How Zola's portrayal of the lower class differs from Victor Hugo's portrayal of the poor as represented by Jean Valjean" In Emile Zola's novel

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How Zola's portrayal of the lower class differs from Victor Hugo's portrayal of the poor as represented by Jean Valjean" In Emile Zola's novel
Emile Zola portrays the poor in the society as a bunch of hopeless people who are living at the mercy of the rich. In the Emile Zola`s novel, the portrayal of the poor seems to be offensive however, the author, has stood firm to his work amid all sorts of criticisms. This novel was both praised for its portrayal of the peasant life and mentality, and condemned as offensive to the peasant class as a whole. Zola spent many months travelling and interviewing subjects in preparation for writing it, and stood by his work against all criticism. His critique of the status of the peasantry has echoes today, French agricultural protection of inefficient small tenure having preserved to the present day certain elements of the lifestyle Zola described about 120 years ago. Zola managed to explain the milieu of the lower classes, and explain lower-class behavior through this milieu' ['Montrer le milieu peuple et expliquer par ce milieu les moeurs peuple' (RM ii 1544)]. The key words of that celebrated focal statement are 'explain' and 'milieu'. Zola's fiction makes the social milieu an active force instead of an inert setting, an explanatory background that interacts with everyone and everything in the foreground. In L'Assommoir, the milieu explains why workers act, look and smell like workers. In other novels, other milieus explain why the rich act and smell rich, why the members of the bourgeoisie act and look bourgeois. No matter what their socioeconomic status, Zola's individual characters are always part of a collectivity wielding monumental influence on their personality and biography. One consequence is that Les Rougon-Macquart's delineation of characters is, invariably and imperatively, representation of society. Conversely, the cycle's representation of society explains, imperatively and invariably, how its characters become themselves. Zola's people exist in a social setting apart from which they would be someone else. That setting and the individuals within it constitute a whole. Neither is comprehensible without the other. Emile Zola may well owe some of his reputation as one of the first to introduce the working classes into central roles in his fiction to the fact that he shifts from the sentimental, romantic portrayal to one that is essentially ironic and quite pessimistic. This is not to imply that modern readers require a literature of condemnation and hatred of the people but that happy endings in the slums and saintly workers are less acceptable. Whatever his attitude toward the peuple—which seems to have been a cautious, critical sympathy—Zola implicitly attacks the traditions of the populist romance throughout the Les Rougon-Macquart series. In both its visionary, transcendental aspects as well as its sociological claims Zola carries out this attack on the romantic notion of the common people, the populist romance. Romantic revolutionaries appear throughout the working-class episodes of Les Rougon-Macquart in a poor light; in addition, the portrait of the peuple at times seems consciously designed to negate practially all of the mayor ideas of the populist romance. This melancholy satire, or anti-romance, becomes a direct parody of situations, characters, events, names, and themes found in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, that most important of all expressions of the populist romance, and, less directly, of ideas found in the writing of Jules Michelet. So fierce is the irony that Zola's own variation of the romantic populist becomes a character type in his fiction, and not a little of Hugo and Michelet as well as the other social romantics is to he found in such characters as Florent of Le Ventre de Paris, Sigismond of L'Argent, and even to a limited degree Etienne Lantier of Germinal. Beyond this rejection of Romantic sociology of the peuple, this rejection of the whole range of Romantic doctrine concerning the common people, and this satire of the romantic populist, Zola actually constructs a radically different vision of the peuple. If the Romantic vision had rested ultimately on a mythic basis, the peuple as a collective romance hero, a collective Christ or Christ-like martyr, or as a collective Prometheus, Zola changes that mythic basis and substitutes elements of the Orpheus story. Orpheus does not become a symbol of the peuple, rather, the symbol of the romantic revolutionary who attempts to politicize them. With a revolutionary Orpheus among the peuple, the problem of the intellectual's the revolutionary's, or the populist's identity returns with full force, after Victor Hugo in Les Misérables has confidently assumed that the revolutionary must necessarily come from outside the plebian realm. Zola's portrait of the poor can be defended in one other respect; L'Assommoir is less of a political statement—if a political statement at all—than an aesthetic one. Specifically, it constitutes an abrupt change in the narrative mode of portraying the working classes; it is a great protest against dreamy romantic visions of the sacred peuple. Zola's own working notes for L'Assommoir show him reminding himself not to fall into a romantic or sentimental mode of fictionalizing the people.
In Victor Hugo's Les Misrables, on the other hand disgusts the treatment that the poor people got in different places that they lived in. in his book, Hugo offers a sigh of relief to the poor by giving them home as he was unhappy with the types of sufferings that they were going through. He states that, ‘The one hope of the poor for relief was charity from those who were, if not indifferent to their plight, outright hostile to it.` From the novel, it is evident that the poor and the disenfranchised understood Hugo's message, accepted the affirmation he gave them, and worshipped him as their spokesman. Workers pooled their money to buy the book not one of them could afford on their own. The struggling people of France had found an articulate illustration of the unjust forces arrayed against them. However, Hugo`s message was not received without opposition. His critics were quick to condemn him for making money by dramatizing the misery of the poor, while the poor themselves bought, read, and discussed his book in unprecedented numbers. True to Hugo's political stance, he had written a book about the people that was for the people, a book that demanded a change in society's judgment of its citizens. In summary, Hugo offered a gift to the society whereby citizens could get an affirmation that every cit...