- Latest English Edition
- translator Leonard Tancock. New York: Penguin Books, 1970.
- Summary
- A terrible study of the effects of drink on the moral and social
condition of the working-class in Paris. There is probably no other
work of fiction in which the effects of intemperance are shown with
such grimness of realism and uncompromising force.
Gervaise Macquart, daughter of Antoine Macquart
The Fortune of the Rougons), got employment
in the laundry of Madame Fauconnier, and a few months later
married Coupeau,
a zinc-worker, who, though the son of drunken parents,
was himself steady and industrious. An accident to Coupeau,
who fell from the roof of a house, brought about a change.
His recovery left him with an unwillingness
to work and an inclination to pass his time
in neighbouring dram-shops. Meantime
Gervaise, with money borrowed from Goujet,
a man who loved her with almost idyllic affection,
had started a laundry of her own.
She was successful for a time, in spite of her husband's
growing intemperance and an increasing desire in herself
for ease and good living; but deterioration had begun.
By easy stages she descended that somewhat slippery stair
which leads to ruin.
If there is a lesson to this novel, it is that life in mean
and depressing surroundings without the money ever to escape,
even for a few days, leads to a dreary existence from which
the only relief is drink and promscuity, a vicious spiral
leading to degradation. Gervaise was a good and naturally
virtuous woman, whose ruin was wrought by circumstances
and by the operation of the relentless laws of heredity.
- Commentary
- In order to heighten the effect, Zola deliberately wrote
the whole of L'Assommoir in the argot of the streets, sparing
nothing of its coarseness and nothing of its force. For this alone
he was attacked by many critics, and from its publication onwards
an unexampled controversy arose regarding the author and his methods.
As translator Leonard Tancock points out, this study is notable
for one of the most moving definitions of love found in fiction:
that of Goujet for Gervaise:
And at the end, when Goujet, ever faithful, has brought her home
from the streets prematurely old, coarsened and brutalized by the
men in her life, he still offers her his love. She refuses this last
chance of salvation because she loves him. True love is never blind,
but thinks first of the real interests and happiness of the other;
she knows herself and that her weakness could only drag him down and
wreck his life. So she goes away, her acceptance of her own
unworthiness having raised her to the height of a tragic heroine.
This scene is one of the most moving in fiction because Zola pities
and loves her, too.
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