Nana in Zola's "Nana": The Destructive Lorette
The threat that Rosanette poses in A Sentimental Education is taken to an extreme in Émile Zola’s Nana, in which a sexually desirable lorette named Nana actively seeks the moral and financial destruction of the men who desire her. This is a portrayal that is much more spiteful and purposeful than the less serious Rosanette, who seems to cause damage by accident.
At the beginning of the book, Nana is an actress, originally from the working class, whose beauty and seductiveness is taking Paris by storm. To the people seeing her perform, her, “name was a caress in itself, a pet name which rolled easily off every tongue. Merely by pronouncing it thus, the crowd worked itself into a state of good-natured gaiety. A fever of curiosity urged it forward” [1]. There’s an aura to Nana that makes one unable to ignore her. As the novel goes on, it becomes clear that, to Zola, this “aura” is a trap, designed to sap men of their fortunes and degrade them to their most basic instincts. Some of this is due to her sexual ordor, or a feminine scent akin to pheromones, that makes her irresistible. In the essay “The Power of the Feminine Milieu in Zola’s Nana,” Catherine Bordeau describes how, “The concept of her powerful odor provides a general model for her influence, encompassing not only seduction but also corruption, as in the popular belief that menstruating women produce a miasma that turns milk sour” [2]. Nana's "odor" is intrinsically related to her seuxality, which is seen as menacing and decadent. Like Rosanette, men desire it as much as they fear it.
One of these victims is the pious Count Muffat, who is aroused by Nana even though in his eyes she is a vengeful threat to the upper class. He reads an article written about Nana, which says, “She had grown up in the slums, in the gutters of Paris; and now, tall and beautiful...she was avenging the paupers and outcasts of whom she was the product...She had become a force of nature...unwittingly corrupting and disorganizing Paris between her snow-white thighs” [3]. This is the most explicit reference to the threat a lorette posed to upper-class society, casting Nana as a deliberate weapon designed to bring down the status quo. Muffat declares, “She frightened him...she had corrupted his life, and he already felt tainted to the core of his being...he saw the havoc wrought by this ferment, himself poisoned, his family destroyed, a section of the social fabric cracking and crumbling” [4]. Nana represents moral and financial degradation. She actively seeks the punishment of the men who desire her.
There’s no doubt that Nana is a fictional figure, because no lorette could have possibly had this much destructive capability, but Zola was out to make a point about what he perceived to be the danger of female sexuality. In his character notes for Nana, he wrote that she, "ends up regarding man as a material to exploit, becoming a force of Nature, a ferment of destruction...The cunt in all its power, the cunt on an altar, with all the men offering up sacrifices to it. The book has to be the poem of the cunt, and the moral will lie in the cunt turning everything sour" [5]. It's not just Nana, but female sexuality as a whole, that is turning the upper class inside out. Although Rosanette posed a much smaller threat than Nana because she wasn't as actively manipulative, they were both threats to society. It makes sense, then, that Nana dies at the end of the novel due to smallpox, meaning that Zola punished her for her unforgivable transgressions.
[1] Zola, Émile. 1972. Nana. Harmondsworth/England: Penguin Group. p. 24.
[2] Bordeau, Catherine. 1998-1999. “The Power of the Feminine Milieu in Zola’s Nana.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 27:97. Retrieved April 15, 2017. (http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/23537560.pdf)
[3] Zola. 222.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Holden, George. 1972. "Translator's Note." Pp. 5-17 in Nana, by Émile Zola. Harmondsworth/England: Penguin Group.