Naturalism in extremis: Zola's Le Rêve

• Published in: Romance studies : a journal of the University of Wales Vol. 33; no. 3-4; pp. 272 - 284
• Main Author: White, Claire
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 01.11.2015
• ISSN: 0263-9904; 1745-8153
• DOI: 10.1080/02639904.2015.1124222

In planning his 1888 "Le Rêve," Zola envisaged a novel that would be distinctly out of character: "je viydraus faire un livre qu'on n'attende pas de moi." The present article explores what is at stake in Zola's desire to break with his own image at this juncture in the history of naturalism's reception. While "Le Rêve" can be understood as a demonstration of the author's aesthetic versatility and experimentation in the aftermath of the "Manifeste des Cinq," it also responds to a more longstanding engagement with the language of idealism. The article focuses on Zola's harnessing, and critique, of the idealist imagination in "Le Rêve." It first proposes a psychoanalytical reading of the Zolian heroine's fantasy life through the lens of Freud's 1908 "Family Romances." The child's power to redraw reality through daydream - to enact what Freud terms "a correction of actual life" - is connected, in turn, to the wager that frames Zola's narrative: that of rendering "la vie telle qu'elle n'est pas." Zola's experiment with idealism thus involves rehearsing the terms and suspicions at work in his earlier biographical writing on George Sand - the idealist writer Zola had assimilated to the "dream" of the novel's title. OA