FEMME DE SIÈCLE:

MALEVOLENT FEMALE SEXUALITY, MASCULINITY AND

LINGUISTIC AUTHORITY IN THE DECADENT NOVEL

BY SHARON D. LARSON

B.A., SMITH COLLEGE, 2001

A.M., BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2005

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFULLMENT OF THE

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

IN THE DEPARTMENT OF FRENCH STUDIES AT BROWN UNIVERSITY

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

MAY 2009

© Copyright 2009 by Sharon D. Larson

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VITA

Sharon Darlene Larson was born on February 6th, 1979, in Highland Park, Illinois. After attending Adlai E. Stevenson High School in suburban Chicago, she entered Smith

College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in

May of 2001 with a double major in French and Women’s Studies. Sharon enrolled as a graduate student in French Studies in 2002 at Brown University in Providence, Rhode

Island, where she received her Master’s degree in 2005. She spent the following school year as a lectrice at the Université de Lyon II in Lyon, France, and participated in conferences in both France and Romania. Upon her return to Brown in the fall of 2006, she continued her dissertation research on the figure of the femme fatale in French

Decadent literature and was awarded her Ph.D. in May of 2009. During her years at

Brown, Sharon was a Teaching Assistant and instructed beginner, intermediate and advanced French language courses. She also worked as a researcher and cataloguer in the development maintenance of the website “Paris, Capital of the 19th Century”

(http://dl.lib.brown.edu/paris) and curated related exhibits on Paris and Baudelaire at

Brown’s John Hay Library.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Without the continual support and encouragement of a number of colleagues, friends and family members, the research and writing of this dissertation would have degenerated in true fin-de-siècle fashion. I would like to start by thanking Gretchen Schultz, who served as my thesis director and informal mentor over the course of seven years. My passion for the nineteenth century and specifically French Decadence took shape in my first year as a graduate student in Gretchen’s classroom. I am greatly indebted to her patience and encouragement as she guided me through various projects and pursuits and to her sense of humor as she helped me to overcome the most frustrating details. I have been grateful to have her as an ally during the more challenging and rewarding times as a graduate student.

The members of my dissertation committee have also provided invaluable guidance through both the research and writing stages. I wish to extend my appreciation to Lewis

Seifert for his unconditional availability and insightful suggestions, specifically regarding representations of cross-dressing and female masculinity. I would also like to thank

Rachel Mesch for agreeing to be a reader at such a late date, and for her inspiring comments about considering the femme fatale as an intellectual figure. Thank you also to

Seth Whidden for his generosity and for offering feedback on my chapter on Krysinska, and to Virginia Krause for her warm words and for assisting me in the final important details of depositing the dissertation .

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I would also like to extend my warm gratitude to the close friends whose wholehearted laughter and fine sense of gastronomy will prove to be an unforgettable part of my years at Brown: Shahrzad, Adele, Theo, Allison, Claudia, Jean-François and Laetitia. Thank you for your encouragement and for showing me how to get the job done.

This dissertation is dedicated to my family: to my father for teaching me the value of honest, hark word, to my mother for instilling in me a love of books and French (at the age of 6, when she taught me the word “papillon”), and to my sister for her shared passion for learning.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction...... 1

Defining the Femme Fatale...... 1

Existing Criticism on the Femme Fatale...... 6

Socio-Historical Context and Feminist Criticism...... 8

Decadent Aesthetics...... 17

Corpus...... 22

Chapter One “Travailler la chair humaine, comme un sculpteur sa glaise ou son morceau d’ivoire”: Mirbeau, Torture and the Narrative Voice...... 30

Narrative Structure in Le Jardin des supplices...... 32

Clara’s First Mark...... 38

The Torture Garden and Voyeurism...... 41

Bodily Torture and Narrative Collapse...... 43

The Aesthetics of Torture...... 49

Language and Feminine Space...... 52

Le Calvaire...... 57

Maternity, or Destroying the Male Within...... 59

Female Intrusion in a Masculine Space...... 62

A Wrtier’s Impotence...... 65

Conclusion...... 72

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Chapter Two Corporal Inscriptions: Language and Sexual Violence in Camille Lemonnier...... 74

The Meeting of the Private and the Professional...... 78

Linguistic Consequences...... 85

Gender, the Male Body and Narrative...... 88

Performing Cross-dressing and Sadomasochism...... 95

Quand j’étais homme: cahiers d’une femme...... 105

Conclusion...... 109

Chapter Three “Ces lignes d’une fine et longue écriture de femme!”: Catulle Mendès and the Writerly Female Protagonist...... 111

“Avertissement au Lecteur”: the Construction of Masculine Camaraderie...... 114

Effeminacy and the Sickly Male Body...... 116

Literary Readings of Maculinity, Romance and Sexuality...... 118

Female Seduction through Language...... 124

La Brasserie: Homosociality and Male Literary Ideals...... 127

Female Linguistic Invasion: When Her Voice Becomes His...... 133

The Female Intrusion of the Male Literary Circle...... 139

Restoring the Male Voice?...... 142

Monstres parisiens...... 146

Conclusion...... 153

Chapter Four “Point fatale ni perverse”: Krysinska and the Poetics of the Femme Fatale...... 155

Preface Poetics...... 158

“Point fatale, ni perverse:” Madge Harding...... 163

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Female Social Networks and Literary Exchange...... 166

Madge’s Literary Coming of Age...... 174

La Création à Deux...... 179

Conclusion...... 186

Conclusion...... 188

Bibliography...... 194

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INTRODUCTION

This dissertation proposes to revisit the figure of the femme fatale in Decadent literature to see what it says about masculinity. As Annelise Maugue has noted, late nineteenth-century France was a moment “[o]ù l’on voit la femme n’être toujours à l’homme qu’un miroir” (632). The femme fatale is not exclusively about female sexuality, but about men’s response to it, and, as I will demonstrate, their loss of creative and communicative power while under her sway. Whether in the narrative frame of the texts, the homosocial friendships that contest excessive female sexuality, or the masculinization of the sexually malevolent woman, masculinity is paradoxically at the forefront of novels about dangerous female sexuality. This dissertation is an attempt to examine the correlation between masculinity, female sexuality and expressive powers in the Decadent novel.

Defining the Femme Fatale

Representations of sexually malevolent women have existed for centuries: evil and domineering women have tormented men in writing from the earliest recorded time.

As Mario Praz has noted in The Romantic Agony (1933), one of the first typologies of the femme fatale, “[t]here have always existed Fatal Women both in mythology and literature, since mythology and literature are imaginative reflections of the various aspects of real life, and real life has always provided more or less complete examples of

1 2 arrogant and cruel female characters” (189). The misogyny inherent in Praz’s comment appears to be a spill-over from the preceding decades, when such “arrogant and cruel” women were ubiquitous in the novels, short stories and poetry at the turn of the twentieth century. Agreeing with Praz, who proposed a variety of classifications of the femme fatale, Elizabeth Menon has argued that “there is no single femme fatale” but rather a

“constellation of types” (4). Similarly, Virginia Allen suggests that images of the femme fatale in the nineteenth century are reincarnations from antiquity, when her “ancestors”—

Salome, Messalina, Circe—flourished. Although this dissertation focuses on the femme fatale at the turn of the twentieth century, this long pre-history is suggestive of the figure’s staying power in Western culture. I will examine the specificity of the figure at the fin de siècle, a temporal moment that carries cultural and aesthetic connotations associated with Decadence. As David Weir has noted, “the ‘end’ of the century is not strictly chronological, but cultural and social as well” (xvi).

The femme fatale is first and foremost defined by her excessive and aggressive sexuality. Her sexual presence is the source of her manipulation and power over the men who surround her. However, the femme fatale’s sexual dominance is not merely a function of sexual activity, but rather a powerful sense of seduction that no ordinary man—or protagonist—can resist. Indeed, the femme fatale exists in a heterosexual context: as Dottin-Orsini spells out, she is “la femme fatale-à-l’homme” (17, her emphasis). In other words, her very existence depends on her rapport with her male counterpart. That is not to say that the femme fatale never exhibits same-sex desire; on the contrary, her hypersexualization sometimes includes the threat of bisexuality that exemplifies her boundless eroticism (as do incest, bestiality, or other non-reproductive

3 sexual acts). However, it is her relationships with men that determine her role as “fatal;” her malevolence is relative to a masculine interpretation. Her “fatality” can be literal or allegorical. Her irresistible seduction leads frequently to fatal results, as well as the financial, intellectual or moral ruin of men and their estrangement from society. The hold that she has on her lover is not simply a sexual one, but also emotional and psychological.

Due to his inability to resist or, more importantly, to act according to his own will, the male protagonist experiences a profound existential crisis that is inherently linked to his emasculation.1 In addition, the femme fatale’s vice is often contagious, and her male lover frequently plunges into a life of moral and sexual depravity, having acquired a masochistic taste for the vice to which he has surrendered.

Artistically, the figure of the femme fatale is a product of a masculine imagination, a projected fantasy reflecting male anxieties about sexuality and aesthetic creativity at the fin de siècle. As a result, the female character in question is one that is lacking in subjectivity and depth: she is a simplified type, a projection of male fantasies of excessive female sexuality. She is enigmatic, a carrier of signs to be decoded, yet ominously ever-present in the masculine discourses that frame the texts. Novels and short stories brazenly bear her name (Nana, Zola) or point to her unsettling obscurity:

“L’Innconue” (Lorrain), La Première maîtresse (Mendès), La Marquise de Sade

(Rachilde). As this final example illustrates, several women writers such as Rachilde and

1 My use of the terms “emasculation” and “emasculated” in this dissertation is intended to underscore that the male protagonists’ loss of masculinity is a process that can be tracked throughout the novels in question. The OED defines “emasculation” as “The action or process of depriving of virility,” and “making weak or effeminate.” In its transitive verb form, “to emasculate” is equally defined as “to deprive of virility, to castrate” and “to deprive of strength and vigour; to weaken, make effeminate and cowardly.”

4 Marie Krysinska adopted this traditionally masculine fantasy and reappropriated it to fit their own literary project.2

To say that the femme fatale is sadistic3 may seem redundant, yet it is the active quality of her sadism that points to her masculinization. Breaking from representations of normative femininity, the sadistic woman’s aggressive sexuality results in many authors’ tendencies to portray her as masculine. As medical and literary discourses of the period reflect, conventional femininity presumes passive and submissive sexuality. Any straying from such behavior in a heterosexual context implies a straying towards the opposite gender. Therefore, sexually aggressive women are deemed to exhibit masculine traits, which are behavioral and, by extension, physical. The femme fatale’s appearance is often marked by corporal signifiers of masculinity: her modest chest size or garçonne hairstyle are examples of how her body carries traces that are masculine. In addition, she often occupies an active role in her erotic encounters: consider Lemonnier’s Rakma, for example, who asserts, “j’entends bien être toujours l’homme,” or Mirbeau’s Clara who snidely remarks to her emasculated lover, “je vaux dix hommes comme toi!...”.4 In the novels in my corpus, the femme fatale’s masculinity is measured in terms of sexual, emotional or intellectual authority, all of which contemporary medical experts associate with normative masculinity. Rakma, Clara and many of their counterparts usurp conventionally masculine authority and pride themselves as they come to assert it. As

Maugue concisely states, “[l]a masculinité est à prendre” (632). Given the consistency

2 For a study on Romantic representations of the femme fatale by women writers, see Adriana Craciun’s Fatal Women of Romanticism. Craciun shows that women writers in the early nineteenth century not only featured the femme fatale in their work, but used her to explore ideas about gender and sexuality. 3 Although I use the psychoanalytic terms of “sadistic” and “masochistic” throughout this dissertation, I am not proposing a psychoanalytical reading of the femme fatale. 4 Le Jardin des supplices, p.198; Le Possédé, p. 306.

5 with which the femme fatale exhibits corporal or behavioral markers of masculinity, she merits consideration as a figure whose gender identity is unstable. This aspect has received scarce attention in the copious critical literature on the femme fatale and deserves a more thorough inquiry.

Finally and perhaps most significant to my dissertation, the femme fatale interferes with her lovers’ ability to generate language, both written and spoken. The male protagonists, often writers of sorts, involuntarily surrender their command of language to their hypersexual, devious mistresses. Throughout the course of the novels and short stories in my corpus, the male characters suffer from artistic impotence, lose the capacity for speech or reason, or regress to infantile forms of self-expression.5 In return, many of the female antagonists exhibit a concurrent authority with words, even a propensity for writing or other forms of creative production. The male protagonist’s loss of lucid speech and creative literary prowess corresponds to the femme fatale’s evolving mastery over language and its production, be it in the form of speech or writing. The femme fatale’s masculinization or usurpation of her lover’s masculinity and male privilege occurs parallel to her undermining of his written, artistic aptitude. As I argue in this dissertation, this is no coincidence. Through usurping masculinity, the femme fatale concurrently usurps a command over language, considered a masculine privilege— reserved especially for l’homme de lettres—at the turn of the century.

5 While the title of my dissertation may hint at a theoretical investment in linguistics, my main concerns are questions of Decadent aesthetics and feminist socio-historic accounts of late nineteenth-century France. However, given my interest in language production and the consequences of its breakdown, it is worth mentioning the work of Émile Benveniste. What are the implications for a subject who loses a capacity for language? As Benveniste writes, “[c]’est dans et par le langage que l’homme se constitue comme sujet; parce que le langage seul fonde en réalité, dans sa réalité qui est celle de l’être, le concept d’ ‘ego” (259). Though I do not consider such existential questions of the subject and language, Benveniste’s work may offer further insight for those interested in the construction of subjecthood in the Decadent novel.

6 Existing Criticism on the Femme Fatale

The femme fatale has received much attention from scholars in literature, art history and popular culture over the last several decades.6 Praz’s The Romantic Agony is perhaps the first text to catalog the femme fatale’s literary presence in Decadent literature. Praz devotes an entire chapter to the femme fatale in nineteenth-century

French, Italian and English literature, arguing that though she has always existed in mythology and literature, it is not until the second half of the nineteenth century that we see the emergence of an “established type of Fatal Woman” (191). His chapter consists of an inventory of Romantic and Decadent texts that feature the figure, and he briefly makes note of her androgynous tendencies. However, Praz’s commentary offers little conclusive analysis of the significance of these representations. While many recent studies point to

Praz’s work on the femme fatale as a precursor to contemporary studies, Adriana Craciun is right to point out that his study is anchored in andocentric and canonical interpretations

(16).

Recent works, including Craciun’s, have pursued feminist interpretations that consider gender expression in their analyses of the proliferation of the femme fatale at the century’s end. And yet, few explore the masculinization of sadistic female sexuality, nor the process of emasculation that she triggers in the male protagonists. Works such as

Nicole Albert’s Saphisme et Décadence dans Paris fin-de-siècle and Frédéric

Monneyron’s L’Androgyne décadent: Mythe, figure, fantasmes address images of masculine women during the Decadent period, but limit themselves primarily to

6 In addition to those mentioned in this Introduction, see: Lynda Hart, Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression; Joy Newton, “More abut Eve: Aspects of the femme fatale in literature and art in 19th Century France”; Helena Shillony, “Hérodias, Salomé, Judith: Figures emblématiques de la peur de la femme dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle.”

7 representations of lesbian desire or figures of androgyny. Adriana Craciun points to the femme fatale’s gender transgression, but labels her as traditionally “unsexed” (9) rather than as masculine. In Evil by Design (2006), one of the most recent studies on the femme fatale’s origins in nineteenth-century popular culture, Menon does mention the masculinization of the femme fatale, as well as the feminization of her male counterpart, but her brief analysis precludes a detailed reading of gender transgression in fin-de-siècle literature. For example, in a chapter devoted to popular culture’s response to the threat of depopulation, Menon examines literary, artistic and media representations of the relationship between the masculine woman—the “femme-homme”— and the effeminate man, claiming that the former’s existence results in concurrent portrayals of emasculated men. Menon’s chicken-or-the-egg scenario doesn’t take into account aesthetic or scientific discourses that contribute to representations of sexual difference. Her archival work on nineteenth-century periodicals offers great insight into popular beliefs about gender and sexuality during the period, yet her conclusions reduce the femme fatale and her masculinization to a mere product of feminist backlash.

