What makes this seemingly melodramatic plot fascinating is Zola’s stated intentions in writing it. The novel is the first of Zola’s experimental novels of Naturalism, a movement of Realism that attempted not only to represent the natural and social world as it really was, but to place human characters into situations of conflict and then observe and describe the inevitable actions that would result from the interaction between organism and environment. Strongly influenced by his reading of the physiologist Claude Bernard’s work on experimental medicine, Zola says in his defensive preface to the novel’s second edition that he has simply applied “to two living bodies the analytical method that surgeons apply to corpses.”

The work itself, however, verges on the gothic, the sexual passion of its anti-heroes quickly replaced by their violent remorse, which is visualized both in the vivid accounts of Laurent’s visits to the morgue to find Camille’s decomposed body and in the bite that Camille inflicts on Laurent during the drowning. This wound, in something reminiscent of Poe, does not heal, leaving a painful scar that becomes a bodily sign of the couple’s guilt and of their inevitable destruction.

In his efforts to use fictional characters as lab rats, Zola reveals both the concerns and methods of the science of his time and the ways in which fiction both fails and exceeds the dictates of science.