Germinal & Middlemarch

The social and cultural changes sweeping Europe in the nineteenth century are the foundation of both Zola's Germinal and Elliot's Middlemarch. Both, through minutiae detail and naturalism demonstrate a profound insight into the intertexture of human lives. So are both critical examinations of the prevailing social structure. Germinal is an attack on the injustices visited upon the bourgeois workers in 1866-1867. These lives are naturalistically depicted in a manner as to create total empathy with the conditions suffered by the working class in this era, and their strength and humanity in enduring and attempting to overcome them. Middlemarch is also a critical indictment of modern social norms that are presented as limiting to the individual and his or her energies, a stunted development that steals from the individual his or her full ability to be of use to society. Nonetheless, it is an affirmation of the fact that the human aspects of every life show the individuality or significance of every human life.

Germinal is as much an admonition as it is a novel. It is Zola's warning that if conditions for workers were not changed for the better, revolution was certain. In an era and society that had recently experienced a revolution, this message was not lost on readers in Zola's time. Germinal means germinate and the lives of the workers cannot bloom in a society that keeps them at the mercy of a handful of greedy ca

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