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Books Like Madeleine Férat
Best books to read after Madeleine Férat by Zola
If Madeleine Férat's application of physiological determinism to domestic tragedy — the theory of 'impregnation' as the mechanism of a woman's past asserting itself in her present — drew you in as a historical document of Zola's development, these eight works trace the tradition around it: the early Naturalist novel, the literature of hereditary determination, and the French psychological tradition.
- 1Buy
Thérèse Raquin
by Émile Zola
The companion early novel that is more fully realized than Madeleine Férat: the same physiological-determinist framework applied to a crime and its psychological consequences, written the year before, and the clearest evidence of the direction the Rougon-Macquart would take.
- 2Buy
La Fortune des Rougon
by Émile Zola
The first Rougon-Macquart volume and the full realization of the hereditary-determinist framework that Madeleine Férat begins — the comparison between the early novel and the mature project is the measure of what Naturalism required.
- 3Buy
La Confession d'un enfant du siècle
by Alfred de Musset
The Romantic confessional tradition that Madeleine Férat is in the process of leaving — Musset's 1836 novel represents the mode that the physiological-determinist method of Madeleine Férat replaces.
- 4Buy
Germinie Lacerteux
by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
The Goncourts' 1864 Naturalist novel is the immediate predecessor that Zola read before writing Madeleine Férat — the first application of clinical observation to working-class female experience that Zola inherits and extends.
- 5Buy
L'Assommoir
by Émile Zola
The fully mature Naturalist method applied to the same class and social world that Madeleine Férat glimpses — the distance between the early novel and L'Assommoir (1877) is the full measure of what Zola developed in the nine years of the Rougon-Macquart's first phase.
- 6Buy
La Cousine Bette
by Honoré de Balzac
Balzac's study of a woman whose entire life is organized around the single passion of destructive envy is the most important predecessor of the female-psychology-under-determination framework that Madeleine Férat inherits.
- 7Buy
Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
The novel that immediately preceded Madeleine Férat's tradition and defined its terms: the woman whose desires exceed what her circumstances can provide, analyzed with clinical precision — the model Zola is working against and through.
- 8Buy
Nana
by Émile Zola
The Rougon-Macquart culmination of the female-sexuality-as-social-force theme that Madeleine Férat begins: the same mechanism of a woman's sexual history asserting itself, now at the scale of the entire Second Empire and with the full Naturalist method behind it.
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