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CHAPTER SIX Nerves: At the Interstices of Physiology and Psychology Emile Zola, Thérèse Raquin (1867) Everything is itself and at the same time something else. —John Banville, The Untouchable “Nerfs” (nerves) is a word that recurs with striking frequency in Zola’s early novel Thérèse Raquin. Nerves form the mainspring of the actions of the two central characters, the titular Thérèse and Laurent, her lover and subsequently her second husband. Thérèse is at first presented as having the more nervous temperament. Yet, through his association with her, Laurent, too, grows increasingly susceptible to the promptings of his nerves. Acting on the impulsion of their nerves they plot and commit the murder of Thérèse’s husband, Camille; although they get away with it, they are locked into a conspiratorial codependency that eventually destroys them. What was understood by “nerves” at the time of Zola’s novel? The meanings of the word had been changing, so that by the mid-nineteenth century it comprised a dualism that is at the heart of Thérèse Raquin. Originally , according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “nerve” referred literally in the singular to a sinew or tendon and figuratively in the plural to those parts constituting main strength. Secondarily, “nerve” denoted a fiber or bundle of fibers arising from the brain, spinal cord, or other ganglionic organ capable of stimulation by various means, and serving to convey impulses (especially of sensation and motion) between the brain and some other part of the body. Although this secondary sense remains predominantly in the domain of physiology, the somewhat ambiguous word “sensa93 tion” suggests a psychological component. This metaphoric potential develops further in the early seventeenth century when “nerve” was used in a nonscientific context in relation to feelings, notably courage or coolness in danger. Such a moral connotation to “nerve” becomes more current in the nineteenth century. For instance, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, rising to make her maiden speech at the Seneca Falls Convention on 19 July 1848, said: “I should feel exceedingly diffident to appear before you at this time, having never before spoken in public, were I not nerved by a sense of right and duty, did I not feel that the time had come for the question of woman’s wrongs to be laid before the public.”1 The verbal form “nerved” here carries a positive psychological charge. The adjective “nervous” underwent a similar transformation. In contrast to the physicalist meanings of the noun, which are still current in medicine , the parallel significations of the adjective have long since become obsolete. The meaning “affecting the sinews” appears only in Middle English , just as “sinewy” and “muscular” went out of use with late Middle English . But from “muscular” it was merely a small step to the figurative “vigorous,” “strong,” “forcible,” “free from weakness, diffuseness,” all of which were applied to writings, arguments, and speakers by the first third of the eighteenth century, that is, at the same time as “nerve” expanded to encompass moral attributes. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, with the growing prominence of sensibility concurrent with romanticism, “nervous” described a state of mind conspicuous for the arousal of the nerves. At this point it straddles the physiological and the psychological as well as pleasurable or frightening stimulation. In their connection to excitability, timidity, and some type of agitation, the new usages pave the way for the application of “nervous” to characterize a disordered state of the nerves. This meaning, increasingly prevalent from the later eighteenth century onward, is common in the medical writings of the third quarter of the nineteenth century at the time of Thérèse Raquin. “Nerve” and “nervous” often crop up, as in Zola’s novel, in attempts to fathom enigmatic conditions for which no acceptable explanation was available. In part, the difficulty stems from the limitations of medical knowledge and diagnostic capacity at that period. But it resides also in the nature of the phenomena under investigation. In deeming them “psycho-physical,”2 Daniel Tuke clearly reveals the perplexed bifocalism of his age, the wavering between physiology and psychology that hinges on the dual potential of “nerves.” Tuke represents one fork of the dichotomy in medical opinion in the third quarter of the nineteenth century in his belief in the essential unity of mind and body and the likelihood of their reciprocal influence on each other.3 Nerves are the medium that bring about nervousness and...

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