Zola's Thérèse: Nineteenth-Century Moral Codes and L'Autre in Bourgeois Society

104 Pages·2015·0.74 MB·English

by  Kathryn Steele

ZOLA’S THÉRÈSE: NINETEENTH-CENTURY MORAL CODES AND L’AUTRE IN
BOURGEOIS SOCIETY
by

Kathryn Steele
A Thesis
Submitted to the
Graduate Faculty
of
George Mason University
in Partial Fulfillment of
The Requirements for the Degree
of
Master of Arts
Foreign Languages

Committee:

Director

Department Chairperson
Dean, College of Humanities and Social
Sciences
Date: Spring Semester 2015
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA
Zola’s Thérèse: Nineteenth-Century Moral Codes and L’Autre in Bourgeois Society
A Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of
Arts at George Mason University
by
Kathryn Steele
Master of Arts
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2011
Bachelor of Arts
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2010
Director: Paula Gilbert, Professor
Department of Foreign Languages
Spring Semester 2015
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA
Copyright 2015 Kathryn Steele
All Rights Reserved

ii
DEDICATION
This is dedicated to my father, Gerald, who has always supported me in all my academic
and personal endeavors.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the many friends, relatives, and supporters who have made this
happen. Drs. Gilbert, Pichichero, Ricouart, and Christensen were of invaluable help in the
process of researching and writing this thesis. Finally, thanks go out to the French
professors at Virginia Tech for their support and inspiration.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Abstract .............................................................................................................................. vi
Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter One: La Femme dans le milieu marital – Thérèse and Camille’s Bourgeois
Marriage .............................................................................................................................. 7
Chapter Two: An Orientalist Adulteress – Portrait of Thérèse and the Dangers of Volupté
........................................................................................................................................... 19
Chapter Three: La Femme dangereuse – Female Criminality .......................................... 37
Chapter Four: Transposition of the Other and the Sexualized Heroine – Carné’s and
Stratton’s Cinematic Adaptations of Thérèse Raquin ....................................................... 48
Chapter Five: Thérèse – Precursor of Zoliennes Women ................................................. 60
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 79
References ......................................................................................................................... 90

v
ABSTRACT
ZOLA’S THÉRÈSE: NINETEENTH-CENTURY MORAL CODES AND L’AUTRE IN
BOURGEOIS SOCIETY
Kathryn Steele, M.A.
George Mason University, 2015
Thesis Director: Dr. Paula Gilbert

This thesis describes the portrayal of the female protagonist in Émile Zola’s 1867 novel
Thérèse Raquin. Zola, a Naturalist author, communicates a critique of nineteenth-century
bourgeois Parisian society and explores gender relations through a description of an affair
and a murder. Thérèse is examined as an “Other,” demonstrating Orientalist attitudes and
representing a binary image of woman as an embodiment of virtue and vice. With her
portrayal as a femme fatale, this analysis of the “exotic” Thérèse will present attitudes
towards adultery/marriage and towards female criminality when the novel was published,
connecting these to social changes that were beginning to take place. This study will also
explore two cinematic adaptations of Thérèse Raquin, and how her Otherness and
sexuality is translated in film representations. To close, this thesis will connect Zola’s
foundational portrayal of Thérèse with two later female characters from his oeuvre:
Gervaise Macquart of L’Assommoir and Anna Coupeau of Nana. The author will discuss
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and demonstrate the complexity of Zola’s early work in relation to his social and
temporal context. In the process of researching and writing this thesis, the author
conducted a literature search and reviewed Zola’s works.
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INTRODUCTION
The nineteenth century in France was one of transformation and progress in the
domains of literature, science, medicine, architecture, and social and political change. As
an author, journalist, and social critic, Émile Zola exemplifies the second half of the
nineteenth century in many ways. Born in 1840 in Paris, Zola spent much of his
childhood in Aix-en-Provence. Like several of the characters he would create later on,
Zola lost his father at a young age, and was raised by his mother and maternal
grandparents. Subsequent to his family’s return to the French capital, Zola found himself
disillusioned with the Paris of the Second Empire, where extreme poverty was starkly
juxtaposed with the haute aristocratie and the new grands boulevards and buildings of
Baron Georges Haussmann (Knapp 4-9 passim).
In 1862, Zola began writing and working in publishing; his first work, a collection
of short stories, was published in 1864 (Knapp vii). He became very interested in science
and began to create his own literary style, combining the influence of Darwin’s and
Taine’s scientific theories with the realist style of Balzac’s and Flaubert’s novels (Knapp
22). With the composition of his novel Thérèse Raquin (1867), Zola began developing a
new type of realist literary perspective: Naturalism. Zola’s Naturalism, “une grande
enquête sur l’homme, sur toutes les variétés, toutes les situations, toutes les floraisons,
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toutes les dégénérescences de la nature humaine” showed evidence of Taine’s influence,1
and promoted a more scientific view of literature (Taine, qtd. in Hatzfeld 697). The
importance of truth, reality, and observation was paramount in Naturalism, which
proposed a realistic portrait of its human subjects, including both the beautiful and ugly
aspects of life; sociology, a developing discipline at the time, and observation were thus
necessarily integrated into Naturalist writing. Brian Nelson writes that Zola’s work in fact
“represented a form of practical sociology, completing the work of the scientist, whose
hope it was to change the world not by judging it, but by understanding it” (“Zola and the
Nineteenth Century” 3).
Two crucial aspects of Zola’s Naturalism are hérédité and milieu, combining both
biological/ hereditary influences on a person’s character with the influences of his/ her
environment and social setting. Although these aspects would be illustrated in much
greater depth in Zola’s famous série des Rougon-Macquart, one can see in all the
principal characters of Thérèse Raquin the importance of milieu and temperament,2 and
in Thérèse’s French-Algerian identity, the influence of hérédité. The milieu de vie of a
zolien character is a determinant of his/ her life, and that character can never escape it;
this can be seen in Zola’s early novels as well as in the série des Rougon-Macquart

1 Hippolyte Adolphe Taine was a French critic/historian and an exponent of positivism.
Taine created the foundation for studying human nature and history through scientific
methods, and developed a determinist esthetic according to which “l’oeuvre d’art derive
de trois facteurs, la race (facteur individuel), le milieu (facteur géographique), le moment
(facteur historique)” (“Hippolye Adolphe Taine,” “Taine, Hippolyte Adophe”).
2 The theory of the temperaments is founded on Hippocrates’ distinction of the bilious (or
choleric), nervous (or melancholic), sanguine, and lymphatic (or phlegmatic) humors.
Thérèse represents the nervous temperament, Laurent the sanguine, and Camille the
lymphatic; the novel “raconte donc la confrontation de ces tempéraments” (Reffait 232).
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