Thérèse Raquin Study Guide

Émile Zola was born in Paris in 1840, but his family moved three years later to Aix-en-Provence, in southern France. He grew up in Aix-en-Provence, where he became lifelong friends with the painter Paul Cézanne. When his father died in 1847, the family was left with very little money. A little more than a decade later, Zola and his mother moved to Paris, where they lived in poverty. Zola eventually started working in the sales department of Hachette (a publishing house), but he left that job in 1866 to devote himself to writing. His first notable work was Thérèse Raquin, in which he began to develop his ideas about human behavior and disposition—ideas he would explore in more depth in Les Rougon-Macquart, a series of 20 novels considered to be some of the foundational works of the Naturalist literary movement. Zola is also famous for J’Accuse…!, the open letter he penned in defense of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army who was wrongfully accused of treason and sentenced to life in prison. The letter led to uproar throughout France, as people rallied against the wrongful conviction. The influence of this open letter signaled a shift in French society, making it clear that the country’s prominent artists and intellectuals possessed the power to sway the general public against the government and the Catholic Church. By the time Zola wrote J’Accuse! (in 1898), the majority of his celebrated literary career was already behind him. He died four years later of carbon monoxide poisoning due to a poorly ventilated chimney.

Before the serialized publication of Thérèse Raquin in 1867, the literary scene in Paris was accustomed to tales that avoided straightforward examinations of misery, violence, and sexual excitement. But Émile Zola was interested in establishing Naturalism, a literary movement that grew out of Realism but was much more concerned with things like science, objectivity, and determinism (or the idea that everything is determined by preexisting causes). He wanted to represent his characters with the same indifferent objectivity that a scientist or doctor might use when observing subjects in an experiment, so he didn’t shy away from telling a very dark tale in Thérèse Raquin—so dark, in fact, that it unsettled the general public. Zola was cast as an immoral writer of pornography, but he didn’t shy away from the public uproar. To the contrary, he indulged the scandal, and some historians believe that he even encouraged certain critics to write scathing reviews of the book, thus giving him the opportunity to publish his own thoughts about the novel in a preface that was included in the second edition. This preface helped define the overall goals of Naturalism, which Zola championed as a “methodical” and unflinching way of exploring human life and reality through a scientific lens. Naturalism thus stood in stark contrast to Romanticism, which was more florid, fanciful, and focused on the idea of transcendence.

Émile Zola was particularly interested in exploring the ways in which “temperament”—or certain inherent traits and dispositions—impacts how people lead their lives. He first explored temperament in Thérèse Raquin and then went on to do the same in his 20-novel series Les Rougon-Macquart, which bears the subtitle Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire—or “Natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire.” The seventh novel in this series, L’Assommoir, is worth mentioning in relation to Thérèse Raquin, since both books examine how a single trait or flaw (alcoholism in L’Assommoir and murderous passion in Thérèse Raquin) can lead to ruin and unhappiness. Zola, who considered himself the foremost leader of the literary movement known as French Naturalism, was heavily influenced by the historian and literary critic Hippolyte Taine, as well as the physiologist Claude Bernard—Zola drew on the ideas these intellectuals set forth about the importance of social environment and heredity, which ultimately informed Zola’s thoughts about what drives people to behave in certain ways. In terms of his writing style, Zola took cues from realist authors like Honoré de Balzac, whose most famous work is La Comédie humaine, a multi-volume collection of stories, novels, and essays about French life. Similarly, Zola drew inspiration from the realist author Gustave Flaubert, best known for his novel Madame Bovary.