Outline Of Ash

Finished Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola, a 1867 novel about ADULTERY and MURDER and AN ACCIDENTAL POLYCULE WITH A GHOST. That is: an unhappy young wife (Thérèse) and her lover (Laurent) conspire to murder her husband (Camille), and while they get away with making it look like an accident, once they marry, they're haunted by hallucinations of Camille, driving them both mad. I had to stop reading this over my lunch breaks because of all the lurid descriptions of corpses, real and hallucinated.

This made me think of Poe's horror and of the English and Irish "urban gothic" of the 1880s-90s (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dracula) and was in fact published almost exactly halfway between the two, which might be an "I've connected the two dots" situation? It is in many ways classically gothic, just set in downtown Paris rather than in some isolated castle: the opening description of the gloomy arcade where the Raquins keep their shop; the pseudo-incest* of Thérèse growing up as the foster sister of her first husband, literally sleeping in the same bed as children and being groomed to be his wife; the heavy foreshadowing of Camille's death via a clumsily painted portrait (by Laurent!) that gave him the greenish visage of a person who had met death by drowning; horribly lurid descriptions of corpses as Laurent visits the morgue every day to see whether Camille's body has been recovered yet; the HALLUCINATED CORPSE of Thérèse's dead husband LYING BETWEEN her and Laurent EVERY NIGHT; the repeated imagery/analogy of being buried alive, from Thérèse's unhappiness in both marriages to Madame Raquin, who learns of their crime but only after she becomes paralyzed and mute and literally can't tell anyone. There's also something vampire-adjacent in the detail that, as Laurent strangles and then drowns Camille, Camille bites him on the neck, and the wound/scar remains physically and psychologically irritating.

I was also struck by the Munchausen by proxy implications of Thérèse's backstory— I was brought up in the tepid damp room of an invalid. I slept in the same bed as Camille. . . . He would not take his physic unless I shared it with him. To please my aunt I was obliged to swallow a dose of every drug. Also, literally every character is selfish and manipulative: after the murder, Thérèse and Laurent basically gaslight everyone in their circle into convincing them (Thérèse and Laurent) to get married on the grounds that it would make life so much more comfortable for the rest of them (everyone else). (I did ultimately feel terrible for Madame Raquin, per the above, but before that, she was also a piece of work.) So, yeah, there's SO MUCH going on here, most of it psychological horror. At a certain point— Thérèse using her paralyzed, mute, completely helpless aunt/mother-in-law as a constant sounding board for how she's soooooo sorry she helped to kill this woman's son (narrator's voice: she was not, in fact, sorry) but she (Madame Raquin) forgives her (Thérèse), right???— I felt actively gross just reading it, and then Thérèse and Laurent continued to be so relentlessly awful that I looped back around to horrified fascination, and then I honestly laughed out loud when they each decide to kill the other at the same time. Like, she literally whips around with a knife to find him pouring poison into her glass. Come on, guys. To paraphrase osprey_archer's review, they may not ""repent"" of their crime but they do in fact suffer for it in a hell of their own making.

Not to look a free ebook in the mouth, but I know just enough French to be curious about some of the translation choices made here, to the point I actually pulled up a French version of the text online and occasionally cross-referenced. For whatever reason, the translator (Edward Vizetelly, 1901) chose to translate le père Laurent as "daddy Laurent", which is... certainly a choice! At another point, the translation refers to "some tarts from the Latin Quarter," and I was curious to see whether I should be more annoyed with Zola or the translator for that one: the original French was des filles du quartier latin, and I can see the thought process here— the context is about the women "playing like little children", contrasting their "virgin-like blushes" and "impure eyes", so I get the idea of emphasizing the irony/contrast— but... hmm. I was going to be more annoyed if the translator had decided to translate grisette as "tart."

( footnotes )