Naturalism and Denaturalising Whiteness in Zola’s Thérèse Raquin

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

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.