Thérèse Raquin explores the things that—for better or worse—bind people together. In Thérèse and Laurent’s case, an intense physical intimacy draws them together, as they each depend on the other to give them something they need. For Thérèse, Laurent helps her feel free from the oppressive, depressing life she has been forced to live with Camille. Laurent, on the other hand, looks to Thérèse as someone who can satisfy his sexual desires. As their relationship develops, though, the ways in which they depend on each other become more complex. After they murder Camille, for instance, they turn to each other for emotional support. But because they’re both haunted by murdering Camille, they end up tormenting each other instead of offering solace or consolation. Because they remind each other of what they’ve done, a strong feeling of resentment takes hold of their relationship, infusing it with bitterness and—eventually—outright hatred. Locked in a loveless relationship that only exacerbates their struggle to move on, they experience feelings of helplessness, as if they can’t escape the past—or, for that matter, their relationship. In a strange way, the tortured existence they share actually binds them together in a kind of intimacy that, although distorted by hatred, actually resembles the intensity of their initial sexual connection. By the end of the novel, their hatred for one another is so strong that it’s almost unifying, as if their original romantic bond has simply transformed into something more sinister. Consequently, the novel indicates that people can come to depend on each other in unexpected and even destructive ways, suggesting that it’s just as possible for people to be bound by hatred and resentment as it is for them to be bound by love.
Thérèse and Laurent’s relationship is somewhat transactional—it’s not about a mutual feeling of love, but about satisfying certain needs. Laurent, for example, is mainly interested in fulfilling his sexual desires. Having lived the life of a freewheeling artist for a brief time, he has become accustomed to sexual pleasures that have left him with “compelling needs of the flesh.” The word “needs” is crucial here, as it highlights the fact that Laurent pursues an affair not just because he thinks it might be enjoyable, but because he has come to depend on a certain level of sexual gratification in his life. To fulfill his sexual needs, he has been paying sex workers to sleep with him. Once it becomes clear that Thérèse would eagerly take him as a lover, though, he realizes that he could stop paying sex workers if he and Thérèse were to start an affair. It’s evident, then, that he doesn’t gravitate toward Thérèse because he loves her, but because he sees her as a convenient way to satisfy his needs. And Thérèse, for her part, views Laurent as a perfect way to escape the crushing boredom and monotony of her life with Camille. Just looking at Laurent gives her a thrill, lending her life a sense of vibrancy and excitement that she’s never experienced before. In turn, the two lovers embark on a relationship based not on purely romantic feelings but on the fact that they have mutual needs.
To that end, Thérèse Raquin is less about a romantic relationship than it is about a fierce, all-consuming dependency between two people. When his boss tells him he’ll get fired if he keeps sneaking away from work, Laurent is distraught because his and Thérèse’s affair grinds to a halt. The ensuing months are full of agony and despair, as if the two lovers are addicted to a drug they can no longer take. But their dependency on one another isn’t necessarily tied to feelings of love, as evidenced by the fact that they continue to depend on each other even after hatred and resentment overtake their relationship. At the beginning of their relationship, they’re connected because of the ways in which their sexual bond fulfills their needs—later, though, they’re connected by the horrifying fact that they worked together to kill Camille. Because they both shoulder the burden of this secret, a new kind of dependency takes hold of them. They come to resent each other, but they also still need each other. For instance, because they experience night terrors that keep them from sleeping, they count on having scathing, violent arguments each night, knowing these brawls are the only way to tire themselves out enough to finally fall asleep. The novel therefore illustrates the enduring strength of certain forms of dependency, which are often capable of existing in even the most troubled, spiteful relationships (or perhaps especially in such relationships).
A downside of developing such a strong dependency on another person, the novel suggests, is that it can trap people in terrible situations. Although Thérèse and Laurent are never discovered by law enforcement and thrown in jail, they still experience a feeling of imprisonment. After all, their dependency on one another keeps them trapped in their toxic, violent relationship. The novel actually explores this feeling of being trapped in terrible situations in a variety of ways. Take, for instance, the fact that Thérèse is forced as a helpless baby to depend on Madame Raquin to house her and raise her, eventually making her feel trapped in a mundane, joyless life. Furthermore, after becoming paralyzed and learning that Thérèse and Laurent killed Camille, Madame Raquin has to depend on her son’s murderers to feed, clothe, and carry her—a terrible form of psychological torture. In all of these cases, overreliance on another person leads to fierce resentment, and though the novel shies away from making an explicit argument about the downsides of human dependency, it certainly highlights the potential dangers of needing other people.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Dependency and Resentment ThemeTracker
Dependency and Resentment Quotes in Thérèse Raquin
By then Camille was twenty. His mother still treated him like a spoilt little boy. She adored him because she had struggled to keep him alive through a youth full of pain and sickness. The child had had every imaginable type of fever and illness, one after the other, and Madame Raquin had put up a fifteen-year fight against the sequence of fearful maladies which had threatened to snatch her son from her. She had overcome them all with her patience, care, and adoring devotion.
