Francois Mauriac's Therese Desqueyroux, the story of a conflicted woman who attempts to poison her husband for no apparent reason, is deeply affecting in terms of its depiction of tensions about the importance of family life, the importance of religion, and the right to agency for women, and for individuals in general, in the context of French modernism. The novel as a whole deals with Therese's return to her husband after her trial, where he is complicit in getting her charges dropped. She is concerned about the possibility of the resumption of their familial routines, but is then faced with his retribution: she is to be kept in confinement, without access to her young daughter, and to be brought out only at social functions so as to retain the healthy image of the Desqueyroux family in the eyes of the public.
There is a continued ambiguity about the reasons for Therese's actions; little more is offered than the fact that she "didn't want to keep on playing a role, speaking only set formulas," having been "in a kind of sleepwalking" (p. 121). This unexplainable, ambiguous quality that she retains throughout the novel is what lends her her "monstrosity" in the eyes of her husband, Bernard, and other members of the family. When she is finally set free by Bernard, who she continues to mystify, it is a form of cutting one's losses; Bernard realizes that he will never understand her, and thus has no room for her at all in his ordered existence.
The implications about Catholicism are many, as she is often referred to as existing outside of the jurisdiction of God, this being the root of her ambiguity to others; for what kind of woman would not want to care for her child? I am particularly interested, however, in the character of Therese's deaf Aunt Clara, a woman who can read lips and can speak rather clearly but who the other characters still acknowledge with uncertainty, often yelling their words at her as though that would make themselves better understood ("overarticulating every word, deforming her tiny mouth into grimaces" [p. 42] -- literally becoming monstrous as a means to communicate with someone they have deemed as an other).
There is an interminable gap between deaf Aunt Clara and the rest of the world; for all her own efforts to the contrary, she is still kept at a distance, refused admittance into some club of comprehension. But there is an important moment in the novel in which Aunt Clara actually does make a mistake that only her deafness allows. When spying on Therese as she has her first conversation with Bernard after the trial, Clara sees a smile on Therese's face and assumes that all is well -- an assumption, of course, which proves to be false, as Therese is only smiling (as is later revealed) because she suddenly finds her husband completely and totally absurd, a man "whose life has no meaning for any cause, any idea, any person" (p. 91).
Aunt Clara is subsequently put to bed by Bernard, who seems to have scared her: "She could decipher from people's bodies what she could not hear from their lips" (p. 95). We last see her lying awake in bed, her eyes wide open. Then the next day, she is found dead from mysterious circumstances, a rosary having been placed between her fingers even though she is noted as having been "nonpious" (p. 100). Perhaps Bernard has killed her, to keep her from meddling in their affairs? (Although that sounds a bit dramatic.) Regardless of the cause, her death in the novel is almost a direct representation of her failure to have been understood, and this is juxtaposed with Therese's near-death as she wastes away in confinement, no one really knowing what to do with her. I'm curious about the ways in which their stories differ, however; why does Mauriac dispose of the deaf Aunt Clara, only to eventually allow his heroine safe passage into the world of the free?
What exactly has Therese accomplished in the end? Upon leaving Bernard, she drifts off into the Parisian crowds "in no particular direction" (p. 124), seemingly having been spared the fate of obscurity, unlike her aunt. Perhaps Mauriac intended Aunt Clara as a warning, a possibility of what could have happened to Therese. And the Catholic intrusion, the rosary placed between her fingers rather than having originated there in the first place, is also an interesting counterpoint to Therese's own experience of Catholicism in the novel, something which could undoubtedly be the cause of much more specific discussion.
