Nana

Nana is the ninth novel in Zola's twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart series, and it is the most ferocious. The series tracks the hereditary and social forces that shape two branches of a family across Second Empire France; Nana is about what happens when those forces produce a woman with nothing to trade but her body, and what she does with the power that body gives her.

Anna Coupeau — Nana — is the daughter of Gervaise from L'Assommoir, raised in poverty and the theater world, now a stage actress and courtesan whose face and figure make her the most sought-after woman in Paris. She cannot act; she cannot sing; she is not particularly intelligent. None of this matters. Men of the Second Empire aristocracy, finance, and politics ruin themselves for her — fortunes, marriages, reputations, and eventually lives. Zola is not writing a morality tale about a dangerous woman. He is writing an indictment of the system that made her: a society in which women of her class had one marketable commodity, in which that commodity was consumed and discarded, and in which the men who consumed it were protected from consequence while Nana was not.

The novel ends with the Franco-Prussian War beginning outside the window, which is not accidental. Zola is arguing that the same moral bankruptcy that made men destroy themselves for Nana also made Second Empire France destroy itself for Napoleon III's vanity. The personal and the political are the same corruption.

This is not comfortable reading. Zola's naturalism requires him to show his characters — including Nana — being shaped by forces larger than themselves, with little capacity to resist. But the anger at those forces is unmistakable.

Nana — not a villain, not a victim; a force of nature produced by specific social conditions. She is generous, impractical, genuinely warm toward some people, and completely indifferent to the destruction she leaves behind. Zola gives her interiority without making her sympathetic in the conventional sense.

Count Muffat — the novel's central male figure; a devout Catholic aristocrat who becomes so enslaved to Nana that he ends on his knees in her dressing room while she receives another man. His degradation is the novel's central image of what the Second Empire aristocracy has become.

Georges Hugon — a young man who kills himself for Nana; one of several men whose destruction she catalyzes without effort or intention. His death barely registers in her world, which is the point.

Satin — Nana's female companion, a street prostitute; one of the few characters Nana has a genuine relationship with. Their friendship is one of the novel's few moments of uncomplicated human warmth.

No. 1 · The theater opening. The novel's first chapter: Nana appears on stage in a theatrical disaster — she cannot act, she cannot sing, she forgets her lines — and conquers the audience anyway. The scene establishes Zola's argument immediately: it is not talent that makes power, it is something the male audience projects onto a body.

No. 2 · The bedroom economy. Zola meticulously tracks what Nana costs her lovers: the itemized bills, the debts, the property transferred, the fortunes dissipated. The accounting is not satirical decoration — it is the novel's structural spine. Nana's bedroom is an economic engine that redistributes wealth from the ruling class downward, which is the closest Second Empire France gets to social redistribution.

No. 3 · The final chapter. Nana dies of smallpox, alone, her face destroyed, while the crowds outside cheer for the war. The famous closing image — her rotting face, the shout of "To Berlin!" in the street — is Zola at his most deliberately programmatic. The beauty that defined her is gone; the society that consumed her is about to be consumed itself. It is a brutal ending, and it is meant to be.

Translation matters, though less than for some authors — Zola's prose style is sturdy and translates relatively well.

The Oxford World's Classics edition includes an introduction that places Nana within the Rougon-Macquart series and the historical context of the Second Empire. You do not need to have read L'Assommoir first, but knowing that Nana's mother drank herself to death in the previous novel adds depth.

Read this if you are…

• Anyone interested in how nineteenth-century fiction handled class, gender, and economic power — Zola is more direct than James or Flaubert about the mechanism.
• Readers who want to understand Naturalism as a literary program: Zola believed heredity and environment determined character, and Nana is his most uncompromising demonstration.
• Anyone who has read L'Assommoir and wants to follow Nana's story forward.

Consider carefully if you are…

• A reader who prefers psychological interiority. Zola is interested in social and biological forces, not individual consciousness. Characters feel like specimens as often as people.
• Uncomfortable with unflinching portrayals of sexual and economic exploitation. Zola does not soften these.

Read Nana as social science as much as fiction. Zola researched the novel obsessively — backstage theater life, high-class prostitution, the financial arrangements of kept women in Second Empire Paris. The specificity is the point. When he describes what Muffat pays and what Nana spends, take it literally: it is an economic argument.

Note the novel's structure: Nana rises, spends, collapses, recovers, and rises again in a cycle that mirrors the boom-bust rhythm of Second Empire finance. The ending — war, death, ruin — is the system's final accounting.

• Gustave Flaubert — Madame Bovary (1857). The other great Second Empire novel about a woman destroyed by the gap between what she desires and what society permits her. Flaubert is interior where Zola is exterior, but both are writing about the same social machine.
• Thomas Hardy — Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891). The British counterpart: a woman ruined by class and sexual exploitation, with a narrator who makes the indictment explicit. Hardy and Zola are doing related work in different literary traditions.
• Émile Zola — L'Assommoir (1877). Nana's mother Gervaise is the protagonist; the novel establishes everything that made Nana. Reading it first is not required but transforms Nana into a story about what poverty inherits.

1. Zola presents Nana as a product of heredity and environment — she never really chooses her situation. Does this make the novel's treatment of her sympathetic, or does it strip her of agency in a different way?
2. Count Muffat's degradation is shown in detail, but Zola reserves more contempt for the social system than for the man. Do you agree with this framing?
3. The novel ends with Nana's death and the start of the Franco-Prussian War in the same breath. What is Zola arguing by putting these two events together?
4. Satin and Nana have the novel's most genuine relationship. What does Zola suggest by making it the friendship between two women who are both outside respectable society?
5. Nana's power comes entirely from men's desire. Does she ever exercise power that is independent of this, and if so, where?
6. Is Nana a feminist novel? What would Zola say, and what do you say?