Analysis Of The Utopian Socialism In Zola’s Travail

Zola, father of naturalism, is a famous French writer on par with Balzac.Throughout his life, Zola produced many outstanding literary works, the greatestachievement is his masterpiece Les Rougon-Macquart, which mainly reflected histheory of naturalism. Zola’s literary artistic achievements covered the glory in termsof his progressive thought of utopian socialist.In fact, the early Zola is an advanced bourgeois democracy activists. In the famouscase of Dreyfus, in the justice of the dauntless spirit, standing in the reactionarybourgeois government opposite, regardless of personal safety, Zola’s J’accuse waspublished officially in the newspaper L’Aurore, and Zola were firmly tireless strugglewith the reactionary government. More valuable is, the late Zola also accepted theFourierism, and put the thought into his later works Travail. In this novel, Zola notonly exposes the evil of capitalist wage labor system, but also shows all sorts ofbeautiful vision in the socialist future such as fairness and justice, the solidarity, freeand happy etc.in the harmonious society. However, it ultimately became a utopian dueto historical limitations and other factors.This paper mainly researched the utopian socialist in Zola’s Travail from thefollowing several aspects: Firstly, the background of Zola’s Travail was analyzedmainly from the widespread dissemination of socialist ideological trend in the periodof the Second Empire of France and the baptism of Fourier’s utopian socialism.Secondly, the story line of Zola’s Travail was elaborated from the following twoaspects: mercilessly exposing of the evil reality in the capitalist society and longingfor the good of Utopian Socialism. Moreover, the typical characters of UtopianSocialism were analyzed. Thirdly, on the basis of the origin and characteristics ofutopian socialism, the Utopian socialism in Zola’s Travail.(including: anarchism,collectivist utopian socialism, Fourier’s utopian socialism.) was further summarized.Fourthly, the three artistic features of Zola’s utopian socialism(the true realism style,advocating the scientific spirit of art, achieving the fraternity themes based on “labor”)in Travail were especially analyzed.Travail is a part of ideological work. Unfortunately, there are only a few peoplecarried on the systematic interpretation. Based on the detailed interpretation and mining to the rich ideas of socialism in Zola’s Travail, this paper will show us aspecial Zola who still keeps writing and thinking until the old age.