One of the most useful studies on artistic and literary representations of sadistic women is Mireille Dottin-Orsini’s Cette femme qu’ils disent fatale (1993). Dottin-Orsini draws from a wide selection of canonical and non-canonical texts, and this dissertation is indebted to her comprehensive bibliography. She privileges “minor” authors and texts as especially rich in representations of the femme fatale: “il est préférable de ne pas privilégier les ‘grands auteurs’: c’est chez les autres, ‘petits décadents’, symbolistes oubliés, réalistes tardifs, plus bizarres, plus naïfs, certainement plus obsessionnels, que se développe le mieux le fantasme” (20). In her study, she classifies representations of the

8 femme fatale by precise thematic elements, ranging from her association with ornamental jewelry and decaying bodies, to dolls and puppet masters. Dottin-Orsini also identifies an aesthetic link between the femme fatale and the fin-de-siècle artist: “jamais le ‘problème de la femme’ n’a été si étroitement mêlé à celui de la création, jamais la misogynie n’est apparue aussi nettement comme la base même de l’expression artistique” (23). Dottin-

Orsini briefly mentions portrayals of female gender transgression in the works of Krafft-

Ebing and Lombroso, which she juxtaposes with the “surféminisées” (40) femmes fatales of artistic representations. Missing from this pioneering work and other studies on the femme fatale, however, is a discussion of her masculinity. Despite the abundant criticism on the femme fatale and the importance of the figure for gender studies, the sparse treatment of her masculinity and related usurpation of creative processes leaves a critical gap that this dissertation aims to fill.

Socio-Historical Context and Feminist Criticism

Nobody has articulated the tensions between sexuality and societal stability better than Emile Zola in 1895 when he wrote, “tout ce qui touche au sexe touche à la vie sociale elle-même” (13). The second half of the nineteenth century in France saw a plethora of emerging scientific discourses that illustrated Zola’s claim through associations of sexuality and degeneration. Following the publication of Bénédict-

Augustin Morel’s Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine (1857) and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), French scientists and literary figures alike grew increasingly preoccupied with hereditary degeneration. Sexuality and its pathologies progressively became subjects of concern for

9 a nation negotiating circumstances that threatened its stability. In this section, I would like to examine the emerging medical discourses in Europe and the historical context of late nineteenth-century France, both which frame the contemporary literary trends I discuss in my study. The femme fatale can be seen as a site of intersecting scientific, social and aesthetic discourses.

The idea of degeneration dominated contemporary scientific thought across

Europe, and was a background to a specific French historical context. Initially introduced by Morel in 1857 and popularized in the subsequent decades by doctors such as Max

Nordau (Degeneration,1892), this neo-Lamarckian theory holds that an individual who acquires “pathologies” in his or her lifetime could genetically pass them down to descendants. Degenerative traits could consist of anything from alcoholism to crime to sexual vice (including gender inversion), and were believed to transfer themselves onto future offspring, resulting in an eventual buildup of pathological illness in generations to come. In the literary world, Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle is a study of hereditary degeneration. The eponymous heroine Nana (1880), for example, portrays the symptoms of degeneration par excellence: the author designates her wanton behavior as a by- product of a familial history of alcoholism.

The contemporary discourses of sexual science set the scene for the elaboration of the Decadent femme fatale. In Les Origines de la sexologie, Sylvie Chaperon traces the etymology of the word “sexualité” (first appearing in 1830) and its signification in the mid-nineteenth century: “Le mot, qui vient du latin sexualis, lui-même dérivé de sexus, sexe, lequel renvoie à la séparation (de secare, diviser) […] Le terme ne désigne donc pas encore les activités érotiques, mais la formation du masculin et féminin, vue alors comme

10 un processus de spécialisation à la fois physiologique et mental” (75). While the word would eventually evolve in association with erotic acts and behaviors,7 its initial use, particularly in medical discourses, was in reference to physical and psychic sexual difference between men and women. This very notion of difference thrived primarily in a binary system of gender and biological oppositions, where masculine corresponded to male and feminine to female. This was the basis of the developing concept of “sexuality,” and had enormous consequences for contemporary understandings of biological sex and gender.

To further understand the ideological weight that the term “sexuality” carries we must consider the developing discourses of what Bram Dijkstra refers to as “sexual dimorphism” (Evil Sisters 133). At the turn of the century, sexologists and Darwinians alike subscribed to the theory that modern civilization evolved from primitive, bisexual beings, containing both male and female reproductive organs. The fin-de-siècle concern about degeneration led scientists to conclude that gender identities that did not adhere to corresponding biological compositions were signs of atavistic remnants (i.e., the masculine woman or effeminate man, whose literary counterparts are a subject of this dissertation). As Dijkstra explains,

These would-be scientific, tendentiously alarmist reversion theories had an indelible impact on the direction of twentieth-century thought. Very few had anything positive to say about the ‘primitive remnants’ of the opposite gender that might still linger in the modern individual. ‘Masculinism’ was almost invariably seen as the mark of the beast in women, and so was any sign of ‘effeminacy’ in men. (ibid. 134)

Many of the medical texts of the fin de siècle hold that clearly marked, unequivocal and opposing gender and biological difference is a sign of evolutionary progress. In Une

7 Nye locates the first modern use of the word “sexualité” in 1924 ( 117).

11 Maladie de la personnalité (1893), the forensic doctor Julien Chevalier insists on this point as he declares that “la différenciation plus ou moins prononcée des caractères sexuels secondaires correspond à un degré plus ou moins avancé de l’évolution des êtres et des races” (34). Simply put, civilization’s advancement is directly proportional to its degree of distinct sexual difference. Chevalier illustrates his claims with a tour through evolutionary history, where

on voit, à mesure qu’on s’élève, les types sexuels se séparer, s’éloigner peu à peu, les formes hermaphrodites succéder aux formes asexuées, la bisexualité remplacée par l’unisexualité, et enfin, celle-ci s’affirmer plus en plus. L’évolution est manifeste dans l’espèce humaine. Les caractères qui font le type viril ou féminin n’atteignent leur complet développement que dans les races et les classes les plus élevées et les plus civilisées. (34)

This perception of human social and sexual hierarchy is anchored in what Judith Butler refers to as a “matrix of intelligibility” (24). It is within this system that “intelligible genders” function, “which in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice and desire” (23). Applied to

Chevalier’s comments and fin-de-siècle models of sexual difference, Butler’s notion of intelligibility reveals a system in which two distinct and coherent genders correspond to a social harmony threatened by degeneration. These nineteenth-century “intelligible genders,” claimed to be distinct from their primitive counterparts, regulate contemporary models of sexual desire, gender and sexual difference.

Unsurprisingly, fiction writers of this time were preoccupied with the role that gender and sexuality played in the future of the nation. As a result, works such as Catulle

Mendès’s Méphistophéla and Octave Mirbeau’s Le Jardin des supplices not only addressed sexual deviances such as adultery, homosexuality or fetishism, but also included explicit references to contemporary medical texts and figures. Scientists did the

12 same, drawing on literature to support their claims and passing off fictional examples as clinical “truths.” As Gilles Deleuze notes, it is no accident that doctors created a terminology of perversions (sadism and masochism) by borrowing from literary figures

(the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch) (10). In a discussion on homosexuality, Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing went so far as to take fiction as a trustworthy testimony to clinical studies: “That inversion of the sexual instinct is not uncommon is proved by its frequent use as a subject of novels, among other things” (670). Chaperon signals that the literary domain’s contribution to evolving notions of sexuality is in turn reciprocated by the medical field: “C’est à l’aube du XXe siècle que l’on observe plusieurs changements: le vocabulaire évolue, de nouveaux concepts surgissent, une psychologie de la sexualité s’élabore, tandis que la littérature fin-de-siècle, pléthorique et bon marché, popularise les taxonomies savantes” (12). As I will demonstrate in subsequent chapters, the novels in my corpus resonate with contemporary medical discourses, sometimes rather explicitly, or sometimes hidden between the lines.

During the second half of the century, France experienced a troubling decline in birth rates, a trend that continued until 1939. While other major industrial European nations faced the same fate, France’s occurred well before its neighbors, who did not suffer a significant drop in birthrate until around 1900.8 Especially troubling for the

French were the figures of their German rivals, whose population actually increased by

58% in the years between 1872 and 1911, while France’s grew by only 10% (Nye 77-78).

While these figures are well known among historians, Robert Nye offers further specifics in pointing out that in 1870 French births also underwent a change in sex ratio: male

8 For specific statistics, see Robert Nye (1993) and Karen Offen (1984).

13 births were less frequent than in years past. In other words, the female population was increasing, while the male population (and population in general) was decreasing (83).

While the decline in birthrate against Germany’s population increase was already a threat to a nation recovering from the human losses and defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of

1870, the decrease in male births further implicated men and masculinity in France’s impending decline.

The implications of theories on degeneration were colossal for a nation already battling a declining birthrate: degeneration became both a national crisis and a national disease. Nye effectively locates the vicious circle within such social and medical reasoning: “Inasmuch as every pathology was both a symptom of the national disease and a cause of future hereditary decline, there was a perfect circularity in individual and collective disease metaphors, a grande ronde of causation” (77). The individual was thus responsible for the fate of the nation, and scientists felt compelled to partake in discussions revolving around family that soon resembled discourses in eugenics.

Particularly striking, however, were the consequences that these concerns had on portrayals of masculinity and male sexuality. At the time, men were believed to be responsible for the sex of their offspring, as intense “male sexual vigor” was thought to produce male children; female babies were therefore thought to be the result of a lack in male vitality (Nye 86). The combination of these factors led scientists and governmental figures to rethink the state and fate of French masculinity, which they associated with the irrefutable signs of decline and degeneration plaguing their nation.

Many feminist scholars, particularly historians, argue that the explosive literary and artistic obsession with demonized female sexuality—as can be seen in the figure of

14 the femme fatale—was the product of growing anxieties concerning the future of the

French nation. Leslie Choquette argues that in the vulnerable social context of fin-de- siècle France, female sexuality was implicated as a major threat for potential national ruin, and “Social Darwinism, with its explicit confusion of the social and the biological, was the perfect vehicle for expressing anxieties about nation and class in terms of female sexuality” (218). Similarly, Dijkstra signals the influence that emerging scientific domains had on Western understandings of and concerns for sexuality, and the ways in which they target female sexuality:

The later nineteenth century used Darwin’s discoveries to transform the scattershot gender conflicts of earlier centuries into a ‘scientifically grounded’ exposé of female sexuality as a source of social disruption and ‘degeneration.’ At the opening of a new century, biology and medicine set out to prove that nature had given all women a basic instinct that made them into predators, destroyers, witches—evil sisters. Soon experts in many related fields rushed in to delineate why every woman was doomed to be a harbinger of death to the male. (Evil Sisters 3)

The scientific discourses of the late nineteenth century posited aggressive women as natural predators of their male counterparts, disrupting heterosexual order and, by extension, as Choquette and Dijkstra argue, social order as well.

First wave feminist activity provided an additional perturbance to the dominant order. In her work on Decadent author Rachilde, Regina Bollhalder Mayer suggests that feminist claims to equality further unsettled ensconced paradigms of sexual difference and, in so doing, provoked Decadent authors to use literature as a means of playing out fears of dangerous femininity:

Si la différence sexuelle, fondée à la fois biologiquement et culturellement, avait légitimé le pouvoir d’un sexe sur l’autre, l’émancipation de la femme semble mettre en jeu leur altérité fondamentalement et aboutir à une dangereuse confusion. [. . .] L’altérité du masculin et du féminin constitue un schéma de pensée universellement

15 admis. Ainsi, toute transgression de cette norme est ressentie comme une menace pour la nature et la société; elle relève de l’anormal, voire du monstrueux. . . La femme moderne, cultivée et indépendante, serait un signe sûr de la décadence qui accable le genre humain. (21)

Indeed, such evolving approaches to (re)thinking sex and gender were not only paramount in the scientific domains, but occupied an unprecedented predominant place in fin-de-siècle literature as well.

Many feminist scholars argue that the political climate of late nineteenth-century

France allowed for the evolution of women’s social roles, resulting in a backlash against an emerging feminist movement which manifested itself both politically and in art.9

Beginning with the Commune of 1871, women were increasingly pathologized for political activity. In her work on representations of women during the Commune, Gay

Gullickson argues that the sexual demonization of the pétroleuse, mythologized as an incendiary arsonist, was a symbolic product of women’s active roles in the short-lived revolution. “Revolution was like the unruly woman” (261) she writes, both of which were considered to be threats to an already politically and socially unstable society. 10

Similarly, Choquette and Dominique Maingueneau both maintain that women were also branded as sites of national contagion and degeneracy due to an outbreak in syphilis following the Commune (220; 13).

9 See, for example, Helena Shillony, “Hérodias, Salomé, Judith: Figures emblématiques de la peur de la femme dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle” and Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity. For an historical account of French feminist movements in nineteenth-century France, see Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the 19th Century. 10 Gullickson cites the portrayal of the pétroleuse in many personal letters and editorials that were written during the Commune. She argues that the sexual content of these primary sources reflects a tendency to (hyper-)sexualize this female revolutionary figure. On May 26, 1871, for example, Edmund de Goncourt describes the pétroleuses in his Journal as sexually seductive revolutionaries: “The rain increases in force. Some of the women pull up their skirts to cover their heads. . . they quickly renew their irony, and some their coquetry with the soldiers” (qtd. in Gullickson: 251). Choquette also comments on the tendency to associate female revolutionaries with sexual pathologies.

16 In addition to the re-establishment of divorce in 1884, the educational reforms sweeping France during the latter half of the century also contributed to women’s increasing independence and public presence. The Falloux Law of 1850 established separate girls’ schools in every French commune, and by 1863 the number of girls in primary school was 93% that of boys (Lyons 7). By 1882, following the Jules Ferry legislation, primary education for both girls and boys was free and mandatory. These educational advancements newly available to girls and women, as well as developments in printing technology and the reduction of censorship laws, resulted in a general increase in availability of novels and female literacy rates—and women writers. Citing the women writers emerging at the turn of the century who were suddenly “produc[ing] novels in record numbers,” Rachel Mesch claims that female sexuality was only one source of anxiety of the period: “the widespread interest in female sexuality among doctors, writers, and scientists during this period has obscured an equally dangerous perceived threat to the nineteenth-century social body—that of the female mind” (5). Indeed, women’s intellectual independence threatened previously conceived gender politics and hierarchies, and the figure of the bas bleu—pejorative parlance for women writers—was the target of a feminist backlash by doctors, writers and scientists. By the time the first issues of Marguerite Durand’s feminist newspaper La Fronde hit the stands in 1897, literary and scientific texts were addressing the intellectual and sexual threats of the New

Woman.11 The fictional figure of the femme fatale, with her interference in dominant discourses and male language production, thus marks a strong presence in this socio- historical context of corporal and cerebral anxieties.

11 See Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France.

17 But there is more to her omnipresence than can be explained by evolving ideologies about gender. How can we locate this literary figure within the poetics of

Decadent fiction? How does her obstruction of language production reflect fin-de-siècle aesthetics? Indeed, while the development of sexology as a medical domain, French concerns about birth rates, and feminist activism provide an important context which anchors representations of the femme fatale in her historical moment, they fail to account for thematic and rhetorical trends in Decadent literature.

Decadent Aesthetics

Decadence and Decadentism are notoriously difficult to define. Though a broad spectrum of works addressing Decadent style, thematics and aesthetics exists,12 definitions are at times contradictory and even confusing. What follows is a brief outline of the stylistic and thematic elements that I believe are most pertinent for locating the figure of the femme fatale and her effect on language production and literary creativity within the Decadent novel.

Huysmans’s publication of A rebours in 1884 is often credited as the first major

Decadent work that celebrates the revival of Théophile Gautier’s “l’art pour l’art” dictum. Theorized in the preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin in 1834, “l’art pour l’art” privileges artistic merit over moral and social values and suggests a non-didactic, aesthetic self-consciousness. Paul Bourget famously defined Decadent style in his Essais de psychologie contemporaine (1883): “Un style de décadence est celui où l’unité du

12 Charles Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy and Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Europe; A. E. Carter, The Idea of Decadence in French Literature, 1830- 1900; Jean de Palacio, Figures et formes de la Décadence (2 vols.); Jean Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination, 1880-1990; Julia Przyboś, Zoom sur les décadents; John Reed, Decadent Style; David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism.

