Therese Desqueyroux Read online

  By allowing Thérèse to grow and become less the edifying example of repentance and more a fully realized individual, Mauriac enormously strengthened the thematic heart of the novel. Again, Kushner isolates the issue:

  If Mauriac didn’t keep to the simplified perspective of “Conscience,” if he wanted, from the beginning to the end, for his heroine to be given up to the anguish, the weight of her thoughts and acts, it is because he wanted to bring into his novel that night of incertitude which is the climate of human life. (95)

  This “night of incertitude” is precisely what Mauriac most wanted to explore—though he had not yet realized this when he drafted “Conscience.”

  It is something of a paradox that Mauriac was only able to make Thérèse into so revealing a self-portrait by freeing her to be entirely different from himself: the male Catholic writer could best sound his own depths by allowing his heroine to be an antireligious, entirely unique individual. In a conversation with Cecil Jenkins, Mauriac explained that creating Thérèse gradually evolved into a kind of self-expression for him:

  Thérèse Desqueyroux was indeed the novel of revolt. The story of Thérèse was the whole of my own drama, a protest, a cry. . . . And I could well say, even though I have never contemplated poisoning anyone, that Thérèse Desqueyroux was myself.9

  The “revolt” of the novel operates on at least two fronts. First, it is a revolt against the idea of the family, revealing it as not the nurturing center of the individual’s life but instead a claustrophobic, repressive, vindictive social unit. Closing ranks against any threat or scandal, the Desqueyroux family devolves from a smug bourgeois respectability to an active, inhuman cruelty—delegating the worst tasks, in a genteel way, to the domestics. After the “Conscience” draft, the next title Mauriac used for the story was “L’Esprit de famille” (The Spirit of the Family)—so that the idea of the family was now, in his mind, the real subject of the novel. And he explicated the issue in a conversation with his son Claude in 1962:

  In a sense, Thérèse Desqueyroux is me. I put into her all the exasperation I felt with a family I could no longer tolerate.10

  Mauriac’s chafing against his family and the repression it represented to him would become more intense over the next few years, culminating in a crisis during 1929–1930, but that discontent and even anguish is powerfully expressed in the story of Thérèse.

  Perhaps even more importantly for Mauriac at this stage in his life, the novel also represents a revolt against an even weightier “family,” the Catholic Church itself, or at least against some of its spokesmen, those Catholic critics who condemned his novels for their sympathetic depictions of sinners. That sympathy goes further in Thérèse Desqueyroux than in any other of his previous works. The only truly worthy character in the book is a nonbeliever and an attempted murderer, and the respectable Christians are in their own way far more “monstrous” than she is. Again, the epigraph from Baudelaire is essential, reminding the reader that such “monsters” as Thérèse were also created by God, and that they were created to be as they are. And when Mauriac concludes his preface by saying how he would have liked Thérèse to end as a saint but feared being condemned for sacrilege, we can sense the pressures, both external and internal, that he was undergoing.

  But if Thérèse Desqueyroux represents a revolt against family and against conventional notions of piety, in a purely literary sense it is less a revolt than an embracing of tradition. The novel can be seen as Mauriac’s own response to, or versions of, two of the most famous works in French literature. No writer, certainly no French writer, could begin a story about a provincial woman suffocating in an unhappy marriage without thinking of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857). Flaubert’s canvas is of course much larger than Mauriac’s, with room for a great deal of satire; Mauriac’s is more condensed and consistently somber. Many comparisons between the two novels suggest themselves, though—notably the village life in both stories. And while Flaubert, too, famously announced his identification with his heroine, Emma Bovary, one could say that Mauriac’s identification is more complete: we always sympathize with Thérèse, and even if we are horrified by some of the things she does and thinks, Mauriac unambiguously presents her as the novel’s moral touchstone. If we know Emma Bovary’s story, we can sense it hanging always in the background of Thérèse Desqueyroux, and we will expect Thérèse to turn to adultery for fulfillment as Emma did—but we find that Thérèse, despite her fleeting attraction to the pompous adolescent Jean Azevedo, is too intelligent for that, or rather too intellectually honest with herself to pretend any happiness might lie in that direction.

