Book of the Week

Thérèse Desqueyroux by François Mauriac

Recommended by Olly Zage

'People who don’t know this forsaken region don’t know what silence is. It surrounds the house like a solid thing born out of the thick mass of forest where nothing lives, only the occasional hooting owl–at night, we think we can hear the sobs we stifle.'

Neither heroine nor anti-heroine are appropriate words to describe the position assumed by the titular character  in François Mauriac’s 1927 novel. As much as anything, this ambiguity reflects Thérèse’s own sense of moral and spiritual untethering, and the brilliance of description and characterisation by which Mauriac is able to convey and instil a similar malaise in the reader.

The Landes Forest

The story takes place in the remote hamlet of Argelouse, obscure even among the sprawling forests of pines which cover the sparsely inhabited Landes département of southwest France. Only two bourgeois land-owning families inhabit this 'land’s end … without a church, or town hall or even cemetery': the Larroques and the Desqueyroux, whose 'properties seem designed to be merged'. As such, the marriage of the Larroque daughter, Thérèse, to the Desqueyroux son, Bernard is a predetermined fact. Tyrannised and isolated by her severe, unempathic and dispassionate husband, his proud and traditional family, and the impossibility of escape from her oppressively empty surroundings, Thérèse recedes into nihilistic aloofness, until - alarmed by her lack of maternal warmth for her newborn daughter and her growing revulsion from her husband - she poisons Bernard by increasing the concentration of his anaemia medication, causing a near-fatal overdose. 

Even this act of desperation proves ineffective, however, when the two families, despite their knowledge of her guilt, conspire to have the case dismissed in order to protect their propriety. Thérèse, now universally loathed, is shut up in her bedroom in Argelouse and denied access to her daughter, who moves to nearby Saint-Clair, along with the sadistically vengeful Bernard. Alone, Thérèse descends into apathetic madness, growing weak and emaciated. This transformation is so startling to Bernard on his return home after several months that he gives in and allows her to move away to Paris. The novel’s final image is that of a recovered and hopeful Thérèse’s flight from the 'Argelouse silence' into the 'torrent' of human life. But even this closing note is tinged with fatalistic uncertainty and inability to escape the burden of the past.

Poster for Georges Franju's 1962 film adaptation of the novel

The novel is technically innovative in its use of devices transposed from silent film: the opening in media res at the conclusion of Thérèse’s trial, and the framing of the majority of the narrative in flashbacks during her journey from the regional courthouse back to Argelouse. Mauriac also uses free indirect discourse to great effect, building up a claustrophobically cacophonous wall of hostile familial voices around Thérèse. During her madness, the narrative voice is kept in phantasmagoric flux, morphing between tones and tenses as the progression of time accelerates in her confinement.

The internalisation of the struggle undergone by Mauriac’s Thérèse is thematically similar to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. However, where Tolstoy’s protagonist is able to reclaim agency by deliberate action, abandoning her husband and son and finally committing suicide in order to escape her suffering, Thérèse fails to kill her husband, is forcibly separated from her child, and contemplates escape or suicide abortively, ultimately being liberated only on a benevolent whim of her captor. Not only is her act of attempted murder made less immediate to the reader by the fact that it occurs prior to the opening of the novel, it is conducted almost incidentally. For all her introspection, Thérèse fails to convince herself or the reader of a satisfying motivation for her crime, and she, unlike Anna, meets with no ultimate retribution, merely ambiguity. 

Overall, Mauriac’s exploration of Thérèse’s nihilistic disillusionment makes a deeply compelling artwork and moving character study.

'The window is open; the roosters seem to be shredding the fog, a few diaphanous scraps of which hang in the tops of the pines. The countryside is dipped in gold. How can one renounce so much light? What is death? Nobody knows what death is. Thérèse is not certain that it will be a nothingness. Thérèse hates herself for feeling this old terror.'