Zola's Naturalism

Do you think Zola was something of a misanthrope or do you think his bleak view of humanity was more because of a belief that we can never escape our social circumstances and environment? Or, conversely, do you think I'm way off base?

Basically I'm wondering what you think 'naturalism' is in Zola's works - what does it do. I've only read Germinal and The Earth, but you could look at human life "naturally" without having the catastrophies that occur in these books. Do these horros popping up continuously in his novels more about wanting to look at humanity in all its filthy detail, or does this more say something about the author himself?

Just to be clear, I'm not making a moral judgement here. I could care less about what is depicted in his novels. I just want to know more about why he chose the things he did.

That's funny, I have just started on Zola with Thérèse Raquin.

Naturalism is always bad occurrences, and as soon as you think that it can't get any worse, there bl**dy well is something that can make it worse. So far, I have read Dutch (Emants, I know he is not very well known in Anglo-Saxon countries, I will try to change that), English (Hardy), Flemish (very rudimentary) and now French. All of it is misery, but English and Flemish are more focused on circumstances alone, I find, than French or Zola. As Emants's example was Zola, he focused, like him, on man and his own weaknesses of spirit despite his sometimes good circumstances.

Zola, in Thérèse Raquin at least, illustrates the weakness of two people to come to terms with their own nature. Indeed, they commit a murder for clear (and really acceptable) reasons, I grudgingly have to admit, but they can't deal with that part of themselves. They start blaming each other, then start to 'repent' but not really (at least one of the two) in an attempt to obtain foregiveness. But to obtain foregiveness, one must first admit what one has done to himself. And that is what fails.

But I gather from what you say that he has written something more like Hardy in that man stays in misery if he was born in misery. I am afraid that that is what Naturalism is, in part (depending on the interpretation the writer gives to it). Hardy, I find, mainly writes about circumstances, but Jude the Obscure for example also has a character who can't deal with her own will despite herself. She is too weak to resist conformity at first and then when she does and she is happy, she starts to doubt and thus maks herself unhappy, starts to think she is punished by God somehow. Then again, the main character is intelligent but is somehow not allowed to be that because he is a workman. So two sides there. That is maybe what unsettled people in that novel.

I personally love that kind of stuff, but not everyone does. ;)

Naturalist novels are about the realities of life rather than the escapist literature that seeks to distract the reader from life's problems. It is easy for we who have the everyday advantages of electric light, running water, central heating etc to forget just how hard life was in former times; what Zola does is to show us and this is why he seems misanthropic. The books you have mentioned are about coal mining and agricultural communities at a time when life was very hard for both and Zola sought to bring the terrible working conditions and hardship of their lives to the general public. He actually went to live in a coal mining community to study the lifestyle and that's why Germinal is so compelling.
The problem with reading Zola is that much of his work is in 20 novels connected to each other by the device of a family called Rougon-Maquart and it is preferable to read starting from the beginning with La Fortune des Rougon if you really want to appreciate the interweaving of the stories which makes them one of the pillars of French literature, although each book will stand alone for those that don't. I have read most of the series and enjoyed them for their brilliant writing but if you are squeamish don't read La Joie de Vivre (the title is meant to be ironic) as there is an horrific description of a breach birth which some might find disturbing.

Zola was against the regime of Napoleon 111, whose reign from 1848-1870 was known as the second empire, and his books point up the worst effects of his rule; so his novels have a propagandist element and necessarily concentrate on the downside of life at that time. I wouldn't say that he was specifically misanthropic but rather that he believed that people don't basically change and may inherit certain characteristics from their forbears, which is a basic tenet of naturalism.

Naturalism is not just about miserable people having miserable things happen to them. It's more about society and environment in a wider sense. There's a bit of inspiration from Darwin- you are the product of your environment and what has gone on before you. It is a struggle to overcome them- perhaps an impossibility. Naturalism is very much about that struggle.

There is just as much fiction in Zola as in anything else, especially Therese Raquin, which is based on a pseudo-science of temperaments, and is melodramatic to say the least. Zola wrote to make money, and did a good job of it. Women in particular were said to love his work - this is coming from someone who studied with a Zola specialist who spent hours quoting and reading his thousands and thousands of letters, many from female fans. The dark humor, and depression were seen as sexy, and interesting, and the elements that border on ridiculous seen as a scandalous type of porn for a repressed audience.

That being said, he also hits on a typically French contradiction - for all the openness and will to change and protest, French people are still, and even more so at that time, culturally conservative, and more religious and traditional than they care to admit - what Zola did was examine the gap.

Not saying he is bad, but, he had objective - the same way