  A second masterpiece hovering in the background of the novel is Jean Racine’s Phaedra (1667). Certain references and some details in imagery make for a comparison that would, again, be natural to any reader familiar with the classic drama, and moreover Mauriac was to publish a superb, highly personal biography of Racine in 1928. Racine, like Mauriac, found himself torn between the conflicting demands of God and Mammon, between those of religion and literature, between those of the spirit and the flesh. The character of Phaedra, caught up in an incestuous passion for her stepson Hippolytus, seems on the surface quite unrelated to Thérèse and her situation. But Thérèse too is a creature of profound passion and the need to love—hers, however, is a passion and love without an object. In this respect, her reference to her hunting-obsessed husband as a young Hippolytus is at first darkly comic, and then deeply pathetic. Finally, in both Phaedra and Thérèse Desqueyroux, our sympathies are entirely with the criminal woman, and the forces of conventional righteousness are presented as unfeeling and destructive.

  But for all its intertextuality, Thérèse Desqueyroux is typically Mauriacian, especially in its setting—the countryside outside Bordeaux, the region known as les Landes, a sandy moorlike area dominated by pines, arid and hot in the summers, rainy and cold in the winters. Nearly all of Mauriac’s fiction—and all of the best of it—is set here, where he grew up and where he returned frequently throughout his adult life. He spent most of his youthful summers at the family’s estate in Saint-Symphorien (the Saint-Clair of the novel). His mature fiction is marked by an unusually powerful use of settings, and this is most masterfully deployed in Thérèse Desqueyroux; nearly every critic of the novel has noted how the setting here is so intensely realized as to become virtually a character in its own right. The novel is rich in unforgettable imagery—the eerie howling of the wind in the pines, the winter rain pouring down like a million prison bars, the sun like burning metal. In his nonfiction also, Mauriac often returned to the region and the effects it had on him. In one essay he described how this setting molded him:

  Walking through this immutable landscape, one’s train of thought is broken by no sudden color, no strange sound. The exterior world reduces itself as far as possible, effacing and annihilating itself before the interior world. The moor is the servant of the spirit. . . . It was in this disincarnate, unchanging region that I, still a child, had the presentiment that we here below were born for eternity.11

  Mauriac took this setting, so spiritually charged for him, and made it into the arena in which his fictional characters attempt to penetrate and understand their own interior worlds.

  We see this setting primarily through Thérèse’s eyes, of course, so it seems entirely natural, not a literary artifice, that the external world mirrors her internal states—her moods, her sense of impending entrapment. Finding in the external world an equivalent for the subtle modulations of our inner world—this is of course what we ordinarily call poetry, and Thérèse Desqueyroux should be appreciated as Mauriac’s most intensely poetic work.12 But there is something even larger at work in Mauriac’s manipulation of setting in the novel. Pierre-Henri Simon points out this larger issue in his discussion of Thérèse Desqueyroux. He says that Mauriac was not simply deploying an analogy between the inner and outer worlds, but something deeper, something that is at the heart of Mauriac’s psychology and even his theol
ogy. Simon says that, between the outer and the inner worlds, Mauriac perceived

  not an analogical relation but a necessary link, a vital solidarity, such that the scene and the event, the physical climate and the moral climate are presented as one, each explained by the other, in a totality at once profoundly psychological and intensely poetic. . . . It is not a question of metaphor, but of an intimate complicity being suggested between the domains of the soul and the flesh. . . . And this is by no means a matter of literary technique: rather, it is the profound exigency of an art that, always aiming to depict the drama of the incarnated spirit, tends always toward a rejoining of the soul and the senses. Mauriac well defined himself as “a metaphysician who works in the concrete.” In fact his work resides beyond that idealism that imagines the human person as isolated in his interior world, and that realism that shows us as absorbed by, and overcome by, physical things. The person in Mauriac has a soul within a body, or, rather, he carries his body within his soul.13