18 livre se décompose pour laisser la place à l’indépendance de la page, où la page se décompose pour laisser la place à l’indépendance de la phrase, et la phrase pour laisser la place à l’indépendance du mot.”13 Placing the accent on the individual aesthetic components of a work, Bourget’s description points to a concern for form over content at even the most basic unit of the sentence. As Weir remarks, “Decadence, in short, amounts to a reformation of the aesthetic code whereby art brings forth its meaning” (14). As certain scholars have noted, this fixation with linguistic effects has earned many

Decadents the reputation of contributing neologisms to the French language.14 Camille

Lemonnier (1844-1913), for example, is renowned for his lofty, hyperbolic prose, which abounds with archaisms and neologisms.15 In 1888, a satirical work poking fun at a seemingly obscure Decadent rhetoric appeared: Petit glossaire pour servir à l’intelligence des auteurs décadents et symbolistes (Goulesque, Une femme poète 31). A preoccupation with evoking sensations through meticulous word choice is also suggestive of an evolving self-consciousness about artistic production or, more specifically, the act of writing. Novels such as Catulle Mendès’s La Première maîtresse or Marie Krysinska’s

Folle de son corps, which feature an entourage of writers among their characters, and

Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus, which is not a novel about writing per se but about creating an artistic ideal, offer self-conscious reflections of the creation process: “la littérature semble mettre ainsi sa propre crise en abyme” (Ducrey xlix). In fact, the relationship between the artist and his or her work occupies either the plotline or peripheral details in a significant number of Decadent novels. Guy Ducrey speaks of a “crise du roman” to

13 Essais de psychologie contemporaine: Études littéraires (qtd. in Laporte: 193). 14 See, for example Pierre Dumonceaux, “Les ‘Décadents’ ont-ils renouvelé la langue?” and Estrella de la Torre Giménez, “Happe-Chair: Révolution langagière expression de la révolution sociale.” 15 See Jean de Palacio’s “Présentation” of Le Possédé.

19 explain the proliferation of (failed) writers appearing as characters in the fin-de-siècle novel:

La crise du roman ne se manifeste pas seulement à la fin du XIXe siècle par des querelles d’écoles, ni même par un questionnement inquiet de la forme. Elle trouve à s’incarner dans le récit lui-même sous les traits de personnages omniprésents et pittoresques: les écrivains ratés. [. . .] Ils sont à la torture: comment écrire? (ibid.)

Writing about writing, a major theme of this self-conscious literary movement, has implications for the representation of gender and sexuality. Let us consider the figure of the Muse, which Christopher Greger has linked to the femme fatale. A female figure of creative inspiration for the Romantics, the Muse’s femininity was not seen as a threat to the artistic process, but rather considered a source of divine inspiration. I am hesitant to label the femme fatale as a muse given her obstruction of male artistic creation in the novels of my corpus. However, as Greger remarks, under the influence of “l’art pour l’art” through the last decades of the nineteenth century, feminine sources of inspiration held new aesthetic meaning within the text:

As aesthetic self-consciousness develops, the translucent figure of the muse becomes increasingly opaque. The artist’s attention turns towards the shape, the features of the muse herself. [. . .] When aesthetic capability itself comes to command a sufficient quantity and quality of attention, it becomes the focus of desire. Thus within the discourse surrounding aestheticism, the image of the muse as a beautiful and authoritative woman draws together two literary conceptions of the feminine. The aestheticist muse is figured as a woman capable of arousing the (male) artist’s desire—but a muse simultaneously possessed of the authority to influence, or even dictate, her own terms of representation. (23)

This evolving feminine authority that Greger signals as a new defining characteristic of the muse can be linked to the prominent role that feminine figures play in masculine creation. Greger makes this connection, remarking that the muse now occupies an autonomous role and is no longer associated with benign artistic inspiration. Instead, this

20 muse-turned-femme-fatale commands her own aesthetic authority in the text at the expense of the suffering artist, and “presides over an art that seems to demand the forfeiture of the aesthetic prerogatives of masculine authority” (24). I am more inclined to agree with Elaine Showalter who persuasively argues that the muse was masculinized in the literature of the turn of the century:

In a further gesture of self-creation, the Muse was transformed from a feminine to a masculine figure. Male writers constructed a new myth of creativity in which the work of art was the product of male mating and male inspiration, totally independent of even metaphorically feminine cross-fertilization. [. . .] More often, the muse was a male friend or collaborator, whose example inspired the young writer to create. (78)

Indeed, given the pervasiveness of homosocial networks between men, and more specifically, male artists, in the novels I examine, it would appear that male camaraderie replaces traditional female inspiration in the creative process (as we see between Évelin and Straparole in Mendès’s La Première maîtresse, or Jean and Lirat in Mirbeau’s Le

Calvaire). While I agree with Greger’s observation that the femme fatale holds an autonomous, aesthetic function within the Decadent text, I believe that she is in fact a sort of anti-muse at the turn of the century, destructive to the male creative process rather than productive.

The demonization of female sexuality in Decadent literature can also be attributed to the Decadents’ celebration of the artificial (as opposed to Romanticism’s emphasis on the artist’s relationship to the surrounding natural world). Famously branded by

Baudelaire as “natural” and thus “abominable,” woman was considered an antithesis to the Decadents’ privileging of artifice: “Because of her ability to engender and sustain life, the woman is viewed by the Decadent as more ‘natural’ than man, whose domain is art.

Since the natural is antithetical to art, and woman is natural, the artist must of necessity

21 be removed from woman as far as possible” (Weir 19). However, the femme fatale is an exception to the rule: as a non-reproductive, hypersexualized and transgressive figure, the fatal woman serves an aesthetic purpose in fin-de-siècle literature. In ascribing masculine traits to sexually deviant women—already considered to be unnatural—Decadent authors privilege the perversity of gender transgression to honor the beauty of the artificial.

Along these lines, the femme fatale’s masculinization and engagement in sexually deviant acts—sadomasochism, bisexuality or incest, among others—equally correspond to a Decadent aesthetic doctrine. In fact, the femme fatale is just one of the many sexually

“perverse” fin-de-siècle icons. Decadent literature, with its dandies and gynandres, cross- dressers and androgynes, offers a rich field for gender and sexuality studies. The femme fatale and the other “deviant” figures reflect a Decadent celebration of the artificial, as well as a fascination for moral and sexual decay. Jean Pierrot explains the Decadent fascination with sexual deviance as an embracing of the “abnormal” within the so-called

“natural” world of sexuality:

Although it was impossible to reject sex absolutely, condemned though it was by its alliance with nature, at least one could continue to express contempt for nature by indulging in perversions of it. [. . .] Since the artificial alone has any value on the esthetic plane, and since morality condemns it, then once ‘vice’ has been chosen why not pursue it to its extremes? (133-134).

The following chapters will examine the link between the sexual perversity of the femme fatale and Decadent aesthetic values through close readings of the corpus described below.

22 Corpus

Each of the novels and short stories that I examine feature a femme fatale who simultaneously usurps masculinity and the command of language from the male protagonist. I have divided my chapters by author in order to nuance each individual writer’s representation of dangerous female sexuality and his or her contribution to

Decadent aesthetics. The four authors in my study—Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917),

Camille Lemonnier (1844-1913), Catulle Mendès (1841-1909) and Marie Krysinska

(1857-1908)—were all active writers in their days and circulated among many of the same literary groups. Though neither Lemonnier nor Krysinska were French (they were born, respectively, in Belgium and Poland), they frequented the literary salons of Paris and were often acknowledged or criticized by their French contemporaries (Lemonnier hailed as the Zola of Belgium, Krysinska appearing in Mendès’s roman à clef, La Maison de la Vieille). These four authors were all major contributors to and representative of fin- de-siècle literary and aesthetic trends.

However, perhaps with the exception of Mirbeau, who has solicited ample interest and criticism, these writers are today considered minor. As Decadent scholar Jean de

Palacio states, the authors of such “forgotten” texts deserve to be revived and examined as primary sources and witnesses to evolving literary trends:

Mais, outre qu’ils furent très lus à leur époque, leur oeuvre constitue pour nous un précieux magasin d’images et de signes, où ne manquent point les trouvailles d’idées et même de style, et sans lequel toute reconstitution d’un ‘imaginaire décadent’ resterait lettre morte. . . En réalité, le moindre texte de cette époque porte la trace d’un travail d’invention, même si l’outrance thématique ou formelle y prend assez souvent des allures d’autodestruction. (Figures et formes 1: 14)

23 The texts in my corpus are, similarly, carriers of signs and images whose decoding allows us access to Decadent notions of sadism and female masculinity. Indeed, Decadent literature, once considered marginal next to works by realist and naturalist authors, has received renewed criticism in the last several decades.16 I hope to contribute to this growing body of criticism by focusing on authors who, while widely read during their lifetime, today are poorly known.

Excluding Krysinska’s Folle de son corps, the texts that I examine rely on male viewpoints—they feature male authors, narrators and protagonists—often at the expense of female subjectivity. I argue that their narrative framework is masculine in structure and built upon a network of exchanges between men. While male authors, narrators and protagonists motivate plot development and its transmission to the reader, the works also feature various indications that the implied reader is male. Whether through a dedication

(such as Mirbeau’s Le Jardin des supplices, dedicated to a series of male figures) or through a warning against female sexuality (as in Mendès’s La Première maîtresse, which features an imagined dialogue with a male reader), these novels call out to male readers and are implicitly structured around multiple layers of masculine exchange. In

Mirbeau’s Le Jardin des supplices, for example, the crux of the novel, told in the first person by a male protagonist, is transmitted as reported discourse by a secondary male narrator, an original witness to the protagonist’s story. Because of these narrative patterns, Dottin-Orsini refers to such novels as “‘romans d’apprentissage’ d’un nouveau genre” and underscores the educative purpose of male homosociality:

16 The “Bibliothèque Décadente” series was published in the 1990s by the Éditions Séguier and consists of sixteen novels and short story collections by French and Belgian fin-de-siècle authors. This collection aims to resurrect and provide access to out-of-print texts and lesser known writers that exemplify Decadent themes and aesthetics.

24 Tantôt le texte tout entier se donne comme une mise en garde adressée aux jeunes gens; tantôt, à l’intérieur du récit, un personnage investi de la sagesse de l’homme mûr raconte une édifiante histoire de malignité féminine, pour tirer un ami des griffes d’une coquette. Ces paraboles éducatives se donnent donc pour but, par la diffusion de l’expérience des victimes, de sauver le genre masculin. (18)

In Adolphe Belot’s Mademoiselle Giraud, ma femme (1870), a popular novel about a man’s discovery of his wife’s lesbianism, a secondary narrator publishes the husband’s story because “il peut-être utile à quelqu’un de la savoir” (19). Like many of the novels in my corpus, Belot’s work falls in the category of a Dottin-Orsini’s “roman d’apprentissage”: a male narrator transmits his “knowledge” and experience to others in an attempt to inform and warn about female sexuality.

In the novels I examine, the femme fatale not only undermines the male protagonist’s capacity for language production, but also disrupts the homosocial narrative framework of the text itself. Whether through non-linear passages, incoherent ponderings, or sentence fragments, the narrative structure of the texts in question appears to fall apart as the story—and the woman’s sadistic sexuality—develop. In addition, stylistic techniques such as free indirect discourse allow her access to male-dominated linguistic spaces: she literally inserts her inner monologues and subjectivity into the masculine narrative. In the next three chapters, as I examine the deterioration of privileged male narrative frameworks and the disruption of masculine discourse, I will also be asking the following questions: what are the cultural and aesthetic implications of linking masculinity with language production? How do the effects of feminine sexual dominance function on the level of the narrative? What is being attacked by the femme fatale and why?

25 As the only female writer in my study, Marie Krysinska also distinguishes herself from the other authors in that Folle de son corps (1895) is not structured around male addressees and homosocial masculine frameworks. On the contrary, Krysinska’s novel is dedicated to a female reader and features a female protagonist. But the novel’s feminine framework is not the only exceptional element of her novel: Krysinska’s novel rewrites the masculine trope of the femme fatale. Though Krysinska is the only female writer in my corpus, I consider her reappropriation and rewriting of the femme fatale to be a political and aesthetic response to misogynist Decadent deployments of dangers female sexuality rather than a manifestation of some inherent sexual difference.

In the spirit of Palacio’s and Dottin-Orsini’s work, I have privileged works that have received less critical attention. While I reference writers such as Zola, Huysmans, and Rachilde, my aim is to bring greater breadth to the criticism of the femme fatale by focusing on less-studied works. The mere fact that one would expect to find Rachilde among the authors in this dissertation attests to her growing importance for fin-de-siècle scholarship in the last several decades.17

In Chapter One, I examine two novels by Octave Mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices (1899) and Le Calvaire (1886). I draw from Foucault’s Surveiller et punir and his work on torture and the body, reading Le Jardin des supplices as a novel about a woman’s literal and symbolic attack on her male lover. Morever, I show how her attack on the protagonist’s body extends to the multi-level masculine narrative. My discussion of Le Calvaire is centered around a break-down of dominant masculine discourse, which is represented by homosocial male friendships. In Chapter Two, I discuss Camille

17 For recent studies on Rachilde, see Regina Bollhalder Mayer, Éros décadent: sexe et identité chez Rachilde; Melanie Hawthorne, Rachilde and French Women’s Authorship: from Decadence to Modernism; Diana Holmes, Rachilde: Decadence, Gender and the Woman Writer.

26 Lemonnier’s Le Possédé (1890) and the intellectual and linguistic ruin that a governmental official undergoes during his affair with a sadistic woman. This novel also documents his exploration of his own gender identity through cross-dressing and role playing, initiated by the femme fatale. To complement my reading of Le Possédé, I examine Lemonnier’s popular novel about cross-dressing, entitled Quand j’étais homme: cahiers d’une femme (1907). Both of these novels feature characters who explore non- conventional gender expression through dress and reflect a fin-de-siècle preoccupation with gender ambiguity. I devote Chapter Three to Catulle Mendès’s La Première maîtresse (1887) and supplement my reading of male artistic impotence with short stories from Les Monstres parisiens (1902). I argue that in these highly satirical works, the male protagonists’ incapacities to write reflect contemporary polemics concerning

Romanticism, Decadence and the popular novel. Chapter Four focuses on Marie

Krysinska’s rewriting of masculine representations of malevolent female sexuality and the femme fatale’s linguistic influence on the male subject. Deviating from her Decadent confrères, Folle de son corps (1895) is not a novel about a femme fatale’s undermining of male creativity, but rather a woman’s own intellectual coming of age and aesthetic exploration. Like Mendès, Krysinska parodies fin-de-siècle writing and artistic creativity, and through her non-conventional “femme fatale” heroine, proposes a new literary asesthetic. In all of my chapters, I consider the gendering of the narrative frames and, like the male protagonists’ command over language, closely examine their deterioration over the course of the novels.

I approach the study of these novels with close readings, and my analysis of them relies strongly on the works of feminist and queer scholars such as Judith Butler, Eve

27 Sedgwick and Marjorie Garber. I also draw on the work of the feminist scholars of

Decadent literature mentioned in this Introduction. Frédéric Monneyron’s study of the androgyne in Decadent literature, Rachel Mesch’s work on fin-de-siècle women writers and representations of hysteria, and Emily Apter’s pointed discussions of Mirbeau, the femme fatale and the Decadent aesthetic have all informed my readings of the texts in my corpus. My understanding of the femme fatale as a masculine figure entails the deconstruction of the nineteenth-century conflation of sexuality with gender: in many of the novels I examine, the women are characterized as masculine because they are sexually aggressive (as opposed to submissive or masochistic). In her 1999 preface to

Gender Trouble, Butler reflects on the relationship between sexual acts and gender expression: “how do non-normative sexual practices call into question the stability of gender as a category of analysis? How do certain sexual practices compel the question: what is a woman, what is a man?” (xi). The questions that Butler raises are fundamental in feminist readings such as my own that attempt to understand representations of sex and gender and their interconnectedness with non-normative sexuality. Butler’s concept of the “matrix of intelligibility” is useful in understanding how ideas of sexual deviance and perversity are conveyed in representations of gender at the fin de siècle. Like the masculinized femme fatale or effeminate male masochist, “certain kinds of ‘identities’ cannot ‘exist’—that is, those in which gender does not follow from sex and those in which the practices of desire do not ‘follow’ from either sex or gender” (23-24).

