Reorienting Everydayness: Social Performances of Female Parisians in Émile Zola's The Ladies' Paradise and L'Assommoir

Wassachol SIRICHANTHANUN

Master's thesis

Work as Phenomenon: The Nineteenth-Century French Women's Social Performances in Emile Zola's L'Assommoir and The Ladies' Paradise

Abstract:

Grand concepts regarding capitalism, consumerism, and class consciousness have been the leading trends in the field of social history for decades. The common people such as the protagonists of Émile Zola's The Ladies' Paradise and L'Assommoir have a part in preserving their culture and social reality, as well as projecting such things into the future. However, many scholars are more interested in analyzing the social structure and the influences of the above-mentioned grand concepts on the nineteenth-century French society. Hence, I attempt to study performative behaviors in the everydayness of the two female Parisians in relation to the cultural stimuli embedded in their social settings. To interpret their performances, I combine Erving Goffmann's dramaturgy analysis with the verb-oriented method, coined and used by the researchers of the Gender and Work project at Uppsala University. Despite that both methods have only been used to study common people's everyday practices in reality, it is also possible to use them to study those practices in fictional texts. After applying both methods to the data, the interpretation is that the social performances of the two protagonists for the most part were stimulated by culture-based concepts: social values, division of labor, and violation of rights. In addition, even though the verb phrases related to male characters are not included in the dataset, their influential roles are still evident. This observation implies that gender is another motivation behind the social performances of the two female protagonists.

Abstract:

Grand concepts regarding capitalism, consumerism, and class consciousness have been the leading trends in the field of social history for decades. The common people such as the protagonists of Émile Zola's The Ladies' Paradise and L'Assommoir have a part in preserving their culture and social reality, as well as projecting such things into the future. However, many scholars are more interested in analyzing the social structure and the influences of the above-mentioned grand concepts on the nineteenth-century French society. Hence, I attempt to study performative behaviors in the everydayness of the two female Parisians in relation to the cultural stimuli embedded in their social settings. To interpret their performances, I combine Erving Goffmann's dramaturgy analysis with the verb-oriented method, coined and used by the researchers of the Gender and Work project at Uppsala University. Despite that both methods have only been used to study common people's everyday practices in reality, it is also possible to use them to study those practices in fictional texts. After applying both methods to the data, the interpretation is that the social performances of the two protagonists for the most part were stimulated by culture-based concepts: social values, division of labor, and violation of rights. In addition, even though the verb phrases related to male characters are not included in the dataset, their influential roles are still evident. This observation implies that gender is another motivation behind the social performances of the two female protagonists.

Keywords

Émile Zola, The Ladies' Paradise, L'Assommoir, social performance, performative turn, verb-oriented method, nineteenth-century Paris

Language used: Czech

Date on which the thesis was submitted / produced: 3. 12. 2018

Thesis defence

• Supervisor: Mgr. Jitka Kohoutová

PALACKÝ UNIVERSITY OLOMOUC

Faculty of Arts

Master programme / field:
Humanities / Euroculture