Excerpt from "On Modem Drama and Modern Theatre" (1889)

…There are some who wish to date the new drama from the Goncourt brothers' Henriette Maréchal, performed at the Théâtre Français as early as 1865 and booed. But the reasons for this dating are not well founded, since the Goncourts represent a Christian physiological movement of older times and in the structure of their play simply used a few bold devices which every realistic movement before them has known how to utilize.

Rather the naturalistic drama will probably continue to regard Thérèse Raquin from 1873 as its first milestone.…When Zola approaches the theatre to make a serious attempt to apply new methods, he is attracted immediately by a great and powerful motif, in this case a murder of one spouse in order that the other may gain the freedom to make another choice. But he does not proceed like Dumas or Augier, excusing the murder partly because of the prevailing legal system, which did not permit divorce; he neither excuses nor accuses, for he has canceled these concepts, but limits himself to a description of the development, indicating the motive of the act and showing its consequences. And in the pangs of conscience of the criminals he sees merely an expression of disrupted social harmony, the results of habit and inherited ideas.


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