'Songs in the Laundry: Music in Zola's L'Assommoir'

Scott, HL

'Songs in the Laundry: Music in Zola's L'Assommoir'

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Hannah Scott ORCiD

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This is the authors' accepted manuscript of a book chapter that has been published in its final definitive form by Oxford University Press, 2024.

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Abstract

The café-concert – or ‘café-cancer’ – caused considerable disquiet among many members of the middle and upper classes in nineteenth-century Paris. It was feared as a vehicle of social decay whose rot would spread upwards from the working classes to infect polite society – and we see many of the same issues of class, gender, and morality at work both in texts condemning the café-concert and under Zola’s pen. This is all the more intriguing since, in Zola’s version of the Second Empire in general, nobody is very inclined to sing. Yet in L’Assommoir, that quintessential tale of working-class degeneracy, there are no fewer than seventeen popular songs mentioned specifically by name – and Zola’s choice to fill the pages of this particular novel with song draws the text into conversation with contemporaneous suspicions surrounding popular music culture. This chapter seeks to resituate L’Assommoir in terms of the cultural history of the café-concert, placing its music back in the context of the performances and audiences of the 1860-80s. In particular, it draws attention to the antithesis between Zola’s weak, degraded Gervaise and the strong, confident, and morally-upright laundresses who featured in popular music – and it asks why Zola might have chosen to create a literary washerwoman so entirely different from the recognizable character-type who would have been such a familiar stage persona for many of his readers.