ntend with the vagaries of the natural order.
As gifted artists, Zola in Germinal and Arnold in Culture and Anarchy exploit the symbolism of light alternating with darkness as a centralizing motif which expresses the nineteenth century's struggle to establish a legitimate order. Zola artfully structures Germinal, meticulously arranging his chapters around a limited palette of colors of black, white, and red with darkness intentionally predominant. Germinal begins with one of its central characters, +tienne Lantier, who can be seen trudging along the main road from Marchiennes to Montsou, and finally stumbling upon the open-mouthed pit of Le Voreux. When eying the mine for the first time, Lantier sees the mine as an adversary, as "evil-looking, a voracious beast crouching ready to devour the world" (Zola, 1954, p. 21). From the novel's beginning, Zola establishes the mining environment as a restriction and threat to personal freedom by emphasizing its dark and sinister aspects.
Similarly, Arnold evokes such critical pairings as "sweetness and light" and "Hellenism and Hebraism" as a way of citing and ultimately attempting to synthesize life's polarities. Curiously, Arnold specifically invokes England's obsession with a potential shortage of coal as one of the downfalls of modern culture. Arnold suggests that England's greatness does not depend upon its ammassing external and material goods, or upon a greatness constituted by its industralized status as a nation dependent upon coal. The best of British culture should strive toward a "finely tempered nature", a "harmonious perfection of beauty and intelligence", the achievement of a spiritual bliss which Arnold citing Swift in the Battle of Books sees as the attainment of "the two noblest of things, sweetness and light" (Arnold, 1993, p. 66). For Arnold freedom resides within those bodies, both civil and human, which thrive in the midst of culture's continual...