EmileZola is remembered as the leader of French Naturalism, an opponent of prejudice, an enemy of the Church, a friend of the working-class and even of women. Through his aesthetic principles based on Science, Truth and Experimentation he claimed to strive for objectivity and proposed his fiction as a faithful reflection of the reality of his time. Yet, an analysis of his thirty-one novels shows that Zola, in fact, devised a new myth of woman, crowding his fiction with mythologized creatures, and creating a "new" idol strangely resembling the Virgin Mary