Germinal by Emile Zola Industrialization Costs
GERMINAL – by Emile Zola – translated by Roger Pearson
Industrialization had many social costs, especially the effect it had on the lives of the working class.Discuss Zola's portrayal of coalminers in Montsou over the course of the entire novel and show how industrial labor affected their overall lives.Does Zola believe that the condition of the working class will improve or get worse?
Industrialization had a general positive effect to life, providing more jobs and changing transportation communication and commerce for france in the 19th century. When looking at it on a smaller scale, to keep up with all these changes many people had to suffer for them to work, someone had to do the “dirty” work. In Emile Zola's book “Germinal” he brings us to the everyday lives of these hard working people , the coal miners in Montsou. They are the lower working class of people that endure many social costs, risking and struggleing their own lives to keep capitalism moving. With fate and hereditary being the main factor in pre determining who works the pits and who collects revenue from the pits, Zola opens us to the “struggle between capital and labor” (Pearson, pg. xx) .The reader experiences first hand , the coal miners lives through starvation, oppression, and darkness. Suffering each day to survive we follow Zola's hero, Etienne Lantier through his journey face to face with cruelty and despair, never giving up on his dream for a better world.
The fate and life of the Miners is foreshadowed by the first person Etienne meets, Bonnemort whose name means good death. Bonnemort explains that he got his name because of the multiple times he almost died down in the mine due to the dangerous working conditions in the mine. He is consistantly coughing and spitting out black phlegm that was collected by his body from all the black coal hes ingested throughout his fifty years down the mine. Even though he should stop working, money is so scarce that he refuses to stop working
Industrialization had many social costs, especially the effect it had on the lives of the working class.Discuss Zola's portrayal of coalminers in Montsou over the course of the entire novel and show how industrial labor affected their overall lives.Does Zola believe that the condition of the working class will improve or get worse?
Industrialization had a general positive effect to life, providing more jobs and changing transportation communication and commerce for france in the 19th century. When looking at it on a smaller scale, to keep up with all these changes many people had to suffer for them to work, someone had to do the “dirty” work. In Emile Zola's book “Germinal” he brings us to the everyday lives of these hard working people , the coal miners in Montsou. They are the lower working class of people that endure many social costs, risking and struggleing their own lives to keep capitalism moving. With fate and hereditary being the main factor in pre determining who works the pits and who collects revenue from the pits, Zola opens us to the “struggle between capital and labor” (Pearson, pg. xx) .The reader experiences first hand , the coal miners lives through starvation, oppression, and darkness. Suffering each day to survive we follow Zola's hero, Etienne Lantier through his journey face to face with cruelty and despair, never giving up on his dream for a better world.
The fate and life of the Miners is foreshadowed by the first person Etienne meets, Bonnemort whose name means good death. Bonnemort explains that he got his name because of the multiple times he almost died down in the mine due to the dangerous working conditions in the mine. He is consistantly coughing and spitting out black phlegm that was collected by his body from all the black coal hes ingested throughout his fifty years down the mine. Even though he should stop working, money is so scarce that he refuses to stop working