To the reader of François Mauriac's 1927 novel Thérèse Desqueyroux the complexity of the title character's personality and motivations is readily apparent. Critics have, in fact, suggested affinities between her and such towering fictional women as Racine's ill-facted Phèdre and Flaubert's insatiable dreamer Emma Bovary.

It is for this reason then all the more surprising to encounter in an otherwise sensitive and astute critical reading of Mauriac's novel this simplistic sexual labelling of his heroine:

So it is that Thérèse—another Lesbian—belongs not to the world of Mme. Canaby (whose physical appearance she inherits) but to the inner world of the writer himself. . . . [Cecil Jenkins, Mauriac (1965). In a footnote, Gallagher adds: "The Mme Canaby referred to here, acquitted in 1906 by the Bordeaux Assizes of having attempted to poison her husband, was the inspiration for Mauriac's plot"].

Simply to call Thérèse Desqueyroux a Lesbian—and with a capital L—(the capitalization is Jenkins') is to resolve a broad and subtle network of textual ambiguities which make Mauriac's title character complex, fascinating, perplexing, and, for all these reasons, hauntingly memorable. To use the term "Lesbian" so unabashedly and unqualifiedly is to do nothing less than seriously distort the meaning of the novel and misrepresent the demonstrable intent of its author.

It is undeniable that Thérèse Desqueyroux views the activities of her marriage bed as physically repugnant. Returning to Argelouse after her acquittal, she recalls the day she married Bernard and the thoughts she had then of the appoaching wedding night, the significance of which was entirely lost on her sister-in-law Anne:

... la joie enfantine de la jeune fille l'isolait de Thérèse: sa joie! Comme si elle eût ignoré qu'elles allaient être séparées le soir même, et non seulement dans l'espace; à cause aussi de ce que Thérèse était au moment de souffrir. . . .

Marriage represents for Thérèse life's watershed. As she begins her long examination of conscience, she describes her life thus:

Tout ce qui précède mon manage prend dans mon souvenir cet aspect de pureté; contraste, sans doute, avec cette ineffaccable salissure des noces.

One would be foolish to try to explain away her aversion to conjugal sex as simply a reaction to the brutish insensitivity or worse of her cloddish husband Bernard. What his sexual practices were is not at all clear. That Thérèse saw what she calls "les impatients inventions de l'ombre" as abnormal and perhaps aberrant is evident, for she asks herself: "Où avait-il appris à classer tout ce qui touche à la chair—à distinguer les caresses de l'honnête homme de celles du sadique?"

While frigid with Bernard—"je faisais la morte"—Thérèse is not unreceptive to the possibility of sexual response. In fact, her conjugal submission to Bernard presages for her the possibility of other sexual feelings:

Un fiancé se dupe aisément; mais un mari! N'importe qui sait proférer des paroles menteuses; les mensonges du corps exigent une autre science. Mimer le désir, la joie, la fatigue bienheureuse, cela n'est pas donné à tous. Thérèse sut plier son corps à ces feintes et elle y goûtait un plaisir amer. Ce monde inconnu de sensations où un homme la forçait de pénétrer, sonimagination l'aidait à concevoir qu'il y aurait eu là, pour elle aussi peut-être, un bonheur possible—mais quel bonheur? Comme devant un paysage enseveli sous la pluie, nous nous représentons ce qu'il eût été dans le soleil, ainsi Thérèse découvrait la volupté.

While her sexual dislikes seem rather indisputable, her sexual preferences remain terribly imprecise. Four times in the novel, twice in the course of two different scenes, Thérèse imagines herself with a lover. The absolutely unresolvable question of the sex of her fantasy lover is striking and seems to have escaped the notice, not only of Mauriac's English translator, but also of those who have written on the novel, analysed its heroine, and alluded to her sexuality.

The first two of these imaginings occur during successive confrontations in the garden at Saint-Clair between Thérèse and her husband's half-sister Anne de la Trave with whom Thérèse has been intimate since childhood and whose amorous liaison with Jean Azévédo she has recently decided to frustrate. Reacting to Anne's inability to describe clearly Azévédo's personality, Thérèse muses on the effect passion would have on her own powers of observation and description: "Moi, songeait Thérèse, la passion me rendrait plus lucide, rien ne m'échapperait de l'être dont j'aurais envie." While there is nothing particularly unusual about Thérèse's use here of l'être, upon reflection, le garçon, which she uses several sentences earlier to refer to Azévédo, or l'homme might be felt in this context to be le mot juste. While one instance of the use of the noun être could be explained as a stylistic avoidance of the banal, its systematic use to the absolute exclusion of any sexually precise noun is worth noting. So it is, in a second garden conversation following hard upon the first, that Thérèse who has begun to arouse Anne's anxiety about Azévédo's commitment to her reflects:

Qu'il doit être doux de répéter un nom, un prénom qui désigne un certain être auquel on est lié par le coeur étroitement! La seule pensée qu'il est vivant, qu'il respire, qu'il s'endort, le soir, la tête sur son bras replié, qu'il s'éveille à l'aube, que son jeune corps déplace la brume. . . .

Much later during her long sequestration at Argelouse she fills her time with daydreams of other lives she might lead. She sees herself in Paris declining a young man's repeated invitations to dine, for her evenings are never free and with reason:

Un être était dans sa vie grâce auquel tout le reste du monde lui paraissait insignifiant; quelqu'un que personne de son cercle ne connaissait; une créature très humble, très obscure; mais toute l'existence de Thérèse tournait autopêchait de respirer; mais elle aimait mieux perdre le souffle que l'éloigner.

