Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [4]
The river, linking the places and people in the book, has a symbolic function, as do so many inanimate objects in Zola’s work. One can also read it as a mythical place, the river Lethe, river of oblivion and death; or see it as a figure for the unconscious, for dark desires and for the terrors of the mind. Zola himself, like Laurent, lived for a while in the Rue Saint-Victor, a few minutes’ walk from the quais, he worked briefly for the Compagnie des Docks, he spent summer afternoons lazing on the water at Vitry. He must often have walked along the banks of the Seine, especially at times when he was unemployed, staring into the river, as his characters do in Thérèse Raquin.
The Seine, as it flowed through the peaceful landscape of northern France, had an increasing appeal for writers and artists. Among the latter, the trend was towards subjects taken from everyday life, landscapes painted (or at least sketched) in the open and scenes of simple people engaged in ordinary activities: the peasants of Jean-François Millet’s L’Angélus (1859), for example. Millet spent much of his life in the Norman riverside village of Barbizon, which gave its name to a school of painting dedicated to the countryside and the open air.
Zola had come to Paris from Aix with instructions from his school friend Paul Cézanne to report back on the art scene in the capital, and this he did, giving an account of the Salon of 1859, the biennial exhibition sponsored by the Académie des Beaux-Arts and the official showcase for new work in the visual arts. Already, the Salon was starting to reflect conflicts between different trends, and it was turned into a battleground with the arrival of the Impressionists in the 1860s, though the seeds of these upheavals were sown in 1859, when works submitted by Manet and Whistler were rejected by the Académie.
In 1861, a painting by Pissarro was also rejected by the Salon committee, and protests from the younger painters grew. The emperor, Napoleon III, demanded that for the following exhibition, in 1863, the painters who had been rejected by the Académie should be allowed to exhibit their works in another part of the Palais de l‘Industrie, in what became known as the Salon des Refuses. It was at the first of these that Édouard Manet exhibited his pastoral scene Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, which showed two young students, fully clothed in modern dress, apparently enjoying a picnic beside a naked woman, with another bathing in the river behind them. The Empress Eugénie was shocked by this canvas and it caused a scandal.
Zola wrote a passionate defence of Le Déjeuner sur l‘herbe and Manet’s other outrageous painting, Olympia (the one with the cat). As Robert Lethbridge argues, Zola may have seen Manet’s notoriety as a means to establish his own name, even though Manet himself may have had doubts about ‘such blatant exercises in publicity’.6 He would become an acquaintance of Manet, of Pissarro and of other writers and painters. In late 1867, Zola sat for a portrait by Manet, which was exhibited in the Salon in 1868. He would later record the artistic life of the 1860s and the struggle of the Impressionists in one of the novels of Les Rougon-Macquart, L’Œuvre (1886). Outside literature, painting was the art that interested him most. He often referred to Manet as a ‘Naturalist’ painter, using the word to associate the new, anti-Romantic movement in art with his own practice in literature.
This connection with the world of the plastic arts is reflected in various ways and at different levels in Thérèse Raquin. The most overt