Zola’s Nana and Kasdaglis’s Eleni: Two Female Portraits of the Naturalistic Persona

Abstract

Nikos Kasdaglis is one of the pioneers in the shift of post-war modern Greek prose towards a more realistic and naturalistic form of writing. Kasdaglis, according to literary criticism, revives and redefines “objective” prose by exploiting the doctrines of the naturalist school at the level of both narrative choices and ideological objectives. Therefore, negative characters, social problems, and bleak conditions are dissected and studied in his works, which make reference in the process to Zola’s experimental method. In The Thirst (1970), Kasdaglis studies the sexual extravagance of Eleni, a young nurse who exhibits psychopathological sexual behaviour – following French naturalist patterns that tended to analyse borderline characters – so as to demonstrate the dependence of human nature on sexual instinct and biological origins. Kasdaglis, like Zola in Nana, presents a naturalistic female portrait which is characterized by apathy, cynicism, cravings of the flesh, and lack of emotional love. The composition of the novel models the poetics of naturalism in order to highlight the fact that human nature is predetermined by natural laws and social conventions. Kasdaglis manages to form a contemporary naturalistic portrait which makes direct reference to the French model, and demonstrates the significant impact of the French novel on European and modern Greek prose.