Through the analysis of Zola's novel L'Assommoir - the seventh in the series of the twenty Rougon-Macquart novels -, this BA Dissertation deals with the status of women in nineteenth-century France. We highlight the full extent of the disadvantage and hardships they had to suffer during that period. Their standing within the society of the day was inferior, i.e. women did not enjoy the same rights as men. In L'Assommoir, we follow the story of Gervaise Macquart - a lower-class washerwoman - to its inevitable and sad conclusion. Gervaise's decline is the direct result of her circumstances, and it is shown to be conditioned by environment and inherited characteristics, chiefly drunkenness and mental instability. She is beset upon, and finally crushed, by a combination of forces she can neither understand nor control. Through her story, we get an insight into great hardships that the lowest-class citizens experienced during the period of Napoleon III's reign in the Second Empire. Life in nineteenth-century France certainly posed many difficulties for its working class population - both men and women. Women however, due to gender inequality, faced many more difficulties than men, and had fewer resources with which to deal with them. The evils of drinking are one of the major themes of the novel. By sliding into heavy alcoholism, these poor and disadvantaged people are destined for moral and physical degeneration. L'Assommoir rightly belongs in the literary movement of Naturalism, which seeks to identify the underlying causes for a person's actions or beliefs. The thinking was that certain factors, such as heredity, environment and social conditions (or race, moment, and milieu, to use Taine's terms) were unavoidable determinants in one's life. By making observations on the influence of these three determinants on Gervaise, we establish that she could not escape her life of poverty and her final tragic decline because her preconditions were the only formative aspects in her existence that mattered. As L'Assommoir is also a novel of historical importance, the purpose of a historical overview of the period, within which the novel is set, was to shed some light on the struggles of nineteenth-century French working women. The nineteenth century was a turbulent period, particularly due to the processes of The Industrial Revolution. It was also a period characterized by gender inequality - women were expected to remain subservient to their fathers and husbands and had to fight for their social, economic or political rights. By analysing and making detailed observations on various key events in Gervaise's life, we managed to highlight her tragic decline and thus confirmed the influence of the three determinants on the "heroine". Through the narrative of Gervaise's physical and moral decline and fall, Zola criticized and publicly displayed social inequalities in the Second Empire, when the underclass, i.e. the most disadvantaged people, was often side-lined and neglected.
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