Naturalism Redressed: Identity and Clothing in the Novels of Émile Zola by Hannah Thompson

Abstract

1132 Reviews The texts themselves evocatively demonstrate Redon's lifelong preoccupation with the interior life of aman 'seul[] aumilieu de tous' (p. 92) and themystery of the imagi nation, the world of dreams, and the motivations and indecisions of the soul. Struc tured through narratives of encounter with strange worlds and beings (the Basque country and its beautiful, noble women; the exotic 'fakir', or the gorilla in 'LeRecit de Marthe la folle'; the war of I870), Redon's texts elaborate upon the dialectic between the internal and external worlds and his own position of semi-estrangement from the habits and mores of the society towhich he belongs. As a textual prelude to the suites of noirs (the charcoal and lithographic images that made him known in the milieu of fin de siecle Symbolism during the I88os), these texts should not be read as an exegesis of his visual work but as a parallel and highly self-conscious investigation of the self, the realm of spiritual mystery, and the essential role of the imagination in a perverse world where 'on ne voit partout que des gens qui font semblant de vivre' (p. 89). UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS NATALIE ADAMSON Naturalism Redressed: Identity and Clothing in theNovels of Emile Zola. By HANNAH THOMPSON. (Legenda) Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre. 2004. x+i88pp. C35. ISBN I-900755-82-3. This book is valuable for its detailed analysis of the significance of clothing in Zola, and even more so for its challenging insights about naturalism as textual practice. From the outset, Hannah Thompson emphasizes the idea of the Zolian text as fabric or network; the work is not about fashion or vestimentary codes, but rather uses 'the ways inwhich the language of clothing signifies' (p. i6) and the 'network of references to clothing' (p. i8) as means of accessing naturalism's wider preoccupations about sexuality, gender, identity, and ultimately aesthetics and textuality. Chapter I asserts a conception, shared with Zola, of the Rougon-Macquart as 'patchwork text', linked metaphorically to the networks it represents. Chapter 2 problematizes the notion of nakedness as truth, demonstrating with reference to La Faute de l'abbeMouret that naturalism contrives to obscure what it purports to uncover. Fabric functions as a metaphor for flesh, sowhat is natural is represented in terms of the artificial; natural ism's claim to represent the natural without artifice isquestioned. This destabilization is related in turn to what Thompson identifies via analysis of La Joie de vivre as 'a shift from scientific observation towards what could be referred to as a poetics of Decadence' (p. 63). A chapter on the erotics of the department store argues persua sively that sexual and gender norms and binaries apparently structuring the naturalist text are everywhere undermined; inAu Bonheur des Dames, the 'erotic investment in the combination of fabric and flesh represents, within the Zolian text, aDecadent challenge to the procreative sexuality necessary to Zola's naturalism' (p. 72). Itmay be that this challenge, as represented by women's shoplifting as self-sufficient erotic fantasy, is thwarted by a male desiring economy, but a female counterpart works against naturalism's ostensible 'heterosexual-reproductive' paradigm (p. 92). This binary paradigm is also undermined by transvestism, which Chapter 4 shows plays a key role in novels as diverse as La Curee and Germinal, in contradicting accepted notions about sexuality, gender identity, and the body towhich it is conventionally assumed Zola subscribed. A final chapter discusses the problematics of veiling and unveiling: nakedness is no straightforward issue, but is part of a dynamic process of covering and uncovering, crucially linked to the naturalist text's urge to disclo sure. And full disclosure is always impossible. The work's nomenclature might in certain places have been made more watertight: there are occasional assertions of how 'the reader' reacts, and references to Zola's narrator(s) as 'Zola'. However, this book, MLR, I0I.4, 2oo6 1133 through its rigorous analysis of discourses of clothing and unclothing, points up the deeply subversive character of naturalism as manifested in the fabric of the Zolian text, always already woven into awider, ever more complex fabric. UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND LARRY DUFFY Paul Claudel I9: theatre et recit...