Emile Zolas "Thérèse Raquin"

Thérèse Raquin

Plot

The story is about madame Raquin and her morbid son Camille, and her adoptive daughter Thérèse. They're a middle class family that lives of the interest from saved money. Madame Raquin is extremely afraid that when she dies her son Camille will end up alone, and she knows he can't survive by himself. Thus, she decides that Camille and her adoptive daughter eventually will get married, because Thérèse is already used to take care of him. To make it natural and familiar she tells them about it when they're both really young. When Thérèse turns twenty-one she is forced to marry her brother, but it didn't seem to bother her because she'd been given a lot of time to get used to the idea. They actually did love each other, but only as brother and sister and not as husband and wife.

The marriage is doomed to fail because Camille isn't showing any affection at all, and inevitable boredom will reach Thérèse. After they got married she was also forced to move to Paris with her new husband. Camille is working during the day and Thérèse gets to manage a little store in a rough neighborhood, where she stands day in and day of together with madame Raquin. There are no lighter sides of life for her at all, until the day when Camille brings home an old friend from school. The friends name is Laurent and he will become very drawn to the melancholy Thérèse, even though her appearance is not to her benefit. Thérèse can sense his animal instincts and becomes attracted to him as well. They start a relationship based on infidelity and can't get enough of each other.

Laurent eventually suggests that the only way for them to be together more is to kill Camille, a suggestion of something Thérèse only makes an short indication of. On a sunday trip Laurent decides to take action and takes Camille out on a boat ride. A fight of life and death takes place on the boat where poor Camille is brutally murdered. Madame Raquin gets a heart attack and becomes paralyzed. Everything became as they wanted, Camille's gone and there's no suspicion towards them at all. After a time of mourning they got married, but the marriage turns out to be a fiasco. The murder of Camille haunts them, and his weaken and swollen body seem to appear everywhere in the presence of the couple. The unbearable guilt is slowly driving them to paranoia and insanity. Now there's only one thing keeping them together and that is to inherit Madame Raquin's fortune. Time goes and Thérèse start drinking and becomes a prostitute, while Laurent spend a lot of time painting, drinking and visiting prostitutes. They eventually got sick of the site of each other, they started building up hate for one another that would lead into insanity. One day they couldn't take it anymore and committed suicide.

Main characters
Madame Raquin adore her son Camille more than anything in the world, and treats him like a child because of his illness, even though he is in his early twenties. Camille is not used to anything else and the exaggerated attention his mother have given him all his life leaves him confused and disoriented by him self. He never developed the mental strength to make it on his own in the real world. Since he's so used to be the one taken care of and the one felt sorry for, he never developed the ability to feel sorrow, anger and remorse for other people but himself.

Thérèse was adopted by her aunt, because her mother was dead and her father didn't have the time or ability to take care of a child. She felt alone in the world, trapped inside her mind, her inner self and her thoughts. Thérèse was the girl who lived in an environment surrounded with morbidness and disease. She never got to fulfill desires and needs that she possessed, until the day when Laurent came along. Laurent was a friend of Camille from school days that he brought home one day. He was the exact opposite to Camille, in all meanings of the word. He was tall and good looking, he was healthy and had muscles. He had all that was needed for Thérèse to get interested and attracted to him.

Story development
In the beginning of the story life for the family Raquin seemed quite calm, easygoing and regular. The children grew up, got married and found jobs. For Camille it was everything he could imagine, and everything he could handle. Thérèse on the other hand didn't live the life she wanted and dreamt of. Instead she lived in boredom, with no brighter side of life at all, having an endless boring job, working with madame Raquin, and being married to an pale and morbidly weak man, who she also could call her brother.

Somewhere in the middle of the story Laurent comes into the picture, and Thérèse's boring life starts to take a turn. Excitement began to appear and she realized there was a reason to live. All her stored needs that earlier never got to see the light of day finally became satisfied, to a level that she never could have anticipated in all her life.

Towards the end of the story Laurent had become more and more convinced that he wanted Thérèse for him self. He didn't want to sneak around anymore and needed a solution. There was only one answer to the irritation that tortured him, and to the obstacle that stood in his way, which was the simple act of annihilation: murder. But nothing felt like before after the death of Camille.
Thérèse started to realize that nothing of what she had was based on love, but on pure lust and desire. It finally ends with both of them killing themselves.

Character development
Thérèse is the main character of the story and changes quite a bite throughout the book. In the beginning of the story she more or less didn't have a life, at least not one worth living. As it's clearly described in the book she shared a bed with an invalid, but her inner life was aflame with passion. She ended up meeting a man who she could experience her accumulated, unfulfilled passions with.

It's obvious why she changed like she did, because no one wants to live a life in unhappiness. She actually only changed her utterly behavior, since all of what she later did had been in her mind and dreams for a long time. It is who she was from the beginning, she just didn't get a chance to show it until the time was right.

All the changes Thérèse went through is kind of symbolic in one way, perhaps an act of rebellion. It shows the no person wants to live an unworthy and unfulfilling life.

Vocabulary and writing style
When I read this book I surprisingly didn't find that many words that were from the time it was written. At least not a lot of words that I know were from that time. I think the writing style was quite similar to books written in nowadays. Most of the time I could see that the story took place a long time ago because of the description of things. Of course I found words and entire sentences that I think are different and old.

On Page 36 it says “Madame Raquin had formerly had a haberdashery business at vernon, ...” and the word haberdashery is even according to the dictionary old-fashioned.

On page 37 it says “This crippling weakness only made his mother love him the more” and is, in my eyes, an old construction of a sentence. The fact that the writer puts 'the' before 'more' makes it sound a little older.

Objects and images described
Descriptions of objects and images are very good in this book, one can almost see the things being described in front of you. The very first sentences of the story on page 31 is a good example of that. “At the end of the rue Guénégaud, as you come up from the river, you find the passage du Pont-Neuf, a sort of narrow, dark corridor connecting rue Mazarine and rue de Seine. This passage is thirty yards long and two in width at the most; it is paved with yellowish flagstones, worn and loose, which always exude a damp, pungent smell, and it is covered with a flat, glazed roofing black with grime.”

Emotional response
In my opinion the story released emotions of disgust and abhorrence. But it's not like I see it as a bad thing, because I like to read about such bizarre events. He's leading us to the essence of the inner self of a human being, where evil, hate, and self love are roaming freely. As a true naturalist he's excluding euphemism and took the writing to another level, which make the story the horrific tale it is. The book is more or less an experiment on how purely naturalistic a story can be. As Zola hi...