This post is part of Paris in the Spring: Émile Zola on Tour at The Classics Circuit.
Le Rêve (The Dream in English) is not so much a story about religious fervor, but about Zola’s most important theme: heredity. In this case, how heredity plays out when the child is reared and educated in an environment that suppresses the negative traits of that heredity. Not having read much naturalist literature, and no Émile Zola, I chose the book that seemed most up my alley—a naturalist tale told within a fairy-tale framework. I chose to read a translation by Eliza E. Chase courtesy of Project Gutenberg.
The story opens with a little girl sheltering herself from the snow in the portal of a Cathedral dedicated to Saint Agnes. There under the protection of its roof, a statue of Agnes and carvings of the other maiden saints seem to watch over the girl through the cold night. Nearby, the home and workshop of an ecclesiastical embroiderer is nestled into the church architecture, and in the morning, the embroiderer’s wife, Hubertine, looks out and sees the child dying from the cold. Hubert and Hubertine take Angelique in and raise her, since they have no child of their own.
Angelique leads a sheltered existence in the embroiderer’s house, but doesn’t desire more than to go from her room, decorated with antique furniture and overlooking the garden and a wilderness called the Clos-Marie, to the embroidery workshop where she learns to create magnificent works in silk and gold thread. She rarely leaves the house, and so she learns little of the outside world. She grows up an innocent. Her only source of information about the world is “The Golden Legend”, an elaborately illustrated book on the lives of the saints, which she becomes obsessed with.
“How wonderful it all was! These saints and virgins! They are born predestined; solemn voices announce their coming, and their mothers have marvellous dreams about them.”
She grows up convinced that she has a special destiny, and when she is a teenager, she believes that she will marry a prince, as Saint Agnes went to Heaven to marry her prince, Jesus. So she begins to wait for him . . .
This book is written as a fairy-tale, but there are psychological undercurrents that indicate something else is really going on as Angelique’s dream unfolds. For one thing, Angelique is passionate and willful, her “freaks” (as Zola calls them) eventually being brought under control by her gentle upbringing and Hubertine’s patience. These fits are brought on by anything that makes Angelique feel a loss of control, including hindrances to her acts of charity (which will make her like the saints). She also displays obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (not to be confused with OCD); at one point, she tells Felicien, the young man she loves:
“‘We had a white cat, with yellow spots, which I painted white. It did very well for a while, but it did not last long. Listen a minute. Mother does not know it, but I keep all the waste bits of white silk, and have a drawer full of them, for just nothing except the pleasure of looking at them, and smoothing them over from time to time.’”
These hoarding behaviors are apparent as early as Angelique’s first day living with the Huberts; when they try to examine the book containing her personal records, they witness her first holy-terror tantrum. Zola makes clear later on that Angelique’s passions are hereditary, passed on from her mother, Sidonie Rougon, and in the context of the whole Les Rougon-Macquart saga, from her ancestress, Adelaïde Fouque.
Angelique grows and is reared with kindness and patience, and those passions are directed toward the saints first and finally to her prince, Felicien. Zola, though an atheist, does not seem to be criticizing religion specifically—the story is rife with nostalgia for the trappings and ritual of Catholicism—at most he indicates that the parents are to blame for sheltering her. This seems to be done more out of a desire to shield her from life’s harsh realities rather than to protect her from worldly influences—though Hubertine does fear that at school she “might not always have the best of associates”. It comes off as a sort of neglect, rather than an intentional strategy to cloister her, and Hubertine often admits to regret for it.
Though Zola portrays all the characters of the story sympathetically, unfortunately they come off flat and unrealistic. Why would Hubertine neglect to acquaint her daughter even with the neighbors in their small, highly Catholic village? No reason is really given. Why does Angelique try, for the space of about a chapter, to make Felicien think she dislikes him, even after she realizes she loves him? Well, she hasn’t confided in her adoptive mother about him, and she can’t tell her now, can she? Why can’t Felicien marry a poor embroideress? Not because she’s poor, but because his father regrets the loss of his late wife. Huh? Motivation is weak in this story, and the characters are like the figures on a Sunday School flannel-board: flat and moved around to make the story’s point.
There is some beautiful description in this book, and the descriptions of the embroiderer’s art alone made it worthwhile reading for me:
“It was for this unknown hero that, little by little, there seemed to grow on the white satin the beautiful great lilies, and the roses, and the monogram of the Blessed Virgin. The stems of the lilies had all the gracious pointings of a jet of light, whilst the long slender leaves, made of spangles, each one being sewed on with gold twist, fell in a shower of stars. In the centre, the initials of Mary were like the dazzling of a relief in massive gold, a marvellous blending of lacework and of embossing, or goffering, which burnt like the glory of a tabernacle in the mystic fire of its rays. And the roses of delicately-coloured silks seemed real, and the whole chasuble was resplendent in its whiteness of satin, which appeared covered almost miraculously with its golden blossoms.”