A mere five paragraphs farther on, she conjures up another scene. In this one too, her lover—described simply as quelqu'un—is again sexually undifferentiated:

Thérèse, assise, reposait sa tête contre une épaule, se levait à l'appel de la cloche pour le repas, entrait dans la charmille noire et quelqu'un marchait à ses côtés qui soudain l'entourait des deux bras, l'attirait. Un baiser, songe-t-elle, doit arrêter le temps; elle imagine qu'il existe dans l'amour des secondes infinies.

At the very end of the novel too, it should be noted in addition to the four key passages just cited, as Thérèse sits alone having just explained to Bernard the two irreconcilable sides of her personality, she decides not to go see Jean Azévédo and ponders the chance rather of other encounters:

. . . elle n'avait pas envie de le voir: causer encore! chercher des formules! Elle connaissait Jean Azévédo; mais les êtres dont elle souhaitait l'approche, elle ne les connaissait pas; elle savait d'eux seulement qu'ils n'exigeraient guère de paroles. Thérèse ne redoutait plus la solitude.

This pattern of ambiguity—albeit subtle in context—can hardly be accidental or without import. [In a footnote, Gallagher adds: "It is nothing less than startling that in the standard English translation of this novel by Gerard Hopkins entitled Therese the first three of these incontrovertibly ambiguous passages are systematically resolved. The ambiguous être is made male:

'Passion,' thought Thérèse, 'would make me clearer sighted. I should take note of every detail in the man whom I desired.'

How sweet it must be to say a name over and over, the pet name of the man to whom one's heart is tightly bound!—merely to think he is alive and breathing; that he sleeps at night with his head upon his arm, and wakes at dawn; that his young body plunges through the morning mist. . . .

Someone was in her life who made the rest of the world seem meaningless: someone completely unknown to the rest of her circle, someone very obscure and very humble. But her whole existence revolved about this sun which she alone could see, the heat of which she only could feel upon her flesh. Paris rumbled like the sound of the wind in the pines. The sensation of her companion's body pressed against her own, light though the contact was, hindered her breathing. But rather than push him away she would stop breathing altogether.

It was in discussions with my former colleagues William Hendrickson and the late Richard Admussen that these mistranslations came to light. For a discussion of Mauriac's novel and the film it inspired, see R. Admussen, E. Gallagher, and L. Levin, 'Novel into Film: An Experimental Course,' Literature/Film Quarterly 6 (1978), 66-72. Naturally, critics relying on the flawed Hopkins English translation (which appeared in 1947) help perpetuate these egregious misreadings. See, for example, Michael F. Moloney, François Mauriac: A Critical Study (1958)."] It is, in fact, highly significant and suggestive, for in the sexual realm too, as in the motivational, Thérèse, it seems clear, is incapable of absolute honesty with herself. Like her sexuality, her role in Bernard's slow poisoning remains imprecise:

Mais Thérèse n'a plus rien à examiner: elle s'est engouffrée dans le crime béant; elle a été aspirée par le crime; ce qui a suivi, Bernard le connaît aussi bien qu'elle-même: cette soudaine reprise de son mal. . . .

The seemingly autonomous nature of his illness suggested by the expression "cette soudaine reprise de son mal" is echoed in the following paragraphs by two similar descriptions of his condition:

. . . vers la mi-août, après une crise plus alarmante . . .

and

Au début de décembre, une reprise de son mal terrassa Bernard.

She is unwilling or, more likely, unable to own up to her active and persistent role in attempting to murder the anemic Bernard by slowly poisoning him with overdoses of an arsenic-based medicine he regularly takes.

While Thérèse's role and responsibility in Bernard's poisoning are clearer to the reader than to her, the precise nature of her sexuality is much less clear to both character and reader. In an attempt to clarify, one could argue that the word être, used so regularly in her sexual fantasies, is at least once in the novel, and early on, used as a feminine substitute when Thérèse thinks in this way of the imminent loss of her virginity: "Anne demeurait sur la rive où attendaient les êtres intacts; Thérèse allait se confondre avec le troupeau de celles qui ont servi"; yet this single such use while suggestive of a possible feminine decoding, rather than resolving, simply underscores the sexual ambiguity of être when used elsewhere.

Whether Thérèse Desqueyroux is a woman with deeply repressed lesbian tendancies or, given the admitted duality of her personality, a bi-sexual is not at all certain. What she ought certainly not to be called is simply a "Lesbian" tout court, as Jenkins does quite matter-of-factly in the first quote cited in this essay. It is not terribly clear whether one is meant to read hers as a repressed homosexual personality, intended perhaps to complement on the internal, psychological level the constraints and limits imposed on her from without in her struggle to survive in the stiffling and oppressive atmosphere of the Desqueyroux family or as bi-sexual. If one is to see her as the latter, is it so because she is to be construed as doomed to yearn for both kinds of love, yet to face as a consequence the impossibility of ever really knowing human love at all? She herself, of course, acknowledges her view of the divided self in her final conversation with Bernard, saying that "la Thérèse qui était fière d'épouser un Desqueyroux, de tenir son rang au sein d'une bonne famille de la lande, contente enfin de se caser, comme on dit, cette Thérèse-là est aussi réelle que l'autre, aussi vivante. . . ." Even here though the nature of "l'autre" is undefined.

Rather it would seem, just as Thérèse cannot explain herself, her actions or her motivations—"Était-il vraisemblable qu'une femme de son intelligence n'arrivât pas à rendre ce drame intelligible?"—that her creator does not choose entirely to do so either. Labelling Thérèse and thus narrowly defining her sexuality simplifies what is, in fact, the richly suggestive nature of her sexuality and the complexity of the total personality which Mauriac gave her and which makes her such a memorable, disturbing and haunting character whose ambiguities resist easy resolution. To attempt to explain Thérèse Desqueyroux in terms of her sexuality alone would be an exercise as foolish and myopic as attempting, as some have, to resolve the ambiguity of her sexuality.