What intrigued me about the novel was the ending. I could not understand why the novelist had to devote more than 6 pages for the preparations of war going on in France while Nana lies in the hospital bed. Nana leads a life of pleasure and un forbidden freedom. She is the embodiment of sensuality. All the men who come under her charm are sucked out and trampled upon except a few worldly wise ones like Mignon, Labordette or Monsieur Venot. Only Fontan can hold her in his command. She takes all the punishment he gives her and works for both of them, all the time loving him more for her sacrifices.
Nana is the Goddess of sex and lust who radiates the glory of her sex in all its youth and lasciviousness. The novel is shocking even by today’s standards. It is not hard to imagine what an uproar it would have caused on its publication. The world of Nana is Paris; a Paris which has sunk low into debauchery and depravity, which has inflamed many a wanderer with its intoxicating charms.
The novel is hailed as a masterpiece of Naturalism. Zola succeeds in foregrounding the theme of corruption which has devoured an entire people. Everyone is a part of it and everyone has a part in it. If Zola sided or sympathized with the working classes, there is no indication of the same in the novel. Nana presents two examples of what the life of a courtesan could be; the elderly countess who is the mistress of a grand mansion and the other, a terrific beauty who is the lurid target of all Paris. Nana’s life leads no where. She suffers a miserable end affected by smallpox, all her physical beauty erased by the vicious germ. Zola leaves Nana to the imagination of the reader. It is the men who destroy themselves in their mad pursuit of Nana. She sucks them all like a luminous black hole and throws them off sapping their everything: Count Muffat, Georges, Philippe, La Feloise, Steiner, Fauchery, Vandeuvres, Foucarmount.
Nana is a plain novel with no literary technique at use. But what about the tragic flames in Nana’s character, her infidelity and her faithlessness, her relationship with Georges a boy, her deliberate destruction of the dignity and honor of the men who love her, her disdain for society, her worship of the self, her relationship with Satan and her pursuit of pleasure. If it pleased her she would sleep even with a stranger! It is hard to imagine so much viciousness concentrated in one individual. Perhaps Nana is precociously immoral and a prototype of the invasive and engulfing female, an omnipotent force of beauty and brains. Zola’s naturalist technique seems to lead to a scientific hypothesis, the result of a character grounded in immorality has to be ruination and destruction. This novel gave me something to brood upon with regard to similarities between; Madame Bovary, Sister Carrie and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. (To be continued)