Analysis

There are a few different reasons why Zola refrains from naming his characters in the first chapter. First, Zola is determined to set a mood of filthiness, squalor, and hopelessness: he focuses on how uncomfortably closed-in the Passage du Pont-Neuf is, and describes how its walls seem to be “stricken with leprosy and crisscrossed with scars” (9). Filling in the names and histories of his characters could distract from this task. But perhaps Thérèse and her family also remain unnamed because Zola wants to suggest that there are many filthy corners of Paris just like this one — that in different parts of the same city, the same kind of depressing scenes are being played out by nameless, interchangeable people.

The second chapter of Thérèse Raquin doesn’t simply explain who the Raquins are; it also explains the urges and motivations behind some of the odd reactions that Thérèse exhibits in the first chapter. We learn that Thérèse looks out at her surroundings with “contemptuous indifference” (12). And soon enough, the reasons for her contempt are explained: her repressed passions, her wild and unrealized dreams, probably even her family heritage. A closed-in Paris street seems like a poor setting for the daughter of an adventurous French sea captain and an Algerian mother, and Thérèse becomes aware of this disparity between her lifestyle and her heredity as she grows older.

Another virtue of the first chapter is that it strikes the mood of disappointment that Zola returns to so often. The narrowness and darkness of the Passage du Pont-Neuf aren’t simply realistic details; they symbolize the set of narrow possibilities that Thérèse is offered in life and seem to point to her dark future. Even when her future isn’t decidedly bleak, it involves “choices” that are both inevitable and insipid, such as Thérèse’s marriage to Camille.

Thérèse’s hopelessness is given a new turn by the appearance of Old Michaud and the other guests. She barely regards these Thursday evening visitors as human beings, viewing them instead as horrid, living decorations: “mechanical bodies whose heads moved and whose arms and legs waved when their strings were pulled” or “paper dolls grimacing around her” (25). Thus, Thérèse’s wild animal energy is stunted in another way, since she is only given these predictable, half-dead companions.

All of these depressing details make the arrival of Laurent seem like a miraculous departure from the usual conditions of Thérèse’s life. The robust Laurent is a foil to the sickly and complacent Camille, but this does not mean that Laurent has the better character; in fact, Camille’s diligence and loyalty to his mother can seem admirable compared to Laurent’s shortsighted unwillingness to obey his father. Thérèse, though, has little time for such distinctions and seems to be craving a way out of her stolid life. But there is another change that Laurent’s presence brings: a shift in the novel’s use of perspective. While the first few chapters cover Mme Raquin, Camille, and mostly Thérèse, the rest of the book will take Laurent as one of its dominant - if not the dominant - perspectives.

In the course of these chapters, Laurent begins an affair with Camille’s wife and is driven to murder Camille himself. It would be wrong, however to identify Camille as Laurent’s antagonist. Laurent is “on intimate terms with Camille, but felt no anger or remorse towards him,” and murders Camille mostly to remove an obstacle, to ensure

himself the life of sensual pleasures and financial stability that he believes Thérèse - and her inheritance - will offer (42).

Thérèse and Camille are a different story; here, there is a clear protagonist-antagonist relationship, though Camille himself is fatally unaware of Thérèse’s hostile feelings. For the first time in the novel, Thérèse voices her long-lived resentments in detail. She tells Laurent of her infuriating, stupefying upbringing: “Oh, what a childhood I had! I still feel revulsion and outrage when I remember the long days I spent I that room with Camille gasping away” (37). Because Laurent and Thérèse can only make love in Mme Raquin’s apartment, Thérèse is (ironically enough) still trapped in Camille’s room. She is enlivened by love, but still cannot escape her limitations and resentments.

However, these chapters do entail a rare departure from the Passage du Pont-Neuf. For the first time, we are given a direct look into the miserable lodging house Laurent rents, occupying a garret apartment that Zola compares to a "hovel" and a "hole." Thérèse enters this space and finds that it is "so small that her wide skirts could hardly fit inside it" (47). The problem that Laurent and Thérèse face may not simply be one of social boundaries and frustrated hopes; whether they know it or not, the closed and cramped settings that they both inhabit may be driving them to a state of restless, keyed-up fury.

Ultimately, Laurent is driven to murder Camille by his own frustrations, by his craving for Thérèse: “A raging of the blood had infected his flesh and now that his mistress was being taken away from him, his passion burst out with a blind fury” (46). On the basis of such irrational instincts, it would be natural to expect Laurent to commit a reckless and impassioned crime - yet he does just the opposite. He carefully thinks through all his options and takes precautions to avoid detection. He even briefly considers killing Camille using a blunt and bloody act of violence - raising his foot to crush the sleeping Camille’s head - but is rational enough to see how easily this murder would be solved.

