Why Zola's Therese Raquin was shocking in its day

It's easy to see why Emile Zola's 3rd novel, Therese Raquin (1867), was shocking and repulsive and condemned by so many critics and reviewers in its day - so repulsive that the first full published version (it initially ran in serial form, like most novels in the 19th century) omitted several passages and, apparently, one full chapter - the Paris morgue scene. I was not surprised about that, either - in fact, it was one of the passages I was going to cite as particularly powerful (as well as repulsive - rivaling anything in Poe or Lovecraft). But aside from the graphic descriptions of corpses, festering wounds, violent struggles to the death, the novel is an extraordinarily dark account of Parisian life; Zola makes Paris seem like a dismal, putrid city. Most of the book is set on the Ponte Neuf, today a beautiful spot that tourists visit (the oldest bridge across the Seine) but then an arcade-like marketplace - much like today's bridges in Florence perhaps - but a place that's gloomy, crowded, and noxious. Over the course of the novel we see the central couple - TR and Laurant - plot their crime, the murder of TR's husband (and cousin), and then suffer from the guilt, shame, and remorse, until their demise. On the simplest level it's a "crime doesn't pay" novel, as the couple is so torn by guilt and fear that they can never love one another. Of course they never would have been in this quandary had Madame Raquin not been such a controlling and domineering woman - arranging the most inappropriate and loveless marriage between her sickly son, Camille, and TR, her niece/his cousin. It's a novel of two people spiraling toward their inevitable doom - right to the end the comparisons w/ Madame Bovary hold up and make sense, though this novel is not really on the level of Flaubert: It's a little too mechanistic for that, and devoid of the beautiful passages that make the final tragedy all the more poignant and painful. TR probably does serve as a good example of 19th-century realism, esp. insofar as "realism" is associated with the life impoverishment and criminality, in contrast w/ most popular fiction of the era, which was genteel and largely focused on the lives of the wealthy and privileged. (The exceptions to this generalization are the greatest of writers of the century, of course: Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Hardy, Flaubert of course ... ) Zola has the "last laugh," so to speak - as his novel remains in print and has a 2nd life as well on screen.