Modeling, Mothering, and the Postpartum Belly in Zola's L'Œuvre

Abstract

OF THE TITLES THAT ZOLA IMAGINED for his novel of the artist's life, L'ÂŒuvre (1886), several recall the birthing process, including Faire un Enfant, ProcrA©er, Engrosser la Nature, Enfantement, Accouchement, Parturition, Conception, Enfanter and Les Couches saignantes (IV, 1338).2 Many readings of L'ÂŒuvre have focused on Claude Lantier's failed attempt at sustaining a new movement in art. Although some of these readings cite the painter's indictment of the model's body as a factor in this failure, my own reading positions that failure of the female body at center stage.31 will propose that L'ÂŒuvre inscribes the deformations of gestation onto the female belly and then presents the ventre, poses it, before the artist (and reader) as unrepresentable, even as the very sign of unrepresentability. Indeed, one way that Zola works through the problem of the nude is to ask the question Can the postpartum model pose?—this in a novel that repeatedly, even compulsively, stages the pre- and post-partum belly as problem for the artist and metaphor of artistic production. This essay reads naturalism's posers in terms of the relationship between modeling and motherhood and, to a lesser extent, modeling and aging, for both motherhood and aging mark the body of the model in such a way that her posing potential becomes questionable. After the model's youth in Balzac's Le Chef-d'Âœuvre inconnu (1832), she reaches motherhood and middle age in L'ÂŒuvre and the Goncourts' Manette Salomon (1867); her death is then staged in Guy de Maupassant's Fort comme la mort (1889). The evolution of realist literature in France follows this life span of the model (i.e., of her body) from youth to maternity, to decline and death.4 As the terms artist, woman, mother and model took on new meaning in the nineteenth century, the pregnant and postpartum model emerged as the worrisome site of conflicts posed by the intersection of the body, art and gender. It is useful, therefore, to first inquire of these terms. Then, after a brief reading of Octave Mirbeau's tale of the aged model, L'OctogA©naire, and references to Zola's Le Ventre de Paris (1873) and the Goncourts' Manette Salomon, the strategies centering on the postpartum belly in L'ÂŒuvre can be untangled. I will argue that in L'ÂŒuvre the female ventre inhibits the successful passage from the problem of the model (the real woman) to the problem of the nude