Émile Zola, The Dream

This is a novel which can be found freely on Gutenberg.org's great website. 

I'm not really sure what brought me around to read this novel by Émile Zola. I guess I was at once wishing for something more substantial than the overdose of short fiction from the two short fiction magazines which I subscribe to. I wanted to read something a bit meatier than those. I am also quite fond of Henri Balzac, and wondered what other great French writers would appeal to me. Did he succeed in seducing me into another one of his novels through the quality of this one, The Dream? I'm not really sure.

In any case, I hadn't done my research before beginning to read this novel. If I had, perhaps I wouldn't have read this one first. In fact, it's near the end of the series of twenty novels.

This is the story of a girl, Angelique, who is lost or sent away by a terrible sort of mother. The mother had no scruples, and I have since read that she had been a prostitute in another novel. So, this is the sort of place where she began. She was then sent into social care. She fled from social care, and was on the verge of death on the doorstep to a house of a humble couple.

The humble couple so happened to feel the need for a child, lacking their own. The house itself is situated, somehow, within the outer structure of a Catholic church. The couple are devout and humble Catholics. When they raise her, they do so within the confines of this home and the church next door. She is cloistered within, and her only book is The Golden Legend, which is evidently a real book. In any case, the book is filled with legends of Catholic virgins who performed miracles and always persevered until taken up into heaven. She determines herself to be as one of these virgins.

She falls in love with a very wealthy prince, but cannot marry him. He loves her as much, but she refuses him until he can get his father's blessing. He ultimately does, but not until she nearly dies from a broken heart. However, in the end, they are married, and she dies, kissing him at the completion of the wedding.

Émile Zola (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I'm not sure how much I loved Angelique. I'm not sure I entirely understood the outer context, either. Apparently, what Zola was trying to do was to show that it does not matter what kind of parents one has, but rather the environment within which they are raised, which affects the character of the person. In essence, he took a prostitutes daughter and put her into a good Catholic home where she can become a martyr of sorts.


There were a few thoughts I had here and there while reading this book. First off, was that Angelique's purity, her fast adherence to the letter of religious edict, effectively weakens and kills her. I'm not sure if this was what Zola was trying to point out, but it's worth considering. Is it evil which makes us strong, and goodness that makes us weak? This debate I remember well in a Star Trek episode, The Enemy Within, where Kirk is divided into two parts: evil Kirk and good Kirk. Good Kirk simply cannot make hard compromises or dangerous decisions, effectively making him a poor captain. Bad Kirk makes decisions too rashly, ready to endanger everyone. In essence, that episode tried to show that a balance of the two was what made Kirk strong. Does the absence of evil in Angelique make her weak?

Also, the ideals of purity, white, and beauty are things that I also have a hard time with: the closer to death that Angelique gets, the thinner and whiter she gets, and the more beautiful.

Will I read another of these books? At first I thought not, but perhaps I will have to take a look at the first book if I decide to try again.