Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Thérèse Raquin, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Passion and Pleasure
Consequences and Delusion
Dependency and Resentment
Money, Greed, and Class
Summary
Analysis
Laurent feels good the next morning. He slept well and is relieved to have finally committed the murder, which had been hanging over his head for a long time. As he gets dressed, though, his collar grazes the bitemark Camille left on his neck. The wound surges with pain, contorting Laurent’s face into an ugly, grotesque expression. After washing the wound, though, he continues getting dressed and goes to work, where he tells everyone what happened. They all shower him with pity and treat him like a hero for saving Thérèse.
In some ways, it seems as if Laurent and Thérèse are going to get away with killing Camille without experiencing any downsides. From a legal perspective, this might be true, but it seems unlikely that the murderers will escape without experiencing some psychological consequences—as made evident by the pain caused by Laurent’s bitemark, which symbolizes that it’s impossible to do something so horrible and then completely move on. The bitemark will seemingly always be with him, serving as a constant reminder of his extreme immorality.
Themes
Laurent’s only concern is that Camille’s death has yet to be officially recorded, since the authorities still haven’t found the body. Although he’s sure Camille was dead, he’s unsettled by the lack of closure, so he starts going to the morgue every day before work. It’s a terrible routine, since he has to carefully study the faces of any corpse that died by drowning, staring into their bloated, disintegrating faces. He starts having nightmares and is relieved whenever there are no new drowned corpses. And yet, his time in the morgue is also somewhat interesting, since he can observe the many different kinds of people who visit the dead. What’s more, he even becomes somewhat sexually aroused one day while looking at the nude corpse of a young woman.
Laurent’s trips to the morgue have a certain symbolic significance because they suggest that his life has become grotesque and full of death after murdering Camille. He develops an obsession with death, finding himself compulsively drawn to the morgue on a daily basis. Indeed, he literally stares death in the face every morning, unable to let himself move on until he finds Camille’s corpse. And yet, there’s also a perverse eroticism at play in his trips to the morgue, suggesting that Laurent conflates violence and sexual passion—perhaps because he ended up resorting to violence as a way of continuing his romantic relationship with Thérèse.
Themes
Just when he can take the nightmares about the morgue no longer, Laurent tells himself he’ll only go twice more—and then he finds Camille. His old friend’s corpse is bloated, discolored, and disintegrating. As he studies Camille, he feels as if the body is “pathetic,” thinking that anyone could tell by just a glance that Camille was nothing more than a low-paid employee. After leaving the morgue, Laurent feels as if the smell of rotting bodies is somehow following him. But because he now has closure that Camille is dead, he devotes himself to the gratifying attempt to forget about the entire matter.
Laurent gains the closure he’s been looking for, but it’s unlikely that closure will actually help him move on from murdering Camille. The fact that the smell of corpses seems to trail him as he walks through the streets is a testament to just how hard it will be to forget about what he’s done. No matter what he tells himself, there’s no changing the fact that he murdered Camille in cold blood. He will simply have to learn to live with this reality.
Themes
