Reading Order
Thérèse DesqueyrouxThérèse Desqueyroux Reading Order
Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927) by François Mauriac is the masterpiece of the French Catholic psychological novel — the story of a landowner's wife in the Landes (the pine forest region of southwest France) who poisons her husband and, after being acquitted on a legal technicality, returns to live with him in the provincial bourgeois world that produced and will re-consume her. Mauriac won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1952 and is the most important Catholic French novelist of the twentieth century after Bernanos; but where Bernanos's world is supernatural and violent, Mauriac's is psychological and social. Thérèse is not motivated by passion or hatred — she does not know why she poisoned her husband — and the novel is the most sustained investigation in French literature of a character who cannot understand her own interiority. Mauriac continued Thérèse's story in several shorter works: Thérèse chez le docteur (1933), Thérèse à l'hôtel (1933), and La Fin de la nuit (1935).
Where to start
Read Thérèse Desqueyroux in one sitting — it is short and the claustrophobic atmosphere depends on continuous reading. Then read La Fin de la nuit (1935) for the continuation of Thérèse's story. Read Le Nœud de vipères (1932) for the other great Mauriac novel — a dying man's confession of a lifetime of hatred — and Le Désert de l'amour (1925) for the earlier novel of sexual frustration in the Bordeaux bourgeoisie.
Complete Thérèse Desqueyroux Book List
- 1Buy
Thérèse Desqueyroux
François Mauriac·1927·Start here — the masterpiece; read in one sitting; the woman who poisoned her husband without knowing why; short and claustrophobic - 2Buy
Le Nœud de vipères
François Mauriac·1932·Vipers' Tangle — the other great Mauriac; a dying man's confession of hatred; the best demonstration of Mauriac's Catholic psychological method - 3Buy
La Fin de la nuit
François Mauriac·1935·The End of the Night — the direct continuation of Thérèse Desqueyroux; Thérèse in Paris, still unable to live; read immediately after the first novel - 4Buy
Le Désert de l'amour
François Mauriac·1925·The Desert of Love — the Prix Goncourt 1925; father and son in love with the same woman; the Bordeaux bourgeoisie and sexual frustration; essential predecessor - 5Buy
Genitrix
François Mauriac·1923·The early masterpiece — a mother who suffocates her son; the possessive love that Mauriac would investigate throughout his career; read after Thérèse
Thérèse Desqueyroux — Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Thérèse Desqueyroux poison her husband?
The novel's central question is that she does not know — and Mauriac's refusal to give a psychological explanation is the novel's most radical formal choice. Thérèse reviews her motives during the long train journey back to her husband after the acquittal: boredom, the desire for freedom, disgust with her provincial life, a moment of opportunity. But none of these explanations is adequate; they all fail to account for the act itself. Mauriac's Catholicism is the framework for this mystery: human actions are finally inexplicable to human psychology, and the incomprehensibility of Thérèse's action is the sign that something more than psychology is at stake — what Mauriac calls the 'mysterious forces' of the interior life.
What is the Landes setting of Thérèse Desqueyroux?
The Landes is the pine forest region of southwest France, between Bordeaux and the Atlantic coast — a flat, dark, resinous landscape that Mauriac uses as the objective correlative for Thérèse's interior life. Mauriac grew up in this region (he was born in Bordeaux in 1885) and it appears in almost all his major novels as a landscape of suffocation: the pines block the light, the bourgeois families are locked into the land and into each other, and escape is almost impossible. The Landes setting is not a naturalist description of provincial life but a symbolic landscape — the forest is as much an image of Thérèse's interior darkness as a geographical location.
What is Sartre's criticism of Mauriac?
Jean-Paul Sartre published a famous essay on Thérèse Desqueyroux ('M. François Mauriac et la liberté,' 1939) arguing that Mauriac was not a genuine novelist because he treated his characters as God treats his creatures — he knew their past, present, and future, and this omniscience meant they had no genuine freedom. Sartre argued that the novelist who knows everything his characters will do has already killed their freedom, and a character without freedom is not a genuine fictional person. Mauriac was deeply offended by the essay; Sartre continued to respect Mauriac's craft while maintaining his philosophical objection. The debate is one of the most illuminating in twentieth-century French literary criticism — it defines very clearly what freedom means for the existentialist and what sin means for the Catholic.
Why did Mauriac win the Nobel Prize?
François Mauriac won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1952 'for the deep spiritual insight and the artistic intensity with which he has in his novels penetrated the drama of human life.' The citation reflects the Swedish Academy's judgment that Mauriac was the finest Catholic novelist in any language — his combination of psychological insight, formal discipline, and spiritual seriousness made him the most distinguished representative of a tradition that included Bernanos, Green, and Claudel in France and Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh in Britain. Mauriac's Nobel lecture ('La Bourgeoisie,' 1952) is a meditation on the provincial bourgeois world that produced him and that he spent his career anatomizing.
How does Mauriac relate to Graham Greene?
François Mauriac and Graham Greene were personal friends and literary admirers of each other's work; Greene wrote the preface to several translations of Mauriac's novels. Their work shares several features: the Catholic psychological novel set in a provincial bourgeois world, the protagonists who cannot escape their sins and do not fully understand them, the atmosphere of spiritual suffocation, and the use of Catholic theology as a framework for psychological analysis. The difference is largely of setting and tone: Mauriac's world is specifically French (the Landes, the Bordeaux bourgeoisie), while Greene's is more broadly European and colonial; Greene's prose is more journalistic and Greene himself is more interested in international politics than Mauriac.
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