Thus, Their Female Characters Are Usually Portrayed As Depraved Females Who

Thus, their female characters are usually portrayed as depraved females who end tragically because of their weakness, poor education and lack of intelligence.
Germinie Lacerteux, the principal female character, is a woman who is sexually abused in early years and who is not able to marry when she comes to Paris. However, her motherly instincts are too powerful and she starts to look after a niece and another child Jupillon. But when Jupillon is transformed into a man, Germinie experiences a sudden passion towards him, and it is this passion that destroys her reputation and turns into poverty, because the love had been for the Jupillon young person only the satisfaction of a certain curiosity of the evil, seeking in the knowledge and in the possession of a woman the right and the pleasure of scorning it10. When Jupillon abandons Germinie, she starts drinking and is involved in numerous sexual intercourses that bring her to death, similar to Dumas' Marguerite and Zola's Renée. In this regard, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt uncover female passion that can gradually destroy a woman and depreciate her, criticising Germinie's uncontrollable sexual desires and instead maintaining the ideas of female virginity. As Jupillon tells Germinie during one of their talks, you appear yourself well still, you are not my heart, you are not my life, you are only my pleasure11.

Contrary to other French writers of the nineteenth century that mainly portray females from the upper-class society, the principal female characters of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt belong to the middle-class. Such shift from aristocratic females to poor females reflects great realism of the narration, eliminating romanticism that is usually utilised in French novels. The Goncourts' naturalism explains the reasons of female sexuality and their further failure. According to the writers, it is really difficult for such a woman as Germinie to suppress her natural instincts and adhere to social morality that rejects any powerful emotions. Such females make attempts to change their conditions of living, but finally they appear in the similar conditions as at the initial stage of life. The Goncourts present this viewpoint not only on the example of Germinie, but also on the example of a secondary character Miss de Varandeuil, an old kind spinster who hires Germinie as a servant to her and who becomes fully attached to a young girl. As Edmond and Jules de Goncourt put it, This old woman isolated and forgotten by death, only at the end of her life, trailing her affections of tomb in tomb, had found her last friend in her servant12.
However, such close relations between a master and a servant are not unusual for nineteenth-century French literature that usually reflects female servants as devoted and hardworking people who gradually occupy the principal place in the narration.