Zola’s environment: “The dark misery of damp times”

Abstract

In naturalist novels, social and biological determinism is imposed on the fate of an individual located in a specific environment. This environment is decisive for the main theme of any literary text which follows this aesthetics. In L'Assommoir (1877) by Émile Zola, it is in the working class environment hosting Gervaise, the protagonist of the novel, where we can examine the slow but unstoppable fall of her fate, condemned to moral and physical misery and accelerated by her alcoholism. The labour world of Parisian workers, the urban landscape of the French capital, as well as the physical and psychological defects that Gervaise inherits from her father are the inescapable conditions that determine her fate. This article aims at an analytical and descriptive study of the destructive environment that ultimately kills the heroine.