thérèse raquin (zola)

Thérèse Raquin is a kind of blockbuster novel, possessing many of the hallmarks of contemporary crime/horror. There is only one real moment of dramatic action in its thirty something chapters, which is sufficient to drive the motor of the book’s narrative. This moment is a gruesome murder, conducted by Laurent, Thérèse’s lover. Zola describes the murder and its subsequent effect on the couple in lurid detail. It’s the extreme psychological examination of the event which raises if above being a mere potboiler. Its sister novel is surely Crime and Punishment, both novels examining, through the incidence of a murder, the structure of late nineteenth century social society. Perhaps it could even be said to have something in common with a contemporary novel such as Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais. Crime as a surgical tool, with all the mystery removed, unlike say, the work of Conan Doyle, designed to strip bare the bride of social mores. Perhaps when the murder mystery started to become a genre, it signified a moment when the social divisions that so often underpin criminality were being swept under the carpet. Zola roots the actions of the protagonists in their hopeless social environment, a space where dreams have no currency and just knuckling down and surviving is all there is to aim for. Curiously, when Thérèse starts to go off the rails in the latter stages of the book, she goes and hangs out with those Parisian bohemians who would later become so fetishised within popular culture, as a kind of ersatz role model for the modern hipster. But she rejects this, suppurated with an unatoneable guilt. The existential weight of karma eventually does for the couple, suggesting a religious dimension at work, over and above everything else.