Witnessing the Remains in Zola’s Thérèse Raquin and Conrad’s The Secret Agent

Émile Zola and Joseph Conrad shock the reader by prominently featuring the brutalized bodies of members of the family at the heart of the novels Thérèse Raquin and The Secret Agent, using these texts to dissect the psychology behind both killing and bearing witness to violence. Highlighting the suffocating and confining nature of nineteenth-century wifehood, these novels turn the seedy, commonplace shop into a stifling, repressive environment that demonstrates the pressures bourgeois life places on obedient women. Such portrayals emphasize both the horrifying trauma and the disturbing pleasure of bearing witness to violence as perpetrators, as family members, and as artists, though Conrad rejects the narrowness of Zola’s scientific method. Evoking Zola in The Secret Agent, Conrad seems to draw on naturalism and the scientific function of literature evidenced in Thérèse Raquin while using irony to undercut the seriousness of this portrayal in a thoroughgoing critique of the empty elevation of the discourse of science.