Germinal Questions Essay Example

1) In Germinal, the character of Catherine is a miner in the mining town of Montsou, and acts primarily as the prospective love interest for Etienne Lantier. She, herself, is dramatically transformed throughout the text from a tomboyish, yet victimized and oppressed young girl to someone who dies released of that burden in a mining accident near the end of the novel. She almost seems to hide her femaleness from others due to her boyish nature; Etienne is able to mistake her for a boy, and she seems incredibly immature. However, up to her death she endures a hard life of oppression and victimization, where she remains in an abusive relationship with her lover Chaval. Catherine, through her dedication to practicality and her dismissal of the notion of ladyhood and demureness, demonstrates the advancing idea of women's liberation at the time.
Chaval is constantly abusive to Catherine, and yet she cannot resist his advances; he seems to own her in an incredibly chauvinistic way, revealing herself to be emotionally weak while the rest of her is quite strong. At the same time, she feels as though she cannot leave Chaval because of that power he has over her. As a woman, she is constantly dehumanized, which is perhaps one reason why she strives so hard to act like a man. In Part 5, Chapter 2, she strips naked in order to endure the terrible heat of the mine; in this way, she reveals her vulnerability around the men of the camp. However, by the time she and Etienne fall in love with her, she feels as though it makes her weaker; being beaten by Chaval was at least one way of maintaining the respect of the other workers, while being with Etienne and stopping work at the pit makes her look weak.
2) In the last two passages of the book, in which Etienne imagines the rest of the men down in the mine, working, as he leaves Montsou, we are able to see the "germination" of the power of the worker in his metaphor about their continued work deep in the Earth. Here, he pictures the deepness and darkness of the earth in which they work. The workers' determination and perpetual forward movement - indicated by "the deep blows, those obstinate blows of the pick" - is indicative of the inexorable and inevitable rise and success of the workers; they cannot be stopped (Zola).
Eventually, as the passage continues, the earth seems to give rise to the worker, having that hardworking spirit break through the earth itself: "From its fertile flanks life was leaping out, buds were bursting into green leaves, and the fields were quivering with the growth of the grass. On every side seeds were swelling, stretching out, cracking the plain, filled by the need of heat and light" (Zola). Eventually, it is made clear that the workers are the ones hammering their way up, growing ever closer to the 'heat and light' of the sun. There is a death/rebirth image inherent to this passage, as men "spring forth," with the words "germinating" and "growing" being associated with their movement. Like seeds germinating, so are the workers; this rising will lead to revolution and permnanent change, as Zola says it will "soon overturn the earth."
3) The concept of capitalism as a failed system, consistent with Karl Marx's notions of communism and labor, is very much present in Germinal. Etienne quickly sees, not long after arriving in the mining town, that the miners are oppressed and abused. They are not given sufficient compensation and agency, and are meant "to suffer and to struggle" for the company heads, who give them little to nothing (Zola 71). This is consistent with Marx's conception of the proletariat, the labor class from which the bourgeoisie profits while giving little back: "The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces" (Bartleby). This is the pinnacle of the capitalist system, and is an injustice that Etienne seeks to correct through whatever means necessary in his idealism. Marx noted the importance of recognizing labor as the true resource to be treasured, not the commodity that it has been used to produce. "This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces labor's product confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor" (Bartleby). Because of this emphasis on the use of labor as its own product, it is important that labor be protected. Understanding and advocating for this protection, Etienne starts the strike at the mine. Etienne's ideals are stymied by the eventual return to work, but the final passage shows him dreaming of labor finally rising up to take back the respect Marx believes it deserves.
4) Despite Etienne's extreme working-class leanings, and his desire to advance socialist ideals of the poor laborers working against the upper class, he does have many aspects of the upper-class within him. He supports the proletariat, but he is a prolific book-reader and an intellectual, something that does not quite gel with his working-class notions. Despite his apparent distaste for the commoditization of labor that Marx would espouse, he purchases boots in order to be seen as someone who looks intelligent and handsome. In front of the strike group, he points out his educated nature and acts extremely eloquent and aristocratic - far from the personality of the laborers.
In these ways, it does seem as though Etienne is merely posing as one of the working class, instead of actually knowing and understanding their struggles. Whether these gestures are legitimate and deeply felt, or whether he is a hypocrite who seeks rebellion against his fellow intellectuals by joining the "common man," he seems to be very confused about himself. He does not know whether he wants to be an intellectual or someone deeply invested in the working class experience, so he attempts to do both. In this way, he seems very foolish, though it comes from a place of earnestness and finding oneself. Etienne acts as a member of the proletariat through his ideals, but his behavior and preferences seem to be decidedly bourgeois; while he has a lot to learn, and is a poseur for much of the novel, his convictions are at least somewhat earnest if not fully understood.