Therese Raquin de Emile Zola

Therese Raquin

Emile Zola

Therese Raquin is the story of a young woman, unhappily married to her first cousin by an overbearing aunt who at first seem to be well-intentioned but in reality is deeply selfish. Therese's husband, Camille, is feeble and self-absorbed, and when the opportunity arises, Therese enters into a fierce and sordidly ardent affair with one of Camille's friends, Laurent. In his preface, Zola explains that his goal in this novel was to "study temperaments and not characters." Because of this detached and scientific approach, Therese Raquin is considered to be an example of naturalism literature."

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Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola (1840 - 1902) was a French novelist, playwright, journalist, the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which is encapsulated in the renowned newspaper headline J'accuse. Zola was nominated for the first and second Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902.

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'Therese Raquin' is a clinically observed, sinister tale of adultery and murder among the lower orders in nineteenth-century Paris. Zola's dispassionate dissection of the motivations of his characters, mere 'human beasts' who kill in order to satisfy their lust, is much more than an atmospheric Second Empire period-piece. 'Therese Raquin' stands as a key early manifesto of the French Naturalist movement, of which Zola was the founding father. Even today, this novel has lost none of its power to shock.