Thérèse Raquin: fire, the ghost, art, Madame Raquin

1/ This is the wedding night of Laurent and Thérèse. There is a fire: 

“A bright fire was blazing in the grate, casting large patches of yellow light that danced on the ceiling and the walls, so that the room was lit by a bright, flickering light in which the lamp, standing on a table, paled by comparison.” (Ch.21) 

Poor Madame Raquin has decorated and perfumed the room for the young couple—everything looks warm and smells nice. 

Here is Zola being a painter: 

“In her lace-trimmed petticoat and bodice, she was a harsh white against the burning light of the fire.” (ibid.) 

They have waited for this moment for so long—they have killed a man to be together, and have waited for nearly 2 years to get married without suspicion. But now that they’re together, something doesn’t work. Other readers would talk about their psychology, guilt, etc., I’m interested in the fire. 

“She looked up at Laurent, whose face at that moment was lit up by a broad, reddish glow from the fire. She looked at this blood-stained face and shuddered.” (ibid.) 

And: 

“They stayed there in silence, not moving, for five long minutes. From time to time, a reddish flame would spurt out of the wood and reflections, the colour of blood, played over the murderers’ faces.” (ibid.) 

Laurent, in an attempt to soothe Thérèse, mentions that Camille is now gone, which feels like a blow in the stomach for her. With the name uttered, the murderers look at each other, shaking. 

“The yellow light from the fire was still flickering on the walls and ceiling…” (ibid.) 

Yellow, red, red, yellow. That’s an interesting play with colours. 

But the ghost has been raised, and appeared between the couple. 

“Thérèse and Laurent could sense the cold, damp smell of the drowned man in the hot air that they breathed.” (ibid.) 

Such a lifelike ghost—(most) people in Hollywood films can’t see ghosts, here you can even smell it. Zola goes even further later on: 

“…they would see it lying like a greenish, rotten lump of meat and they would breathe in the repulsive odour of this heap of human decay.” (Ch.22)

Ugh that’s gross. 

They can see and smell and feel the ghost.

“They locked into a frightful embrace. […] Yet they could still feel Camille’s shredded flesh, foully squeezed between them, freezing their skin in places, even while the rest of their bodies was burning.” (Ch.23) 

How on earth is this meant to be scientific? How is this Naturalism? 

But then Zola seems to suggest that the ghost isn’t there—the murderers just have the same image, the same thoughts, the same hallucinations. 

“She looked at Laurent’s neck. She had just noticed a pink patch on the white skin. A rush of blood to his head made the patch larger and coloured it a fiery red.” (Ch.21)  

That, Laurent has to admit, is where Camille bit him nearly 2 years ago in the boat. I won’t write about what happens next, but clearly the key to enjoy Thérèse Raquin is to ignore everything Zola says, to read it not as a realistic novel but as something else. 

2/ The scene of the painting in chapter 21 made me laugh, though I assume it’s meant to be dark and sinister, at least not comic. Imagine being an aspiring painter and feeling terror upon seeing your own work. I wouldn’t pick up the brush again. 

3/ I like that Laurent and Thérèse are first attracted by their different temperaments (opposites attract, as people say). I also like that Laurent and Thérèse are tormented by guilt, loathing, and self-loathing, and cannot be happy together. But Zola isn’t content with describing it, he has to appear and turn it into something higher and explain it by “science”: 

“Thérèse’s dry, nervous character had reacted in an odd way with the stolid, sanguine character of Laurent. Previously, in the days of their passion, this contrast in temperament had made this man and woman into a powerfully linked couple by establishing a sort of balance between them and, so to speak, complementing their organisms. […] But the equilibrium had been disturbed and Thérèse’s over-excited nerves had taken control. Suddenly, Laurent found himself plunged into a state of nervous erethism; under the influence of her fervent nature, his own temperament had gradually become that of a girl suffering from an acute neurosis. It would be interesting to study the changes that are sometimes produced in certain organisms as a result of particular circumstances…” (Ch.22)

Look, Monsieur Zola, here is someone who has killed a man and is now beginning to realise the enormity of what he’s done, especially now that he’s in the room of the man he has murdered, with the wife of the dead man, watched by their cat and by the dead man’s painting. Psychologically their behaviours make sense, but for Zola that isn’t enough.  

“Then, he underwent a strange internal process: his nerves developed and came to dominate the sanguine element in him, this fact by itself changing his character.” (ibid.) 

The author insists that it isn’t guilt, even though it looks like guilt to me: 

“His remorse was purely physical. Only his body, his tense nerves and his trembling flesh were afraid of the drowned man. His conscience played no part in his terror: he did not in the slightest regret having killed Camille.” (ibid.) 

4/ Thérèse Raquin can be divided into 2 parts: the first part (up till the murder) mostly focuses on Thérèse, the eponymous character; whilst the second part is about both Thérèse and Laurent, but Zola seems to write more about him.  

Personally I think Thérèse is more interesting. First of all, she’s not wholly bad or purely motivated by self-interest like Laurent, and in her mind, she’s been wronged by the Raquins—for years she had to suppress her passionate nature, had to take medication she didn’t need, and felt pressured to marry the cousin she didn’t care for. 

Then after the murder, the two of them feel bound to each other, bound by the crime, but gradually she’s both afraid of and disgusted by Laurent, which makes perfect sense psychologically because she has seen him murder a man—her husband, his close friend—before her eyes and she has seen him lie unembarrassedly to others in front of her. Such a man is capable of anything. 

In her, there’s a combination of guilt, loathing, fear, disgust, self-hatred. Zola doesn’t need ideas about temperaments to explain her feelings and behaviours. 

Thérèse becomes even more fascinating as a character when there’s a new turn later on. 

5/ The untalented painter in Thérèse Raquin all of a sudden becomes a true artist, thanks to killing a man. No, really.

“Since he’d killed a man, it was as though his flesh had become lighter, his brain, distraught, seemed immense to him, and in this sudden expansion of his ideas he saw exquisite creations and poetic reveries. This is why his hand had suddenly acquired its distinction and his works their beauty, in a moment becoming personal and alive.” (Ch.25) 

And: 

“Perhaps Laurent had become an artist as he had become lazy, after the great disruption that had unbalanced his mind and his body. Previously, he had been stifled by the heavy weight of his blood and blinded by the thick vapour of health surrounding him.” (ibid.) 

This is absolutely nuts. But it leads to a powerful and haunting scene of Lauren and the sketches. I can imagine it working very well on screen. 

6/ The power of Thérèse Raquin is, I think, in the character of Madame Raquin. Whilst other characters are all brutes, selfish and hypocritical, she alone feels the depth of grief, she alone feels the depth of despair. 

For a large part of the novel, Zola does seem to put in all kinds of shocking and extreme things for the sake of being shocking and extreme, especially in the depiction of Laurent, who becomes increasingly more brutal and animalistic throughout the course of the story, and the portrayal of the other characters isn’t much better—they are all animals, motivated by self-interest. Madame Raquin, despite her egotism, is different because of her love for her son.   

It’s in similar to the way Flaubert gives Charles Bovary depth of feeling—if every single character in a novel were shallow, egoistic, and devoid of deep feeling, the book as a whole would be a minor work, however well-written.