Female masculinity is a concept that has recently generated work in gender and masculinity studies. In the opening article of the anthology Constructing Masculinity

(1995), Eve Sedgwick insists on dislodging the analysis of masculinity from a rigid

28 association with the male body and relocating it in a multi-dimensional system of gender and performance. This fluidity allows for the possibility of female masculinity, such as we observe in fin-de-siècle literature. In her book Female Masculinity (1998), Judith

Halberstam examines women who self-identify as masculine, from the tomboy to the drag king, in an attempt to show the ways in which masculinity, as experienced and performed by women, is fluid and unfixed: “female masculinity is a specific gender with its own cultural history rather than simply a derivative of male masculinity” (77). For

Halberstam, female masculinity is about specific, malleable appropriations, rather than imitative, replicate performances of conventional male masculinity. As one of the earliest theoretical analyses of female masculinity, her work is ground-breaking. However innovative and useful her arguments are for contemporary studies of masculinity, they are less applicable to representations of female masculinity that are products of dominant constructions and fantasies, unrelated to female subjectivity.

Michel Foucault’s La Volonté de savoir (1976), with its focus on the emergence of the scientia sexualis in the nineteenth-century, is a foundational text for a study such as this. Foucault locates the confluence of “perversion-hérédité-dégénérescence” (157) at the core of what he refers to as the technologies of sex, the emerging institutional practices working to circumscribe sexuality. As Foucault states, “l’analyse de l’hérédité plaçait le sexe (les relations sexuelles, les maladies vénériennes, les alliances matrimoniales, les perversions) en position de ‘responsabilité biologique’ par rapport à l’espèce” (156). His work is essential for understanding nineteenth-century theories of degeneration and the pathologization of women and men who strayed from heterosexual reproductive norms.

29 Decadent literature is slippery in its representations of sexuality, gender and their transgressions. Sometimes appearing almost revolutionary in its portraits of non- normative sexuality, most often the Decadent novel serves a policing function by providing frightening fantasies of female sexuality that run amok and place male sexuality under siege. Read from a twenty-first-century vantage point, they nonetheless betray early inklings of the fluidity of gender and sexuality, a fluidity that, as theorized by contemporary scholars, can be liberating to subjects struggling to free themselves from oppressive paradigms.

CHAPTER ONE

“Travailler la chair humaine, comme un sculpteur sa glaise ou son morceau d’ivoire”18: Mirbeau, Torture and the Narrative Voice

Octave Mirbeau’s (1848-1917) works are no stranger to the femme fatale. In his short story “Lilith” (1892), Mirbeau articulates what could serve as the maxim for many of his fictional texts: “La femme possède l’homme. Elle le possède et elle le domine. Elle le domine et elle le torture” (qtd. in Contes Cruels 2: 12). Mirbeau was the author of nearly a dozen novels, plays and numerous collections of short stories, and his eventual shift from Naturalism to Decadence was accompanied by the misogyny characteristic of each movement. As a telling reflection of the pervasive presence of dangerous sexuality in his work, his collected short stories, organized thematically by present-day editors, feature a series entirely devoted to sadistic and malicious women, aptly entitled “La

Femme domine et torture l’homme.”19

For Mirbeau, “la femme est inapte à tout ce qui n’est ni l’amour ni la maternité”

( Les Écrivains 191), and that especially includes intellectual puruits. In fact, according to him, a right-wing journalist who would later support anarchist and leftist causes, female intellectual figures, such as women writers, do more than overstep their social boundaries: they disrupt gender hierarchies. In 1900, Mirbeau wrote the following of women writers wishing to serve on the committee of the Société des gens de lettres: “Une

18 Mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices, p. 187. 19 Contes cruels, vol. 2. Edited by Pierre Michel and Jean-François Nivet. 30 31 fois le principe établi, toutes les dames qui écrivent ne tarderont pas à entrer dans ce comité, et les hommes, enfin vaincus, n’auront plus qu’à se retirer à la maison, où désormais ils surveilleront, ménagères, le pot-au-feu et donneront, nourrices sèches, le biberon aux enfants” (ibid. 186). Equating female writers with domestic deserters and usurpers of masculinity, Mirbeau’s views on writing and gender are unequivocal: writing is for men.

Despite Mirbeau’s insistence that writing is a masculine occupation, his first- person male narrator is verbally vulnerable and linguistically impotent in a number of his works. In his novels and short stories featuring male masochism and female sexual ascendancy, the deterioration of the narrative is linked to an attack on the male body. In other words, the narrator loses his capacity for story-telling as the narrative progresses. In turn, the female antagonists demonstrate a menacing aptitude for authorial projects. In this chapter, I focus on two of Mirbeau’s better-known novels, Le Jardin des supplices

(1899) and Le Calvaire (1886), beginning with the former because it corresponds most directly to the problematic of my study. Le Jardin des supplices, written during

Mirbeau’s anarchist days and at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, is a critique of Western systems of government and justice, set against the backdrop of a sadistic love affair, which includes a visit to a Chinese Torture Garden. My reading of this novel is indebted to Foucault’s analysis of torture and the literary metaphor of bodily inscription: through voyeurism, the narrator’s body is implicated as a site of torture and literary inscription for the femme fatale. Le Calvaire, Mirbeau’s first novel, depicts the financial, sexual and intellectual ruin of a young, effeminate male writer at the hands of his materialistic and merciless mistress. The parallels between these novels are apparent: both feature non-

32 conventional heterosexual relationships in which the female’s sexual aggression is juxtaposed with the man’s emasculating submission. Both also document the gender transgression that the protagonists undergo in their relationships. And both depend on a first-person narrator who recounts his own experiences and who surrenders his authorial and narrative command along the course of the novel. As we shall see, it is no coincidence that the narrators’ mastery of language and story-telling breaks down as the female antagonists symbolically disrupt dominant masculine discourses through an attack on the male body.

Narrative Structure in Le Jardin des supplices

A homosocial and phallocentric network of storytelling dominates the narrative from very first page of Le Jardin des supplices. Mirbeau’s dedication invokes a masculine economy of institutional law and order: “Aux prêtres, aux soldats, aux juges, aux hommes, qui éduquent, dirigent, gouvernent les hommes je dédie ces pages de meurtre et de sang.”20 Having prepared the reader for a masculine-defined space, Mirbeau next uses his frontispice or introductory chapter to present—and parody—contemporary discourses on morality, gender and sexuality in the setting of a dinner party attended uniquely by men. These opening pages introduce the prestigious party guests, who include various scientists, philosophers and public officials, each representing a discourse socially and ideologically defined as masculine. The salon discussions that follow are recorded and relayed to the reader by an initial, diegetic first-person narrator, also a dinner guest. As one of the attendees later emerges to tell his own story (which he calls

20 Later in the novel, the narrator reproduces this dedication nearly word for word when he evokes French institutions: “Et ce sont les juges, les soldats, les prêtres qui, partout, dans les églises, les casernes, les temples de justice s’acharnent à l’oeuvre de mort…” (233).

33 “Le Jardin des supplices”), the initial narrator allows him full narrative authority. In other words, the novel consists of two first-person narrators and two narrative layers, or a story within a story. It is the second character’s story that will occupy the remainder of the novel, following the frontispice, in the form of a metadiegetic narrative.

This introductory section presents the thematic elements of the novel through the form of a philosophical debate. The social and intellectual mélange of sciences and letters—of doctors and writers— leads to a stimulating discussion on violence and human nature, or what one character calls the “besoin inné du meurtre” (9). Considering that violence may be instinctive, natural, even the very foundation of civilization itself, the men engage in a discussion that touches on contemporary theories of degeneration, evolution and criminology, going so far as to claim that murder is as instinctive—and pleasurable—as sexual, reproductive desire (“l’instinct génésique”):

Et c’est tellement vrai que, la plupart du temps, ces deux instincts se combinent si bien l’un par l’autre, se confondent si totalement l’un dans l’autre, qu’ils ne font, en quelque sorte, qu’un seul et même instinct, et qu’on ne sait plus lequel des deux nous pousse à donner la vie et lequel à la reprendre, lequel est le meurtre et lequel est l’amour. (9)

This initial coupling of violence and sexuality leads others to comment on personal or second-hand experiences of violence that link murder with desire— “le spasme de plaisir” and “le spasme de mort” (9)— such that one character even expresses “une forte ivresse d’une volupté sexuelle” (22) at the thought of murder.

These introductory ponderings on the amalgamation of violence and desire pave the way for a discussion of sadism and female sexuality. In the midst of these debates, an unknown, desolate “ravagée” (23) figure emerges unexpectedly to ask why the men have not considered women, whom he claims to be paramount in their consideration of

34 violence and sexuality: “les crimes les plus atroces sont presque toujours l’œuvre de la femme” (24), he reminds his peers, giving a nod to Lombroso as he dramatically adds,

“ ‘[c]herchez la femme!’ dit le sage criminaliste” (25).21 And thus begins a debate on female sexuality. This unidentified character, who remains anonymous throughout the novel (“[p]eu importe mon nom!”[31]), launches a series of provocative questions regarding what he believes to be women’s common (sexual) desire for violence and blood:

Alors pourquoi courent-elles, les femmes, aux spectacles de sang, avec la même frénésie qu’à la volupté? … Pourquoi, dans la rue, au théâtre, à la cour d’assises, à la guillotine, les voyez-vous tendre le col, ouvrir des yeux avides aux scènes de torture, éprouver, jusqu’à l’évanouissement, l’affreuse joie de la mort? … Pourquoi le seul nom d’un grand meurtrier les fait-il frémir, jusque dans le tréfonds de leur chair, d’une sorte d’horreur délicieuse? (23-24)22

These questions do not simply infer that women enjoy bloodshed: rather, as the character’s vocabulary and corporal references suggest, they insinuate that women experience a profound sexual pleasure when witnessing acts of violence (“frénésie,”

“yeux avides,” “frémir,” etc.). This character articulates an essentialist discourse on female nature and sexuality: “La femme a en elle une force cosmique d’élément, une force invincible de destruction, comme la nature… Elle est à elle toute seule toute la nature!... Etant la matrice de la vie, elle est, par cela même, la matrice de la mort…, puisque c’est de la mort que la vie renaît perpétuellement” (27). Associating women with nature, the speaker claims that women are the “matrice”—uterus—of the cycle of life and

21 While references to Lombroso are unambiguous in this introductory segment, Pierre Michel argues that Mirbeau and the criminologist diverge on a number of approaches and ideologies, particularly in their representations of “marginalized” groups. See “Mirbeau et Lombroso” (2005). 22 Mirbeau uses a considerable amount of ellipses in his writing. For the purposes of clarity, his original ellipses will be indicated by three consecutive periods (…). My own ellipses, intended to signal an omission my part, will be designated by three periods, each separated by a space, and enclosed in a bracket ([. . .]).

35 death. In doing so, he maintains that female nature is responsible for the advancement or, by extension, the destruction, of the species. But a woman is not to be blamed for her inherent violence, he insists: “je ne puis la maudire, pas plus que je ne maudis le feu qui dévore villes et forêts, l’eau qui fait sombrer les navires, le tigre qui emporte dans sa gueule, au fond des jungles, les proies sanglantes” (26-27), for her evil is as natural—and beautiful—as the animal world (hence the recurring animalistic metaphors used in portraying the female protagonist of the novel).

Similarly for Mirbeau’s character, there exists only one “kind” of woman, regardless of individual characteristics or differences, such as economic class:

les grandes dames et les bourgeoises… C’est la même chose… Chez les femmes, il n’y a pas de catégories morales, il n’y a que des catégories sociales. Ce sont des femmes. Dans le peuple, dans la haute et petite bourgeoisie, et jusque dans les couches plus élevées de la société, les femmes se ruent à ces morgues hideuses, à ces abjects musées du crime... (24)

This reduction of women to a common essence and the effacement of their individual attributes and social specificity sets the tone for the personal narrative that this character will soon relate. Defending his potentially contentious opinions, he claims to speak from experience: “Les hasards de la vie [. . .] m’ont mis en présence, non pas d’une femme…, mais de la femme” (26, my emphasis). As we will see, Clara represents all womanhood, all femininity, and her dangerous sexuality, by extension, is a trait that Mirbeau assigns to all women. In juxtaposition with the sadistic woman, the narrator also prefaces his story by recognizing his own crippling masochistic tendencies, defining himself as “quelqu’un qui causa beaucoup de mal aux autres et à lui-même, plus encore à lui-même qu’aux autres [. . .]” (31).

36 The narrator’s story unfolds as he prepares to read from “Le Jardin des

Supplices,” an autobiographical text in which he documents his experiences with Clara.

The frontispice ends here and the remainder of the novel is narrated in the first-person by this unnamed character. The document from which he reads thus appears to readers as a discours rapporté by the first diegetic narrator, now absent and replaced by a new narrator.23 Of central importance to this study, the existence of his manuscript locates the narrator as a writer; the remaining sections of Mirbeau’s novel are thus presented as the narrator’s textual production, which he even considers publishing (26). Though he does not represent a professional writer like those in Mendès’s La Première Maîtresse,

Krysinska’s Folle de son corps, or even Mirbeau’s Le Calvaire, his manuscript places him in the company of the other fictional male writers that I examine. Moreover, the masculine network of narration—from Mirbeau to both the diegetic and metadiegetic narrators—is based on multiples layers of readings that are filtered through masculinist discourses and interpretations. It is significant to note that a similar structure of masculine reception has simultaneously been established, whether it be internal to the novel in the form of male listeners (the dinner party guests), or external, in the form of the male readers to whom Mirbeau addresses his work. Aleksandra Gruzińska (1982) comments on this narrative strategy and the anonymous narrator’s choice to read his story from a prepared manuscript rather than simply tell it spontaneously: “the act of reading betrays a greater complicity between narrator and reader [. . .]. Everyone who opens the book participates in the personal adventure of the anonymous hero whose experience becomes a universal one” (69). In addition to contributing to the complicity between male narrator

23 As a result, I will now refer to this character as the narrator, though keeping in mind his secondary role in these narrative layers.

37 and male reader, the narrator’s reading also exposes his shortcomings as a storyteller and writer. As we will observe throughout the novel, the narrator’s recurrent inability to recite his own story has repercussions for the text’s underlying frame and inherent attempt to contain dangerous female sexuality.

Before we move on to the central story and contents of the manuscript, we must first make sense of this introductory section and the initial diegetic narrator who never reappears, even at the novel’s conclusion. To describe the multi-layered narrative structure of Le Jardin des supplices as framed would be misleading, for a narrative frame implies a circularity, a return to the initial starting point. While the novel contains an imbedded narrative, what is lacking from the typical narrative structure of fin-de-siècle works like Pierre Louÿs’s La Femme et le pantin (1898) is a closing that ties all narrative strings together. The fact that the narration in Le Jardin does not come full circle means that the novel lacks narrative resolution, that its so-called “frame” is left open and vulnerable. To understand the implications of such a structure, let’s turn to Peter

Brooks’s analysis of such narrative layers or frames:

The nested narrative structure calls attention to the presence of a listener for each speaker—of a narratee for each narrator—and to the interlocutionary relations thus established. Each act of narration in the novel implies a certain bond or contract: listen to me because. . . The structure calls attention to the motives of telling; it makes each listener— and the reader—ask: Why are you telling me this? What am I supposed to do with it? (200)

What then is the purpose of the frontispice? How do we understand the “bond” that

Brooks speaks of between these men, between these interlocutors?

The frontispice sets itself apart from the remainder of the text both structurally and stylistically. In addition to serving as a thematic introduction to the pages that follow,

38 it also appears in italicized font, attracting the reader’s attention and indicating a break from the rest of the story. Its contents are therefore of high importance for the larger implications of the novel. Gruzińska privileges the information transmitted in the frontispice and claims it to be both an introduction and conclusion of the novel, a major section to which the reader should return and reread after completing the novel. However, what she fails to consider is the fact that these discussions do not reappear to offer a conclusive and resolved closing. It is both their importance in the text as a whole and their same absence at the conclusion that is noteworthy. As I will show, this unresolved, unstable narrative structure is directly related to the threat that female sexuality poses to the male body. It is through an understanding of this correlation that we can respond to

Brooks’s questioning of the characters’ storytelling motives.

Clara’s First Mark

The first chapter begins as the second narrator introduces his story by providing his listeners with a brief account of his family, childhood and ambitions. Following a humiliating defeat in a run for public office and betrayal by his governmental colleagues, he falls into a depression characteristic of Decadent despair: “J’éprouvais de la fatigue cérébrale, de l’ankylose aux jointures de mon activité; toutes mes facultés diminuaient, en pleine force, déprimées par la neurasthénie” (60). In addition to physical breakdown, the narrator loses his professional ambitions as well as libidinal impulses. When he attends a dinner party and shows little sexual—or social or political— motivation (“les belles créatures étalées et choisies par Mme G…, pour le plaisir de ses invités, ne me fussent de rien”[60]), he is encouraged by a colleague and childhood friend to voyage to Ceylon

39 under the guise of a scientific expedition. The narrator accepts to leave for the East and falsely assumes the identity of an embryologist.

