ABSTRACT
Whilst the novelistic project is driven by a totalizing desire, its scope is defined by the specificity of contexts and portrayed by such memorable individual characters as Gervaise Macquart, Octave Mouret, Nana, Aristide Saccard, Jean Macquart, Claude Lantier, Helene Grandjean, Etienne Lantier and Eugene Rougon. The idea that the individual and society are in a two-way transitive relationship is central to Massin Zola's conception of subjectivity and Second-Empire society. In Zola's novels, individual 'biographies' are shaped by the pressures of social modernization with its ideology of individualism. Throughout the Rougon-Macquart there emerges a sense of the individual as at once predetermined and self-determining, for the experience of social pressures and possibilities spurs the desire to individuation. Modernity and individualism are complementary and interdependent. The project of self-realization in a modernizing society is galvanized by a sense of possibility which, in the capitalist nexus, implies simultaneous awareness of opportunity and risk.
