Nana

“Nobody knew this Nana. Where had she sprung from? Rumours spread, jokes were whispered from one to another. It was a caress, a familiar pet name everyone liked to say. Just to utter the word enlivened the crowd and put them in a jolly mood. Everyone was burning with curiosity, a violent, passionate fever so typical of Parisians. They were desperate to see Nana. One lady had the flounce of her dress torn off, a gentleman lost his hat.”

In this glimpse of the crowd that assembles in the theater lobby for Nana’s debut performance, the reader can see glimpses of the ills in France’s Second Empire society that Zola wants to highlight, even before Nana’s influence has taken a firm hold. They are easily given over to their passions, driven to excessive behavior by something as simple as the sound of a name. They have all the patience and civility of schoolchildren at recess.

“The entire audience was trembling, slipping into a sort of vertigo, weary and excited, overcome by sleepy midnight desires like the inarticulate murmurs from the beds of trysting lovers. And Nana, in the face of this swooning public, […] remained victorious with her marble flesh, her sex strong enough to destroy them all and emerge unscathed.”

Nana’s debut performance as the goddess Venus is an apt foreshadowing of the role she will assume for the rest of the novel: a larger-than-life figure inextricably connected to sex and physical passion, a connection that she sometimes likes and sometimes wants to transcend.

“She imagined their hot breath coming through the cracks in the wall and began to feel uneasy. But when Zoe ushered in Labordette, the young woman gave a cry of relief. […] That nice Labordette, what a good thing he arrived just at that moment! He was never demanding. He was a friend to women and helped them with little tasks.”

The first scene that takes place in Nana’s apartment plays out like a farce, with Zoe frenetically attempting to find more and more distinct spaces in which to store Nana’s male visitors so they do not run into each other while they wait for her. Despite the humor, this passage shows that Nana’s popularity also brings certain dangers, like finding herself vastly outnumbered by strange men in her own home. While friends like Labordette and Zoe help, they often do not have her best interests at heart.

“The place for a man of his [Muffat’s] rank was not at the table of a woman of that sort. Vandeuvres protested: it was going to be an artistes’ supper. Talent excused everything.”

Fauchery and Vandeuvres’ attempt to coax Muffat into attending Nana’s dinner party is wry and ironic on several levels. First, because of their disingenuousness—no one in Parisian society considers Nana a talented artist. Second, as experienced men of the world, Fauchery and Vandeuvres surely know that Nana hopes to convert the wealthy Muffat into a paying lover rather than just discuss art with him.

“It was very luxurious, but it was the luxury of a restaurant, porcelain with threads of gold but no monogram, a worn silver service dulled by constant washing, crystal glasses, replaceable from among the dozens of incomplete sets in countless bazaars. It resembled a house-warming that had been celebrated too soon, as though someone had unexpectedly come into a fortune and nothing was yet in place.”

Nana aspires to be not only comfortably wealthy but admired and respected. However, she thinks the key to admiration and respect is ostentation. She often presents as someone trying hard to impress rather than someone with the confidence granted by a lifetime of wealth.

“They [Rose and Auguste Mignon] had a mutual agreement. She worked as hard as she could with all her talents and beauty. He had abandoned his violin to better supervise her career as an artist and a woman. You would not have found a more bourgeois, or a more united, couple anywhere.”

The Mignons are two of the most interesting and modern characters in the novel. Auguste has given up his work to support his wife, and he considers both her sex work and her acting legitimate careers worthy of his attention. While Zola may present their relationship as an indicator of Second Empire society’s wrong turns, they are at least free from the lies and deceit that mark almost every other romantic relationship in the novel.

“It was like a subterranean existence down there in the dark depths, men’s voices sounding as if they were ascending from a cave […] As he passed, the count raised his head and glanced up at the stairwell, startled by the sudden flood of light and heat falling on the back of his neck. From above came the sound of people washing in sinks, laughing and calling, and a row of doors, continually banging, emitted a female scent, the musk of the make-up mixed with the strong animal smell of hair. And he did not stop, he hastened his step, as though he were escaping, taking with him on his skin the thrill of that opening into a passionate world he knew nothing about.”

As Muffat descends to the cave-like backstage area of the theater, Zola focuses on his physical sensations. This space is devoted to physicality and is so overwhelming that the count loses sight of his loftier spiritual values. Until this evening, he has thought of sex as a duty rather than a pleasure.

“It was no longer a joke, they were at Court. This world of the theatre recreated the real world in a solemn farce beneath the flame of the gaslights. […] Nobody thought this was an odd mixture—the real prince, the heir to a throne, drinking an actor’s champagne and very much at ease in this carnival of the gods, in this masquerade of royalty, in the midst of a crowd of dressers and whores, showmen and pimps.”

