Representation of modernity in Zola's La Curée and Balzac's Le Père Goriot

La Curee

French author Emile Zola was noted for his realistic portrayals of human beings in his novels and short stories. In his novel La Cur-e, he tells a story about the failings of the modern world, particularly in what is valued in modernity as opposed to periods in the past. Modern people all value money, material possessions, and satisfaction of personal desires and hungers. So consumed are people with these desires that they ignore anything which might hinder them, including ethics and morals. In the past, Zola, insinuates people cared more about family and honor, but in the present it is only money that matters. Through the relationships that Aristide Saccard has with his first wife and second wife, as well as in comparison with P-re Goriot from Balzac's novel Le Pe-re Goriot, it is clear that Zola is showing that valuing money above all other things is a poor way to live one's life.

Aristide Saccard starts the novel married to a woman who is sickly. This woman has already given him a son and it is presumed that they have a fairly happy marriage. However, when Aristide decides to better his financial and social situation, he is only too happy that she dies, leaving him open to marry a younger woman. The marriage to young Ren-e will give him financial gain whereas his first union has not bettered him at all monetarily. In reality, the only way that his first wife is able to provide for Aristide in this sense is through her death. By dying, it is presumed Aristide will receive some sort of life insurance pay out which will allow him to purchase real estate in Paris which is about to become highly valuable. His first wife has absolutely no emotional value for Aristide; rather she has become an inconvenience who is literally more valuable to him dead than alive. Zola writes, "Saccard, who for a moment thought that fate had contrived some diabolical resurrection in order to keep him mired in misery, felt reassured on seeing that the wretched woman would be dead within the hour" (62). Leaving Aristide a widower also allows him to pursue and secure the hand of Ren-e for an exorbitant dowry because she is pregnant and unmarried, and her parents wish to marry her off to avoid any hint of scandal.

Aristide Saccard has no more love for his second wife as his first. She is a means of money and a pretty bauble by which society can gaze upon him and feel jealous. Even when she is unfaithful with Aristide's own son, he does not seem to care except in terms of ownership. He carries out liaisons and feels no guilt or remorse for them because he feels that he is entitled to fulfill his desires, regardless of who he might injure through his actions. Ren-e herself does not exist as a singular person but as an object and a means for his further success. Zola writes, "His wife was now his. He had just held her in his hands and felt her softness…it was essential that Ren-e be stripped of her title before word of the upcoming expropriation leaked out" (208). Saccard is a hypocrite who does everything for himself and is willing to sacrifice anyone and anything for the bettering of his financial situation, a common characteristic in the modern world.

In Balzac's Le Pe-re Goriot also try to achieve social mobility through immoral means. Franc at the time these two authors were writing was a changing place. The old regime of royalty and aristocracy was dead and in its place was a chaotic society where the class system was wholly restructured. Anyone, provided he had the right luck, could overcome their class of birth and be accepted into the upper echelons of society. The cost of this mobility, unfortunately, was the traditional values of family, religion, morality which had guided society in the centuries before.