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Scripting, surrogate mothers, incest taboo, and creativity: Zola's twofold self-betrayal in L'?uvre by Patrick Brady is a Arts and Humanities article available to read on EtoBox.

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It is well-known that Zola consciously portrays himself in L'G%vre (1886), in the characters of the painter Claude Lantier and the Naturalist novelist Pierre Sandoz. What I propose to explore here is a special dimension of these self-portraits that we have no reason to believe Zola was aware of, namely that which derives from the characters' relations with their mothers, their wives, and their professional activities as creators. The presence or absence of one of the parents of a protagonist, especially the mother, is an aspect of narratives that is pregnant with significance. Notable cases of absent mothers include Munon Lescuut (Des Grieux), Rousseau's Confessions, Adolphe, Le Rouge et le Noir, Madame Bovay (Emma). On the present occasion, however, I wish to consider the opposite situation: that of the all-too-present mother. l I have studied elsewhere one such case, involving an unmarried son -namely in A Za recherche du temps perdu. The present cases, provided by Zola's novel L'GYuvre, have quite other ramifications because this time the sons do marry, and this enables us to study their relationship with their wives and their art, and the effects produced on the latter by the r

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Author

Patrick Brady

Publisher

Springer Netherlands; Springer-Verlag; Kluwer Academic Publishers; Springer Science and Business Media LLC (ISSN 0028-2677)

Published

1985

Language

EN

Field

Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)