Camille was irritated by his mother’s constant fussing; he had rebellious moments when he wanted to rush about and make himself ill, just to escape from her cloying attentions which were starting to make him feel sick. Then he would drag Thérèse off and challenge her to wrestle with him in the grass. One day he gave his cousin a push and she fell over; she leapt up at once like a wild animal, with her cheeks red and eyes blazing with anger, and threw herself on him with both fists raised. Camille slid to the ground. He was scared.
When he left her he was tottering like a drunkard. The next day, once he had regained his caution and his rather forced composure, he asked himself whether or not to go back to this lover whose kisses so inflamed his passions. At first he firmly resolved to stay at home. Then he began to weaken. He wanted to forget Thérèse, the sight of her naked body and her sweet but brutal caresses, yet there she still was, implacable, holding her arms out to him. The physical pain which this vision caused him soon became unbearable.
I don’t know how I can have loved you; actually, it was more like hate. The sight of you irritated me, I couldn’t stand it; when you were there, my nerves were stretched to breaking-point, my mind went blank, and I saw red. Oh, how I suffered! Yet I wanted my suffering and longed for you to come; […]
But, unbeknown to him, desire had worked away deep inside him until it had finally delivered him, bound hand and foot, into the wild embrace of Thérèse. Now he was afraid he would cast prudence aside altogether, and did not dare go to the Passage du Pont-Neuf of an evening for fear of committing some act of folly. He was no longer in control of his actions; his mistress, with her cat-like suppleness and nervous sensitivity, had slowly insinuated herself into every fibre of his body. He needed this woman to live, as one needs food and drink.
Before Thérèse had come he had not had any thought of murdering Camille; then, under the pressure of events and in exasperation at the thought that he would not see his lover ever again, he had talked of his death. Thus a new corner of his unconscious nature had revealed itself: carried away by his adultery, he had started dreaming of murder.
If they were in a hurry to get marriage over with, it was because they could no longer stand being apart and on their own. Every night they were visited by the drowned man, and insomnia laid them on a bed of burning coals, turning them over with red-hot irons. The state of nervous irritation in which they were living still kindled new desires in them each evening, setting atrocious hallucinations before their eyes.
But in the dreadful silence that followed, the two murderers still went on conversing about their victim. […] They could not have understood each other better if they had both screamed in heart-rending tones: ‘We killed Camille, and his body is still here between us, turning our limbs to ice.’ And the terrible confessions went on flowing between them, more visible and resounding than ever, in the calm, damp air of the room.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I didn’t get married for sleepless nights…We’re behaving like children…It’s your fault; when you put on your graveyard expression like that, it flusters me. Do try and be a bit more cheerful tonight and not scare me to death.’
Thérèse remained tight-lipped, for she had no intention of letting Laurent fritter away the small fortune on which her freedom depended. When her husband pressed her with questions in an attempt to gain her assent, she replied drily, pointing out that, if he left his office, he would no longer be bringing in any money, so he would have to depend entirely on her. While she was speaking, Laurent looked at her sharply in a disconcerting way that made the rejection she was about to pronounce stick in her throat; she thought she could read in her accomplice’s eyes the menacing threat: ‘If you don’t agree, I’ll spill the beans.’
‘It’s perfectly clear, I can guess the whole sentence from the look in Madame’s eye. I don’t need things written out for me on a table, one glance from her is enough. What she meant to say is: “Thérèse and Laurent have taken good care of me.’”
Grivet had reason to feel pleased with his powers of imagination, because this time the whole company agreed with him. The guests began to sing the couple’s praises for having been so kind to the poor lady.
Suddenly, Thérèse and Laurent burst into tears. An overwhelming crisis broke them and flung them into each other’s arms, as weak as children. They both felt something gentle and tender awakening in their bosom. They cried, unable to speak, thinking of the sordid life they had led and would go on leading, if they were cowardly enough to go on at all. Then, as they thought back over the past, they felt so weary and disgusted with themselves that they were filled with an immense need for rest, oblivion. They exchanged a final glance, a glance of gratitude, before the knife and the glass of poison. Then Thérèse took the glass, drank half of it, and handed it to Laurent, who swallowed the rest straight down.
