Thérèse Raquin

by Pericles Lewis

Inspired by Darwinism, Émile Zola was particularly concerned with deterministic accounts of human behavior and laws governing heredity, and wrote a series of novels, beginning with Thérèse Raquin (1867), about a family, the Rougon-Macquarts, afflicted with hereditary criminality. He also turned Thérèse Raquin into a play (1873), one of the first examples of dramatic naturalism. Naturalism was the leading new movement in the novel and the theater towards the end of the nineteenth century. Naturalists often had left-wing political convictions, sympathized with socialism, and campaigned for reforms to antiquated laws. Like Gustave Flaubert, the naturalists ideals of impersonality and objectivity and challenged traditional assumptions about the family and gender roles; however, they tended to avoid Flaubertian ambiguity. Zola, a younger friend of Flaubert’s, believed that the artist could discover the laws governing society in something like the way that the scientist discovers physical laws.[1]


  1. ↑This page has been adapted from Pericles Lewis's Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), p. 43.

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