Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Emile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart family tree and notes display the inherited characteristics passed down within each branch of the family. Most prominent are the mental afflictions that plague one branch and the alcoholism that is rampant in another. Zola’s era was a period of scientific development that strongly impacted many aspects of life. Zola sought to make his works a marriage of literature and science—a sort of scientific experiment with humans that he could observe and record. What had previously been a debate only in philosophical domains—the factors that determine human behavior—had become a part of experimental research. From Lamarck to Darwin and Mendel, the existence of inherited characteristics was being researched and proven. The attention then turned to the power of inherited characteristics that began being qualified as race. While others of his time created a nature/nurture dichotomy, Zola examined their complicity and interactions, like variables in a laboratory experiment. Genetic predispositions and social factors surrounding his characters, like cafés and social drinking, lead them inevitably to ruin. The use of alcohol is an apt demonstration of the nature/nurture vector in Zola’s work. During the nineteenth century, through research and observation, alcoholism went from being considered a moral problem to a medical, hereditary problem. In this paper, I show how Zola uses nature and nurture as accomplices to lead his characters to their inevitable demise. Such dependence on inherited characteristics will eventually lay the groundwork for the development of racial conceptions that persist even in today’s Francophone world.