Thérèse Raquin: “a psychological and physiological fact that often occurs between those who are thrown violently together by great nervous shocks”

1/ In the previous blog post, I wrote about smells in the novel and the way Thérèse and Laurent are driven by the physical, by scents. 

In the second half of the novel, there are different kinds of smells. 

This is the scene at the morgue. After the murder of Camille, Laurent forces himself to go to the morgue every day, before work, to look at the bodies and look for Camille’s. 

“When he went in, he was sickened by a stale smell, a smell of washed flesh, and cold draughts blew across his skin. His clothes hung against his shoulders, as though weighed down by the humidity of the walls.” (Ch.13) 

The translation is by Robin Buss. 

I can see why people found, and still find, Zola shocking—he doesn’t hold back—just look at his description of the corpses. 

Later: 

“He shook off his fears, called himself a child and tried to be strong, but in spite of that his flesh rebelled, and feelings of disgust and horror seized him as soon as he came into the humidity and the stale smell of the hall.

When there were no drowned men on the last row of slabs, he breathed more easily and felt less disgust.” (ibid.) 

What a scene. It is terrifying. This is one of the most striking, unforgettable chapters in the novel, especially when Zola goes from describing the corpses in graphic detail to writing coldly about the people who come in like they come to a show, commenting on or sniggering at the dead bodies. 

This is the moment after Laurent sees Camille’s body. 

“He felt as though a pungent odour were following him around, the odour that this putrefying corpse must be giving off.” (ibid.) 

2/ The characters in Thérèse Raquin are utterly compelling and feel real—not in the sense of being lifelike and multifaceted like Tolstoy’s or Cao Xueqin’s characters, but in the sense that they feel perfectly real within their world, like the characters in Wuthering Heights. 

Up till some time after the murder. 

After the murder, of course Thérèse would change and I can see her open up and no longer feel wrapped up in bad thoughts, but I’m not quite sure about these lines from Zola: 

“She subscribed to a lending library and became passionately fond of all the heroes of the stories that she read. This sudden love of reading had a considerable influence on her temperament. She acquired a nervous sensibility which made her laugh or cry for no reason. The equilibrium that had started to be achieved inside her was shattered. She fell into a sort of vague reverie.” (Ch.16) 

How do I put it, I think I take his characters more seriously than I take his “science”, his theory of the different temperaments being thrown together. 

3/ 15 months after the murder, Laurent also changes, or rather, he has a rush of fear and series of nightmares the night after Thérèse asks him to marry her. I try to tell myself that it’s some kind of delayed reaction, that the awareness of what he’s done only sinks into him now, but somehow to me it doesn’t quite work—his sudden terror in the dark alleyway after the meeting, his obsessive fear and paranoia when he gets home and checks everything, his repeated nightmares that night… all seem a bit… odd? A bit unnatural? 

“He tried to sleep once again. There followed a succession of sensual drowsings and sudden, agonized awakenings. In his furious obstinacy, he kept on going towards Thérèse and kept on coming up against Camille’s corpse. More than ten times […]. His desire was not lessened by this same sinister ending that woke him up every time; a few minutes later, as soon as he went back to sleep, his desire forgot the ghastly corpse that awaited him, and hurried once more to find the lithe, warm body of a woman. For an hour, Laurent lived through this series of nightmares, this bad dream constantly repeated, continually unforeseen, which, at every shocked awakening, left him shattered by an ever sharper sense of terror.” (Ch.17) 

I understand, in theory, that Thérèse’s talk of marriage forces him to confront the fact that he has killed a man, but the sudden excessiveness of it all seems a bit strange. 

See the moment when Laurent looks at his neck where he was bitten by Camille right before death: 

“The scar was light pink. As Laurent was making out his victim’s tooth marks, he felt quite moved by it and the blood rushed to his head. It was then that he noticed something odd. The scar was turned purple by the rising flow; it became bright and blood-filled, standing out red against the plump white neck. At the same time, Laurent felt sharp pricks, as though someone were sticking pins into the wound.” (ibid.) 

I thought this was meant to be scientific? That’s what Zola wrote in the Preface. See Tom’s blog post about the “science” of the book. 

The next day Laurent goes to work, fighting his sleepiness after a night of nightmares and insomnia. After work he comes to see Thérèse—she too has had nightmares and insomnia, she too has been haunted by the image of Camille.    

Zola writes more about it: 

“… Like Laurent, she had twisted around in a frenzy of desire and horror and, like him, told herself that she would no longer be afraid, no longer experience such suffering, when she held her lover between her arms.

At the same moment, this man and this woman had felt a kind of failing of the nerves, which brought them back, gasping and terrified, to their terrible love. An affinity of blood and lust had been established between them. They shuddered the same shudders, and their hearts, in a sort of agonizing fellowship, ached with the same terror. From then on, they had only one body and one soul to feel pleasure and pain. This community, this mutual interpenetration, is a psychological and physiological fact that often occurs between those who are thrown violently together by great nervous shocks.” (Ch.18) 

That looks like mumbo-jumbo to me. It works better if I just read it as a supernatural element—both characters get a visit from the ghost of the dead man. 

Zola explains further: 

“In the mental collapse that followed the acute crisis of the murder, in the feelings of disgust and the need for calm and forgetting that came after that, the two prisoners could imagine that they were free and that no iron link bound them together. The chain lay slack on the ground, while they rested, stricken with a kind of happy stupor, and tried to find love elsewhere, to lead sensibly balanced lives. But on the day when circumstances drove them once more to exchange words of desire, the chain suddenly tightened and they experienced such a shock that they felt attached to one another for ever.” (ibid.) 

This seems not to be guilt, but something else. But what is it? I have no idea. As Thérèse and Laurent wait and try to plant the idea of their marriage in the acquaintances’ heads so they don’t have to say it themselves, the nightmares return every night.  

Let’s go back to Zola’s statement at the beginning, where he defends his book against the critics who fail to understand what he’s doing: 

“The reader will have started, I hope, to understand that my aim has been above all scientific. When I created my two protagonists, Thérèse and Laurent, I chose to set myself certain problems and to solve them […] showing the profound disturbance of a sanguine nature when it comes into contact with a nervous one. […] In a word, I wanted only one thing: given a powerful man and a dissatisfied woman, to search out the beast in them, and nothing but the beast, plunge them into a violent drama and meticulously note the feelings and actions of these two beings. I have merely performed on two living bodies the analytical work that surgeons carry out on dead ones.” (Preface) 

Clearly I’m missing something, because I can’t take that seriously at all. If we go back to chapter 13 for example, which is disgusting and very disturbing, I think it’s a great chapter and Laurent’s reaction upon seeing Camille’s corpse makes perfect sense. I mean it seems natural. I don’t quite understand the logic, the psychology of chapters 17 and 18.  

4/ The passages about the mother’s grief are poignant: 

“The poor mother realized that she alone kept the memory of her dear child alive in the depths of her being. She wept and felt as though Camille had just died a second time.” (Ch.19) 

After 2 chapters of horror and melodrama, chapter 19 is an excellent one, coolly describing the play-acting of the murderers and their manipulation of Madame Raquin and their acquaintance Michaud. Especially good, I think, is Thérèse’s reaction to the effrontery, the bare-faced lie of her lover.  

Perhaps some readers will tell me what I’m missing and how I’m reading it wrong.