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How is Nana connected to Gervaise Macquart?

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Black and white portrait of French novelist Emile Zola with glasses, a full beard, and mustache, wearing a suit and looking to the side. — Émile Zola French novelist Émile Zola.

In the Rougon-Macquart cycle by Émile Zola, Nana is the daughter of Gervaise Macquart.12

Zola’s series explores the deterministic influence of heredity and environment on the members of the Rougon-Macquart family. While Gervaise is the central figure of the novel L’Assommoir, which depicts her struggle with alcoholism and decline in a working-class neighborhood, the novel Nana follows the life of her daughter. Nana’s trajectory—from her early life in the slums to her eventual career as an actress and a successful, destructive courtesan—is presented as a result of both her economic circumstances and the hereditary penchants inherited from her family line.21