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ZOLA AND THÉRÈSE RAQUIN

When Thérèse Raquin was published in 1867, it caused rather a scandal. This violent, red-blooded story of adultery and murder among the lower orders shocked a middle-class readership accustomed to delicate psychological intrigue and veiled titillation, and conferred on Zola a quite undeserved reputation as a pornographer. But for the young man of twenty-seven vying to make a name for himself in the Parisian literary world, publicity of any kind was not to be spurned;…a number of years as a freelance literary and art critic for regional newspapers had given him a keen sense of polemical cut and thrust, as well as nourishing his pronounced talent for self-publicity, while a period of dire poverty in the early 1860’s had left him with a burning determination not to fail in his chosen profession.

Thérèse Raquin was a runaway success: the first edition sold out in under four months. A year later, after one more ‘experimental’ novel (Madeline Ferat), Zola was already working on the monumental twenty-volume cycle Les Rougon-Maquart which was to dominate his life for the next fifteen years and for which he is now so justly celebrated.

While it may have enjoyed a succés de scandale at the time, Thérèse Raquin has endured with subsequent generations for different reasons. A work of intense atmosphere and unremitting tension, it builds a compelling drama out of a minimal plot, few characters, and the most basic of human motivations, the sex drive, in its crudest form.

For all its strong story-line and direct presentation, however, the book remains highly ambiguous and unsettling…. There is something distinctly disturbing about the way he draws his characters and the attitude he invites his readers to adopt towards them. Zola works hard to deny the reader two key privileges which centuries of increasingly refined psychological literature had accustomed him or her to enjoying as of right: those of identifying with the characters’ motives and feelings, and of judging their actions… Zola’s aim, – explained in a preface to the second edition, a landmark manifesto for Naturalism – was precisely to make a radical break with the prevailing literary norms of human interest and moral judgement, and to write an experimental work which would utterly undermine the novel’s dependence on conventional psychology.

By permission of Oxford University Press

from the Introduction of Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola, translated with an introduction and notes by Andrew Rothwell (2008)