One of Nana’s most prominent motifs is performance. In this passage, the actors, who already perform the part of royals on stage, also act the part of royals backstage, trying to fit in with the Prince’s grandeur. At the same time, everyone assembled is performing ignorance of the Prince’s real motivation for being backstage at all—the opportunity to see his lover, Nana—even though the affair is hardly secret. The Prince himself participates in this performance, pretending not to know Nana personally.

“His [Muffat’s] whole being revolted, he was terrified by the way Nana had for some time now been slowly invading his consciousness and taking hold of him, reminding him of the pious texts, the stories of possession by the Devil on which he had been reared. He believed in the Devil. In a strange way, Nana was the Devil, her laughter, her bosom, her bottom, she was swollen with vice.”

Zola is interested in describing the effects of heredity and environment more so than the effects of demonic forces. His character Muffat, however, is a religious man. He sees Nana’s temptation as a supernatural force, a perspective which allows him to continue feeling powerless against her, as if his mortal will is too weak to combat her demonic power.

“Listening to the robin while the young boy nestled against her, Nana remembered. […] In the olden days she would have given the world to have the full moon, the robins, and a lovelorn young man beside her. Oh, she could have wept, it seemed so good and innocent! Had she not been born to live a life of virtue?”

As the child of poor parents, Nana started her life with the escapist ambition of living a peaceful life in the countryside—a simple vision, but one that shows how early her materialism and quest for physical comfort began. Her affairs with Georges and Fontan show that a part of her still thinks of that idyll as the good life. However, in her adulthood she becomes addicted to material luxuries and the feeling of high social status that they represent. Zola shows that such decadence can become every bit as much of an addiction as the alcohol Nana’s father succumbed to.

“Straight away, after the first words had been exchanged, he tried to grab hold of Nana with both hands. […] He gritted his teeth and lunged at her again. Then, as she fought against him, his language became coarse and he reminded her crudely that he had come in order to go to bed with her. She caught hold of his hands, still smiling, yet embarrassed. She called him ‘tu,’ to soften her refusal.”

Once Muffat has decided to begin a sexual affair with Nana, his morality fades away. He becomes brutish, willing to resort to physical violence because he thinks that as a known courtesan, Nana owes him sex whenever he wants it. Nana’s embarrassment in this passage is likely not only on her own behalf, but on Muffat’s as well, as she witnesses him behaving just like men to whom he considers himself superior.

“The coaches had passed through the middle of these embarrassed people who knew, but weren’t acknowledging, each other. This delicate, fleeting encounter seemed to last an eternity.”

The meeting between Nana’s party and Madame Hugon’s party in the countryside outside Paris is extremely awkward, almost entirely because of Madame Hugon’s presence. Everyone else there is well aware of how interconnected the two groups really are, and how frequently the wealthier, higher status men in the group spend time with the courtesans. Madame Hugon, one of a tiny number of unhypocritical people in the novel, is the only one with no prior knowledge of this, so the group orients itself around her ignorance.

“The church was emptying; all the good folk of Charmont made deep bows to her; an old man kissed her hand and a woman tried to kneel at her feet. She was a mighty queen, crowned with years and honours. […] Without turning a hair, Nana resumed her daydreams, gazing into the distance as though seeing in her mind’s eye a Nana who enjoyed a vast fortune and was respected by one and all.”

Before Nana and her party arrive at the abbey of which Irma d’Anglars is the caretaker, they poke fun at her advanced age. When they arrive, however, no one is laughing. Nana stares at the woman awestruck, so entirely does Irma embody what Nana wants for herself. Sadly, Nana has no conception of how to garner the respectability Irma d’Anglars enjoys. When she tries to think of righteous, virtuous things to do in her own life, the best she comes up with is staying with Muffat even when she finds him boring.

“In Nana, the immorality that was being allowed to pollute the common people was rising to the surface and rotting the aristocracy. She was becoming a force of nature, an unwitting ferment of destruction, corrupting and throwing the structures of Paris society into disarray between her snowy-white thighs, churning it up, as women each month turn the milk sour. And it was at the end of the article that the comparison with the fly was made; a fly the colour of sunshine, escaped from the midden, a fly which sucks death from the carrion you are wont to see along the roads and which, buzzing and dancing, throwing out a dazzle of jewels, poisons men simply by flying in through the windows of palaces and landing on them.”

The cruel and inflammatory article that Fauchery writes about Nana for the Figaro for aligns with the narrator’s stance on Nana. The novel does not portray Nana as a woman who sets out to destroy Parisian society. She is as unconscious of the import of her actions as a common housefly, both just following instincts. Like the housefly, though, this unawareness does not make the diseases she spreads any less serious.

“In his [Muffat’s] mind he rewrote the article Fauchery had published about the poisonous fly and waded into the argument, declaring that with this Late Empire decadence, society was no longer possible. That did him good.”

