Gervaise

Gervaise is the main character of Zola’s L’Assommoir, a poor laundress living in a dilapidated neighborhood of Paris. Over the course of the novel, Gervaise slips deeper and deeper into squalid poverty, a result which Zola wishes the reader to see as a consequence of poverty rather than a fault of her own decisions.

Gervaise’s character arc is a testament to the trauma of poverty: she begins the tale as a poor immigrant from Plassans, which the end notes tell the reader is “Zola’s fictionalized version of Aix-en-Provence… [and] the setting of the provincial novels of the Rougon-Macquart series…” (442). A laundress since she was ten years old, Gervaise is no stranger to hard labour, and as a mother of two children (the father of whom is Lantier), no stranger to responsibility. She does the best she can with what she has, and despite the...