| Critics have previously examined the inverse correlation between incidences of violent crime and their representation in nineteenth-century France (Vigarello, Muchembled). The relationship between the portrayal of sexual violence in nineteenth-century French literature and its occurrence in real life has received less attention. Likewise, the link between the representation of sexual violence and critical narrative elements, such as space and time, remains unexplored. Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, and Octave Mirbeau represent the rape-murder of a young peasant girl in three representative texts, La Bete humaine (1890), "La Petite Roque" (1885), and Le Journal d'une femme de chambre (1900). These texts contain a strikingly similar criminal act (rape-murder), an almost identical victim (young peasant girl), and a suspected perpetrator who is much the same, a middle-aged man who is esteemed in his community, and often highly placed provincial bureaucrat. As for the scene of the crime, each of the three texts relies on a dialectic between an undomesticated landscape (forest) and the victim's corpse. Beyond their dramatic import, these scenes of brutality are referred to throughout the entire narratives, suggesting a greater structural role than current criticism suggests.;This dissertation examines the functions, both narrative and social, of the representations of sexual violence in these three texts. Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach pairing close reading with cultural studies, I examine how these scenes of sexual violence are discussed after their occurrence. I analyze the description of each crime scene as well as how the narrative refers back to the crime, the alleged criminals, and their victims, through court proceedings or amateur investigations on the part of characters. A consideration of the social function of such violence includes an overview of the historical context of sexual crimes and the role of gender. What emerges from the examination of these three texts is a new narrative system that, through the representation of crime, is able to indirectly present a criticism of the French state as corrupt.;Moreover, I consider how these representations relate to the larger goals of each author and how these texts point to a new definition of naturalism based on narrative experimentation. Such a definition allows for new intertextual links in the representation of crime and spatio-temporal constructions, in particular for naturalism the unprecedented narrative ties to Victor Hugo's Le Dernier Jour d'un condamne (1829). |
