Abstract
This dissertation examines representations of dirt in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) and Émile Zola’s Germinal (1885) and La Terre (1887). Across these novels, dirt appears in varied forms, including manure, mud, coal dust, bodily filth and human excrement as agricultural fertilizer. It circulates between exterior landscapes, interior spaces and human bodies, repeatedly becoming associated with female figures and moments of social and narrative tension. Attentive to dirt’s material presence as well as its symbolic resonance, this dissertation argues that dirt functions as a site through which these rural fictional novels negotiate questions of femininity, cultures of cleanliness and modernity. In Madame Bovary, dirt punctuates Emma Bovary’s trajectory from her rural origins through marriage and motherhood, grounding her aspirations in the material realities she seeks to escape. As substances such as manure, mud and dust traverse the boundary between the exterior rural world and the domestic interior, they destabilize distinctions between purity and impurity, underscoring Emma’s inability to extricate herself from her origins. Dirt thus comes to mark not only Emma’s physical environment but also her moral positioning, binding femininity to domestic responsibility to ultimately expose her flawed humanity. In Germinal, dirt emerges from the mine and the earth itself, permeating bodies and interfering with scenes depicting sex and violence. Intermingled with coal and generated from a feminized natural landscape, dirt reflects an ever-present anxiety about contamination that is deeply entangled with gender. Through recurrent associations between the feminine and dirt, the novel presents femininity as materially dangerous, exposing tensions within naturalism’s claim to objective scientific observation. In La Terre, women’s direct engagement with fertilization and animal husbandry reshapes the meaning of dirt within agricultural labor, transforming women’s association with dirt into a source of agency rather than contamination and challenging masculinist models of agricultural progress and scientific mastery. This dissertation argues that dirt serves multiple narrative functions that reveal persistent anxieties about women’s proximity to excessive materiality. First, dirt operates as a destabilizing substance that troubles distinctions between purity and impurity, particularly as it enters domestic and bodily spaces associated with women. Second, dirt functions as a site of transformation: while in Madame Bovary and Germinal women’s association with dirt marks moral confinement and fears of contamination, La Terre reconfigures this association by presenting women’s engagement with dirt as productive and potentially subversive. Together, the three chapters of this project trace this progression, showing how dirt moves from grounding and contaminating feminine figures to enabling challenges to masculine authority. By establishing dirt as a narrative and symbolic force, I demonstrate how these works of nineteenth-century French fiction use materiality to interrogate gender and its relation to both power and agency.