To assuage his guilt over his affair with Nana, Muffat places his behavior in a wider context. When he thinks about “Late Empire decadence” in general, his personal behavior seems less egregious. His part in the slow decay of society’s morals seems out of his control, just a tiny part of a larger social problem.

“When Muffat finally reached his house in the Rue Miromesnil, his wife was just going in. They met on the huge staircase whose gloomy walls gave off an icy chill. They raised their eyes and looked at each other. The count was still wearing his muddy clothes, and looked pale and agitated like a man coming back from a night of debauchery. The countess, as though shattered by a night on the train, was asleep on her feet, unkempt and with dark rings under her eyes.”

Comte Muffat and his wife Sabine arrive home at the same time after their extramarital affairs. Their marriage began passionless, and now they have reached open contempt for each other. Remarkably, Muffat chooses to ignore what he sees with his own eyes and believe that she is faithful to him until later in the novel when he receives concrete proof.

“They would settle down happily, the two of them, to recount their tales of blows, their heads full of the same stupid facts repeated ad infinitum, as they gave themselves up to the warm, comforting feeling of talking about their outrageous treatment.”

In a deeply disturbing moment, Zola paints a picture of two women who enjoy their own abuse. Nana and Satin seem to take pleasure in the grand drama and tragedy of the experience. Referring to the details of their abuse as “stupid facts” further reinforces the idea that their conversations about abuse are vapid and meaningless—no matter how much they complain and commiserate, each refuses to change her lifestyle.

“I bet you a hundred louis that all those people laughing tonight, I’ll have them worshipping the ground I tread on! Yes, I’ll show your Paris what a fine lady I am!”

When Nana gets mocked by the public for her poor portrayal of a noblewoman in her second theatrical role at Bordenave’s theater, she vows to show up her doubters by becoming a “fine lady.” She believes that if respectability is out of her reach, she can at least achieve trendsetting finery with the right mixture of consumerist choices.

“That day she [Nana] had read a novel which was all the rage, the story of a prostitute. And she was indignant, she said it was quite untrue, and declared that she found such literature, which claimed to reflect life as it really was, disgusting, highly offensive. As if a writer could possibly describe everything! What were novels written for? To help you pass the time agreeably of course!”

Here, Zola inserts an allusion to the novel itself; the book Nana is reading sounds like an analog for Nana, the story of a courtesan’s life told as realistically as the novelist can manage. That Nana herself would not like Nana is a source of pride for Zola. As a person who refuses to confront the unchangeable nature of reality, Nana has the exact attitude Zola wants to combat through naturalistic literature like his Rougon-Macquart series.

“I’m just not impressed by those people now. I know them too well. You should see them with their clothes off! No respect then! Respect is finished. Filth below stairs and filth above, it’s always filth wherever you go. That’s why I can’t be bothered with them anymore.”

Nana’s disillusionment with the upper classes of Paris society is ironic and sad. The irony comes from her lack of awareness that she has influenced the upper class’s bad behavior in which she is disappointed. The sadness comes from the realization that the people she has always tried to emulate are no better than her after all. Therefore, she has nothing left to admire.

“Nana was still listening to her name echoing around the entire plain. It was her public applauding her, while erect in the sunshine she towered above them, golden-haired, in her blue and white dress, the colours of the sky. […] When the champagne arrived and she raised her full glass, there was such loud applause, with them all shouting, ‘Nana! Nana! Nana!,’ that the astonished crowd looked around for the mare. And no one knew if it was the animal or the woman who had captivated every heart.”

When Nana attends the horse race, powerful royals are also in attendance. Muffat is there attending to the Empress. Even in the company of France’s most powerful people, it is Nana who captures the crowd’s attention. When her namesake horse defeats the English horse, Zola shows that Nana, with all her excesses and preoccupations with material gaudiness, is the premiere representative of Second Empire France.

“There, in a corner of the provinces, were ironworkers whose faces were black with coal dust, soaked in sweat, who night and day strained every muscle and felt their bones crack as they laboured away to provide Nana with her pleasures. She consumed it all, like an enormous fire, the loot of international banking as well as the hard-won sous of the workers.”

Nana takes and takes from her many wealthy lovers, but never gives a thought to the actual lower-class workers who toil to provide the products she consumes. This is another irony of Nana’s character, as she considers herself a person who still has solidarity with her lower-class origins. All the while, laborers work under dangerous, unhealthy conditions to provide Second Empire luxuries.

“They were maddened by sex, thrown into the delirious imaginations of the flesh. The old religious terrors of their sleepless night were turning now into a thirst for bestiality, a frantic desire for getting down on all fours, grunting and biting.”

As the novel nears its conclusion, Zola brings Muffat’s ruin to new heights. There is no indignity he will not suffer to please Nana. He ignores her other liaisons. He imitates an animal on her command. He even destroys his chamberlain uniform, the foremost symbol of his high social status. She has taken him from the most respected, most devout character in the novel to the most foolish, degraded character in the novel.