Thérèse by François Mauriac

First published:Thérèse Desqueyroux, 1927 (English translation, 1928)

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of plot: Early twentieth century

Locale: France

Principal characters

• Bernard Desqueyroux, a petty landowner
• Thérèse Desqueyroux, his wife
• Marie Desqueyroux, their daughter
• Georges Filhot, a law student and Marie’s lover
• Anne de la Trave, Bernard’s half sister
• Jean Azévédo, a young intellectual

The Story:

In the little French town of Argelouse, where she has spent the first part of her life, Thérèse Desqueyroux is known not so much for her beauty as for her charm. Her wit and independence of mind make her conspicuous in the stifling and inbred atmosphere of her native province, and she inspires in her friends and relatives as much disapproval as admiration. Left to her own devices by a father more intent on his political career than on the problems of fatherhood, Thérèse spent her girlhood in isolated brooding. Her one friend has been Anne de la Trave, the half sister of Bernard Desqueyroux, to whom Thérèse is now married.

Thérèse can remember little of her youth and the days before her marriage. For the most part, her memories are clouded by the confusion in her own mind caused by her intense love of life and desire for experience joined to provincial willingness to sacrifice self to tradition. She sees her marriage to Bernard Desqueyroux as the natural culmination of a social cycle, but her honeymoon is not yet over before Thérèse begins to feel acutely the loss to herself that her marriage represents. She discovers in Bernard all that is worst in the provincial character: a fanatical pride of family and material possessions. To a fatal degree, he lacks the insight and imagination to understand his wife. For her part, Thérèse is disgusted by the marriage.

During the honeymoon, Bernard receives a letter from his family informing him that his half sister, Anne, has fallen in love with a penniless young man named Jean Azévédo. To preserve the family name and honor, Bernard prevails on Thérèse to try to help stop the affair. Thérèse returns to Argelouse and persuades Anne to go on a trip. After Anne has gone, Thérèse meets Azévédo and discovers in him that intensity and individualism she misses in her own life. Azévédo admits that he is not really in love with Anne, and he readily agrees to write to her to tell her his true feelings. He and Thérèse meet from time to time and are drawn to each other. When Azévédo leaves Argelouse, he promises that he will return in a year.

After Azévédo has gone, Thérèse settles into the routine of a farmer’s wife. Even the birth of a child, Marie, fails to give her life meaning, for motherhood only further intensifies her frustration. Almost involuntarily, Thérèse decides to poison Bernard.

The attempted murder is quickly discovered, and Thérèse is brought to trial. At the last moment, however, Bernard offers a trumped-up explanation and saves her from conviction. Thérèse returns home to learn that Bernard has lied only to save the family from scandal. After telling her that divorce is impossible, he forces her, under threat of disclosing the truth, to live a life of semi-imprisonment in her bedroom. Thérèse regains her freedom, however, when Bernard allows her to go to Paris. Alone in the city, Thérèse tries to make a new life for herself, but without success—the sense of sin she carries with her perverted all her attempts to find happiness. As the years pass, she retreats more and more into herself.

Fifteen years after her banishment from Argelouse, Thérèse is found living in an apartment in Paris by her daughter, Marie, now seventeen years old. Marie, who explains that she has come to Paris because of a young law student from her native province, is shocked to find Thérèse in poor health and looking years older than her age. Thérèse, hoping to extirpate the sense of her own sinfulness, decides to help Marie win the love of the student, Georges Filhot. To persuade Filhot to marry Marie and to mitigate his parents’ disapproval, Thérèse tells her daughter, she will turn over to Marie all her own landholdings in Argelouse. The next day, Thérèse visits Filhot and invites him to dinner. At the conclusion of the evening, Marie returns to Argelouse with the promise of a final reunion with Filhot in three months.

In the next few days, it becomes painfully and thrillingly evident to Thérèse that Filhot is in love with her and not with her daughter. In a violently emotional scene, she confesses to the student not only her past crime but a whole series of crimes of which she believes herself guilty but that are not recognized as criminal by the law. Then she sends Filhot away. Rather than insist that he sacrifice himself to her daughter, however, she urges him to write to Marie to tell her that he does not love her.

A short time later, Marie returns to Paris to confront her mother, who by this time is living in a confused and paranoid world in which she believes all of her acquaintances are engaged in a plot to bring her to justice for her sins, real and imaginary. Marie’s anger is softened when she realizes her mother’s state, and she takes Thérèse with her when she returns to Argelouse.

In her birthplace, Thérèse slowly regains her sanity; the doctor predicts, however, that she will soon die. She is nursed during her last days by her daughter and Bernard—for whom, by this time, she feels neither pity nor disgust. During this time, Thérèse tries to put her mind in order. She awaits death with hope, seeing it as the final deliverance from self.

Bibliography

Flower, John E. Intention and Achievement: An Essay on the Novels of François Mauriac. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1969. Includes analysis of Thérèse that links it to other novels by Mauriac with characters who seem increasingly saturnine and enigmatic. Contends that Thérèse is a powerful figure of alienation who stands out as an unconventional literary heroine.

Flower, John E., and Bernard C. Swift, eds. François Mauriac: Visions and Reappraisals. Providence, R.I.: Berg, 1991. Collection of essays provides a lucid presentation of Mauriac’s life and works. One essay evaluates Thérèse as an approximation of a Colette figure.

Landry, Anne G. Represented Discourse in the Novels of François Mauriac. New York: AMS Press, 1970. The section on Thérèse emphasizes the austerity of Mauriac’s language and examines the dramatic flow of the novel’s structure between central action and flashback.

Moloney, Michael F. François Mauriac: A Critical Study. 1958. Reprint. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2006. Presents an excellent treatment of Mauriac’s use of poetic imagery in his fiction.

O’Connell, David. François Mauriac Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1995. Provides a useful introduction to Mauriac, with information about the author’s life and analyses of his novels and other works. Includes discussion of Thérèse.

Smith, Maxwell A. François Mauriac. New York: Twayne, 1970. Connects Thérèse with Mauriac’s other literary achievements and offers many perceptive observations about the novel based on Smith’s interview with the author. Mauriac defends himself against critical reactions that are overly pessimistic about Thérèse’s destiny and insists that he has merely presented an isolated study of oppression and confinement.

Speaight, Robert. François Mauriac: A Study of the Writer and the Man. London: Chatto & Windus, 1976. Provides an overview of Mauriac’s career, including discussion of Thérèse in which the work is described as a poetic tour de force.

Wansink, Susan. Female Victims and Oppressors in Novels by Theodor Fontane and François Mauriac. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Compares the depictions of female characters and society in the works of Mauriac and Fontane, focusing on Mauriac’s novels Thérèse and Genitrix (1923; English translation, 1950) and Fontane’s novels Effi Briest (1895; English translation, 1914, 1962) and Frau Jenny Treibel (1893; Jenny Treibel, 1976).

Welch, Edward. François Mauriac: The Making of an Intellectual. New York: Rodopi, 2006. Examines Mauriac’s career, tracing his evolution from a novelist in the 1920’s and 1930’s to a major French intellectual and journalist in the years following World War II. Describes how the arc of Mauriac’s career reflected broader changes in French culture.

Williams, Timothy J. Desire and Persecution in “Thérèse Desqueyroux” and Other Selected Novels of François Mauriac. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007. Uses French literary critic René Girard’s concept of scapegoating to analyze Mauriac’s novel, arguing that Thérèse is both oppressor and victim. Compares Thérèse to other novels by Mauriac, including L’Agneau (1954; The Lamb, 1955), to describe how scapegoating and persecution are common themes in the author’s fiction.