Soon after embarking, the narrator makes the acquaintance of Clara, a young

Englishwoman traveling to China aboard the same boat. Immediately attracted to her, the narrator inquires about her to his shipmates and learns that, born in China to an opium vender, Clara is “un peu toquée… mais charmante” (76). This potential warning does not sway the narrator, as he grows more and more intrigued by the woman, whose “lèvres charnues et rouges” (83) are a sign of sexual danger. As Jean de Palacio explains, “ [. . .] dans le blason décadent du visage féminin, c’est toujours la bouche, rarement le regard, qui requiert le spectateur mâle. La bouche de la femme apparaît d’emblée comme une chose rouge et pulpeuse, ouverte des deux lèvres, sanguinolente ou saignante, corrosive, déjà vaguement obscène” (Figures et formes 1: 55-56). Indeed, while the color red evokes traces of blood, the mouth appears by extension to signify vampirism or even the vagina dentata: hence Clara’s “lèvres dévoratrices” (103) suggest the danger of castration during intercourse. Palacio identifies the female mouth as a dangerous sexual organ:

“Tout geste érotique (et d’abord le baiser) devient ainsi processus d’appropriation de l’homme par la femme à travers un ensemble de métaphores prandiales où dominent la succion, l’absorption, l’aspiration, l’ingestion” (ibid. 57, my emphasis). As we shall see, this common decadent topos—the woman aux lèvres rouges—functions metonymically to signify usurpation of the male lover’s masculinity—and language—by way of the symbolically charged kiss.

The process by which the narrator succeeds in seducing Clara prefigures his emasculation, which will play a central role in their relationship. When asked for the

40 scientific name for a sea creature that Clara excitedly spots from the boat, the narrator, suddenly taken by “un violent besoin de franchise” (97), breaks down and admits to her that he is not a scientist. His confession consists of a series of self-deprecating accusations muttered between tears of desperation and shame. “Je prenais une joie atroce

à m’accuser, à me rendre plus vil, plus déclassé, plus noir encore que je l’étais” (98), he remarks. It is in this moment of self-compromise and lack of composure that the narrator finally attracts Clara’s attention:

Tandis que je parlais et que je pleurais, miss Clara me regardait fixement. Oh! ce regard! Jamais, non jamais je n’oublierai le regard que cette femme adorable posa sur moi… un regard extraordinaire, où il y avait à la fois de l’étonnement, de la joie, de la pitié, de l’amour—oui, de l’amour—et de la malice aussi, et de l’ironie… (99)

Far from being put off by his desperation and helplessness, Clara appears to be drawn to the narrator by both love and the promise of sadistic pleasure. The narrator does not fail to notice this paradox: “Tant que j’ai été pour elle un homme régulier, elle ne m’a pas aimé… elle ne m’a pas désiré… Mais de la minute où elle a compris qui j’étais, où elle a respiré la véritable et impure odeur de mon âme, l’amour est entré en elle—car elle m’aime!” (101). The narrator, overjoyed that Clara loves him, recognizes that his own weakness—the “impure smell of his soul”—is what appeals most to her. Unable to read the signs of suffering to come, the narrator decides to abandon his work in Ceylon and accompany Clara to her place of residence, China. “Cet amour était en moi, comme ma propre chair; il s’était substitué à mon sang, à mes moelles; il me possédait tout entier; il

était moi!... Me séparer de lui, c’était me séparer de moi-même; c’était me tuer…” (103), he explains. His sense of autonomy and free will suffer shortly after his initial seduction of Clara, thereby prefiguring the loss of self that follows. But more importantly here,

41 Clara has already gained possession of the narrator’s body, and yet the corporal references (“ma propre chair,” “mon sang,” “mes moelles”) suggest more than just a symbolic invasion: she has “substituted” herself for his vital essences (blood, marrow), usurping his body and making her own space of it. And yet the narrator defends this parasitic relationship. “J’appartenais à Clara,” he poeticizes, “comme le charbon appartient au feu qui le décore et le consume” (104). The narrator proudly expresses a desire to belong to Clara, to find meaning and to be defined by the very energy that destroys him. Thus concludes the first part of the work, as the new lovers prepare to voyage to China.

The Torture Garden and Voyeurism

The crux of the novel is its second section, whose backdrop is the eponymous

Chinese Torture Garden. Though Le Jardin des supplices has been translated into English as The Torture Garden, the French notion of “supplice” is not exactly identical to

“torture.” Rather, as Lawrence Schehr points out, torture involves a verbal exchange: the victim is coerced into vocally releasing a piece of information. Supplice, however, is punishment inflicted on an individual following his or her judgment and condemnation, with no economy of linguistic exchange (Parts 47-49). This being said, Michel Foucault glosses the practice of supplice (which he claims disappeared around the mid-nineteenth century) in Surveiller et punir, in which he stresses the public’s involvement in watching the form of torture: “Dans les cérémonies du supplice, le personnage principal, c’est le peuple, dont la présence réelle et immédiate est requise pour leur accomplissement” (61).

Foucault characterizes the public’s presence as a participatory form of witnessing

42 because of the fear it ignites: “Il faut non seulement que les gens sachent, mais qu’ils voient de leurs yeux. Parce qu’il faut qu’ils aient peur; mais aussi parce qu’ils doivent

être les témoins, comme les garants de la punition, et parce qu’ils doivent jusqu’à un certain point y prendre part” (ibid.) For Foucault, the act of watching the supplice is not separated from the thing itself, for without a public the punishment does not serve its purpose. This active, fear-based role fulfilled by the observer depends on his or her inclination to identify with the victim. In return, the tortured body becomes a site of inscription to be read and interpreted by a public. Paraphrasing Foucault on representational punishment, Elizabeth Grosz notes that “where punishment is envisaged as a system of clearly legible signs to be read by the populace, the criminal’s body must become ‘literary,’ capable of bearing meanings and of being deciphered as a sign of prevention” (151). Grosz’s literary metaphor for the body is especially useful in my reading of Clara’s assault on the narrator’s body and his concurrent surrendering of authorial command.

The implicated body of the observer also becomes a site of inscription. The supplice strategically aims to inflict punishment at a precise corporal location, and in doing so fragments the body into inscribable pieces and parts. Literally marking areas of the body with “des signes qui ne doivent pas s’effacer” (Foucault , Surveiller et punir

38), the supplice breaks it into fragments that call attention to the specific site under attack. Again, to cite Schehr:

The part of the body that undergoes the supplice becomes isolated from the rest of the body, from the being that may inhabit that body. Isolated, the body part becomes the unique object on which attention is focused. And indeed, it quite literally becomes the partial object that belongs at the same time to the subject of consciousness and the subject of pain. (“Mirbeau’s Ultraviolence” 115)

43

The spectator, referred to by Schehr as the “subject of consciousness,” is both implicated in the supplice through active observation and is physically bound to the pain of the condemned. In other words, the body of the witness becomes identified with that of the victim: one’s torture is another’s pain. This concept of participatory observation and the fragmentation of the body is key to my understanding of how the narrator experiences his highly sexualized visit to the Torture Garden, with Clara as his guide. If the narrator’s body is implicated in a symbolic inscription, to continue with Grosz’s literary metaphor, who holds the pen?

Bodily Torture and Narrative Collapse

The novel’s final section follows a two-year lapse in time corresponding to the narrator’s expedition to Vietnam ( his attempt to “fuir Clara” [127]) and resumes as he returns to China and to Clara. This ellipsis marks an unraveling of the storytelling, and the undocumented jump in time reads like a hole in the narrative. It equally signals the onset of the narrator’s growing rift from language under Clara’s influence. This destabilizing effect exposes the reader to the narrator’s vulnerable relationship with language and to the torment and shame that he has undergone since agreeing to accompany Clara. For example, upon his reunion with Clara, he learns of the tragic death of their common lover Annie, which Clara insists on describing in gruesome detail. In a noteworthy gesture, Clara fills in the blanks, playing the role of story-teller while the narrator can only listen passively and is unable to provide the reader with details of the previous two years. However, he cannot bear the graphic nature of Clara’s description, and begs her to stop: “Clara… Clara! suppliai-je, éperdu d’horreur… ne me dites plus

44 rien… Je voudrais que l’image de notre divine Annie restât intacte dans mon souvenir…

[. . .] Ah! Clara, ne dites plus rien, ou parlez-moi d’Annie, quand elle était si belle… quand elle était trop belle!...” (121). The narrator’s relationship to language goes beyond mere sensitivity here, as his demand for an exclusion of detail hints at a developing estrangement from language. He recalls, “[l]’épouvante me clouait les lèvres. Je regardait

[sic] Clara, sans avoir l’idée d’une seule parole” (121).

Like an excited child awaiting a trip to an amusement park, Clara asks her helpless and exhausted lover to accompany her while she goes to feed—and tease—the prisoners of a local labor camp: “Voulez-vous que nous allions donner à manger aux forçats chinois?... C’est très curieux… très amusant…” (123). And so begins the trek to the Torture Garden. By way of her cruel proposition, Clara wishes to partake in the taunting of the prisoners, thereby removing herself as passive observer and aligning herself with the role of torturer. Through opposition, Mirbeau continues to associate the narrator with the torture victim, as his suffering manifests itself at first through his inability to keep up with Clara: “j’avais beaucoup de peine à la suivre… Plusieurs fois, je dus m’arrêter et reprendre haleine. Il me semblait que mes veines se rompaient, que mon cœur éclatait dans ma poitrine” (132). The narrator’s difficulty in following Clara sets him apart from her desire to torture the prisoners. Perhaps more significant, however, is the physical pain that the narrator experiences, and he is further associated with the torture victims. The narrator’s lack of physical prowess is a sign of femininity for Clara, and she refers to him as “[p]etite femme!... Petite femme de rien du tout!...” (133). This is one of the many times that Clara bullies her lover by challenging his masculinity, foreshadowing the connection between the torture they witness and his emasculation.

45 As the two lovers continue to the Garden, they must work their way under the hot midday sun and through aggressive crowds and markets selling rotting animal carcasses baking in the heat. Nauseated by the strong odor and struggling to fight off a fainting spell as he pushes through the crowd, the narrator observes that Clara seems unphased by the rancid flesh and forceful mob surrounding them:

Elle ne semblait pas incommodée… Aucune grimace de dégoût ne plissait sa peau blanche, aussi fraîche qu’une fleur de cerisier. Par l’ardeur voilée de ses yeux, par le battement de ses narines, on eût dit qu’elle éprouvait une jouissance d’amour… Elle humait la pourriture, avec délices, comme un parfum. (136)

The crowd is so violent that at one point Clara’s dress rips, and she excitedly exclaims,

“[v]ois chéri… ma robe est toute déchirée… C’est délicieux!” (136). Clara’s sexualized response to the macabre decay and violence that surrounds her signals her association of violence with eroticism. However, this portrayal of Clara, this sexualization of her reactions, is based solely on the narrator’s reading of her words and body (“sa peau blanche,” “l’ardeur voilée de ses yeux,” “le battement de ses narines”). Clara exists only through the narrator’s descriptions, through his ability, in which we must trust, to read her body and relay her words.

The narrator further develops his portrait of Clara as he recounts the remainder of their journey to the Torture Garden. As the two lovers encounter various traces of torture along the way, such as bits of flesh and stains of blood, the narrator tries to convince

Clara to return home. However, while the narrator is horror-struck by such sights and smells, Clara’s senses are awakened and she becomes sexually aroused at just the thought of approaching the Garden: “caresse-moi donc, chéri!... Tâte comme mes seins sont froids et durs…” (143), she commands her lover. She has a similar reaction after

46 initiating and then observing a deadly fight between prisoners as they battle for a piece of meat: “Embrasse-moi. Caresse-moi… C’est horrible!... C’est trop horrible!...” (158). But these states of arousal triggered by bloodshed carry a philosophical and ideological justification: Clara defends her voyeuristic and sexual yearnings for carnage by reminding the narrator that sexuality and violence are both a part of the “natural” world.

Comparing European sexuality with that of the Chinese, Clara calls for celebrating the natural through an Orientalist discourse on sexuality:

Chez nous, l’érotisme est pauvre, stupide et glaçante… il se présente toujours avec des allures tortueuses de péché, tandis qu’ici, il conserve toute l’ampleur vitale, toute la poésie hennissante, tout le grandiose frémissement de la nature… Mais toi, tu n’es qu’un amoureux d’Europe… une pauvre petite âme timide et frileuse, en qui la religion catholique a sottement inculqué la peur de la nature et la haine de l’amour. (140)24

Clara articulates her abhorrence of Europe through a criticism of its discourses on sexuality. In attacking European masculine discourses, Clara also launches a metonymical assault on the narrator, this “amoureux d’Europe.”

Significantly, the prisoner that Clara most wishes to visit and to taunt is a poet.

Locked in a cage with other starving men, the poet is a convenient target for the sadistic protagonist who coquettishly parades around the confines with a basket of raw meat.25

Once a “grand poète” (153) especially known for his satirical works, La Face’s imprisonment and torture has reduced him to a vile and decrepit caged animal:

Pâle, décharnée, sabrée de rictus squelettaires, les pommettes crevant la peau mangée de gangrène, la mâchoire à nu sous le retroussis trémescent des lèvres, une face était collée contre les barreaux, où deux mains

24 This commentary is reminiscent of Wanda’s, Sacher-Masoch’s sadistic protagonist in his 1870 Venus in Furs. Defending her libertine ways, she says, “Christianity [. . .] introduced something alien, inimical into Nature and her innocent drives” (18). 25 Emily Apter (1988) sights a similar case history for “degeneracy” by the doctor J. M. Charcot in which a caged man feeds on raw meat for circus spectators. Apter argues that Mirbeau’s poet is intended to mock Charcot’s famous case.

47 longues, osseuses, et pareilles à des pattes sèches d’oiseaux, s’agrippaient. Cette face, de laquelle toute trace d’humanité avait pour jamais disparu; ces yeux sanglants, et ces mains, devenues des griffes galeuses, me firent peur… (154)

This description of the poet, once an intellectual figure, now reduced to a corporal fragment (la Face), is vaguely reminiscent of that of the narrator when he first appears in the Frontispice to share his story about Clara: “à la figure ravagée, le dos voûté, l’oeil morne, la chevelure et la barbe prématurément toutes grises, [. . .] et d’une voix qui tremblait” (23). The poet and narrator, both victims of Clara’s torture, lose control of their voice: the poet’s is described as “un bruit rauque d’animal” (155) while the narrator’s shakes (“une voix qui tremblait”). The symbolic rapprochement of these two figures is literalized when the narrator finds himself face to face with the poet: “Je me rejetait en arrière d’un mouvement instinctif, pour ne point sentir sur ma peau le souffle empesté de cette bouche, pour éviter la blessure de ces griffes…” (154). The narrator seems instinctively to recognize his own fate as he approaches the ravaged poet, and though he pulls away avoiding any further contact, Clara leads him back to the cage:

“Mais Clara me ramena, vivement, devant la cage” (154). The adverb “vivement” ironically underscores the contrast between her state of excitement and the physical and mental decay of the poet and narrator.

Clara, contributing in her way to the poet’s torture, promises the prisoner rewards of food, but only after she recites his three-stanza poem from memory. The poet, distracted by the basket of rotten meat before him, shows little recognition of the words

Clara recites. She complains to the narrator, “[t]u vois… il ne se souvient plus de rien!...

Il a perdu la mémoire de ses vers, comme de mon visage… Et cette bouche que j’ai baisée ne connaît plus la parole des hommes!” (157). The poet’s loss of his own poetry is

48 attributed to Clara’s attack on his starving body, but also to her sexuality: through her kiss, she seizes the poet’s language and makes it her own. Not a simple generalization for a human signifying system, the “paroles des hommes” can be understood as a masculine system of discourse that Clara successfully usurps. Clara now holds the linguistic—and poetic—authority, as only she is able to recite the poet’s famous verses. The poet’s intellectual ruin foreshadows that of the protagonist, and points more generally to Clara’s increasing authority over masculine discourses.

