Emile Zola - The Dream

Those who do not wish to learn details of the plot may prefer to read this Introduction as an Afterword.

R eaders who pick up a copy of The Dream having finished one of Zolas better-known novels, such as LAssommoir, Germinal, or La Bte humaine, may have an impulse, as they wade deeper into it, to double-check the name of the author on the title page. The Dream, the sixteenth of the twenty novels that make up the Rougon-Macquart series, is the least Zolaesque among them. Although it is, like the others, a naturalist novel set in Second Empire France, and linked to them by the lineage of its main character, it is at the same time a fairy tale, a romance between naive young lovers that unfolds in the shadow of a medieval cathedral. The story opens during a snowstorm on Christmas Day, when the young heroine, Anglique, takes shelter beneath a cathedral porch. She is found by a childless couple, a pair of humble embroiderers, who take her in and raise her as their own. From these beginnings, fairy-tale elements multiply. Anglique falls in love with Flicien, a lords son, and their attachment develops chastely, Zola choosing to steer them away from the sort of frank sexual encounters he had described in some of his earlier novels. The Dream was partly intended by Zola to show critics who had accused him of obscenity that he could in fact portray the psychology of more sensitive characters. Rather like an actor playing against type, Zola enjoys the freedom that this new approach affords him. He places his characters in a setting suffused with a mood that owes much to the Middle Agesa period he had long been fascinated by, and which he evokes through his descriptions of castle and cathedral architecture, embroidery, stained glass, and heraldry. He creates in Anglique an unusual heroine, a girl initially dominated by her passions, who is gradually reformed through the influence of her environment. He also hints at his own private anxieties, rarely voiced in the Rougon-Macquart series, concerning his childless marriage. Radically different from its predecessors, this novel, a hybrid of antagonistic genres, interweaving realism with fairy tale, reveals a new side to Zolas art and contains hints of the softening to come in his naturalist stance.

When TheDream was published in 1888, reviewers reacted in markedly different ways: there was confusion, disappointment, and scornbut also a certain amount of admiration. Those who welcomed this poem of grace tended to find points of continuity between it and the lyrical qualities in Zolas earlier works. What, then, had propelled Zola to soar free of the tawdry realities of life, which many critics considered his natural element? Why had he written a novel that seemed so uncharacteristic?