Week 5: Therese Raquin (1867) by Emile Zola

I first read Emile Zola’s Therese Raquin when I was in first-year uni (which, for anyone counting, was 9 years ago). It was a set-text in a subject where we studied what I now consider to be the “greatest hits of literature”.


(Personal sidebar: my lecturer was the first person who planted the idea of a PhD in my head, so it’s all his fault, really!).

In my mind, Therese Raquin is linked to Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Although Flaubert was a realist writer and Zola a naturalist (distinctions I learned about in that same class, 9 years ago), there are definitely similarities in the plots.


In both novels, a young woman (who shares her name with the title of the novel) marries a man she doesn’t love for the financial stability he provides. Soon, she finds herself dissatisfied with her oafishly-depicted husband, a dissatisfaction which is compounded when she meets a more attractive man who promises her an escape from the her mundane life.


Like Madame Bovary, Therese Raquin was denounced upon publication as “pornographic”, “putrid” and “a quagmire of smile and blood”. Unlike Bovary, whose heroine never repents of her actions, Zola’s characters live out the consequences of their every action. Either way, these novels certainly do not deserve the reputation they received when they were initially published, even when changes in morals and norms are taken into account.


Certainly, Zola depicts with relish the thrills experienced by Therese and her lover Laurent when they are in the midst of their infidelities. Zola took great pains to accurately represent the emotional life of his characters. Therese, who before meeting Laurent, lived a quiet life of silent resentment, comes alive during their affair. Zola describes how

“Her unsated body threw itself frantically into pleasure; she was emerging from a dream, she was being born into passion”.

However, this novel is not an advertisement for adultery, as it was originally (mis)interpreted. Driven wild by their passions, Therese and Laurent commit a desperate, despicable act, which turns their lives upside-down and sets the rest of the novel on a course towards its dramatic conclusion.


What makes this novel so interesting to read is how the emotional life of each character is not just described in emotional terms and words, but their emotions are externalised through their actions, reactions and perceptions. Emotions permeate the very core of each character, as well soaking through the very nature of the text, until you feel as though you’ve been living with every moment of their happiness, sadness, guilt, grief and ultimately wrath.


For Zola, Therese Raquin was an experiment, he wanted to place his characters in situations of intense emotional anguish and see how they would react. He later went on to perform a similar, more extensive, literary experiment: writing a series of novels which traced the lineage of one (fictional) family over the course of numerous generations.


More than an example of early literary experimentation, Zola’s Therese Raquin is an amazingly evocative and deeply tragic novel, and well worth a read (or two, even if those readings are over 9 years apart!).


The Penguin Classics page for Therese Raquin is here.