The narrator, a story-teller like the poet, suffers a similar fate: “Je ne me demandais même pas, non plus, si c’était de la réalité qui m’entourait ou bien du rêve…

Je ne me demandais rien… Je ne pensais à rien… Je ne disais rien… Clara parlait, parlait…” (166). Similar to the poet, the narrator unwillingly relinquishes his story-telling skills to Clara, who indirectly takes over as narrator as she “racontait encore des histoires et des histoires” (166). The narrator shows symptoms of an estrangement from reality, and his ability to recount his own story deteriorates. And so Clara speaks. And speaks.

This narrative disappropriation also manifests itself at a descriptive moment in this section of the text, in which the narrator relinquishes his viewpoint to Clara.

Describing the flora and fauna of the Chinese garden, he uncharacteristically and vehemently criticizes his fellow European horticulturists in favor of the artistically- talented Chinese gardener:

il me serait même agréable qu’on les guillotinât sans pitié, de préférence à ces pâles assassins dont le ‘sélectionnisme’ social est plutôt louable et généreux, puisque, la plupart du temps, il ne vise que des vieilles femmes très laides, et de très ignobles bourgeois, lesquels sont un outrage perpétuel à la vie. (161-162)

49 Claiming that the mediocre French gardener deserves the guillotine while defending the serial killer as an unrecognized social hygienist, the narrator adopts a perspective typical of his sadistic English lover. He continues his four-page description of the Garden, praising the Chinese for their sexual and artistic ingenuity, and casually concludes by mentioning, “[e]t Clara, qui me contait ces choses gentilles [. . . ]” (163). These pages, the descriptions and harsh judgments, so atypical of the narrator, are now revealed to be

Clara’s opinions, Clara’s details, transmitted by the narrator as though they were his own.

Focusing on the aesthetics of the novel and the (albeit satirical) portrayal of torture as a lost art form, one critic has likened Clara’s role in the Garden to that of the art critic.26

Indeed, Clara’s aesthetic judgments have permeated the text. Clara has taken over, inserted herself into the narrative. We can no longer distinguish between her words, her opinions, and her perceptions of the unfolding events and those of the narrator.

The Aesthetics of Torture

Clara’s possession of language is a by-product of the war she wages against the male body, and she implicates the narrator as both witness and symbolic victim of her torturous tendencies. Let us consider Clara’s fascination with one of the sentencings she witnesses while the narrator is in Vietnam: referred to as the “supplice de la caresse”

(144), a male prisoner is tied down to a table and masturbated by a woman for four consecutive hours until he dies, releasing a spurt of blood. Can we read this as an image of castration? Or even male menstruation? In any case, the memory continues to captivate

Clara as an ultimate sadistic fantasy founded on the subjugation of masculinity. As she recounts her impressions upon having observed this punishment, Clara expresses a desire

26 Christina Ferree Chabrier, “Aesthetic Perversion: Octave Mirbeau’s Le Jardin des supplices.”

50 to symbolically partake in the act by acquiring the ring worn by the torturer: “Cette femme avait, à l’un de ses doigts, un gros rubis qui, durant le supplice, allait et venait dans le soleil, comme une petite flamme rouge et dansante… [. . .] Je voudrais bien l’avoir” (145). Clara’s association with the “supplice de la caresse” via the torturer’s ring is equally reinforced by the narrator’s reference to Clara’s “main donneuse d’oubli et verseuse d’ivresse” (142), occurring just prior to the description of the masturbatory chastisement. Recalling Schehr’s comments above, as Clara verbally depicts this

“supplice de la caresse,” the narrator focuses on the bodily object subjected to torture, and his very own voyeurism—as indirect as it may be—locates him within the act as victim.

The Torture Garden offers multiple spectacles of castration that continually position the narrator as not just a witness, but also a symbolic victim. In addition to the

“supplice de la caresse,” Clara and the narrator hear of the sexual transformation that a torturer performs on a prisoner: “Hier, ma foi… ce fut très curieux… D’un homme j’ai fait une femme… Hé!... hé!... hé!... C’était à s’y méprendre…” (184), he boasts to the visitors. Through these examples, the Torture Garden can be read as a site of both physical and symbolic assaults on masculinity, implicating both Clara and the narrator as participants with very different roles.

For though both Clara and the narrator are simultaneous witnesses in the Torture

Garden, they participate in distinctly gendered ways. Clara’s sadism is accompanied by an attraction to pain, one which does not, however, place her in the role of the victim.

While we have already seen her participation in the torturing of the condemned, she is also the victim through her observation and identification. However, while the narrator is

51 literally sickened by the pain he sees and vicariously suffers, Clara is amused and sexually aroused. For example, she experiences a satisfying connection with a beaten prisoner, recalling, “à moi aussi, chère petite âme, il me semblait que la badine entrait, à chaque coup, dans mes reins… C’était atroce et très doux!” (144). Clara’s implication in the torture differs greatly from that of the narrator’s. With the exception of one or two,27 most of the observed victims are male, while Clara is one of many women who visit the

Torture Garden for sadistic gratification. The narrator recalls, “[n]ous passâmes lentement devant les dix cages. Des femmes arrêtées poussaient des cris ou riaient aux

éclats, ou bien se livraient à des mimiques passionnées. [. . . ] Des curieuses suivaient toutes les péripéties de ce jeu cruel, d’un air attentif et réjoui” (152). Coupled with his characterization of Clara, Mirbeau’s portrayal of these women depicts sadistic voyeurism as uniquely feminine.

In addition to portraying women as sexually aggressive, the author equally depicts their male counterparts as effeminate. Not only does Clara call her lover “une petite femme de rien de tout,” but accuses him of not being a man: “Tu n’es pas un homme…

Même du temps d’Annie, c’était la même chose… Tu nous gâtais tout notre plaisir avec tes évanouissements de petite pensionnaire et de femme enceinte… Quand on est comme toi, on reste chez soi” (197). By default, Clara asserts her own masculinity in juxtaposition with the narrator’s: “de nous deux, c’est moi l’homme. [. . .] [J]e vaux dix hommes comme toi!...” (198). The narrator’s susceptibility to fainting spells and Clara’s strong sexual drive and attraction to bloodshed exemplify Mirbeau’s representation of the

27 Like her male counterparts, one of the female victims undergoes a sexualized kind of torture: “Une autre femme, dans une autre niche, les jambes écartées, ou plutôt écartelées, avait le cou et les bras dans des colliers de fer… Ses paupières, ses narines, ses lèvres, ses parties sexuelles étaient frottées de poivre rouge et deux écrous lui écrasaient la pointe des seins” (226). Interestingly, this sexualized attack on the female body is noted in passing, with no commentary on the part of the narrator or his lover.

52 decline of normative masculinity at the fin de siècle. Clara muses, “[l]es hommes!... ça ne sait pas ce que c’est que l’amour, ni ce que c’est que la mort, qui est bien plus belle que l’amour… Ça ne sait rien… et c’est toujours triste,… et ça pleure!... Et ça s’évanouit, sans raison, pour des nunus!” (198). By way of metonymy, the narrator has come to exemplify the decline of normative masculinity (“les hommes!”). His anonymity also implicates his male readers in this story about female sexuality and emasculation, rendering his experiences universal for his male audience.

Language and Feminine Space

The novel undergoes a major narrative shift midway through the second-to-last chapter. Though parts of the narration slip to and from past and present tenses at various moments in the text, the temporal shift at this moment in the novel marks a palpable narrative breakdown that will define the concluding chapters. The conventional story- telling structure that previously characterized the narration now unravels as the narrator laments, “Ah oui! le jardin des supplices!... [. . .] Ce que j’ai vu aujourd’hui, ce que j’ai entendu, existe et crie et hurle au-delà de ce jardin, qui n’est plus pour moi qu’un symbole, sur toute la terre…” (232, my emphasis). The shift to the present tense (“existe et crie et hurle”) bespeaks a confusion preventing temporal distancing between the narrative act and the event: as he tells his story, it is as though he just visited the Garden

“aujourd’hui”. The narrator will continue to process his impressions at random instances as he approaches the novel’s climax. Moreover, he has also come to doubt his ability as a narrator (and writer, by extension), as the excessive use of qualifiers and rhetorical questions in this section (“A quoi songe-t-elle? Je ne sais pas…”[229]), signals his lack

53 of mastery over the details and events that he is recounting. The story is no longer his own, just as the poet’s verses are no longer his own. And, finally, the narrator’s constant, haphazard calling of Clara’s name throughout the chapter (“Clara!... Clara!... Clara!...”) contributes to the narration’s disjointedness as her presence inserts itself into the manuscript at random moments, disrupting coherent flow.

Significantly, this is the very moment that Clara’s “vice” proves to be contagious and triumphs over the narrator’s resistance, as he too becomes sexually aggressive. This becomes most evident in his decision to be with Clara in the Garden itself: “d’une main brutale, je lui empoigne les seins. [. . .] Ma voix est haletante; une bave ignoble coule de ma bouche et, en même temps que cette bave, des mots abominables… les mots qu’elle aime!...” (237). Whether due to Clara’s constant bullying or to the relentless presence of decay and bloodshed, the narrator has come to employ methods of seduction—“les mots qu’elle aime”—that he finds “abominable” in an attempt to please his lover. In addition, the narrator’s recounting of this moment, again in the present tense, illustrates his lack of mastery over his words—in both the incident itself and this narrative moment—as they incoherently escape from his mouth accompanied by “une bave ignoble.” This scene illustrates the narrator’s surrender of language, of his language, of the masculine discourse structuring the text, to that of Clara’s, as her “abominable” words now characterize his own voice. As we’ll see below, a similar episode takes place in Mendès’s work: seduced by a femme fatale with a vicious tongue, a priest’s nervous breakdown is characterized by irrepressible verbal obscenities. Like Clara, Mendès’s femme fatale

54 exercises such an authority over language that her own vulgarity in speech, like her sexual deviance, is contagious and contaminating. 28

In this same disjointed chapter the narrator, in a haze, even questions the existence of Clara and the reality of the events that he recounts. Again in the present tense, he wonders whether this enigmatic figure is a projection of his own fantasy:

Existe-t-elle réellement?... Je me le demande, non sans effroi… N’est-elle point née de mes débauches et de ma fièvre?... N’est-elle point une de ces impossibles images, comme en enfante le cauchemar?... Une de ces tentations de crime comme la luxure en fait lever dans l’imagination de ces malades que sont les assassins et les fous?... Ne serait-elle pas autre chose que mon âme, sortie hors de moi, malgré moi, et matérialisée sous la forme du péché?... (230)

As his narration unravels, the narrator experiences a poignant moment of self-awareness as he speculates that Clara could perhaps be a projection of his own imagination. These uncertainties place the entire narrative into question and, as a result, suggest a collapse of the male-centered discourse that structures the novel. They also reveal the narrator’s loss of authority as a storyteller and authorial figure. Syntactically, his acute use of ellipses in this passage reflects his own self-doubt that clearly manifests itself within the text. In an article on Mirbeau’s excessive use of punctuation, Jacques Dürrenmatt argues that such syntax both reflects and is a metaphor for the writing process:

On voit assez comment l’écriture, par la répétition, par la ponctuation, reproduit ce processus créateur qui hésite, qui tâtonne, qui est tout pris de ce ‘désir furieux et tendre’ qui, comme tout acte poétique, tend à concilier les contraires par la méditation d’un langage qui n’est jamais pure forme, mais lutte vers l’harmonie. (315)

28 These incidences recall the work of the French neurologist Georges Gilles de la Tourette, a contemporary of Mirbeau and student of Charcot. In 1885, Tourette published a study investigating the excessive verbal and physical tics exhibited by some of Charcot’s patients. Charcot is responsible for naming the disease “La Maladie de Gilles de la Tourette,” in honor of his student.

55 Though Dürrenmatt is referring to Mirbeau’s writing, it is equally applicable to the narrator’s language. With Dürrenmatt’s comments in mind, we can point to the breakdown of this narrative: the hesitation of the narrator’s pen, series of rhetorical questions and incessant ellipses are syntactical markers of Clara’s influence on his control of language. We can argue that the narrator’s subsequent emasculation, also triggered by Clara, ultimately results in his inability to use language coherently and intelligently or, in Dürrenmatt’s terms, to obtain linguistic harmony. And finally, as

Lawrence Schehr (1998) points out, the ellipses are also stylistic echoes of the narrator’s tortured and fragmented body.

In a final chapter as stylistically disjointed as the previous, Clara is taken into the hands of the women of a Chinese brothel following a fainting spell and uncontrollable spasms.29 Terrified for his lover’s life, the narrator is relieved when a woman reminds him that Clara’s physical state is not uncommon when she visits the Torture Garden.

What follows is a ritual among Clara and these women, one of whom whispers, “[v]ous allez revivre, petite amie de mes lèvres, revivre sous mes caresses et sous les parfums de ma bouche” (244). The narrator slips back into a state of submission—“[j]e ne pouvais faire un geste, ni prononcer une parole” (245) —, numbed by the obscenities and tortures he witnesses in the brothel, which he identifies as “un lieu de torture” (247), dominated by sadistic, hypersexualized women. Having lost his ability to act or speak, the narrator simply observes “machinalement” (246), understanding that it is only in this female space that Clara can be “healed.” Once again he is reduced to a voyeur, but a strictly passive one in this exclusively lesbian context. As confused and muddled as his telling of the tale,

29 For a reading on the parallel between Clara’s convulsions and neurologist J.M. Charcot’s female hysterics, see Emily Apter, “The Garden of Scopic Perversion from Monet to Mirbeau.”

56 the narrator watches these women seeking to ceremonially “cure” Clara through sexual acts: “Griserie de rêve, de débauche, de supplice et de crime, on eût dit que toutes ces bouches, toutes ces mains, tous ces seins, toute cette chair vivante, allaient se ruer sur

Clara, pour jouir de sa chair morte!...” (245).

This feminine orgy, from which the narrator is excluded, reaches its climax when the women direct their sexual energies and desires towards a bronze statue. Known by the narrator as “l’Idole aux Sept Verges,” it is “enlacée, chevauchée, violée” (248) by the women who worship it. It is exactly at this moment that the narrator recognizes the pinnacle of sexual anguish, the link between eroticism and torment: “Je compris, en cette atroce seconde, que la luxure peut atteindre à la plus sombre terreur humaine et donner l’idée véritable de l’enfer, de l’épouvantement de l’enfer…” (248). This orgiastic demonstration of female sexuality, which leaves the narrator both speechless and powerless, is a ritual in Clara’s name and an attempt to heal her. In his helplessness, the narrator frantically cries out “Clara!... Clara!... Clara!”: it is only her name that he can evoke. She represents female sexuality par excellence, in all its exoticism, excess and violence.

The image at the novel’s conclusion mocks the narrator’s virility in a final attack on dominant discourse. Though Clara wakes from her fainting spells revitalized and temporarily “cured,” the narrator admits helplessness in face of the vice that reigns over

Clara and, by extension, himself: “un bronze que je n’avais pas encore aperçu, une sorte de singe de bronze, accroupi dans un coin de la pièce, tendait vers Clara, en ricanant férocement, un sexe monstrueux” (254). The narrator interprets this closing image of the novel—a laughing monkey with enormous genitalia—as an ill-omened sign that Clara

57 will not renounce her sadistic pleasures. But more importantly, confronted with this mocking image, the narrator is contrasted with the ultimate phallus in all its obscenity and scorn, gesturing towards Clara in temptation. This zoophilic image concludes the novel with a revealing challenge to the narrator’s virility, which he defends until the last pages. The final words of the novel are his desperate cries: “Clara!... Clara!... Clara!...”

(254). The narration is unresolved, as the structure does not come full circle; the original diegetic narrator and dinner guests do not reappear at the novel’s end to bring closure to the discours rapporté and to the thought-provoking discussion of human instinct and sexuality. Instead, the original masculine frame is replaced by a female one, and the homosocial space of the frontispice is now usurped by an orgiastic brothel of women.

Le Calvaire

With its backdrop of torture spectacles and public punishment, the importance of

Le Jardin des supplices to the study of masculinity, narrative and bodily inscription is unequivocal. In addition, Mirbeau’s novel Le Calvaire, while lacking in this pertinent setting of attacks on the male body, proves a worthy supplement to understand how the collapse of masculine narration is triggered by sadistic female sexuality. While bodily inscription may not be at its forefront, its richness in questions concerning gender transgression provides an additional opportunity to understanding masculinity and sexuality in Mirbeau. In my reading of Le Calvaire, I will focus on how the female character’s sexuality is inextricably linked to the narrator’s emasculation and gender identity, as well has his command of the narrative.

