L' Assommoir by Émile Zola
"L'Assommoir" is a novel by Émile Zola that explores the harsh realities of working-class life in 19th-century Paris. The story follows Gervaise, a woman who moves to the city with her husband, Auguste Lantier, and their two sons, only to face abandonment, poverty, and struggle. After Lantier leaves her for another woman, Gervaise works tirelessly as a laundress and eventually marries Coupeau, a zinc worker. However, her newfound happiness is short-lived as Coupeau falls into alcoholism after a debilitating accident, leading the family into greater despair.
The titular bar, L'Assommoir, becomes a symbol of the destructive forces of addiction and the struggles of the working-class environment. Zola vividly depicts the oppressive urban landscape and industrialization's impact on personal relationships, emphasizing how societal pressures and economic hardship can dominate lives. Gervaise's attempts to rise above her circumstances are thwarted by the systemic issues of poverty and the allure of alcohol, culminating in tragedy for her and her family. The novel is noted for its naturalist style and social commentary, offering a critique of the socio-economic conditions that entrap individuals in a cycle of despair.
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Subject Terms
L' Assommoir by Émile Zola
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1877 (English translation, 1879; also as The Dram-Shop, 1897)
Type of work: Novel
The Work
In L’Assommoir, Auguste Lantier brings his wife, Gervaise, and two young sons, Claude and Étienne, from the country to a working-class neighborhood in Paris. Almost as soon as they arrive in the city, the couple quarrels, and the indolent Lantier leaves Gervaise for another woman, abandoning them in a squalid hotel with wretched and greasy furniture. With few friends, Gervaise must make her way on the streets of Paris, where she finally takes a low-paying job as a laundress in a neighborhood laundry.
Gervaise’s future looks hopeless until she meets and marries Coupeau, a zinc worker with whom she has a daughter, Nana. The lazy and greedy Coupeau turns out to be little better than Lantier, for he gambles constantly, often stealing money from Gervaise to pay his debts.
In spite of these obstacles, Gervaise is able to save enough money to open her own laundry and achieve some measure of prosperity. Neighborhood women begin to look up to her, and suddenly it appears that she and her family will be able to survive with some measure of dignity and wealth in Paris.
Gervaise’s momentary happiness comes crashing down around her when Coupeau falls off a roof, injuring himself so badly that he cannot work again. Thus begins his life of idleness and alcoholism. He begins to frequent the bar—L’Assommoir—that lends this novel its title. At the center of the bar stands a gigantic still, a powerful and inhuman machine that sucks life from those around it. Coupeau cannot control the attraction the machine has over him, and he succumbs to a life of alcoholism, spending Gervaise’s every penny she earns at her laundry.
The family’s fall into abject poverty begins when Lantier returns to lodge with them. His and Coupeau’s indolence and their inability to control their desire for alcohol destroy the family. Nana becomes a prostitute (and the leading character of her own novel, Nana, published in 1880), getting caught up in a web of debauchery on the streets of Paris. Alcohol kills Coupeau, and Gervaise dies of hunger in more desperate and squalid circumstances than when she first arrived in Paris.
Trapped in a bourgeois city that demands that commercial transactions become the center of life, Gervaise and her family are soon caught up in the feverish desire to make money and lead a life of wealth. Their inability to meet such demands leads to their downfall.
In L’Assommoir, the packed working-class slums, the pulsing still, and even the greasy, steamy laundries determine the fates of their inhabitants. As hard as Gervaise works to pull herself out of poverty, the labyrinthine streets of her neighborhood trap her in their web, squeezing the life out of her and her family. This environment eventually defeats her will, even though for a short time her physical will seems strong enough to defeat the forces that drain the life from her. The increasing industrialization that creates the alcohol still, the urban slum, and the proletariat poison simple relationships, leading to death, debauchery, and degradation.
L’Assommoir was sensational when it was first published because Zola wanted to present a simple moral lesson about the nature of life. No matter how strong and good Gervaise was, she could never overcome the forces of the slums or the evils imposed on workers forced to live in the working-class neighborhoods by the middle classes that kept them in poverty, paying them low wages for simple tasks like doing laundry.
Zola’s novel, with its focus on the evils of money, the mechanistic power of the urban landscape, and the determinism of environment, provides the model for many other naturalist novels, most notably Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899) and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900).
Bibliography
Baguley, D., ed. Critical Essays on Émile Zola. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986. A collection of historical responses to Zola, including the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne’s famous condemnation of L’Assommoir.
King, Graham. Garden of Zola: Émile Zola and his Novels for English Readers. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1978. Describes the book’s compulsive readability, a result of its rise-and-fall structure. Discusses the reception of the novel, its imagery, and much else.
Lethbridge, Robert. “Reading the Songs of L’Assommoir.” French Studies: A Quarterly Review 45, no. 4 (October, 1991): 435-445. Describing the twenty songs in the novel and their context in the plot, the author shows the upsetting hybridity of the narration. Zola invites the reader ironically to observe the peasants, yet at the same time excludes the reader with the songs.
Lethbridge, Robert. “A Visit to the Louvre: L’Assommoir Revisited.” The Modern Language Review 87, no. 1 (January, 1992): 41-55. Demonstrates in detail what the characters notice and avoid in their visit to the Louvre, and shows the mutually self-defining distinction between verbal and pictorial cultures.
Viti, Robert M. “Étienne Lantier and Family: Two-timing in L’Assommoir and Germinal.” Neophilologus 75, no. 2 (April, 1991): 200-206. Étienne is conflicted by his dual inheritance: his father’s revolutionary and temporally disruptive existence and his mother’s bourgeois ideal of order.