Though the novel confirms that the upper-class women she admires are also consummate actors, their kind of role playing is not accessible to Nana. Assuming that respectability is something she can achieve with the right performance-the right clothes, the right walk, the right home décor, she approaches her whole life as a performance. She fails to realize the utter impossibility of this dream. Origins edit A year before he started to write Nana, Zola knew nothing about the Thtre des Varits. Completed in 1880, Nana is the ninth installment in the 20-volume Les Rougon-Macquart series. As an adult, her first tastes of luxury give her an insatiable appetite for conspicuous consumption, which in her mind puts her ever closer to her most elusive wish: to be mistaken for a highborn lady. Nana is a novel by the French naturalist author mile Zola. The simple Nana is a girl from a disrupted home her father died of alcoholism and her mother of starvation. In childhood, she dreamt of seemingly simple pleasures-a partner to love, a simple house in a pastoral setting-but even this fantasy betrays her longing for material comfort. The daughter of poor parents, one of whom died of alcoholism and the other of starvation, she has always yearned for more. Zola is also concerned with the ways in which traditional social distinctions have.

As the novel’s protagonist and anti-hero, Nana is nuanced character who primarily represents unchecked female sexuality and the unquenchable power of desire. Nana moves widely in Paris during her career, in her pursuit of power, lost innocence, and material success.

Naná by Émile Zola