  Of course, we are accustomed to seeing things as just the reverse of this: the body is the receptacle of the soul. But the incarnation of the soul, Mauriac suggests, is more complicated than that simple container metaphor suggests. The traditional theologian may wish to preserve an absolute distinction between soul and body, but the novelist, “metaphysician of the concrete,” sees how the two act upon each other in mysterious but powerful ways. This truth was explored most deeply, perhaps, by the poet who provides the novel’s epigraph: Charles Baudelaire. To choose just one of his poems touching on the subject, his “wretched monk” lamented this aspect of the human condition:

  My soul’s a tomb that, wretched cenobite,

  I travel in throughout eternity;

  Nothing adorns the walls of this sad shrine.14

  The domain of the literary artist—at least of the artist haunted by the idea of the incarnated soul, as were Baudelaire and Mauriac—is not of the spirit or the flesh alone, but the often agonized intersection between the two.

  This leads us inevitably to the question of whether and how Thérèse Desqueyroux is a Catholic novel, as opposed to simply a novel written by a Catholic. As we have seen, Mauriac looked back on it as a novel of revolt—a revolt against Catholicism itself, or at least against certain aspects of Catholicism that had become as intolerable to Mauriac as marriage had to Thérèse. Certainly, the novel has been widely appreciated by entirely secular readers, among whom are many who would be repelled by any overt Catholicism. And even as informed and searching a reader as Jean Lacouture can say this about the novel:

  It marks . . . the limit, at least the provisional one, of [Mauriac’s] removal from Christianity. In none of his books is faith so coldly deserted, in none is the absence of God so oppressive. . . .15

  Thérèse herself feels this absence of God deeply, true—but does the novel itself depict or suggest a world without God? It goes against the trend of most criticism of the novel to say so, but I believe Thérèse Desqueyroux is one of Mauriac’s most profoundly Catholic novels—as well as being his most artistically accomplished one. To begin with, Providence is vigorously present in the novel, perhaps most strikingly in some scenes involving the minor character Aunt Clara. The old, deaf sister of Thérèse’s father is only tolerated, at best, by the Desqueyroux family. Less than adept at lipreading, she chatters constantly to avoid having to puzzle out what others are saying. As adolescents, Thérèse and her friend Anne mock her, and later, Bernard’s contempt for her is only thinly dissembled. Moreover, Clara offends the pious Desqueyroux sensibilities by her rabid anticlericalism and distrust of religion. But for all this, it is Clara who lives the social imperatives of Christ: she is the one who works tirelessly and unpretentiously for the local poor, seeing to their needs without expecting any reward. And she is the only one in the novel who truly loves Thérèse selflessly and unconditionally, and has done so since Thérèse was a little girl.

  Clara makes for an unlikely saint, living entirely outside, and even in opposition to, the church, yet she embodies and acts out the church’s most vital teachings. Clara is in fact closer to God—in whom she doesn’t much believe—than are the respectable, pharisaical Desqueyroux family who make so grand a show of attending church services regularly. And this connection between Clara and God is brought to an extraordinary climax (even a shocking one, if the reader has been led to expect this to be an entirely realist novel) in chapter X. At that point, Thérèse is in her deepest moment of despair and resolves on suicide; she is pulled back from the act only by the sudden death of Clara. Mauriac shows us in this chapter how deeply and, indeed, spiritually linked Clara is to Thérèse, via her simple love for the young woman. As Bernard lays out the fate he and the family have determined for Thérèse, Clara looks in at the keyhole, then squats alone on the stairs, in the grip of an increasing, vague terror for her beloved niece; she only goes to bed later out of fear of Bernard, and she lies there in the dark, out of breath, her eyes wide open. Her death is discovered at the very moment Thérèse is about to take the poison that will end her life, and the discovery puts an end to all Thérèse’s thoughts of suicide. Clara’s death is thus presented to us as a substitution for Thérèse’s, a case of giving up her life for her niece—it is providential, not coincidental. It is an example of a motif in Catholic literature sometimes called vicarious suffering, and sometimes called mystical substitution. Theodore P. Fraser notes the presence of the motif in earlier writers such as Dostoevsky and Léon Bloy, saying, “in its simplest form this term means the offering of one’s life for another, following Christ’s example.”16 This motif of substitution has been widely discussed in Mauriac’s later novel, Le Noeud de vipères (Viper’s Tangle), but has received little attention in Thérèse Desqueyroux—where it is equally striking and equally important thematically.

