Naturalism, Female Evil, and the Body: A Comparative Study
of Emile Zola’s Nana and Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler
Anthony Patterson
Abstract
In nineteenth century literature, female evil and concomitant understandings of
female monstrosity and female lunacy are often aligned to the unleashing of sexual
desire, an unleashing that is often in stark contrast to the sexual and moral probity
of more central female protagonists. In terms of such literary representations,
Naturalism marks a turn from such metaphysical assumptions of character on
which the moral aesthetics on the novel were grounded to a concern with
explicating character through emerging and newly valorised scientific discourses.
Consequently, European Naturalism produces representations of women and
especially representations of the female body that go beyond the moral and
aesthetic parameters of the nineteenth century novel of character.
This paper offers a comparative study of female evil in Naturalism through
focusing on two representations of it in Naturalist literature: Emile Zola’s Nana
and Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. The aim of the paper is to explore the complex
configurations of female evil Naturalism produces in relation to the body and
female agency at a critical moment both for the development of literature and for
broader understandings of sexuality in the light of new emerging discourses of
science. The paper examines the degree to which through such new configurations
both novel and play transform, challenge or reinscribe dominant sexual ideologies.
However, the paper also explores how Nana and Hedda Gabler, both of whose
actions are provocatively recognisable as representative of evil in traditional moral
discourses, can be read as seeking, if in perverse ways, the agency which
patriarchy denies. In many respects, these very different representations of evil
women foreground not the fixed aberrancy of women, but the ideological
construction of morality that these ‘evil’ women supposedly transgress.
Key Words
Naturalism, Aberrancy, Transgression, Science, Evil, Gender, Metaphysics, Body,
Sex, Ideology
Writing of Zola’s New Naturalism, W. S. Lilly complained:
In Nana there is not a vestige of the ‘beau ideal’. Blank and crude
materialism, the trivial, the foul, the base of animal life, is the staple of the
book from beginning to end. The heroine, whose role, M Zola deems to
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embrace the whole keyboard of human existence is “a beast no more,”
indeed rather less.1
Indeed the destructive force of Nana might stand as metonym for the destruction
that many believed Naturalism caused to those who read or watched it. In the same
essay, Lilly states:
The issue of the Naturalistic Evolution is the banishing from life of all
that gives it glory and honour: the victory of fact over principle, of
mechanism over imagination, of appetites, dignified as rights, over duties,
of sensation over intellect, of the belly over the heart, of fatalism over
moral freedom, of brute force over justice, in a word, of matter over
mind.2
Lilly rails against the Naturalist attack on the aesthetics of the mid nineteenth
century novel in which moral precepts are banished by the foregrounding in
Naturalist novels of the materialist, animal nature of the human. Even if Zolean
scholars are now sceptical about the extent to which Zola’s writing can be said to
be scientifically grounded, his fiction, as many of his contemporaries complained,
leaves little space for the moral assumptions of much mid-nineteenth century
fiction. As the pathological force of Nana’s sexuality destroys Muffat’s
metaphysical ethics in Zola’s novel, Naturalism denies, as Lilly complained, the
metaphysical values of glory, honour, principle, imagination, intellect and heart.
As such, evil perceived as essentially metaphysical is now rendered in Naturalism
as a consequence of natural disposition and environment. Morality is replaced by
pathology; and ethical autonomy subsumed by an aetiology of biological and
environmental determinants. Consequently, what is deemed evil cannot be
identified so simply as moral absolute when contextualised by such causal factors.
What, then, might be the consequence of representations of female evil in the
literary paradigm of Naturalism? How do Naturalist texts such as Zola’s Nana
represent female evil and how do such representations relate to broader
conceptualisations of the feminine? To address these questions, this paper explores
Emile Zola´s novel Nana (1880) alongside Henrik Ibsen´s play Hedda Gabler
(1890). I am aware that there may be objections to utilising Naturalism to yoke
Zola’s novel to Ibsen’s play given the differences in terms of aesthetics, literary
form and social context between these two writers. While Zola is recognised as the
dominating figure of French Naturalism, Ibsen has been recently identified more as
a seminal influence on the development of Modernism than an advocate of
Naturalism.3 However, as I will discuss below, both writers’ construction of evil
female characters are grounded in similar, and what might be called Naturalist,
preoccupations even if their treatment of such preoccupations differs. More
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specifically, both writers deploy these representations to critically examine
normative understandings of sex and gender.
