Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola

Posted on | April 29, 2010 | 7 Comments

I am extending a warm welcome to the Classics Circuit tour today who are bringing us Émile Zola in spring.  I opted to read Thérèse Raquin, one of Zola’s earlier novels, based on a couple of favourable reviews I read last year, most notably this one, which prompted me to purchase a copy.  Published in 1867, originally in serial format, the novel is a pyschological study of Thérèse and Laurent, her lover, in the aftermath of their murder of Thérèse’s husband. Camille.  In many ways I was reminded of the brilliantly-realised short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, which pre-dates Thérèse Raquin by more than two decades and that explores the psychology of a murderer’s guilt.

Thérèse and Laurent, her husband’s friend, enter into a sordid affair and in the throes of their passion, suggest murdering Camille; this act, they think, would serve as a solution to their lust and avarice but, ultimately, serves only to destroy them.  The novel’s original serialised structure heightens the suspense and drama, creating mini-endings and/or cliff-hangers in the close of most chapters but it is not a sensational read but a gritty, life-like one.  Zola was at the head of the literary school of Naturalism and Thérèse Raquin is a realistic exploration of the underbelly of human nature, in a realistic -and lower-class- setting.

Zola wrote that in Thérèse Raquin he was studying temperaments as opposed to characters and I think that he succeeded; the characterisation was mainly through the heightening and deepening of emotions, exploring why and how the characters acted on and coped with their emotions, as opposed to fully-fledging them out.  Thérèse, the eponymous anti-heroine, was exceedingly passive to begin with, or at least was pretending towards passivity, and then became increasingly self-serving and irrational; none of the characters were likeable but they were realistic in their sheer unpleasantness.  I found the contrast between the sensual yet sordid affair at the beginning with the stripped away loathsomeness of the lovers at the end very effective (demonstrated with the two quotes used below); however I wasn’t as immersed in the events as I had hoped that I would be, finding it dragged out in some parts.

The translation by Andrew Rothwell was immensely readable and I will read further Zola in the future, beginning with The Ladies’ Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames).

From the beginning, the lovers felt their affair to be something necessary, inevitable, and utterly natural.  At their first meeting they spoke familiarly and kissed without any blushing or embarrassment, as if their intimacy had already been going for a number of years.  They were quite calm and at ease in their new situation, and they lived completely without shame.

For more than a year Thérèse and Laurent had borne lightly the chain that bound their limbs to each other with equanimity.  In the period of numbness that had come after the acute crisis of the murder, in the feelings of repugnance and the need for peace and forgetfulness which had then followed, these two prisoners had been able to imagine themselves free, no longer linked together by an iron bond.  The chain had hung slack on the ground whilst they rested, and they had fallen into a contented stupor and looked around for love elsewhere, trying to lead a sensible and balanced existence.  But the day came when, driven by events, they began once more to exchange words of passion, and the chain snapped taut again, giving them such a jolt that they realized they were now attached to each other for ever,

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