Zola, Emile,--1840-1902--Criticism and interpretation

Emile Zola 's Rougon-Macguart novels describe the essential
corruption of the Second Empire. In the cycle of novels,
this epoch of rapid industrialization, before it ended in
the Franco-Prussian debacle of 1871, enriched th e
entrepreneurial Rougon branch but brutalized the proletarian
Macquart branch of Zola's socially symbolic family. The
majority of critics, past and present, either neglect or
regret one major aspect of Zola's fictional portrayal of the
period: the cumulative animal and machine imagery in the
cycle's meticulously prepared settings, diction, epithets,
and names. Such intricate veins of imagery constitute
Zola''s architectonic symbolism. And the author's didactic
sub-texts, especially in Le Ventre de paris, L'Assommoir,
Nana, Germinal, and La Bete humaine, give the cycle its
universality and its humanistic power.

Although both Zola and Dickens represent the precarious situation of the lower classes of society (workers, miners, and peasants), and that representation is similarly constructed at the level of both characters and narrative, Zola's characters engage in an active endeavor to change their social conditions while those of Dickens are more resigned to their circumstances, and are rather oriented toward individual moral accomplishment. The tones of the discourse of the characters, closely reflects the implicit political posture of the narrators, in Zola's Germinal and La Terre, and in Dickens's Hard Times and Our Mutual Friend . Both writers oppose social injustice, while leaving the reader toward differential solutions, politico-economic in Zola and socio-moralistic in Dickens.