58 Unlike Le Jardin des supplices, Mirbeau’s Le Calvaire opens directly with an identified protagonist, Jean Mintié, a professional writer who is fully conscious of the structure of his narrative and whose narration has been described as “net et concis propre

à l’essai” (Planchais, “Gynophobia” 195). His first sentence demonstrates signs of a well- thought out narration temporally and emotionally removed from the events that he recounts: “Je suis né, un soir d’octobre, à Saint-Michel-les-Hêtres [. . . ]” (1). His narrative unfolds chronologically, and though he claims lucidity and distance, he nonetheless slips at moments into a present tense marked by parallel structure (“je revois”) that reflects his vivid remembrance of the details as he describes them. He explains, “[j]e revois sans attendrissement, mais avec netteté, les moindres détails de ces lieux où mon enfance s’écoula. Je revois la grille [. . . ] Je revois la maison [. . . ] Je revois le parc [. . .]” (3). Jean’s use of the present tense is indicative of his self- consciousness as a narrator. In the introductory chapter, he demonstrates a cautiousness about his narrative responsibilities. Describing his parents’ influence on his development as a child, for example, Jean considers how memory and emotion can color the telling of his story:

Je veux, dès maintenant, parler de mes parents, non tels que je les voyais enfant, mais tels qu’ils m’apparaissent aujourd’hui, complétés par le souvenir, humanisés par les révélations et les confidences, dans toute la crudité de lumière, dans toute la sincérité d’impression que redonnent aux figures trop vite aimées et de trop près connues les leçons inflexibles de la vie. (4, author’s emphasis)

Jean’s recognition that the memories of loved ones can be completed and humanized with time and distance illustrates his awareness of his narrative subjectivity. Unlike the intermittent and jarring narration of Le Jardin des supplices, Jean’s narration projects a lucidity designed to gain the confidence of the reader. Described by Planchais as being

59 “d’une sincérité presque irréprochable” (ibid.), Jean establishes a trust with the reader and invites his identification. As in the other texts studied, Mirbeau takes pains to posit a male reader to whom Jean relates his story as a cautionary tale or a public confession.

He hopes his story will prevent his male reader from replicating his poor judgment:

je me dis aussi que mon exemple servira de leçon… Si, en lisant ces pages, un jeune homme, un seul, prêt à faillir, se sentait tant d’effroi et tant de dégoût, qu’il fût à jamais sauvé du mal, il me semble que le salut de cette âme commencerait le rachat de la mienne. (179)

Like Lemonnier and Mendès, Mirbeau establishes a male-centered network of narration and reception: Jean devotes his work to a strictly male public that is embodied by the

“jeune homme” reading his text.

Maternity, or Destroying the Male Within

Typical of fin-de-siècle narratives, Jean’s childhood is defined by a profound despondency linked to parental traits represented as hereditary: the anxiety of his mother and the violent, brutal nature of his father. The latter’s greatest passion in life is to hunt and kill the living creatures that he encounters in the countryside, from housecats to wild birds, and Jean is often witness to this carnage. Interestingly, as he recounts his impressions of his father, he is far from outraged by this gratuitous violence, but rather admiring: “Il fallait le voir,” he explains, “son fusil sur l’épaule, tenant par la queue un cadavre de chat, sanglant et raide. Jamais je n’admirai rien de si héroïque, et David, ayant tué Goliath, ne dut pas avoir l’air plus enviré de triomphe” (6). Already showing signs of wonder and awe at unnecessarily violent, “heroic” acts, Jean also is visually drawn (“il fallait le voir”) to his father’s physical strength and prowess. With his phallic gun slung on his shoulder and a stiff dead cat in his hand, his father represents violent and

60 aggressive masculinity, leaving Jean trembling in both fear and admiration. And yet he ultimately rejects him and recalls “fuyant mon père que je n’aimais point” (28).

His mother, on the other hand, is of a nervousness and superstition that result in her shunning her son. Having witnessed her own mother’s (Jean’s grandmother’s) suicide when she was a small child, Jean’s mother is convinced that she carries the “fatalités de sa race” (19), marks of degeneration that she will inevitably pass down to him. It is to this mother and in these circumstances that Jean is born, “malingre et chétif” (20), weak and barely showing signs of life, “animé d’un souffle de vie si faible qu’on eût dit plutôt un râle” (20). Jean’s delicacy and sickly childhood disposition place him among the great

“héritiers du mal” of the Decadent period, worthy of des Esseintes. At the age of one,

Jean’s nervous tics and tremblings are quick to be interpreted as the “premiers symptômes du mal héréditaire” (22). Fearing her hereditary influence on her son, Jean’s mother refuses to play an active role in his life, and he is raised by the domestic help until her premature death.30 His father’s presence in his life, though limited, is defined mostly by the jarring juxtaposition of his virility with Jean’s frailty: “Et, tout chétif, à côté du gros corps de mon père qui oscillait suivant les cahots du chemin, je me rencognais au fond du cabriolet, tandis que mon père tuait, avec le manche de son fouet, les taons qui s’abattaient sur la croupe de notre jument” (36). These childhood details and early signs of effeminacy prefigure Jean’s complete emasculation and his masochistic attraction to violence in his young adult years.

30 For further reading on the figure of the mother in Mirbeau, see Jean-Luc Planchais, “La Mère fatale, clé d’un faux naturalisme dans les trois premiers romans d’Octave Mirbeau”; Isabelle Saulquin, “La Mère et l’Amante dans Le Calvaire et Le Jardin des supplices ”; Virginie Quaruccio, “La Puissance du mystère féminin dans Le Calvaire.”

61 Following an uneventful relocation to Paris to study law, Jean, motivated by boredom and depression, enlists in 1870 to fight in the Franco-Prussian War. As he describes the horrific living conditions of the starving soldiers, he recalls experiencing a sort of maternal instinct that manifests itself in a desire for a female body. Upon visiting the local regiment’s infirmary and witnessing the lack of care that the injured soldiers receive, Jean recalls the following urge:

J’éprouvai un sentiment de si fraternelle et douloureuse commisération, que j’eusse voulu serrer tous ces tristes hommes contre ma poitrine, dans un même embrassement, et je souhaitai—ah! avec quelle ferveur je souhaitai!—d’avoir, comme Isis, cent mamelles de femme, gonflées de lait, pour les tendre à toutes ces lèvres exsangues. (65)

Far from being the typical “fraternal compassion” that Jean claims it to be, this detailed evocation of the maternal breast and desire to transgress sexed corporal boundaries demonstrates a susceptibility to emasculation in a character already showing signs of gender fluidity. In addition, it reveals Jean’s own estrangement from his male body.

Jean’s relation to the virility of other men is ambivalent. One day, after getting separated from his regiment while wandering in the forest, Jean comes across a Prussian on horseback. Hiding behind a tree out of the enemy’s sight, he carefully observes his target and he aims his gun: “Il était beau, vraiment; la vie coulait à plein dans ce corps robuste” (98), he remarks. As he studies this masculine figure—the enemy—Jean is moved by the common humanity that they share: “quelque chose comme un vertige m’attirait vers lui, et je dus me cramponner à mon arbre pour ne pas aller auprès de cet homme” (99). Helplessly attracted to this virile soldier, Jean realizes that he loves him

(“oui, je vous le jure, je l’aimais!”[100]), and suddenly fires his gun, without warning.

The killing of this soldier is spontaneous and unpremeditated, taking Jean by surprise and

62 reminding him of his father’s own violent tendencies towards animals (100). Jean, disgusted with himself for having killed a man he loved (“je l’aimais!”), approaches the cadaver and lovingly embraces it: “collant mes lèvres sur ce visage sanglant, d’où pendaient de longues baves pourprées, éperdument, je l’embrassai!” (103). 31 This unusual scene can be read in multiple ways. While clearly suggestive of Jean’s homoerotic tendencies, it is also reflects his own gender expression and exploration. It numbers among several episodes in which he seeks to reject, if not destroy, conventional masculinity. The affection he experiences for this figure (as manifested in his “love” for him, as well as the macabre kiss) reflects a conflict in which Jean does not know whether to embrace his own masculinity or to reject it in a process of emasculation to be catalyzed by the femme fatale Juliette Roux.

Female Intrusion in a Masculine Space

During the years following the war, it is significant that Jean meets Juliette through Joseph Lirat, a bitter forty-something year old painter whose flagrant misogyny is the result of years of witnessing women’s cruelty towards his male friends: “j’en ai vu souffrir les autres et cela m’a suffi” (114). When Jean expresses a curiosity towards the mysterious Juliette, Lirat explodes in a series of misogynistic slurs that concludes with a violent gesture of strangulation, an imaginary neck of a women in his hands: “Être nés de la femme, des hommes!... quelle folie! Des hommes, s’être façonnés dans ce ventre impur!... Des hommes, s’être gorgés des vices de la femme, de ses nervosités imbéciles, de ses appétits féroces, avoir aspiré le suc de la vie à ses mamelles scélérates!” (115-116).

31 This passage and the chapter in its entirety were deleted from the novel’s original publication in La Nouvelle Revue in 1886. According to Gruzińska, the editor of the journal feared that detailed depictions of the Franco-Prussian War would be painful and upsetting for readers.

63 Lirat’s comments are reproduced here in full by Jean, perhaps meaning to serve as a warning to both Jean and the male reader. Lirat’s function in the novel, though a peripheral character, cannot be underestimated; Jean remarks the pivotal role that meeting and befriending him play in his life’s circumstance: “si le soir où je rencontrai Lirat dans cet endroit oublié où je n’avais que faire assurément, je fusse resté chez moi à travailler, rêver ou dormir, je serais peut-être aujourd’hui l’homme le plus heureux de la terre, et rien de ce qui m’est arrivé ne serait arrivé” (117). Lirat is the masculine voice of caution that Jean lacks, warning him of Juliette’s ruses and wrongdoing with her previous lovers, claiming that “elle est comme les autres, avec cette aggravation qu’elle est plus jolie que beaucoup, par conséquent plus bête et plus malfaisante” (113). Lirat’s character represents both artistic production and masculine discourses on female sexuality, and his name evokes the symbol of poetic creation, par excellence: the lyre. Lirat has served as a source of comfort for Juliette’s previous lovers as well, a service he pessimistically extends to Jean: “quand vous aurez envie de pleurer… vous savez… le divan est là… Les larmes des pauvres diables, ça le connaît” (200). Lirat’s anti-woman discourse revolves around a world ruled by masculine camaraderie and security. This circle is a homosocial one, where women have no place, and is juxtaposed with conventional heterosexual unions. In a discussion of Mirbeau’s “politics of misogyny,” Sharif Gemie highlights the value that Mirbeau accords to such relations between men: “A more unusual quality is

Mirbeau’s refusal to applaud or to celebrate the virtues of domesticity; real life is to be lived outside the home, in homosocial circles, which alone—according to Mirbeau— seem to have the ability to develop politically authentic politics” (83). Lirat’s studio is a place for artistic and philosophical discussions, not unlike those held by the male dinner

64 guests in Le Jardin des supplices or in the literary cafés in Mendès’s La Première maîtresse. The meeting between Jean and Juliette in this setting upon her visit is therefore suggestive of a disruption of masculine fortitude and the novel’s homosocial framework.

Juliette’s presence is an intrusion into this masculine space, and upsets the structure that is built on female exclusion.

While describing his first encounter with Lirat, Jean expresses a self-effacing admiration. Awe-struck by the painter’s genius, Jean feels inadequate in his love for his new friend, not unlike those he experienced for his father: “je l’aimais avec crainte, avec gêne, avec ce sentiment pénible que j’étais tout petit à côté de lui, et, pour ainsi dire,

écrasé par la grandeur de son génie… [. . .] Lirat m’intimidait” (119). Jean goes so far as to compare himself to a coy woman seeking to please a potential suitor through any means necessary, including self-compromise. He openly confesses, “[j]’avais cette curiosité féminine, qui m’obsédait, de connaître son opinion sur moi; j’essayais, par des allusions lointaines, par des coquetteries absurdes, par des détours hypocrites, de la surprendre ou de la provoquer encore [. . .]” (120). Once again Jean has openly expressed an identification with what he associates with femininity.

Enter Juliette Roux. The transition from Lirat’s homosocial circle to the domestic life Jean adopts with Juliette is not an easy one. Neglecting his friend out of shame for his betrayal and embarrassment for ignoring his advice, Jean is finally coaxed into visiting him by Juliette. He imagines an emotional scene in which he humbly begs for Lirat’s forgiveness: “L’attendrir, lui prendre la main, lui demander pardon de mon manque de confiance, faire appel à toutes les générosités de son cœur!... non!... Je jouerais mal ce rôle, et puis, d’un mot, Lirat me glacerait, arrêterait l’effusion” (194). This sentimental

65 projection illustrates Jean’s fear and humility next to such an admired figure of restrained masculinity. Fantasizing about pouring his feelings out to Lirat, Jean knows that Lirat’s cold and detached nature will leave him all the more hurt. Nonetheless, Jean resolves to visit him in his studio to confess his affair with Juliette and to apologize for his betrayal.

Though Lirat insists that Jean’s personal life is not of his concern, he makes sure to have the last word as he shuts the door, reminding Jean that Juliette will one day hurt him. This scene marks a rupture in the protagonist’s wellbeing and a point of no return in his relationship with Juliette:

Lorsque la porte se referma, il me sembla que quelque chose d’énorme et de lourd se refermait avec elle sur mon passé, que des murs plus hauts que le ciel et plus profonds que la nuit me séparaient, pour toujours, de ma vie honnête, de mes rêves d’artiste. Et j’éprouvai, dans tout mon être, comme un déchirement… Pendant une minute, je demeurai là, hébété, les bras ballants, les yeux ouverts démesurément sur cette porte fatidique, derrière laquelle une chose venait de finir, une chose venait de mourir. (200)

The high walls that Jean describes here now separate his domestic, heterosexual space with Juliette from the secure, artistic homosocial space offered by Lirat. Breaking from

Lirat’s artistic circle, Jean will suffer its linguistic consequences while with Juliette.

A Writer’s Impotence

It is under Juliette’s grasp that Jean first experiences an inability to write:

Je ne travaillais plus. Non que l’amour du travail m’eût abandonné, mais je n’avais plus la faculté créatrice. Tous les jours je m’asseyais, à mon bureau, devant du papier blanc, cherchant des idées, n’en trouvant pas, et retombant fatalement dans les inquiétudes du présent, qui était Juliette, dans les effrois de l’avenir, qui était Juliette encore! (210)

Guy Ducrey has suggested that artistic impotence often doubles for sexual impotence in fin-de-siècle literature: “L’impuissance littéraire [est] souvent liée dans l’imaginaire à

66 l’impuissance sexuelle.”32 With this in mind, we can understand Jean’s writer’s block, intrinsically connected to Juliette, as not just a symptom of sexual helplessness, but of an ongoing process of emasculation. Unfavorably comparing Juliette’s intellectual companionship with that of Lirat, Jean recognizes the negative repercussions of his friend’s absence:

Aussi l’amitié de Lirat m’était-elle très utile, autrefois. Mes idées se dégelaient à la chaleur de son esprit; sa conversation m’ouvrait des horizons nouveaux, insoupçonnées; ce qui grouillait en moi de confus, se dégageait, prenait une forme moins indécise que je m’efforçais de transcrire: il m’habituait à voir, à comprendre, me faisait descendre avec lui dans le mystère de la vie profonde… Maintenant, jour par jour, et, pour ainsi dire, heure par heure, se rétrécissaient, se refermaient les horizons de lumière où j’avais tendu [. . .]. (211)

Removed from the intellectual and social security of Lirat’s circle, Jean’s artistic production as a writer cannot survive in the presence of a sadistic and emasculating woman such as Juliette. Desperate, Jean wants to reconcile himself with his lost masculinity: “J’aurais voulu me jeter au cou de Lirat, lui demander pardon” (233), but with a loss of masculinity comes a loss of free will, and Jean will continually fail to act in his best interest.