The detailed depiction (surely accurate considering Zola’s insistence on research and a scientific approach to writing) of the work-room and activities of the embroiderer alone make me glad I read the book. The embroidery itself seems to take on a mythic, magical quality.
Though the romance often feels forced and the characters’ motivations don’t always make sense, the scene in which Felicien chases the barefoot Angelique through the Clos-Marie at night and swears his love to her is genuinely sweet. There is some beautiful imagery in this story, and a small handful of touching moments, marred unfortunately by the unbelieveable characters.
However, the psychology that underpins the story is interesting. I’m not sure Zola fully understood the mental state behind the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, but the disorder has an interesting affect on the events of the tale. There is a point at which Angelique can choose to run away with Felicien and marry him, but she looks around her room, at all the white objects in it, and asks him to give her just a few moments. And as she sits there, the reader starts to realize that she is never going to leave, that her obsession with the color white, the possessions she’s hoarded, are holding her there. She justifies her decision to stay with a speech about obedience, but that moment of admission was there, the reader caught it:
“She continued to look round the room as if she had
forgotten some valuable object there, but could not tell what it was.
It was a regret, at first slight, but which rapidly increased and filled
her heart by degrees, until it almost stifled her. She could no longer
collect her thoughts. Was it this mass of whiteness that kept her back?”
Though Angelique believes her passions and the willfulness of her heredity have been conquered by her upbringing, in reality, her passions have merely been redirected. She is not a prostitute like her cousin Nana, and in the end she dies an innocent, but it is still her ambition, for goodness, for perfection, for sainthood, that killed her. In the end, heredity wins out.
This book was interesting but not enjoyable to read. In spite of the fairy-tale feel, there was a depressing, hopeless tone throughout, or rather, a sense that all of Angelique’s hopes are false. I believe Zola was genuine in his attempt to explore his themes through the medium of the fairy-story, and the undercurrent of hopelessness may have been Zola’s attempt to subvert the fairy-tale framework; to me the book was superficial and the ending especially felt less true to the human condition than most fairy-tales.
I wonder if naturalism and a fantasy/fairy-tale story style could be merged successfully? My first thought is that they would be mutually exclusive, as fairy tales and fantasy require something of the unnatural, something of the fantastic in their core makeup, and a naturalistic view might take away too much of the wonder and mystery of the setting. It’s interesting to see different combinations of things, though.
Reading a story through the eyes of someone with a disorder sounds like a fascinating idea. I’ve head it described as the “unreliable narrator”, I think. You would never know if what you are reading is an accurate account or even “really happening”.
I think naturalism has certain requirements that would make it difficult (and I admittedly don’t know that much about it), but maybe it would be easier with urban fantasy? I think naturalism is more about its themes (human evil, heredity, survival of the fittest, that sort of thing) than specifically being about “only a realistic setting”. I’m not completely sure…
I found it tiring and discouraging to read about someone with a personality disorder, in this context. I do think that Zola got the anti-logic of Angelique’s thought-processes right, as far as I can tell, but it felt like everything I was reading was basically false.
I’m adding so many new Zola books to my TBR pile! This sounds fantastic, and after loving Germinal despite all my trepidations, I’m starting to think Zola can pull off anything.
Amanda: Glad you found the review helpful! Though I have some complaints about “The Dream”, the book was worthwhile reading for sure, and it may be more to your taste than it was to mine. It definitely makes one think. Enjoy! :)
This one appealed to me because I likewise WASN’T interested in the harshness of naturalist perspective and I liked the idea of a fairy tale. It sounds like he struggled to make the characters feel real. The sense of doom was present in the book (THE MASTERPIECE) I read too, but the characters did feel incredibly realistic to me too. Sounds like this wasn’t his strongest, but I”m glad you still found it a worthwhile read in the end!
Rebecca: Well, I’m a romantic to my core and I wanted to make sure I could at least get through whatever I read. This is one of those books that I’m glad I read, so long as I don’t have to read it again. ;) I didn’t enjoy it while I was in the middle of it, but I can look back and see some qualities I appreciate. Thanks for commenting!
Emile Zola suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder himself. He must tu touch the furniture several times before sleep. Jonas
That’s interesting, Jonas! Thanks for pointing that out. I’d like to learn more about that.