Female victimhood and suicide in the naturalistic novel

Heroines in literary naturalism are different from the popular concepts of ideal heroines because the former lack certain qualities we expect from the latter who are powerful. Naturalistic heroines are the conquered ones because they are construed as victims of their environment. Identified with someone low and ignoble bereft of the will to alter her fate, the naturalistic heroine suggests that she has issues about herself as a product of heredity and social conditions. Because she has been moulded by her environment and heredity, she acquires certain traits that have direct bearing to her instincts and physical desires and which Zola in his doctrines of naturalism refers to as the “beast within” depicting an animal inheritance. Since the naturalistic heroine’s actions are based on her instincts and desires, the inevitable consequences that challenge her are premature and violent deaths such as suicide. The naturalistic heroine thus suggests that she is worth the focus in literary studies because as distinctive literary character she is “the salt of literature” that gives discriminatory flavour because “without it, the page is savorless” (Burroughs 4). Zola wants to portray representations of human beings that have the greatest percentage among the population, and he specifically refers to the lower and middle classes in society. His theory of naturalism relied on the belief that this group of people comprise the greater reality that can also be appropriate as content of literature instead of the typical small portion of people who belong to the upper class usually represented in the literature that precedes naturalism.