Sœur Philomène Reading Order

Sœur Philomène (1861) by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt is their novel of the hospital world — a study of the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Paris as a complete social and emotional environment, centered on the nursing nun Sœur Philomène and the young intern Barnier, whose relationship is a carefully limited emotional attachment that the Goncourts analyze with clinical precision. The novel belongs to the Goncourts' systematic project of bringing the clinical observational method to social worlds that had been unexplored in fiction: the servant class (Germinie Lacerteux), the hospital (Sœur Philomène), the painter's studio (Manette Salomon), the literary world (Charles Demailly). The hospital as a setting gives the Goncourts their most sustained exercise in the aesthetics of suffering: the wards with their rows of patients, the operating theater, the morgue, the daily exposure to pain and death that the medical staff learn to navigate without losing either their competence or their humanity. Sœur Philomène is also the earliest major French novel to take a nurse as its central consciousness — Zola's later L'Assommoir and Maupassant's stories would explore the same world, but Sœur Philomène is the founding document of the hospital as a naturalist subject.