Angélique Rougon is the main character from Le Rêve, a novel from Emile Zola’s Rougon–Macquart cycle, atypical because the author originally conceived of it in a way radically different from the rest of his work. He promises his heroine a happy destiny by moving her from her abandoned childhood identity to a triumphant marital status. But the tale fails at the same time as the project for a successful socialization, and the novel becomes an expression of two tensions: a literary tension on one side, because of the gap between the first plan and the completed text; and an anthropological tension on the other because it questions the possibility of a happy evolution from a symbolical savage state to an environment defined by its ancestral culture.
