Thérèse Raquin is an absolutely fucking disgusting book. It is also a breathtakingly wonderful book. Outside of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart opus, Thérèse Raquin is his most well-known work, and we can say that it is a warm-up to the series if you can call a nuclear explosion as a warm-up. It certainly got a lot of hate by the critics then as it is now (The current rating for Goodreads is 3.73). At the same time, it is also included in prominent lists of classics. Admittedly, it is a polarising work, but no matter how you feel about the book, it demands reflection.
The manacles of a loveless marriage
Life in a loveless marriage is absolute hell for some, but that’s because they don’t know what’s in store for them on the other side. Thérèse is an orphan, her father left her to his aunt before he died in battle. Her mother is Algerian — a successful conquest of her father while he was soldiering. And this is all we know about her. Her aunt really takes good care of her though, some would say that she treats her as her own daughter. But the centrepiece of her aunt’s life is her own son, Camille, a weak and sickly boy who would evolve to a weak and sickly man, and eventually becomes Thérèse’s husband.
The family moved to Paris to a dank neighbourhood to a run a haberdashery. Camille worked as a clerk in the railway, and they have regular guests coming in every Thursday to have fun times playing cards. Once, Camille brought an old acquaintance home, Laurent, who was so different from Camille’s other connections that Thérèse was instantly attracted to him for his blatant masculinity, though she kept her distance and remained cold with him. The attraction was reciprocated, and Laurent swooped and aggressively kissed her while nobody’s looking, sparking a calamitous affair. The only way for the conniving couple to live happily ever after was to remove Camille from their lives.
Good guys finish last. They really do. But bad guys too.
When Thérèse Raquin was first published, it caused such a stir that Zola had to defend his novel in the preface of the second edition. His defence was that he approached the novel in a hypothetical “what-if”, the way an analyst or a scientist would to a particular problem. A writer’s job is to dissect and extrapolate on human problems. Even though Zola may have written the novel for sensationalism, which it succeeded with flying colours, I think that this preface is justified. Thérèse Raquin hit quite close to home as it is an evil that we have come across before — if not in our own affairs than in others.
It may have bothered many people as we are put into a corner where we are impelled to see evil succeed in expense of the innocent. The villains win the day here, to a great cost of the good. Mme Raquin’s position as the grieving mother leaves a lump on your throat because all of us are screaming inside, that life should not be like that for good people. Mme Raquin sheltered, fed and clothed Thérèse, satisfied the whims of her son, and only wanted a quiet and peaceful life. The death of Camille follows the decline of Mme Raquin which eventually rendered her invalid. We can say that Thérèse and Laurent thus committed a double murder with the downfall of Mme Raquin.
But Mme Raquin has the last laugh at the end when the couple killed each other, having resigned their fates. Thérèse Raquin is perhaps a more compelling study on guilt than Crime and Punishment. Zola also revisited this issue of guilt in The Beast Within, slightly through the lens of Roubard, who went on absolute decline, and Severine, who cannot keep her mouth shut to unbear the burden of her guilt. But Thérèse Raquin is different, as the guilt eats into the sinful couple.
After having murdered Camille, life preceded as normal. Laurent even had the time for a mistress before she left him, and after more than a year Thérèse and Laurent decided to marry. This is the real turning point of the story, when Laurent started to fear for his life and feeling the phantom presence of Camillle which was more real than when he was alive. He imagined absurdly that Camille was under his bed to shake his bed in terror. Thérèse also underwent the same torture as she became severely insomniac.
Marrying each other only made things worse — Camille’s presence is too tangible, too real, a third invisible presence in their bed. One of the most poignant excerpts in the book happened in the night of their marriage, they had a whole conversation in their minds of the dead man before Thérèse broke the silence. When much later, Laurent procured a studio, he kept painting different subjects — a girl, a dog, a man, but all with the contours resembling the dead man. Yet, his artistry is elevated because of this.
The obsession of guilt escalates the friction between Thérèse and Laurent to the point that Laurent commits domestic violence and Thérèse goes missing to have sex with men who are not her husband. Laurent, after having found out about the affairs was rather relieved that Thérèse was not going to the police station as he had thought, even though her action is morally much, much worse. Guilt, it seems, propagates more hurt than actually correcting the wrong. I will not revisit what happened to Mme Raquin.
Outdated, yet timeless
Zola’s scientific mind borrowed a leaf of the theory that human temperament is divided into bilious, sanguine, nervous and lymphatic — a theory derived from the concept of ‘humours’ in the medieval times. In the book, Laurent’s sanguine character is degraded to the nervous state, while Thérèse’s initial nervous state is elevated even further. Freud has yet to enter the building with all his errant theories, and if you mention ‘psychology’ to anybody back then, they’d probably think you’re a pretentious idiot. But Thérèse Raquin is a perfect psychological thriller, borderline psychological horror. This shit is scarier than Stephen King.
Zola’s early naturalistic thoughts may have germinated from Thérèse Raquin, if we see Thérèse as an outsider. We know that her mother is an exotic beauty from North Africa, and Thérèse may have inherited the nature of this exoticism. We will need to view how the French view exoticism at that time — we can compare this with Baudelaire’s Parfum Exotique which sexualises women from these origins. We can assume that Thérèse inherited this sexuality due to her exotic nature, and that being locked up and married to a sickly man only represses this sexuality even more, and the backlash comes with a vengeance.
Thérèse Raquin is a book for the ages. It is a vile book, a book which makes you question humanity, yet it is an astounding and relevant book. Its deliberate and repressing claustrophobia locks you in, drives you wild. There are times when I had to put the book down because it bothers me so much. Zola’s early critics were appalled for many colourful reasons, but he was only twenty-seven when he wrote this. I don’t think most of those critics would be capable to produce anything as grand, grotesque yet as magnificent as Thérèse Raquin in their lifetime.
