Boredom with Thérèse Raquin
“Thérèse, living in this dank darkness, in this dreary, depressing silence, would see life stretching in front of her, quite empty, bringing her each evening to the same cold bed and each morning to the same featureless day.”
Thérèse Raquin by Emile Zola, Chapter III
In marrying her cousin Camille- a sickly child who grows into a feeble and decidedly not hot adult- Thérèse Raquin submits to a life of boredom. Her tedious existence, working in her mother-in-law’s depressing Parisian shop, punctuated with grim Thursday night card parties (described by Zola as a “madly jolly (but respectable) orgy”, although there is nothing of the Jilly Cooper about this gathering. Well, not until the arrival of Laurent. But more on him later.) Life in the Passage du Pont-Neuf suits the rest of her family and, although Zola’s descriptions of Paris are so vividly grotesque, you feel as if you could scrape the grime of the city off the pages with your fingernails, it is not necessarily terrible for everyone. But Thérèse Raquin so devastatingly cannot even with the life she has chosen; she is bone-achingly bored.
Here's why:
“I had a ravenous hunger for fresh air; even when I was small I dreamed of wandering the roads, barefoot in the dust, begging and living like a gypsy”
Adult boredom is not the same as the boredom we experienced as teenagers or children. When I say I am bored I am not lacking things to entertain me- there is instant gratification available to me at my fingertips (no pun intended, although I’m sure if she were a real person, it totally would be one of Thérèse’s hobbies…). Books! Music! Exercise! Friends! All of these are accessible and I know that all of these exist because I have an adult brain that can compartmentalise and contextualise. I can find my own fun if I need to. Boredom as an adult comes from, as Thérèse feels it, looking at all the ‘mundane’ aspects of our lives and thinking- is this it? We apply a nostalgia to the times when we were not ‘adulting’- typically our late teens/ early twenties, when the promise of ‘a life’ was so excitingly out there, just waiting for us to grab it.
In the time before bills, and cleaning our own kitchen floors, and thinking about pensions, and facing our mortality when one day our back does something funny when we pick up another sock from the floor that doesn’t belong to us, life was a possibility. It wasn’t a fully-formed thing; it didn’t have us stuffing yet another load of washing into a machine each day, only to turn around and realised we’d missed the sports top needed for tomorrow. When we say that we are bored as an adult, we are really talking about the loss of our former selves, a self that we feel removed from when we look at how generic and cliched we feel we have become.
Whilst we may not feel, as Thérèse does, that we have been buried alive, we can sympathise with this sentiment, of our younger, more carefree self, becoming stifled by the conventions of being a grown up. We may feel perhaps that we are not where we thought we would be by now, that we have forgotten to have fun because how can you find joy when you start each day on the commute, crushed under the sweating armpit of someone wearing a polyester suit? The conveyor belt of tasks that is presented to us each day, can leave us drowning in tedium to the point that we become frustrated and, ultimately feel like we have failed. And whilst positive thinking, and reframing our narrative can go some way to help manage some of our daily dismality (yes, I have made that word up), there is only so many times you can tell yourself that you “get to Fresh Brush someone else’s poo off the toilet bowl, again” before your eye starts twitching.
We must also be wary of misremembering our youth as a time of true spontaneity. It is unlikely that we really were off on adventures, “wandering the roads barefoot”, with just a lip balm and optimism to see where life would take us. The time when we were most able to throw caution to the wind often coincides with the time when we have the least money. If you’re honest with yourself, you probably felt most invincible and alive after five tequila slammers. That’s when you did something really spontaneous. And that’s why you ended up in A and E.
So, what can we learn from glum old Thérèse? Well, first of all, do not alleviate your boredom by having lots of grunting sexy time with your husband’s best friend to re-awaken your inner passions. Seriously, even if they a) are very dark and brooding and you suspect that they might be very, very good at it and b) can build a pizza oven with their bare hands- don’t do that. Also, don’t plot and then kill your husband. You can, however, take inspiration from Thérèse and Laurent by remembering WHO you are and what you actually like doing. Make a list- of all the things you find (or found) fun; make a Pinterest board of all the places you have been or want to go; set yourself an achievable goal that isn’t about work or completely reinventing yourself; if you are very brave- ask one of your friends why they like you; go dancing, fire arrows at a target, climb a big hill- whatever gets your boat floated; PUT DOWN YOUR PHONE.
Find a way of reminding yourself that you are a full-bloodied human. That you are funny. And bright. And cool. And interesting. And definitely not boring.
(But please- I implore you- don’t snog the best friend with the “swelling, well-developed muscles beneath his clothes”. And don’t chuck your husband in the Seine.)
Reading List:
For a less ‘air-borne syphilis filth-ridden’ view of Paris try Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast
Not a book but everything produced at Revere The Residence is so joyful and created by young people who are neurodiverse or have learning difficulties. All of it make me smile; my favourite print in my office is from here.