The Infertile Rabbit: Ambiguities of Creation and Destruction in Germinal

In Emile Zola's Germinal the rabbit, Pologne, performs a deeply thematic, symbolic, and structural role. Zola develops both a physical and fictional resemblance between the rabbit and the female miners entrapped by a circle of sex and fertility. In a curious symbiotic relationship of creator and destroyer, Pologne restrains the anarchist Souvarine, so that when the rabbit is killed, Souvarine destroys the mine. Furthermore, the rabbit, as a scapegoat, prefigures most of the violence in the novel. Probably the fundamental mythic confrontation in the novel comes with two figures associated with Pologne – la Maheude, the fertile mother, symbolized by the rabbit, and Souvarine, the anarchist, calmed and restrained by the rabbit. This confrontation transforms the themes of creation and destruction, opposing forces in the Zolian world, because Souvarine who first represents destruction ends positively as an ideological generator of a new race and a new world, whereas la Maheude, the embodiment of the miner's creative force becomes, at least temporarily, the revolutionary destroyer. Finally, in the belly of the mine, the most positive linkage of these opposing themes is made: Catherine – the immature mother, the infertile rabbit – also undergoes transformation and is assimilated with the larger creative forces of the earth and the future. (CSF)