Thérèse Raquin, completed in 1867 when Émile Zola was only twenty-seven years old, was actually his fourth novel. The previous three novels, however, were plainly immature work, awkwardly composed and sensationalistic, written solely for money. Thérèse Raquin, on the other hand, embodied Zola’s serious ideas about the art of the novel and was his first real critical success, not merely because it was a daring story of a wife and her lover who conspire to murder her inconvenient husband, but because it was well written, constructed with a sense of form, and filled with powerfully unforgettable scenes and images. Perhaps because, in it, Zola also succeeded so well in conveying the gritty feel of daily life among the urban poor, Thérèse Raquin became the first of Zola’s books to attract substantial sales. That makes Thérèse Raquin a milestone, marking the start of Zola’s distinguished career as a novelist of realism—or, as he would later call it, naturalism, the literary movement in France that Zola founded.

The significant sense of form exhibited in this novel can be seen in its unusual organization into thirty-two very short chapters, each of which advances the narrative in a terse and dramatic way. This structure imparts a feeling of rapid movement and suspense to the novel, which compels the reader’s excited attention. Viewing the novel as a whole, one also recognizes a symmetrical division into three approximately equal parts, like the three acts of a play, each part ending on a note of high drama: part one, the adultery, culminating in the murder of Camille; part two, the marriage of the criminals, apparent proof that they got away with their crime; part three, the horror of their haunted marriage, ending in a double suicide. By confining the plot to just a few characters and presenting their story in three relentlessly fast-paced parts leading inexorably to the fatal outcome, Zola manages to give his novel the power and the inevitability of a classical tragedy. Zola also shows instinctive skill in modifying the real event that inspired his novel (in which the criminal lovers were brought to justice and executed), allowing his criminals to escape detection, only to find themselves condemned to death by their own guilty consciences and their inescapable feelings of remorse.

Zola insists, in his preface to the second edition of Thérèse Raquin in 1868, that his intention is to study temperaments and not characters, showing that individuals whose temperaments are conditioned directly by their nerves and blood, rather than their intellect, will display the beast that is in every human and will invariably act according to the force of their physical drives. That is why, Zola argues, his presentation of the criminal lovers, Thérèse and Laurent, includes no moral judgment of their conduct. His purpose is simply to portray truthfully the behavior of certain human types in order to understand the physical bases of their actions. Even their remorse, Zola maintains, arises from physiological causes.

Most readers will recognize Zola’s effort to emphasize the physical in Thérèse Raquin . Thérèse is a creature of violent passion, long suppressed by the necessity of survival but suddenly released by a chance encounter. Laurent is lazy, unambitious, and fond of sensual pleasures. Camille is a weakling and a physical coward, viewed with contempt by both Thérèse and Laurent. Nevertheless, Zola is clearly less dispassionate than he claims in this early novel. His description of the wound Camille inflicts on Laurent as a vivid, red stigma that can never heal makes it a symbolic representation of Laurent’s guilt, less physical than emotional. The same is...