Nana by Emile Zola (1880)

Continuing with my mini-unit of books about prostitutes (following Moll Flanders and Fanny Hill), I chose as my next this 19th Century French novel. Zola approaches his account in a naturalistic manner, portraying his heroine as the amoral product of her heredity and environment. As the child of a family of alcoholics and criminals, she is almost bestial in nature. Through her animal sexuality, she seduces men of a higher social standing, bringing them down to her level and destroying them. The intention of the novelist does not seem to be so much a condemnation of prostitution as it is a condemnation of a society which tolerates and even celebrates degradation. The scholarly introduction to my copy indicated that Zola was writing in reaction to the excesses of the French Second Empire. I can't speak to that, but it seems to me that American tabloid readers and trash-TV watchers who relish accounts of sexual escapades display a similar behavior.

Nana begins her career as a celebrated demimondaine (courtesan) by appearing almost nude in a play on the Paris stage. Blond and voluptuous, she immediately captures the attentions of several upper class sensualists who vie with one another to gain her favors, showering her with expensive gifts and money. Moving from one to another, always betraying the man who is financing her at the moment, she ultimately sets out to entrap the one man whose religious beliefs prompt him to resist her charms. Once in her power, he allows Nana to humiliate and betray him time and time again. Nana delights in sucking the last remnants of dignity and fortune from her willing victims. A journalist writes of her as a "golden fly" who "sucked death from the carrion left by the roadside and now, buzzing, dancing, and flittering like a precious stone, was entering palaces through the windows and poisoning the men inside...."

Throughout the novel, Zola interestingly uses animal images to reference the behavior of his characters. Nana is the "Golden Beast," the "...Beast of the Scriptures, a lewd creature of the jungle." At a horse race, spectator comments about Nana the woman and a horse by the same name are interchangeable. She forces her most pathetic victim to crawl around the floor growling like a bear or barking like a dog, fetching her shoes in his mouth.

This novel is fascinating and very well done. It is not overtly moralistic like Defoe's Moll Flanders or pornographic like Cleland's Fanny Hill. Ultimately, however, it is so depressing that I will not ever read it again.