The murder that Laurent commits is a flawless piece of savagery: it looks like an accident and leaves no incriminating clues. Laurent even leaves the impression that he had ardently and heroically tried to save the drowning Camille. Although Zola constantly points out how different Thérèse and Laurent are in temperament, the two protagonists have found one major point of similarity by the end of this chapter. They have both become proficient in the art of deception

Analysis

As soon as Camille is gone, Laurent feels “a heavy, anxious feeling of joy, joy at having accomplished the crime” (64). But once again, he is able to perfectly conceal his true feelings and motives from those around him. He does so by seeking out the last people that a newly-minted criminal would normally seek: police officials, in this case Old Michaud and Olivier. There is a smug, self-satisfied air that surrounds Laurent in the initial days following the crime. Instead of fleeing a milieu of crime and investigation, Laurent gravitates to settings that resonate with his murderous new status, including Paris’s own house of death, the Morgue.

But in a positive sense too, these chapters present both Thérèse and Laurent with the potential to begin life anew, or at least to embrace new selves. Thérèse begins reading novels, which is in some ways the perfect recreation for her nervous temperament; she

reads about emotional characters and becomes “passionately fond of the heroes of all the stories that she read” (82). While reading transports Thérèse away from her dingy shop and into a world full of heroic and interesting people - people she can finally identify with - Laurent uses his newfound leisure to take a new mistress and loaf around Paris, all stresses gone or forgotten.

Zola underscores these changes and new possibilities by way of contrast. While Thérèse and Laurent are transformed by the murder of Camille, the Thursday evening guests simply carry on as though nothing major had happened. And for the newly-relieved lovers, even these tedious meetings take on a hint of pleasure. Laurent feels “at ease among these few people that he knew” and is not afraid to survey Thérèse with pride and satisfaction (79).

Yet by the end of these chapters, Zola makes it clear that the release that Thérèse and Laurent feel is an illusion, a byproduct of their frequent distance from one another. Throughout Thérèse Raquin, Laurent is portrayed as capable of rationalizing his decisions and thinking through his actions and impulses. But these rational abilities are rendered powerless by the terrible phantasm - Camille’s drowned corpse - that comes to haunt Laurent at night, reducing the strong young man to a state of insomnia and to a childlike fear of the dark.

The nightmare vision of Camille is delivered almost entirely from Laurent’s perspective, and on a first read, it might be tempting to write this vision off as a result of Laurent’s superstitious peasant blood. (Remember, Laurent has an almost supernatural fear of the cat François, which Thérèse does not share.) Zola, however, quickly defeats the idea that all this is a fleeting over-reaction. The two murderers understand one another perfectly, even without speaking, and are determined to unite against “the terror they had shared” - the horrifying figure of the drowned Camille (93). The "perfect" crime begins to shadow their lives.

Analysis

Early in these chapters, Zola signals that Thérèse and Laurent have one and the same perspective: “An affinity of blood and lust had been established between them. They shuddered the same shudders and, in their hearts, a sort of agonizing fellowship ached with the same terror” (94). Formerly, Zola took great pains to differentiate the sanguine Laurent and the nervous Thérèse. The temperamental differences between the two murderers have not yet broken down - Thérèse wants to marry because she fears a nervous crisis, while Laurent cautiously weighs the costs and benefits of a union - yet the deadly links between the two characters are becoming tighter.

None of the other characters have the least hint of how trapped Laurent and Thérèse feel. The two protagonists realize this, and they decide to speed along their marriage by staging a further set of manipulations. In order to win Mme Raquin over to the idea of a new marriage, Thérèse adopts an especially interesting ploy. She neither conceals her negative state of mind nor fully reveals it - instead, she strikes a note that is dour enough to arouse Mme Raquin’s concern, but not to suggest her true psychological torture. Mme Raquin is indeed convinced that Thérèse has “retreated into herself and seemed to be dying of some unknown sickness” (99). She misdiagnoses the sickness as maidenly loneliness, though Thérèse is in fact dying of neurotic terror.

As the narrative moves forward, Thérèse and Laurent continued to be grouped together in emphatic ways. They are not simply companions in sorrow. Despite their nocturnal torments, they manage to share a few sympathetic joys; for instance, on their wedding morning they wake up “with the same profoundly joyful thought: they told themselves that their last night of terror was over” (108). Even their acquaintances regard them in terms of similarity, and Mme Raquin regards them not as bride and groom, but as “her two dear children” (104).

It is clear that Mme Raquin and the Thursday guests are eager for a new beginning. Yet as with the resumption of the Thursday evenings, this “new beginning” is less of a radical, refreshing departure and more of a return to the same comforting, stupefying routines. By the time of the wedding party, Grivet is back to his stupid jokes and Mme Raquin is mostly her affectionate old self. And the idea of the new husband and wife as “children” is itself a return to form, since Mme Raquin also regarded the married Camille and Thérèse as her children. Laurent is simply a new “child,” occupying exactly the same place that Camille once occupied in Mme Raquin’s household and affections. Eerily enough, he becomes a double for his murder victim.

For Thérèse and Laurent, Camille’s lingering influence isn’t merely impossible to escape; indeed, Camille’s influence starts to take on new forms. During their wedding night, the newlyweds are vexed by Camille’s long-disregarded portrait and alarmed by Mme Raquin’s tabby cat, whom Laurent equates with Camille. Laurent doesn’t even have the limited comfort of being able to toss off the earlier manifestations of Camille, since the drowned man’s scar remains on his neck, resisting any and all soothing efforts.