it’ (p. 31). No details are offered about Angélique’s father.

  In the complete family tree of the Rougon-Macquart, published five years after The Dream, Zola identifies the main principles of heredity at work in the different characters. Angélique’s make-up is governed by ‘inneity’—a principle of difference rather than resemblance. That is, she bears ‘no resemblance to her mother or forebears’.26 It might sound, then, as though Zola is having it both ways. He anchors The Dream in the Rougon-Macquart series by way of Angélique’s maternal line, but supplies Angélique with none of her family’s traits. However, with the 1893 statement, Zola is somewhat recasting Angélique’s inheritance. Earlier, Zola had made it clear that Angélique is ‘proud, passionate, sensual, […] a Rougon-Macquart’.27 She inherits the general temperament of her ancestors, even though it suits the idyll of the novel that Angélique should not share any of her mother’s particular vices.

  Angélique’s passionate nature expresses itself in a wide variety of forms in The Dream—in rage, disobedience, and sensuality, religious fervour, love, and a mania for charity. The Huberts encounter this side of her when they bring her in from the snow to warm her up. When Hubertine picks up a booklet Angélique has dropped, the child bursts into rage:

  The Huberts watched astonished […]. They no longer recognized the blonde child with violet-coloured eyes and long neck graceful as a lily. Her eyes had turned black, her face was twisted with hatred, and her sensual neck had swollen as the blood pulsed through it. Now that she was warm she stood tall and hissed like a grass snake that has been rescued from the snow. (p. 9)

  Anger in a young girl is interpreted as a moral flaw: the Huberts think she must be ‘a bad little girl’ (p. 10). Such outbursts occur again after the Huberts install her as their ward, and they view her rage as a degenerate quality, inherited, no doubt, from vicious parents:

  They recoiled with fear before this little monster, horrified by the malign impulses that stirred within her. Who was she, then? Where had she come from? Foundlings, in most cases, are the children of criminality and vice. (p. 16)

  While Angélique’s passionate nature manifests itself at times in anger and unruliness, at others her emotions attach themselves to objects of faith. As a little girl she works herself into ‘a feverish passion over images, little engravings of holy scenes, and […] Jesus figurines’ (p. 17). Religious passions go hand in hand with sensual passions—as Zola had previously shown in The Sin of Abbé Mouret. The ‘ardour and intensity’ of Angélique’s caresses give Hubertine cause for concern, and she catches Angélique on occasion ‘kissing her own hands’ in a form of sexual experimentation (p. 17). When she turns 12, the child’s ardour finds a new object, Jacobus de Voragine’s thirteenth-century compilation of the lives of the saints, The Golden Legend. Angélique is enraptured by the stories she reads about the saints’ miraculous triumphs over Satan, and feels as though she is entering a new world, a ‘great dream’ emerging from
‘the depths of the unknown’ (p. 19). Her fervid mysticism, deriving from the same source as her rage, summons forth invisible beings and brings inanimate objects to life around her as she grows older. The passions that create her dream world fire her genius as an embroideress, and she creates a great many ‘gleaming, sacred marvels’ with her needle (p. 35). She is gripped at times also by an intense ‘passion for charity’ (p. 25), following the example of St Francis of Assisi and other saints she has read about, on one occasion flinging her clothes out the window to a drunken beggar. This passion is partly virtuous and partly vain—she becomes engaged in a battle with Félicien over who can do the most good, and even offers a pauper girl the shoes from her feet in an effort to prevail.

  At 14, as Angélique is ‘becoming a woman’, her mingled sensual and religious passions grow more intense. The ideal of virginity becomes dearer to her as she develops:

  When she read the Legend, she heard a ringing in her ears, and the blood beat in the delicate blue veins around her temples; and she was filled now with a tender fellow-feeling for the virgins. (p. 25)

  Although Zola had intended The Dream to be an innocent idyll, his presentation of Angélique’s maturing sexuality is frank enough in its own way—if much less explicit than certain scenes in Earth. At 16, as the spring arrives, Angélique feels deeply troubled by the scent of vegetation, her emotions fluctuate wildly, and she has trouble breathing. In describing her nightly fantasies, Zola uses language that is at once chaste and sensual: ‘she had exquisite dreams, shadowy shapes swirled round her, and she swooned in ecstasies she dared not recall on waking, so bewildered was she by the bliss the angels brought her’ (p. 48). Around her, inanimate objects come to life: the leaves of the trees, the waters of the stream and the stones of the cathedral all speak to her, and she has ‘the sense that the unknown [is] shaping her life, independently of her will’ (p. 56). The shadows in the field beyond her bedroom window gradually take on the shape of a young man, Félicien, and, after she meets him in the flesh by the stream on washing day, they fall in love and decide to marry. When Félicien’s father, Monseigneur d’Hautecœur, a nobleman and a bishop, forbids the proposed union between his son and a lowly embroideress, Angélique faces a stark choice: whether she should follow her desires or obey her elders. Hubertine, who has long tried to teach Angélique mastery of her passions, urges her ward to choose obedience and duty over pride and passion.

  In the chapters that follow, Zola traces Angélique’s struggle with this dilemma. It is ultimately resolved in a naturalist fashion, with Zola showing how environment acts on Angélique’s inherited passions to mould her fate. Almost against her will, she chooses obedience:

  She called to mind her years of toil, such happy, fruitful years, and the calm and honest habits she had gradually acquired, which revolted at the idea of sin. And day after day, the chill little house of the embroiderers, and the hard-working, virtuous life she led there, hidden away from the world, had reformed a little the blood that ran within her veins. (p. 156)

  In other circumstances her degenerate inheritance might have propelled her, like her distant relative, the heroine of the novel Nana (1880), towards prostitution. For Zola, environment, in this instance, performs a secular function equivalent to Christian grace, redeeming the ‘original sin’ of the flaw she has acquired from her forebears—her unruly passions.

