Madeleine Férat ou la mémoire dans la peau : l’imprégnation comme procédé mémoriel dans le roman naturaliste
Madeleine Férat or “la mémoire dans la peau”: impregnation as a memorial process in the naturalist novel

Summary/Abstract: By the time Émile Zola published Madeleine Férat (1868), the motif of the amorous courtesan was already a Romantic cliché. The future leader of the Naturalists therefore wished to distance himself from an outdated concept of the repenting lost woman, and seized upon the embodiment par excellence of the converted sinner in the Judeo-Christian imagination, Saint Mary Magdalene, in order to subvert it. While the Gospels build the character on the dichotomy of fall and redemption, the novelist does not allow his heroine to forget her past. Chapter after chapter, the writer suggests the relentless progression of Madeleine Férat’s dramatic destiny, modernising the ancient Fatum, as he will later do in the Rougon-Macquart novels, by drawing on the medical theories of his time, in this case Dr Prosper Lucas’s publications on seminal impregnation. In spite of herself, Madeleine Férat is subject to the domination of physiological laws that clash with her moral values, and suicide seems to be her only way out. Under Zola’s pen, Marie de Magdala becomes a tragic heroine.

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