Nana
In Zola’s novel there seems little new about the representation of female evil.
The eponymous hero of Nana is clearly a vagina dentata, a castrating figure that
devours men and through devouring them threatens patriarchal order. As the
narrator comments: ‘In a few months Nana gobbled them up, one after the other.
The growing needs of her life of luxury sharpened her appetite, and she would
clean a man out with one snap of her teeth.’4 At the most intense moment of her
first theatrical triumph, her apotheosis from young girl to sex incarnate, Nana
smiles ‘with the deadly smile of a man-eater.’5 She is described as ‘taking two
bites at a time’ in order to finish off Steiner,6 and she ‘swallows an acre’ of la
Faloise’s land ‘at every mouthful.’7 The trope is also used in a plan for the novel in
which Zola refers to Nana, eating up gold and leaving nothing but ashes. In the
concluding paragraphs of the penultimate chapter, Nana is also likened to ‘those
monsters of ancient times whose fearful domains were covered in skeletons,’ and
on which, ‘she rested her feet on human skulls and was surrounded by
catastrophes.’8 Nana is also vengeful, ‘settling an unconscious family grudge,
bequeathed to her in her blood’ avenging ‘the beggars and outcasts of her world,’9
For the religious Comte Muffat, she has ‘taken possession of him: ‘reminding him
of the pious stories of diabolic possession which he had read as a child.’10 Nana is
also, of course, a fly, if a golden one, ‘carrying the ferment of social decay’; she
poisons men, ‘just by alighting on them.’11 Such a view of Nana as representative
of a largely antifeminist Naturalism is consonant with many scholars such as Irene
Gammel who argues that Naturalist fiction ‘inscribed normative standards in its
conventions, regularly “punishing” and ritually exorcizing the sexual
transgressors.’12
However, although I do not seek to necessarily minimise Gammel’s perception
of a misogynistic Naturalism evident in Nana in the representation of a woman as
vagina dentata, animal, monster, devil and insect, Zola’s novel, I will argue, also
reimagines sexuality and gender in significantly different and provocative ways
that often resist patriarchal assumptions of female behaviour. Zola’s character’s
deviation from gendered norms both illustrates her monstrosity but also prefigures
several issues that would preoccupy New Woman writers a decade or so later. The
fabulous monstrosity has perhaps tended to overshadow this perhaps more
progressive element of Nana’s transgressive behaviour.
This progressive element is clearly evident in the novel’s denial of Nana’s
culpability for the devastation she causes. Nana is, after all, described in Zola’s
plan of the novel and the novel itself as a good natured girl. There is no autotelic
impulse in Nana’s actions; Nana ‘never does harm for harm’s sake’. Evil is
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displaced from the morality of personal intention to a more materialist perception
of Nana as natural force, and thus she is exculpated as she cannot be accountable
for the effect her body has on others. Nana herself proclaims her innocence:
No dammit, they can say what they like; it isn’t my fault. Am I a bad sort?
I gave away everything I got, and I wouldn’t kill a fly … It’s their fault –
yes, it’s all their fault! … I never wanted to hurt them. But they came
running after me, and now they are kicking the bucket, or begging in the
street, or crying their eyes out.13
If pathology still renders Nana’s sexual allure dangerous, Nana the good
natured girl is largely absolved, and absolves herself, from the guilt that was
frequently placed on women for the errant sexual behaviour of men. Zola’s use of a
hunting metaphor emphasises the obsession and ferocity of the chasing pack rather
than culpability of the pack’s unwitting prey.
