Nana in the World: Novel, Gender, and Transnational Form

Nana in the World: Novel, Gender, and Transnational Form Christopher L. Hill A journalist in Emile Zola’s novel Nana describes its unrestrained heroine as a “golden fly” who spreads social rot, “corrupting and deranging Paris between her snowy thighs.” 1 The same might be said of Nana. In the decades after its 1880 release, an epidemic of “Nana figures,” sexually and economically independent women who, like Nana, straddled the line between stage performance and prostitution, appeared in fiction from North America to East Asia. As Nana infected the world’s literature, so did the naturalist novel: emerging in France in the 1860s, this variety of European realism had practitioners across the globe by the early twentieth century. The transnational career of the Nana figure opens questions cen- tral to any attempt to create a truly global history of literary form. How does travel assist the extraction of a character from a novel? What role did the Nana figure play in the establishment of realism outside Modern Language Quarterly 72:1 (March 2011) doi 10.1215/00267929-2010-032 © 2011 by University of Washington 1 Emile Zola, Nana, ed. Henri Mitterand (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 224 – 25. Fur- ther citations refer to this edition. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the American Comparative Liter- ature Association’s 2008 conference at California State University, Long Beach. I would like to thank members of the conference’s “Traveling Discourses” seminar, Marshall Brown, and Jonathan Arac for their comments. Japanese names are in the customary order of surname followed by given name. Authors who adopted a pen name in place of their given name (Kosugi Tengai) are referred to by the pen name on second usage. Modern Language Quarterly 72.1 (Mar. 2011)

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Transcript of Nana in the World: Novel, Gender, and Transnational Form

Nana in the World: Novel, Gender, and Transnational Form

Christopher L. Hill

A journalist in Emile Zola’s novel Nana describes its unrestrained heroine as a “golden fly” who spreads social rot, “corrupting and

deranging Paris between her snowy thighs.”1 The same might be said of Nana. In the decades after its 1880 release, an epidemic of “Nana figures,” sexually and economically independent women who, like Nana, straddled the line between stage performance and prostitution, appeared in fiction from North America to East Asia. As Nana infected the world’s literature, so did the naturalist novel: emerging in France in the 1860s, this variety of European realism had practitioners across the globe by the early twentieth century.

The transnational career of the Nana figure opens questions cen-tral to any attempt to create a truly global history of literary form. How does travel assist the extraction of a character from a novel? What role did the Nana figure play in the establishment of realism outside

Modern Language Quarterly 72:1 ( March 2011)

1 Emile Zola, Nana, ed. Henri Mitterand (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 224 – 25. Fur-ther citations refer to this edition.

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the American Comparative Liter-ature Association’s 2008 conference at California State University, Long Beach. I would like to thank members of the conference’s “Traveling Discourses” seminar, Marshall Brown, and Jonathan Arac for their comments. Japanese names are in the customary order of surname followed by given name. Authors who adopted a pen name in place of their given name (Kosugi Tengai) are referred to by the pen name on second usage.

Modern Language Quarterly 72:1 (Mar. 2011)Modern Language Quarterly 72.1 (Mar. 2011)