The Smell of Misery: How Odors Distinguish Social Classes in Émile Zola's L'Assommoir and Gabrielle Roy's Bonheur d'occasion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using the senses to understand our world can have a powerful effect on our ability to understand differences and, most importantly, our ability to understand the construction of differences. This research looks at how smells in two francophone novels – Bonheur d’Occasion by Gabrielle Roy and L’Assommoir by Émile Zola – serve as indicators of social classes. Comparing these two novels, one from Québec and one from France, the various types of odors present distinguish social classes and limits one’s social trajectory. This distinction works in junction with Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of economic and cultural capital. Smells act as the distinguishing factor in the encounter between social classes and smells prevent social mobility. Using the senses allows us to question the creation of identity and how such distinctions in identity affect class relations. From a clear prejudice against Jews in Montreal based on their “smell” to a picture of misery in low-income housing of nineteenth century France, smells create distinctions and are never arbitrary. This research divides the types of distinguishing smells into the following categories: the smell of housing, the smell of individuals, the smell of industry and labor, and the smell of perfume and flowers. Using the field of smell studies and Bourdieu’s understanding of distinction, this research proves that odors serve as social class indicators that prevent social mobility and that smells are nuanced perceptions that carry meaning. Turning to smells in literature can help reveal such markers of identity and help illuminate boundaries to social class ascension.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".