Indeed Nana goes much further in her rejection of marriage than many New
Woman writers did who still saw marriage, for all its flaws, as providing some
legal sanctuary for women. Nana turns down several proposals although she knows
that marriage would bring the respectability that she craves. Inverting the usual
images of purity and sanctity that are often commonly associated with marriage as
both civic responsibility and religious sacrament, Nana considers marriage “too
foul for words”. The narrative continues: “And she spat and hiccoughed with
disgust, as if she had seen all the filth in the world spreading out beneath her.”14
Marriage would, as she makes clear rob her of her identity: “Why I wouldn’t be
Nana any more if I saddled myself with a man …”15 Her severe critique of
marriage as incompatible with women’s freedom is not strikingly different from
several first-wave feminist attacks in both fiction and non-fiction prose on the
restrictions conventional marriage could place on women. 16 The novel
demonstrates that Nana’s independence can only be vouchsafed by her remaining
beyond the confines of matrimony.
Considering that Nana is a prostitute, perhaps one of the great ironies of the
novel is that Nana’s independence also extends to her control over her body. In
many respects, and similar to Hedda Gabler, Nana’s offence is that she often
behaves more like a nineteenth-century man than a woman even to the extent of
picking girls up in the street for her own sexual gratification, “abandoning herself
to monstrous caprices.”17 Such monstrous caprices may identify her as a symbol of
second empire corruption and a figure of female aberration but it also shows a
woman in sexual control. A distinction is clearly drawn in the novel, moreover,
between the lack of sexual pleasure Nana derives from prostitution which she
declares produces no enjoyment and the pleasure she obtains from her noncommercial sexual dalliances.18 Promiscuity might be an occupational hazard, but
the novel also makes clear it is more rewarding for Nana as a leisure activity.
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Nana, furthermore, refuses to be accountable to others for her sexual choices.
When Muffat jealously complains about Nana’s other sexual liaisons, Nana frankly
retorts: “Just you get it into your head that I insist on being completely free. When
I like the look of a man, I go to bed with him […]’19 With some exceptions, even
when working as a prostitute, Nana is in control of those who pay for her sexual
favours. She humiliates Muffat and is sexually dominant in their relationship
getting him to dress up in his uniform or pretend to be a horse she rides or a dog
that she beats. Such representations of female sexuality might show a society that
is wanton and corrupt, but they also deviate from a common notion that good
women were invariably sexual dormant and passive. As a depiction of a sexually
interested and independent woman, Nana, thus, challenges the sexual double
standard that allowed men to fulfil their sexual needs beyond the confines of the
conjugal bed in ways in which women could not, not at least without destroying
their lives and reputations. This might make Nana a monstrous figure for some
men, but the novel also demonstrates a woman enjoying her freedom and
independence in ways that were seldom expressed in contemporary literature.
My purpose, here, has not been to rescue Zola as a proto-feminist or to
minimise the harsh realities of prostitution in nineteenth-century France. However,
although within the Naturalist paradigm Nana might be a natural force, a
contaminating insect, a sexual parasite bringing about degeneration and, an
incarnation of female monstrosity, she is also something more: her sexual
aberrance need not only point to the conclusion that the novel merely reinstates
patriarchy in new novelistic perceptions based on an increasing valorisation of
scientific rationality. The novel can also be viewed as opening up new contentious
perceptions of contemporary women not only as an aberrant sexual monster, but as
an individual managing her affairs, be they financial or amatory, independent of
male authority and ultimately unanswerable to anybody. Nana might be a monster
to men, but at least in her independence, her keen sexual interest and her frank
sexual expression, and in her rejection of marriage, she offers an alternative
representation of women to those that were invariably rendered in mainstream
fiction.
