L’Assommoir and Zola’s Nuanced Vision of Nineteenth-Century Alcoholism

Abstract

This article examines depictions of problem drinking in Emile Zola’s 1877 L’Assommoir, situating the novel within contemporaneous writings about alcoholism. While criticism has long found in Zola’s novel the ruinous effects of hereditary degeneration, I propose that L’Assommoir also illuminates the flaws in nineteenth-century French medical thinking about alcoholism. One curious point about L’Assommoir is that this most famous work of French literature to deal with alcoholic drinking never uses the word alcoholism or alcoholic. Underneath that very elision, though, is a surprising amount of clarity and modern nuance about the realities of the disease. In the context of a contemporaneous French medical discourse that argued for the feasibility of moderation in drinking, that overwhelmingly counted wine as part of the solution, and that underscored the damning role of heredity, this novel is clear about the variance among constitutions, even among people in the same demographic and with similar family histories. It indicates that individual compulsion, not solely choice, and not solely heredity, drives the problem drinker. It also indicates that an alcoholic compulsion can be nourished through wine. In this manner, Zola was more aligned with the modern disease model of alcoholism than the prevailing French wisdom of his time.