“L’Œil Gauche Barré:” Migraine, Scotoma, and Allied Disorders in Emile Zola’s Novels

Abstract

This chapter explores the representation of the neurological condition, migraine, in nineteenth-century French literature, with a focus on three novels from Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle: La Curée (1871), Pot-Bouille (1882), and L’Œuvre (1886). Although migraine was a well-known condition, the nineteenth century witnessed a proliferation of medical treatises dedicated to the subject and its symptoms, pathogenesis, and comorbid conditions. The author of this chapter reads the medical works of Hubert Airy, Peter Wallwork Latham, Edward Liveing, and Jean-Martin Charcot to demonstrate how knowledge about migraine changed, particularly regarding the symptom of scotoma (spots or shapes in the field of vision). The figure of the “migraineur” in Zola’s novels contributes to literature’s negotiations with realism and perception, due to the figure’s paradoxical mode of embodiment.

Couché dans une migraine, les bruits, les choses au loin se transfigurent, se poétisent, arrivent aux sens dans la légèreté d’un demi-rêve.

(Edmond and Jules de Goncourt)

[“Lying down with migraine, noises, far-away things transfigure themselves, become poetic,

and approach sense in the lightness of a dream.” ¹ ]

This chapter is based upon my doctoral thesis, Scintillating Scotoma: Migraine, Aura and Perception in British and European Literature, 1860–1900. I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Janelle Blankenship, and my second reader, Dr. Christopher Keep, for their assistance and insight with the dissertation.