"Therese Raquin" by Emile Zola

It’s been about eight years since I’ve read this - I first read it when I was around sixteen and since then, I’ve read the book, read a graphic novel based on the book, listened to the audiobook, watched a production of it and read a ton of journals all about the way in which the book portrays Shakespearean themes. The way in which I first discovered it was because I heard about it on the radio. Yes, the radio. I don’t actually remember exactly where but I liked the pronunciation of the word and looked for it for half an hour because I couldn’t spell it. It took a while but I finally found it and read the book. It was crazy and amazing. It was almost overwhelmingly emotional and it makes you fearful and tearful at the same time. It completely changed the way I thought about gothic romances and what they could achieve. I admit, I never thought literature could be so dark and romantic since I read Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles Series.

My favourite character was obviously Therese because she has this almost tragic sense from the very beginning of the novel. She, to me, resonates the tragic females of Shakespeare and the doomed females of nineteenth century literature like those from Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Anne Radcliffe and Mary Shelley. Most of all, I found that Therese’s greatest quality was her ability to be patient and yet, be completely reckless at the same time. She was reckless about her love, but when it comes to herself and her thoughts, she remains patient before she takes much action. When she believes she’s seeing a ghost or phantom figure, there is an awful lot of time that it takes her to go insane, but when it came to the act of why the ghost came to her, it almost took no time at all. It’s almost like her deep contemplation comes too late. But her thoughts are always interestingly descriptive. She always seems so internal even when everything could be moving on the outside world. However, her biggest fault is the way in which she fails to act morally in her life. She nearly always chooses what she wants rather than what is required to better the situation and this makes her situation worse. When she is haunted by the ghost, she doesn’t take the morality question into account until it is too late and she still takes a new lover. As a character, she represents all the repressed emotions of the common female. These repressed almost Freudian emotions include things like killing your husband and taking a new lover, engaging in immoral activities completely out of gender and time, having a ‘Romeo and Juliet’ effect with the new lover. It is not only Freudian but something that would never actually be acted out in real life unless the woman was completely criminal. Having this criminal personality mixed with the overwhelming emotions are pretty suggestive of being a sociopath. When it comes to repressed emotions, she is the sociopathic criminal who masquerades as the romantic female with the overwhelming emotions of a tragic heroine.

A key theme in the book is death. Death is not only a theme that is made flesh in the book but it is also a theme that drives the main character insane. It is a theme that basically tears the book apart and creeps into the storyline, ripping each and every aspect of the main character’s new love existence until finally, there is really nothing left. It entails the entire premise of the book and every single aspect of the character that is completely consumed by the death of her first love at the same time. It is an incredibly complex theme with many symbols such as the sea. The characters play out the theme of death physically, psychologically and see it as a point of mental torture which is possibly one of the best things I’ve ever seen in literature. Emile Zola writes so cunningly about the aspect of the night terror and death that we consider it almost too realistic to just be a ghost. We no longer know what reality truly is because it is shaded over by the third person limited perspective of Therese. This theme is mainly used because of the fact it is so relative to so much literature of Zola’s own time and also of the great literary eras before him. To make Therese basically a female Byronic anti-hero type character is to also link her back to people like Victor Frankenstein who also suffers great night terrors. It is these dreams of death and destruction that ultimately destroy the character from the inside out. First, it destroys their mental state, then the way they see other people, then the way they see themselves and their life, and finally the value of their own lives - mostly leading to suicide. It really does impact the way you read the book because there aren’t many female Byronic heroes that you see in literature except Therese being the template. Therese is a perfect mix between the Byronic hero and the characters of Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, Juliet, Elizabeth Lavanza, Sybil Vane and even aspects of Jane Eyre - all of which are relative to the characters’ own experiences of love and death.

This book means so much to me because it was at this point that I realised what Liebestod actually meant and I was never really the same again. It impacted my latter readings because after that I basically devoured the works of Emile Zola. I haven’t quite finished yet but I must have read at least four works after Therese, it was just one of those things. I couldn’t really get off them, it was like a drug for satirical tragedy. Through my re-readings of “Therese Raquin” by Emile Zola, I have realised that Therese plays both hero and villain in her own story. Whilst her physical presence is the hero of her being - she is beautiful and stunning, described as something to worship in her looks, her mental contemplations are the villain since they are so dark and almost cunningly evil in their descent into madness. They not only lead her to do bad things to others, but they lead her to her own death. The best thing about this book is how conflicted the reader feels about Therese after they’ve finished.

This is also why so many more people should read this book. It’s beautifully tragic and has an incredible amount of overwhelming contemplation on love, death and what it means to commit an act of complete immorality. A lot of people read it today because of the fact it represents the gothic in a completely different way to what you are normally used to. It presents us with a woman who doesn’t know whether she is a hero or villain of her own story herself. She goes through her entire life not really knowing who she is or what she wants. I would like to explore that more when I revisit the book - this is a woman without a single want in the world and yet, she seems to do everything to change her position. When she changes that position, it comes back to haunt her because she chose the easy, yet immoral, way out.