Hedda
Although the character of Hedda Gabler could not, ostensibly be more different
from that of Nana as unlike Nana, Hedda is intelligent, perceptive, sexually
reluctant, upper class and wilful, the critical receptions to both protagonists were
not dissimilar. W. S. Lilly’s view of Nana’s as a beast is comparable to Hedda
being likened to a "human beast domesticated, socialized, and cowed into
submission." Like Nana, Hedda Gabber was also described as a female monster, in
Hedda Gabler’s case by both the Times and the Observer, and even a "Valkyrie in
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a corset."20 According to Clemence Scott, “A woman more morally repulsive has
seldom been seen on the stage.”21
The aberrance of both characters is, of course, grounded in their rejection of
female duty, as wives and mothers. As Nana does, Hedda Gabler transgresses
normative views of marriage. While Nana disavows the institution of marriage,
Hedda marries, but ultimately rejects her role as wife once she realises the
impossibility of George Tesman becoming a politician. When Hedda Gabler
attempts to exercise power through influencing the lives of men it is, indeed, a
travesty of the role of wife. The burning of Loevberg´s manuscript, the
encouragement of his suicide are the antithetical acts of uxorial support. Moreover,
while Nana is a bad mother, or indeed mothers the wrong people such as Georges
Hugon, Hedda Gabler rejects her maternal role, killing her own child in the act of
committing suicide, an act prefigured by her comparison of the burning of
Loevberg’s manuscript to the burning of a child. The latter action also indicates
that it is not merely this specific rejection of motherhood that provokes offence but
a broader understanding of women as primarily creators and nurturers of life.
Contrary to such views, both women are fascinated with what might be called the
gestural performance of death. This is perhaps more obvious in Ibsen’s play in
which Hedda Gabler longs for the beautiful death of Loevberg, but Nana also
describes le beau geste of Vandeuvres’s suicide as a beautiful thing.
Such a transgression of gender norms emphasises the disjunction between
gender roles and expectations, in the sense that the ideological alignment between
what is thought socially appropriate and what is deemed natural is brought into
question. If Hedda is a domesticated human beast then her representation is
inseparable from the social cage within which she has been consigned as a woman.
If, in Naturalism, heredity predetermines nature then the focus in Ibsen’s play is as
much on how the environment shapes it. This is to say that Hedda’s behaviour is
viewed less as moral absolute than to a large extent consequential of her living in
an environment which rigidly delineates gender roles that clearly cannot
accommodate the complexity, intelligence or ambition of her nature. Her suicide is,
in part, a consequence of having exhausted the possibilities that are prescribed for a
middle-class woman.
Indeed, central to Hedda’s resistance to her constricting environment is her
investment in the metaphysical idealism that W. S. Lilly valorises in his tirade
against Zolean Naturalism. The military code of honour to which she subscribes
and which through her principled suicide she enacts are juxtaposed with the
modern bourgeois life she inhabits, epitomised by Aunt Julia’s trite views,
Tesman’s squabble for academic tenure, and Judge Brack’s manipulative selfinterest. If the idea of Loevberg´s noble suicide represents the exercise of an ideal
over material self-interest, and offers at least the idea of heroic self-sacrifice that
Hedda finds beautiful, Loevberg´s failure, dying in an unseemly fight in a brothel,
is indicative of the loss of the aristocratic and specifically military ideals
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represented by Hedda Gabler’s father. The manner of Loevberg’s death is
emblematic of, to appropriate Lilly, the victory of the belly first over the head, and
then, as Hedda learns that Loevberg has not shot himself in the breast, the belly
over the heart.
