Naturalism and Denaturalising Whiteness in Zola’s Thérèse Raquin

ABSTRACT

In his preface to Thérèse Raquin (1867), Zola declares he will expose the inner truth of his characters. In the novel, however, it is the heroine's exterior that is scrutinised. Thérèse is physiognomically European, and her appearance hides the passionate disposition she has inherited from her indigenous Algerian mother. Her whiteness, Zola suggests, is merely a performance. Zola's treatment of Thérèse is consistent with the anxiety around racial purity propagated by pseudoscientific circles of his time, and Zola's Naturalist method can be seen as a highly racialising process that patrols the boundaries of whiteness, which mixed-race bodies threaten to transgress.

KEYWORDS:

• Naturalism
• whiteness
• Zola
• passing
• race
• blood
• French colonial empire

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a discussion of literary representations of métissage in French Romantic works, see Prasad (2009, 45–71). For a discussion of “the boundary-crossing figure of the mulatto” in the decades leading up to the abolition of slavery in French colonies, see Andrews (2011). A few works that feature mixed-race characters include Honoré de Balzac’s Le Mulâtre (1824), Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal (1826), and Alexandre Dumas’s Georges (1843).

2 See Harrow (2007, 110), Lethbridge (1980, 285).

3 See Saada (2012, 92–115), Sessions (2014, 321), Weil (2002, 45).

4 See Brett (1988, 452–458), Legg (2021, 63–84), Lorcin (1999, 676–677), Sessions (2014, 318–319).

5 See also Legg (2021, 13–16), Lorcin (2014, 146–166), Saada (2012, 95–129).

6 See Lorcin’s discussion of the French racial classification of the Algerian indigenous population as in need of French civilising (1999, 667–671).

7 As W.E.B. Dubois and Toni Morrison (1992) have demonstrated in foundational texts on the topic of whiteness in the U.S., viewing whiteness as unmarked is itself a product of a racist cultural imaginary. A wealth of scholarship on whiteness has emerged in the U.S. context (primarily from the social sciences) from the end of the twentieth century to the present. Important figures in critical whiteness studies include David Roediger (1994), Theodore Allen (1994), Ruth Frankenberg (1993), and Richard Dyer (1997). See also Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1984) for a critique of white feminism.

8 An early francophone text to which whiteness studies is indebted is, of course, Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs (1952), which also evidences the theoretical ties between critical race studies and whiteness studies. Another key study of whiteness in a French context is Stovall’s article on the importance of whiteness for understanding the construction of French national identity (2003). Later, in White Liberty (2021), Stovall examines liberty as a racial concept. The edited volume De quelle couleur sont les blancs? (2013) can be seen as an inaugural work of critical whiteness studies in a French context. See also Katelyn E. Knox’s chapter “Anti-White Racism without Races” in Race on Display (2016) for a discussion of whiteness as a blind spot in French cultural studies. Finally, Mathilde Cohen and Sarah Mazouz’s special issue introduction, “A White Republic? Whites and Whiteness in France” (2021) provides a superb and up-to-date account of the field of critical whiteness studies in the Francophone context.

9 See Rémi-Giraud (2003), Blanckaert (2003a). For a discussion of how Zola’s view of physiognomy reflected his pseudo-scientific interests, see Gauthier (1960). See Reynaud-Paligot on scientific notions of race (2014).

10 Discussions on physiological disorder in the nineteenth century often provided the medical vocabulary used to demonstrate the ills resulting from interracial breeding, a central concern among degeneration theorists during this same time. Physiological disorder appearing in individuals was often attributed to the phenomenon of irrevocable degeneracy. On a wider scale, the idea of civilizational degeneration principally concerned the degeneration of the French through the mixture of races. As biological heredity dealt with the preservation and deviation of physical and mental traits between generations, hereditary degeneration conveyed the deterioration of lineage, or race. On Gobineau’s racial theories, see Nale (2014).

11 As Blanckaert puts it, “the métis, in effect, exists only for those who profess the so-called system of pure race.” (2003b, 63). See also Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (1995).

12 See also Baguley (1990), Pick (1989) and Yee (2016) for their discussions of Zola’s use of heredity in his writings.

13 On the influence of Madame Bovary on Thérèse Raquin, see Baguley (1990, 90).

14 Mary Greenwood’s discussion of racial passing in the late nineteenth-century U.S. as described in Sidonie de La Houssaye’s Les Quateronnes de la Nouvelle-Orléans may be instructive for thinking on some of the possible echoes between the U.S. and Francophone contexts (2017).

15 For a discussion of how the metropolitan proletariat came to be viewed in racial terms, see Louis Chevalier’s Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle (1958). See also Eugen Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen (1976).

16 On the craze for “anatomical” fiction in which Zola took part, see Hill (2020, 55); see also Bell (1995), Kelly (1995), Rothfield (1994).

17 See Baguley (2014, 88), Bell (1995, 122–123), Tanner (2019, 80).

18 See Furst (1972, 201), Harrow (2007, 110), Knutson (2001, 141–152), Lapp (1964, 96–97).

19 The long-assumed influence of Claude Bernard’s 1865 study Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale on this early novel has been rightfully questioned by Bell (1995, 123) and Sicard-Cowan (2021) who has recently also debunked Zola’s simulatory relationship to Bernard, specifically the latter’s practice of vivisection. For a different reading of Bernard’s influence on Zola, see François-Marie Mourad (2010), who emphasises the experimental tenets operating in Zola’s pre-Rougon-Macquart novel, as well as Rothfield (1994).

20 A brief comparison between Thérèse and the depiction of racial determinism that seals the fate of the eponymous heroine in Claire de Duras’s Ourika (1823), who is also positioned to tragically fail in her assimilation into whiteness due to her biological make-up, suggests an evolution towards analysing the mixed-race subject in understanding racial difference.