The Drinking Den Read Online Free PDF Page A

continues to plot against her rival. Early film adaptations also interpreted the story as this kind of melodrama, giving it titles that include
A Drinker’s Dream, The Victims of Alcohol, The Poison of Mankind, A Drunkard’s Reformation
(the version made by D. W. Griffith in 1909) and
Drink
(by the British director Sidney Morgan, 1917); and in that way linking Zola’s novel to a whole literature of anti-alcohol propaganda between the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth century. The story of Bijard can be seen as one of these popular moralities in miniature: the wicked drunkard beats his wife to death, makes a martyr of his saintly daughter, then repents at her deathbed, even as she mutters her forgiveness…; and there are other genres referred to in the novel. There is a great deal of satire and humour in
The Drinking Den
– more, perhaps, than in any of the other parts of the Rougon-Macquart. The struggle between Goujet and Bec-Salé at the forge, by contrast, suggests an epic treatment of some myth involving gods and demigods (Vulcan or Thor), 6 with the Lorilleux, in their attic, as evil dwarfs hoarding their gold; note that while the Lorilleux transform gold into something that looks to Gervaise like dirt or base metal, Goujet can turn iron into ‘a veritable jeweller’s piece’ (Chapter 6). The story of Nana (Chapter II) is also a separate morality tale: ‘A Young Girl’s Downfall’, perhaps.
    The later novel,
Nana
, which is the sequel to the events of that chapter, has been criticized as a succession of loosely linked episodes rather than a balanced whole. The same criticism cannot be applied to
The Drinking Den
, despite the presence within the novel of these distinct episodes and of the famous setpieces – the fight in the wash-house, the wedding-party’s visit to the Louvre, Gervaise’s feast – because of thetight structure of the whole and because of the recurrent elements that bind the story together: the drinking den itself, with its sinister distilling apparatus; Bazouge, the undertaker, after his first ominous appearance at Gervaise’s wedding; the rain that falls on Gervaise at the moment of her greatest shame (Chapter 12), recalling the water splashed around the wash-house in her moment of greatest self-assertion (Chapter 1); and many more. Images of high and low, rising and falling also run through the whole book: the novel opens with Gervaise looking down into the street, then up at the new hospital building. When she first arrives at the tenement building where she will eventually live, she looks up at the window with the flowers, ‘with the sensation of being inside a living organism, at the very heart of a city, regarding the house with the same interest as she would had she been confronted by a giant being’ (Chapter 2); she will later look down into the courtyard at the place where she stood, recalling this moment. Inanimate objects repeatedly take on the features of living beings: 7 the environment, which is the cause of Gervaise’s tragedy, is often personified in this way, almost invariably as malevolent.
    These and many other aspects of the novel have provided material for scholarly analysis in the century and more since it was published, and Zola’s reputation has grown, though he was to remain a controversial figure for a considerable time after his death in 1902. His status, both in France and abroad, has been to some extent conditioned by views on his treatment of sexual matters and by his political opinions, though outside France Henry James’s essay on him in 1903 was an important step in consolidating his reputation as a major figure, despite what were seen as his faults. Of course, James had reservations about Zola’s lack of ‘taste’, and he writes in a typically Jamesian manner, qualifying, hinting, modulating shades of meaning, criticizing Zola for lack of psychological