However, Hedda is trapped in the double bind of being intrigued by the life that
Loevberg in the earlier stages of their relationship had detailed and being repulsed
by the fear of scandal her involvement in such a life might cause. The sordidness
might interest her, as it interested many readers who read Naturalist novels, and
presumably many female readers for the same reason as Hedda: like Naturalist
novels, Loevberg narrated events from a world from which Hedda and the
respectable female reader were excluded. The modern world which may well offer
women new opportunities, is, for Hedda Gabler, the same modern world of mass
culture and shrunken ideals, a world devoid of nobility in both senses of the world,
and of heroic self-sacrifice. To return to W. S. Lilly and the beau ideal: if Zola’s
Naturalist novel Nana destroys the beau ideal by depicting a human beast, Hedda
Gabler affirms the ideal through encouraging Loevberg to die beautifully and
exemplifies it in her own suicide. In both cases, however, such ideals predicated
both on class and gender distinctions whether represented by Muffat in Nana or
Hedda, or indeed articulated by W. S. Lilly, are represented increasingly as a
metaphysical irrelevance in understanding the individual and society. Nana’s and
Hedda’s actions cannot be understood by reference to metaphysical ideals or
immutable moral certainties but by contextualising their behaviour within their
respective environments. So while both texts might display a traditional fascination
with female evil - Nana as vagina dentata, Hedda a Medea-like monster - both
register the rigidity and the hypocrisy of the moral, social and cultural codes by
which women were supposed to live, although in Zola the emphasis is on the
hypocrisy and in Ibsen the rigidity. This is not to deny the persistence of a male
fascination with such representations, but at least to recognise the extent to which
in Naturalist writing female aberration is, to a degree, located within equally
aberrant societies. Female aberration thus becomes a creation of and a response to
the environment within which it emerges. By destabilising the fixity of gendered
evil, and by showing the aberrant nature of the environment in which such
behaviour is fostered, both works, if in distinctly different ways, reiterate less the
fixity of the evil woman than register the fluidity of ideological beliefs
masquerading as moral certainties, and, as such, point more firmly than preNaturalist texts to the potential of social change. While neither work offers ways of
seeing what this change might be or how it might come about, both identify those
issues which continued to form the disputed territory on which such issues would
be contested.
Naturalism, Female Evil and the Body
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1
W. S. Lilly, ‘The New Naturalism,’ Fortnightly Review 44 (1885), 240–256 (256)
Lilly, ‘The New Naturalism’, 252.
3
See for example Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen And the Birth of Modernism: Art,
Theatre, Philosophy. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
4
Emile Zola Nana, trans. George Holdon (1880, London: Penguin, 1972), 434.
The vagina dentata was not, of course, an uncommon motif among naturalist
writers. For example, Edmund Goncourt, writing in his journal about a woman in a
dream, comments: ‘Then she started to dance, and while she was dancing took
steps that showed her private parts armed with the most terrible jaws one could
imagine, opening and closing, exposing a set of teeth.’quoted in Daniel Pick, Faces
of Degeneration: A European Disorder 1848-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1989), 96.
5
Zola, Nana, 45
6
Ibid., 435
7
Ibid., 436
8
Ibid., 452
9
Ibid., 452, 453
10
Ibid., 155.
11
Ibid., 453
12
Irene Gammel, Sexualizing Power in Naturalism:Theodore Dreiser and
Frederick Philip Grove (Calgary; University of Calgary Press, 1994), 16
13
Zola, Nana, 451
14
Ibid., 438
15
Zola, Nana, 438
16
One thinks of New Woman writers such as Sarah Grand, Mona Caird and
George Egerton.
17
Zola, Nana, 434
18
Ibid., 451
19
Zola, Nana, 428
20
Barbara Fass Leavy, “Hedda Gabler and the Huldre”, Henrik Ibsen ed Harold
Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1999) 170.
21
A review of Hedda Gabler at Vaudeville Theatre in The Times, London, 21
April 1891; An unsigned notice, Observer 26 April 1891, 6
2
Bibliography
Fass Leavy, Barbara “Hedda Gabler and the Huldre”, Henrik Ibsen ed Harold
Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1999)
Gammel, Irene, Sexualizing Power in Naturalism: Theodore Dreiser and
Frederick Philip Grove. Calgary; University of Calgary Press, 1994.
Anthony Patterson
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Lilly, W. S. ‘The New Naturalism,’ Fortnightly Review 44 (1885), 240–256.
Moi, Toril. Henrik Ibsen And the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theatre, Philosophy.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Pick, Daniel Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder 1848-1918. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1989.
Zola, Emile. Nana, trans. George Holdon (1880, London: Penguin, 1972),