Zola's ‘Thérèse Raquin'

Zola's ‘Thérèse Raquin' by Frederick Wedmore

Frederick Wedmore reviews a stage version of Thérèse Raquin seen at the Royalty Theatre, judging the piece itself less melodramatic than some critics claimed, and the performance good but not as remarkable as reported. He calls it only the second of M. Zola's works given hospitality among us, since L'Assommoir was properly seen only in Charles Reade's adaptation Drink. The translation, done mainly by Mr. De Mattos and overseen by Mr. George Moore, stays close to the original; Wedmore finds it adequate for stage purposes but not literature, since De Mattos never truly made the English his own. He places Thérèse Raquin in a middle position among Zola's works: lacking both the sterile realism of some of his uglier books and the poetry of his finer ones, with only faint hints of the author of La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret, yet free of the hideousness of La Terre or the grossness of Nana. He aligns it with L'Assommoir: a sad, degraded world with glimpses of the skies, and an austere moral showing evil-doing marching to its own punishment. He notes the murder occurs between acts, not onstage, and that the play's early scenes offer mental analysis rather than melodrama. He closes by praising Zola's power and singleness of aim, while criticizing his characteristic diffuseness and excess of commonplace detail, a fault he traces partly to Zola's master, Balzac, though present in Balzac to a lesser degree.

By Frederick Wedmore · First published 1899 · Genre: Psychological Drama, Crime Drama, Tragedy · 1,046 words

First lines

On Saturday I went to _Thérèse Raquin_ at the Royalty Theatre; and while I found the piece itself -- as indeed I expected to find it -- far less of a melodrama than certain of its critics had said, I discovered that the performance, though good and creditable, was not quite so noteworthy as it had been pronounced. The thing is worth seeing, though -- would indeed in any case be worth seeing. It is but the second piece of M. Zola's which has found hospitality among us: nay, in a certain sense, it is the first, for _L'Assommoir_ was hardly seen in its nakedness and truth, though it was seen with fulness of horror in Charles Reade's version _Drink_. The version of _Thérèse Raquin_ -- executed mainly, as I suppose, by Mr. De Mattos, but overlooked by Mr. George Moore -- does not widely depart from the original. It is not a bad translation, though it might, with advantage, have been a little more colloquial. It suggests nowhere that it has been subjected to the process which I believe to be the only satisfactory one, in translation, to a writer who is ambitious, as he ought to be, to write the English that we talk: the process of wholly discarding the original at a certain point -- when the bare but real equivalent of that original has once been secured -- of forgetting, from that moment, the existence of the original, and of setting oneself solely to say well and naturally what the translation, which is still beside one, says with awkwardness. The translation of _Thérèse Raquin_ is good enough, it may be, for most people's requirements on the stage; but it is not good enough to be counted as literature. The thing -- that is -- has not become Mr. De Mattos's own: he has remained its somewhat mechanical interpreter.

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theatre review · stage adaptation · murder · remorse · moral punishment · psychological drama · Paris · naturalism · realism · melodrama · 19th-century drama · translation criticism

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