Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [8]
Taine’s literary and historical criticism was based on a Positivist approach that saw writers, like other historical figures, as the product of ‘race, milieu, moment’. But if the task of the critic is to study the work of writers who are shaped by their heredity and their environment, why should the writer not treat the characters in fiction in the same way? They, too, can be treated as the product of a particular race, milieu and historical moment. The novel, instead of being a mere fantasy, will become a laboratory in which the novelist carries out his experiment, a scientific instrument for the analysis of individuals and society.
Of course, Zola was writing in the days before Freud and psychoanalysis; theories of human psychology contained elements that we would nowadays find odd. In particular, doctors still believed in the idea of ‘temperament’, which derived from the medieval concept of ‘humours’. According to the Larousse dictionary of 1875, human temperaments could be divided up into bilious, sanguine, nervous and lymphatic, with an additional category, phlegmatic (a combination of lymphatic and bilious). The nervous and sanguine temperaments were to be considered more or less normal, while the bilious and lymphatic were weaker and pathological.16
The Larousse dictionary shows that there had been some development in the concept since the Middle Ages. For a start, the melancholic temperament had been discarded, and the temperaments were no longer considered to be so closely related to particular organs of the body or to the four elements, earth, air, fire and water. Nor were they thought of as innate: a person’s temperament could alter according to circumstances, so there were cases of ‘mixed’ temperaments and many individuals were unclassifiable. But the basic theory — that humans could be divided into psychological types according to certain physiological criteria — was still accepted, not least by Zola. ‘In Thérèse Raquin I set out to study temperament, not character,’ he wrote in the Preface to the second edition, meaning by this that he wanted to show how human beings of a particular disposition react when placed in a given set of circumstances. And throughout the novel he refers to the sanguine temperament of Laurent and the nervous temperament of Thérèse, these two temperaments being opposite and complementary. Laurent is earthy, driven by his animal needs, while Thérèse is nervous, changeable, hysterical; and each of the main protagonists in the novel has physical characteristics that correspond to the traditional descriptions of his or her particular temperament: Laurent’s ruddy cheeks, Thérèse’s pale face and the lymphatic Camille’s blond hair.17 What Zola aims to do here is exactly what he attributed to the Goncourts in his review of Germinie Lacerteux: putting ‘a certain temperament in contact with certain facts and certain beings’.18 And the Goncourts themselves had written in their diary: ‘Since Balzac, the novel has had nothing in common with what our fathers understood by “novel”. The present-day novel is made with documents described or noted down from nature, just as history is made out of written documents.‘19 The ‘milieu’ and the ‘moment’ were ready for Zola’s first serious attempt to apply his theories in Thérèse Raquin.
In December 1866, Zola published a short story in Le Figaro under the ironic title ‘Un mariage d’amour’ (‘A Love Match’). This