Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [1]
Introduction
(New readers are advised that this Introduction makes
the details of the plot explicit.)
Thérèse Raquin is the only one of Émile Zola’s works outside his novel-cycle Les Rougon-Macquart and his polemic J‘Accuse that is widely read. Indeed, with a few individual works from that twenty-volume cycle, it represents the height of his achievement as a novelist. Published in 1867, when Zola was only twenty-seven, it was not his first work of fiction, but it is the book that established his reputation as one of the outstanding novelists of the younger generation. Denounced by the critic of Le Figaro as ‘putrid’, ‘a pool of filth and blood’,1 it achieved a notoriety that would pursue Zola throughout his life and, at the same time, established the ‘experimental’ method that he would apply in the twenty volumes of Les Rougon-Macquart. We can say, with his biographer Henri Mitterand, that ‘Zola’s career as a novelist only really begins with Thérèse Raquin.’2
The novel does, however, differ from the later works in some important respects. Les Rougon-Macquart was a hugely ambitious project, designed (according to its subtitle) to constitute ‘The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’.3 The individual volumes in the cycle centre on a particular aspect of life in that period: provincial and national politics (La Fortune des Rougon, Son Excellence Eugène Rougon); the Parisian working class (Le Ventre de Paris, L’Assommoir); the industrial working class (Germinal); the peasantry (La Terre); and so on. Entering into these different milieux is part of the pleasure of reading Zola, and he supported the fictional narrative with extensive documentary research — into life in a large department store, for example, when writing Au Bonheur des Dames, or among workers on the railway, for La Bête humaine. Behind the chief protagonists in all these novels, one is aware of a host of minor figures and, beyond them, of the crowd: the crowd in the Parisian streets and markets, the shoppers in the department store, the miners, politicians, priests, soldiers, stockbrokers, workers and peasants who populate the background of the picture.
This is not the case in Thérèse Raquin. Here is a tale of adultery, murder and madness, set mainly in a single location and with a cast of four leading characters and four minor ones (five, if we count the cat, François). Only during the scenes on the river (Chapters XI and XII) and in the Morgue (Chapter XIII) does one have any sense of other people moving around in the background; only very exceptionally does the writer introduce another character with a speaking part, like the painter who makes a fleeting appearance in Chapter XXV. For the rest of the time, he concentrates our attention on Thérèse, Camille, Laurent and Madame Raquin, with occasional appearances by the group of guests who visit them every Thursday: Grivet, the Michauds, father and son, the son’s wife, Suzanne; and, of course, by the cat. In the forefront of this picture is Thérèse, the half-Arab orphan who is abandoned by her father to be brought up by her aunt, the haberdasher, Madame Raquin. Thérèse has to compete for her aunt’s affections with her cousin, Madame Raquin’s sickly son, Camille. It is an uneven struggle. Camille gets all the attention, while Thérèse learns to hold in her frustration and resentment, her natural energy and health smothered by the possessive mother and feeble son. When the time comes, she accepts marriage to Camille for want of anything better and prepares for a life of endless Thursday evenings playing dominoes in the company of Madame Raquin’s friends: the former policeman, Michaud, and his son, and the railway clerk, Grivet. The stage is set for a tragedy that will be set off by the arrival of Camille’s friend Laurent, a sturdy lad, self-indulgent and unscrupulous, who releases the full force of Thérèse’s passionate nature — under the watchful eye of François, the cat.
The novel is intentionally claustrophobic. Thérèse Raquin is a chamber piece, a melodrama, a horror story