Nana

Courtesan, actress

Anna Coupeau — Nana — is the most famous character in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, and one of the great figures of nineteenth-century literature. Daughter of Gervaise Macquart and the roofer Coupeau, she grew up in the degradation of L'Assommoir — barely noticed by her parents as their lives fell apart — and taught herself, by the age of fifteen, that her body was her one resource. She appears first in L'Assommoir as a child, already sharp-eyed and half-feral; the novel Nana begins with her at eighteen, appearing on stage as the Golden Venus at the Théâtre des Variétés, technically incompetent and already irresistible. Zola does not allow Nana to be simply a predator. She is not intelligent, exactly, but she is shrewd; she is not cruel, exactly, but she is indifferent to suffering she cannot see directly; she is not calculating, exactly, but she instinctively understands what men want and uses that understanding without guilt, because guilt would require the ability to imagine herself as the men imagine her. Her relationship with Fontan — the coarse, violent actor with whom she lives in a moment of something like genuine feeling — is the one crack in this: she chooses to be with him, is beaten by him, and stays. With everyone else, she is the one who receives. Count Muffat de Beuville, the rigidly Catholic chamberlain who becomes her most destroyed admirer, is the novel's central case study: a man whose entire public identity is built on propriety and moral authority, dismantled piece by piece by his own desire. Nana does not engineer this — she barely understands it. She is hereditary ruin made beautiful: the accumulated damage of the Macquart line expressing itself through the most total instrument available, the one commodity the Second Empire values above all others. She dies of smallpox in a locked hotel room, the beautiful face obliterated, as the crowd outside chants 'À Berlin!'

Blonde, magnificent, with the heavy golden beauty of a goddess risen from the gutter — a beauty that is not elegant but overwhelming, that bypasses aesthetic judgement entirely and operates directly on the body.

Nana

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