Alaoui, Sanaa Ismaili

Critical studies of Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels, while explicating in detail the characterological functions of the women characters, including Gervaise in L'Assommoir and la Maheude in Germinal, have neglected the thematic functions of matriarchy in those texts as in the cycle as a whole. The decline of the matriarch is a prominent component of Zola's naturalistic scheme for the Rougon-Macquart , manifests not only in the increasing corruption of the progeny across the cycle, but primarily in the monographic depictions of the matriarchs themselves. Working-class mothers in particular embody the conflictual tensions of gender inequities and socio-economic deprivations that lead them to produce child-workers to support the family, typically becoming ever more negligent, on the model of Gervaise. Specifically in Germinal, Zola's largely negative conception of the fictive matriarch begins to change. This shift is sustained in subsequent texts of the cycle: the matriarch still suffers almost total loss (of husband, children, position), but she attains a new insight into the socio-economic system that so devours her offspring, and a new lucidity about her position within it.