The Dream (1888)

Part of the 20-vol Rougon-Marquart cycle. ( )

like the fairy tales.the story of the orphan Angélique.and her dream to be saved by a handsome prince and to live happily ever after....
the end was very sad....
( )

Zola’s Rougon-Macquart novel cycle purports to show how the forces of heredity and environment shape the members of a single family during France’s Second Empire. In The Dream he takes a little girl named Anglelique, the abandoned daughter of one of the Rougons, and has her raised in almost monastic seclusion as the adopted child of a patient and loving couple, the Huberts. They live in a cathedral town in a house that actually shares a wall with the cathedral itself, and they make their living embroidering ecclesiastical garments and furnishings. Because the young waif is violent and unpredictable, they educate her themselves, training her to become an embroidress.

Her rough edges soon smoothed over, Angelique becomes a pious and dutiful, if dreamy, young woman. Her only knowledge of the world comes from the environs of the cathedral, and her only reading is a book of the lives of saints, a book she reads over and over again until she comes to see the miraculous as commonplace. Angelique expects life to be like a fairy tale, complete with a prince who will sweep her away to a life of comfort and riches. Her fantasies seem only too likely to come true when the young workman she admires turns out to be a rich nobleman in disguise.

Where is Zola the atheist and reformer in this romantic, idealistic story filled with so much religious piety and pageantry? It doesn’t even seem to belong in the 19th century at all, having an almost medieval flavor. Of course his panorama of French life would be incomplete without a study of traditional attitudes toward religion and its role in the lives and imagination of common people, and that is what we have here. As for the absence of the author’s usually critical eye, perhaps it is to be found in the closing sentences. When he says “All is but a dream,” is he speaking of Angelique’s romantic ideals, or perhaps of religion itself?

Emile Zola’s powers of description are no less on display here than in his other novels, but in most other respects I found The Dream to be less engaging and less satisfying than the other Zola novels I have read. ( )

Unlike the other works of Zola's I've read so far, this one doesn't concentrate on broad social issues, but is centered on one girl and her struggles with love and religion. I read it because it was the next in Zola's recommended order of reading the Rougon-Macquart cycle; the girl, Angelique, is the abandoned, illegitimate daughter of Sidonie, the sister of Saccard in The Kill. And although the novel, like the rest of the cycle, takes place during the mid-19th century Second Empire, the tale harks back much more to medieval times and medieval ways of thinking.

Angelique is discovered, starving and faint, huddling in the doorway of St. Agnes, the cathedral in the town of Beaumont, by the Huberts, a childless couple who live in an ancient house built against the wall of the cathedral. The most recent in a family of embroiderers of church vestments, the Huberts take Angelique in as an apprentice. As she grows up, reading legends of virgin saints and martyrs, she develops a dream that a prince will marry her and take her away. When a handsome young man, who is not who he seems to be, appears in her life, she believes her dream is coming true. I don't want to give too much away but, needless to say, obstacles arise.

Aside from the plot, much of the novel is taken up with the details of hand embroidery (superseded in large part by mechanical methods at the time of the story), church architecture (also medieval), and the lives of female saints. (The edition I read, unlike the Penguin and Oxford World Classics editions of other book by Zola I've read, did not have notes, and I would have dearly loved them to help me understand terms of architecture, embroidery, and heraldry, as well as the lives of the saints.) Recurring themes include death, martyrdom, virginity as well as the inability to bear children, the contrast between the rituals and indeed luxury of the church and the poverty of the people who live in the old section of the town around the cathedral, and the difficulties of interaction among people of different classes.

With Zola's belief that families pass along behavioral traits genetically, the reader sees Angelique struggling with her "family" demons, struggling to give up her pride and stubbornness and submit to the rules of proper behavior, although one does not have to believe in the inheritance of acquired characteristics to believe that, after the traumas of her early life, Angelique would be angry and determined. As always, Zola is a great story teller who demonstrates his thorough investigations of the worlds he depicts (especially, in this case, the techniques and materials of hand embroidery), and who can create great set pieces as well as insights into human psychology. The characters of the Huberts, the young man, and his father, as well as Angelique, are fascinating, with those of the older people in particular rooted in tragedies of the past. Much of the drama in this book takes place internally, inside people's minds, inside the Huberts' house or the cathedral, rather than out in the world as in other Zola novels. This was an excellent book, and I enjoyed reading it, but I think I like the novels with greater social scope better.

I struggled with this - found the descriptions of saints etc hard to relate to. It was worth persevering to find out the conclusion but wasn't one of the most compelling of Zola's novels. ( )