  A Return to the Past

  Although The Dream is set in Second Empire France, its action unfolding across the years 1860–9, the atmosphere is more redolent of the Middle Ages than the mid-nineteenth century. Much of the research Zola did for the novel went into creating this archaic mood. Not only did he draw heavily on The Golden Legend, he read up on the history of embroidery and stained-glass manufacture and on the architecture of cathedrals and castles so as to be able to describe the characters’ occupations and surroundings in convincing detail. The methods he had used to impart modern documentary truth to his earlier novels he employs here in the service of anachronism. And yet, oddly enough, there was a contemporary aspect to the novel’s medievalism—the Middle Ages had become fashionable again in 1880s Paris, and it was an enthusiasm that Zola shared.

  Before he turned to naturalism, Zola’s early literary interests lay in the Romantic movement, in authors such as Victor Hugo and Théophile Gautier, who had both been keen medievalists. As Elizabeth Emery points out, Zola went from composing ballads and a story about the crusades in youth to decorating his house at Médan in maturity with an array of medieval objects, ranging from tapestries and suits of armour to stained-glass windows, religious paintings, and church ornaments.28 When he wrote in his study in Paris, he sat in an armchair bearing the motto of his fictional lords of Hautecœur: ‘If God wills, I will.’ This thoroughly modern writer had an unshakeable fascination with medieval miscellanea, whether genuine or ersatz. Across the Channel, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had looked back to the Middle Ages for their artistic inspiration, while William Morris’s Arts and Crafts Movement extolled old-fashioned craftsmanship over modern mechanized forms of production. In France, too, by the late nineteenth century, many had grown sceptical about the advantages of science and the modern age, and looked back fondly to the naive faith of earlier eras.29 Symbolist poets and painters turned away from realism towards the spiritual and ideal, while Joseph Péladan’s Order of the Rose + Croix and a resurgent Catholic Church shared common ground in their embrace of mysticism over the positivist doctrines then in vogue.

  In The Dream Zola uses architecture as one means of reviving the medieval past. The town of Beaumont-l’Église is dominated by its old cathedral, looming ‘enormously over the little heap of low-standing houses, which shelter like a brood of chicks beneath its stone wings. The inhabitants live for it and by it. The artisans toil and the shopkeepers trade simply to nourish, clothe, and maintain the cathedral and its clergy’ (p. 14). Although it is only two hours by train from Paris, Beaumont feels cut off from the outside world and ‘bathes in an age-old atmosphere of tranquillity and faith’ (p. 14). Across the river, the new town of Beaumont-la-Ville is spacious and modern. It owes its prosperity to textile factories and looks back somewhat disdainfully at its older sibling. Angélique, though, lives out her days in the shadow of the cathedral: her house leans against its wall and trembles when its great bells toll; its vast bulk shuts out the sky above her balcony. She develops a connection to this monument that is both physical and emotional. She finds her features mirrored in its ancient sculptures of St Agnes. Through long gazing at the cathedral, she imparts to it a consciousness and enrols it in her dream world, feeling it to be ‘as capable of loving and thinking as she herself’ (p. 49). The cathedral plays a part in many of the crucial events in her life: she shelters from a snowstorm in its northern porch, summons her lover from its shadows, pleads with the bishop in its chapel and at last marries Félicien before its altar, the edifice rejoicing in the sacrament. The west portal of the cathedral marks the fatal boundary for her between dream and reality, between past and present: it is here that she dies as she walks out of the building on her wedding day. Angélique, who comes to imagine herself a virgin of the primitive Church, is unable to survive this transition into modernity.

  Zola offers a precise history of the cathedral’s construction: the nave, the reader learns, was begun in 1150 in the Romanesque style and was completed after 1230 in the early Gothic style, while the towers and main façade were finished around 1430 in the late flamboyant Gothic style. These details are important, as the Romanesque and the Gothic styles carry different symbolic meanings. Adapting ideas developed by Victor Hugo in Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), Zola associates the squat, heavy Romanesque style with the tyranny of the priesthood and the vengeful God of the Old Testament, and the lighter, airier Gothic style with the liberation of the people and a movement towards ‘a loving and forgiving God’ (p. 49). In a striking image, Zola compares the cathedral to a figure at first bowed in prayer (at the Romanesque level) who then turns her face upwards (at the early Gothic level) and soars towards the heavens (at the late Gothic level). As the final scene in the novel makes clear, the stages of the cathedral symbolize the phases in Angélique’s naturalistic development, from a child dominated by the demons of hereditary evil to a young woman set free by the secular grace of a benign environment. Like the mine in Germinal or the locomotive in La Bête humaine, the medieval cathedral is the emblematic centre of the novel. In modelling his cathedral, Zola relied heavily on the writings of the architectural historian Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79), and he creates a sort of poetry out of the technical language he acquired, with its voussoirs and tympanums, piers and flying buttresses, spirelets, finials, and pinnacles. The cathedral is, as Zola insists, ‘a living thing’ (p. 49), and he lyrically evokes its appearance through the changing seasons and shifting patterns of light in a way that seems to anticipate Claude Monet’s series of paintings, begun four years later, of Rouen Cathedral in different weathers.30