  Clara’s death shows us that the world of Thérèse Desqueyroux is one where a spiritual economy allows for the suffering, even the death, of one to pay for the sins of another—a fact that Thérèse herself dimly comprehends at the close of chapter X, though she goes on to reject the intervention as having been mere chance. Clara’s presence in the novel demonstrates how the truly Christ-like among us are more likely to be found among the marginalized, the ridiculed, and the rejected than among the conventionally pious. If this theme constitutes a “revolt” against Catholicism, it is a revolt that urges us not to abandon the faith but to return to its real essence, and to reject the false shows of smug righteousness.

  Where does Thérèse herself fit within this spiritual economy? She is, formally at least, a nonbeliever. As André Joubert puts it, “The religious hypocrisy of the Desqueyroux family, combined with the anticlericalism of her father and Clara, together deprived her of the circumstances that would be favorable to faith.”17 Yet, Joubert adds, she continues to feel a sense of religious inquietude, manifested in her fascination with the local priest, her often religious vocabulary, and her recurrent concern with the relation between God and His creatures (185). Still, she remains acutely aware of her isolation, and her religious leanings never coalesce into a faith that could help or console her, and she drifts into an anomic state, so dissociated from the reality around her that murdering her husband becomes only a vaguely interesting experiment. She feels no connection even to her daughter—the “fruit of her womb,” as she sarcastically expresses it, as if she were a sort of anti-Mary. She is unable to enter into the primary roles a woman of her region and class was expected to play, but far from feeling liberated by this, she often envies the other women who are able to sublimate all their personal and individual desires into being good wives and mothers; and she is always, painfully, aware of her difference and her aloneness.

  The “Conscience” draft suggested that repressed lesbianism was at the root of Thérèse’s problems, but in the finished novel this is only one thread in a tangled skein of conflicts and motives. Richard Griffiths, however, argues that the lesbianism of “Conscience” remains important in Thérèse Desqu
eyroux and that her sexual frigidity and homosexuality provide the key to her motivation in poisoning Bernard.18 He quotes a 1927 letter in which Mauriac regrets not having stressed her sexuality sufficiently in the finished novel—which seems conclusive as to Mauriac’s intentions with the character. But of course there is often a great gap between what the author intends and what the work itself presents to us. Some other critics, like William Kidd, have suggested that the essence of her conflict can be located in her relation to her father, in a version of the Oedipal complex.19 Given Mauriac’s ambivalence toward, and often hostility to, psychoanalysis (he mocks it in the later short story, “Thérèse at the Doctor’s”), it seems unlikely that he consciously employed the Oedipal model, but whether or not one uses Freudian terminology, it is clear that the relation between Thérèse and her father is a troubled one—at least in that he does not fulfill the role of a loving father who helps to give her a sense of her own identity and value.

  Shut out from sexual love, from her father’s love, and from the fulfillment other women find in their social roles, she yearns above all not to be alone, and her naïve fantasies of simple love during her long agony in the upper room are among the most heartwrenching pages Mauriac ever wrote. Again, we should recall the Baudelaire epigraph to the novel in contemplating Thérèse’s character: she too was made by God, and He made her this way—isolated, unable to work her own way out of her suffering. At the end of the powerful chapter XI, Mauriac’s own voice enters the text, asking whether it could be that her suffering is not simply an accident but in fact the reason for her existence. She is perhaps marked out for a life of sorrow and rejection—as much as, for example, Jesus Christ was. The suggestion is that she, like Aunt Clara, is in some mysterious way an agent of God’s providence, that she has a role to play in the spiritual economy of this world.