Shortly after Jean agrees to live with Juliette, he realizes she is not as conventionally domestic as he imagined. While Juliette’s extreme materialism manifests itself in an obsessive desire to decorate their apartment, Jean claims that she is not “la femme de ménage qu’elle se vantait d’être” (202). Having promised Jean a domestic, feminine touch, Juliette is more concerned with spending his money, and in his

32 In his introduction to Louis Dumur’s Albert, from his edited anthology Romans fin-de-siècle, p. 173. Ducrey cites Albert Giraud (“Le Scribe,” 1883), Jean de Tinan (Penses-tu réussir!, 1897), André Lebey (L’Âge où l’on s’ennuie, 1902) and Jules Renard (L’Écornifleur, 1892) among fin-de-siècle writers portraying artistic impotence in their work.

67 submission he admits defeat: “je ne pouvais rien refuser à Juliette” (204).33 Her sexuality is equally unconventional: anything but passive and submissive, Juliette exhibits an insatiable sexual drive. Lirat reminds Jean that in addition to cheating on her lover,

Juliette is rumored to have paid a male wrestler for sex.34 Jean describes Juliette’s sexual excess in its complexity:

Dans notre chambre, le soir, tous ces jolis enfantillages disparaissaient. L’amour mettait sur le visage de Juliette je ne sais quoi d’austère, de recueilli, et de farouche aussi; il la transfigurait. Elle n’était pas dépravée; sa passion, au contraire, se montrait robuste et saine, et, dans ses embrassements, elle avait la noblesse terrible, l’héroïsme rugissant des grands fauves. Son ventre vibrait comme pour des maternités redoutables. (186)

As “austère” and “farouche” as Juliette might be, she nonetheless attracts Jean in a sexual aggression that is not perverse (“dépravée”), but rather healthy and symptomatic of an instinct for motherhood, though “redoutable.” Rather than portraying his lover’s sexuality as threatening, he appears to be in awe, likening her sexuality to a noble heroism to be both feared and revered. Similar to Clara in Le Jardin des supplices, Juliette’s sexuality has its limits; she also suffers the physical consequences of constant pleasure and stimulation: “Parfois, il arrive à Juliette d’être malade… ses membres, surmenés par le plaisir, refusent de la servir; son organisme, ébranlé par les secousses nerveuses, se révolte” (263).

33 Following the publication of Zola’s Au Bonheur des dames in 1883, such excessive materialism has been coded as feminine. However, in Le Calvaire, Juliette’s renunciation of domestic chores signals her break from conventional femininity. 34 This rumor is reminiscent of Jean Lorrain’s short story “L’Inconnue” (1891), in which an upper-class woman repeatedly seeks out lovers among lower-class wrestlers in the hopes that they will inevitably commit a crime and that she might attend their execution.

68 Juliette’s sadism becomes apparent—fulfilling Lirat’s predictions—as her relationship with Jean progresses. Juliette betrays her delight upon discovering that her ex-lover Malterre is suffering horribly without her:

Juliette écoutait ces détails, silencieuse, d’un air en apparence indifférent. Elle passait de temps en temps sa langue sur sa bouche; il y avait dans ses yeux comme le reflet d’une joie intérieure. Pensait-elle à Malterre? Était- elle heureuse d’apprendre que quelqu’un souffrît à cause d’elle? Hélas! je n’étais déjà plus en état de me poser ces points d’interrogation. (180)

Jean dismisses his own observations and concerns this early in their relationship, though it is not the first time he is startled by such potential warnings. During their initial courtship he remarks contradictory characteristics and notes that “[i]l y avait, en cette femme, un mélange d’innocence et de volupté, de finesse et de bêtise, de bonté et de méchanceté, qui me déconcertait” (164). As their relationship progresses and her spending escalates, Juliette turns to prostitution after learning that Jean is financially ruined. In addition to recognizing Juliette’s “effroyable égoïsme” (227) and material priorities, he also witnesses a developing delight she experiences in reminding him that she is seeing and supported by other men. “Elle se déshabille,” he recounts, “et je crois qu’elle éprouve une joie sinistre à me montrer ses jupons mal rattachés, son corset délacé… l’odeur des autres!” (260). Jean’s entreaties to Juliette to stop selling herself are met with uncompromising and unsympathetic responses. His disillusionment quickly follows: “J’ai voulu l’amour, et je suis allé à la femme, la tueuse d’amour” (268).

As these scenes of desperation escalate, Jean is caught in a vicious circle of masochistic suffering. He frequently contemplates leaving Juliette, only to realize that he lacks free will: “M’en aller? Mais je ne veux pas!... Une glu, chaque jour plus épaisse, me retient à ces tapis; une chaîne, chaque jour plus pesante, me rive à ces murs” (262).

69 Juliette’s cruelty is the very “glue” or “chain” that keeps him from leaving: “Plus elle est infâme, plus je l’aime” (263). This equation confirms Jean’s masochistic tendencies, which prevent him from leaving a woman he knows can only bring him harm. Jean is convinced of his love for her, in spite of—or because of—her cruelty and imperfections:

Je l’aimais de tout ce qui faisait ma souffrance, je l’aimais de son inconscience, de ses futilités, de ce que je soupçonnais en elle de perverti; je l’aimais de ce torturant amour des mères pour leur enfant malade, pour leur enfant bossu. [. . . ] J’aimais Juliette ainsi; je l’aimais d’une pitié immense… ah! ne riez pas!... d’une pitié maternelle, d’une pitié infinie! (215)

Jean again expresses an instinctive maternal desire, this time directed towards his sadistic lover,35 once more identifying with conventional femininity. However, in this instance, he appears to be ashamed of his gender transgression. Jean addresses the male reader—

“ah! ne riez pas!”—from whom he appears to be feeling more and more distanced as his aspiration to or expression of normative femininity becomes increasingly evident. In addition to his maternal instinct and “feminine” curiosity and shyness, as Juliette’s blatant infidelity grows increasingly intolerable, Jean desperately abandons himself to moments of masochistic pleasure. He explains, for example, “[n]on seulement l’image de

Juliette prostituée ne m’est plus une torture, elle m’exalte au contraire” (308). He begins to seek out emotional pain, reading letters from Juliette’s lovers: “Le soir, alors qu’elle est couchée, je rôde dans le cabinet de toilette, ouvrant les tiroirs… Il ne me suffit pas de savoir, il faut que je voie!” (263).

35 Mirbeau’s masochistic, maternal masculine subject foreshadows Freud’s 1924 association of “feminine” masochism in the male subject with maternity: “if one has an opportunity of studying cases in which the masochistic phantasies have been especially richly elaborated, one quickly discovers that they place the subject in a characteristically female situation; they signify, that is, being castrated, or copulated with, or giving birth to a baby. For this reason I have called this form of masochism, a potiori as it were, the feminine form […]” (“The Economic Problem of Masochism” 277). In his work, Freud identifies three types of masochism: “erotogenic,” “feminine” and “moral.”

70 Similar to what happens in Le Jardin des supplices, there is a deterioration in

Jean’s narration as his suffering escalates. While the beginning of the novel is marked by a coherent, organized and well-structured narration, it appears to fall apart as Jean’s writing capacities do. In this particular passage, for example, Jean poses a series of rhetorical questions punctuated by sentence fragments and broken, incomplete thoughts:

Pouvais-je quitter Juliette! moi qui avais exigé qu’elle quittât Malterre? Moi parti, que deviendrait-elle?... Mais non! mais non! je mentais… Je ne voulais pas la quitter, parce que je l’aimais, parce que j’avais pitié d’elle, parce que... N’était-ce point moi que j’aimais, de moi que j’avais pitié?... Ah! je ne sais plus! je ne sais plus!... (218)

Through this slippage back into the present tense (“je ne sais plus!”), the narrator reveals his continued suffering, as very much a living part of the circumstances from which he previously claims to be removed. In addition, Jean questions the legitimacy of Juliette’s existence in musings similar to those found in Le Jardin des supplices:

Juliette!... Certes, je l’aimais… Mais cette Juliette que j’aimais, n’était-ce point celle que j’avais créée, qui était née de mon imagination, sortie de mon cerveau, celle à qui j’avais donné une âme, une flamme de divinité, celle que j’avais pétrie impossiblement, avec la chair idéale des anges?... Et encore ne l’aimais-je point comme on aime un beau livre, un beau vers, une belle statue, comme la réalisation visible et palpable d’un rêve d’artiste! (214)

Echoing the narrator’s “existe-t-elle réellement?” of Le Jardin des supplices, Jean doubts the circumstances of the story he is telling and, by extension, his own narrative authority.

Comparing Juliette to a work of art exposes the artistic, or narrative, process that is responsible for her existence. Like Clara, she is the product of a masculine fantasy and imagination comparable to poetic verse. But paradoxically, it is her very creation that is a destructive force in the novel in question. Such a mise-en-abyme of the artistic process

71 reveals the parasitic relationship in Mirbeau between female sexuality and male creativity.

Desperate and lacking in free will, Jean returns to Lirat’s studio with threats of suicide and describes his current state in sexual terms: “je ne suis plus un cerveau, plus un cœur, plus rien… Je suis un sexe désordonné et frénétique, un sexe affamé qui réclame sa part de chair vive” (263). Jean bears the same signs of sexual excess that define his lover, and he now lives a life reduced to obsessive sexual desires and unfulfilled physical needs. Upon seeing his Jean in such a state, Lirat forces him to seek exile in Brittany in the form of a femme fatale detoxification (not unlike that in Le Jardin des supplices when the narrator escapes to Vietnam for two years). While there, hoping to cure himself of Juliette’s influence and cruelty, he imagines having an affair with another woman. But he is quick to warn this innocent woman of his moral and sexual contamination: “mon cœur est gangrené,” he imagines telling her, “et mes lèvres ont bu le poison qui tue les âmes, le poison qui damne les vierges comme toi… Ne t’approche pas ainsi, je te flétrirais; ne me regarde pas ainsi, mes yeux te saliraient, et tu serais pareille à

Juliette!...” (292).

Perhaps the most significant aspect of Juliette’s contagion is that it contaminates well beyond Jean, and symbolically defeats an entire regiment of men: Juliette succeeds in seducing Lirat, the untouchable voice of masculine reason and creation. The novel concludes with Jean’s reflections on this final emblematic loss. With the fall of Lirat comes the fall of his contemporaries, and Jean perceives of Paris as having fallen victim to female vice. Observing a parade of prostitutes, he notes, “j’eus l’impression que je voyais des régiments ennemis… ivres de pillage, sur Paris vaincu” (345). This military

72 vocabulary announces a war between the sexes, reducing women to prostitutes and men to their victims. Juliette becomes an allegorical figure for Jean: “dans mon esprit égaré,

Juliette s’impersonnalisait; ce n’était plus une femme ayant son existence particulière, c’était la Prostitution elle-même, vautrée, toute grande, sur le monde” (344). It is in these final moments that Jean envies a local manual worker, whose physical prowess is a reminder of the narrator’s lost masculinity: “je m’attachais aux pas d’un ouvrier dont la physionomie m’intéressait; j’aurais voulu avoir son dos résigné, ses mains déformées, noircies par le travail rude, son allure gourde, ses yeux confiants de bon dogue” (331).

But this man is one of the few specimens of masculinity that remain untouched in the capital city. The novel’s final passage is revealing: “Dans la rue, les hommes me firent l’effet de spectres fous… Et tous ces lambeaux de corps humains, décharnés par la mort, se ruaient l’un sur l’autre, toujours emportés par la fièvre homicide, toujours fouettés par le plaisir, et ils se disputaient d’immondes charognes…” (355). These wandering ghosts of men are the final image of the book, and they embody the effects of female sexual excess on masculinity and linguistic control.

Conclusion

When Mirbeau wrote that “[l]a femme n’est pas un cerveau: elle est un sexe et c’est bien plus beau” (Les Écrivains 191), he was speaking specifically of women writers.

Mirbeau’s vehement opposition to femmes de lettres reflects a masculine defensiveness that is at the forefront of the two novels studied in this chapter. Indeed, the dominant masculine discourses that structure the novels collapse in the presence of a woman who masters language. Whether literal or metaphoric, her sexual attack on the male body

73 results in a simultaneous seizure of the very language that defines his authority. And assaulting his emasculated body and leading the narrator to question his own aptitudes, the sadistic female protagonist exposes the instability of dominant masculine narrative and male homosocial networks in Mirbeau, and also the author’s anxieties about the state of male fin-de-siècle writing.

CHAPTER TWO

Corporal Inscriptions: Language and Sexual Violence in Camille Lemonnier

J’achetai des livres, je lus d’un tourment amer Flaubert, Goncourt, Zola. Baudelaire me fit goûter des délectations corrosives. Je m’empoisonnai chez Barbey d’ardentes perversités. C’étaient les chrysostomes, les ulcérés, les voyants d’humanité. Tous proposaient la femme comme la mouche d’or des fumiers du monde, l’abeille en folie ruée au carnages des mâles, le poulpe allouvi pompant la phlétore des races, consommant l’œuvre d’extermination. Elle se dénonçait tragique et barbare, investie d’une grandeur farouche. (Camille Lemonnier, L’Homme en amour 109)

Belgian art critic and novelist Camille Lemonnier (1844-1913) could easily figure among his French confrères in the epigraph to this chapter. Indeed, his commentary on nineteenth-century literary representations of femininity is an ironic mise-en-abyme of his own portrayals of excessive and dangerous female sexuality. Better-known titles such as L’Hystérique (1885), Le Possédé (1890) and L’Homme en amour (1897), for example, promise tales of excessive, phantasmatic female desire within their pages. Lemonnier’s depictions of malevolent femininity also reflect a profound interrogation of gender and sexuality that is central to his works. In an article on Lemonnier, Jean de Palacio remarks that “[i]l n’est guère de roman où Lemonnier n’ait volontiers semé un élément douteux tenant à l’hésitation des sexes” (“Camille Lemonnier” 33). There remains, however, to be an in-depth study entirely devoted to the author’s representation of non-normative genders and sexualities.

`74 75

While he is oftentimes considered to be the Zola of Belgium, Lemonnier’s literary contributions went well beyond the Naturalism put forth in works such as Happe-Chair

(1886) (often labeled as Germinal’s counterpart). Rather, like many Naturalist writers of the late nineteenth-century, he made a transition to Decadence, and continued to put into relief this “hésitation des sexes” that is at the forefront of many of his novels and short stories. Le Possédé (1890) marks this very break from the Naturalism that previously defined his earlier novels. Subtitled “étude passionnelle,” the novel traces the professional, familial and sexual decline of an influential judicial magistrate brought on by an affair with his daughter’s governess. The third-person narrative, sometimes disjointed, is composed of a series of dream sequences, journal entries and indirect discourse that serve as testimony to Lépervié’s complete intellectual and linguistic breakdown as a male subject and representative of male dominant discourse, and also attest to Lemonnier’s rhetorical and syntactical shift to Decadent style and aesthetics.

This narrative fragmentation is often represented by the grating presence of an inner and split conscience, known simply as la Voix or “l’autre homme” (52), which constantly taunts and mimics him. The novel documents Lépervié’s initial seduction by Rakma, which begins as an extra-marital romance inside his own home, and quickly progresses to an all-consuming, violently sadistic “possession” that Lépervié (a near anagram of

“dépéri” and “perversion”?) cannot resist. The lovers attempt to conceal their affair, spending many hours in the most ill-famed hotels of the city, until Lépervié’s family discovers the torturous hold that Rakma has on him. Lépervié’s masculine authority, free will and sense of self slowly deteriorate alongside his weakening, agonizing body, all of which are literally at the hands of the vicious Rakma and her sadistic, drug-enhanced

76 “messes de péché” (148). When Lépervié’s wife finally demands that Rakma be forced to leave their home, Lépervié follows her and the two seek social and sexual refuge in a masquerade of cross-dressing. The novel concludes with Lépervié’s failed attempt to return to order following Rakma’s departure with his son, and he wanders the city in an unmanageable sexual rut and state of dementia.

Le Possédé’s unique structure and style consist of a fragmented and disjointed web of limited third-person narration, free indirect discourse and a series of letters and journal entries (which are curiously in the third-person). This grouping of various narrative techniques and genres (including the epistolary), as well as Lemonnier’s penchant for neologisms and lofty, exaggerated prose, result in a profound attentiveness to language at the expense of a coherent and linear plot line. Lemonnier’s contemporaries, such as Antonin Bunand, were not always impressed with such a style:

“Sa prose gonflée charrie les termes rares et précieux, les archaïsmes et les néologismes, et les mots arrachés aux jargons des provinces. Il y a pléthore, et cette pléthore menace de crever, pour ainsi dire, la peau de la phrase.”36 Le Possédé’s textual and stylistic

“hybridity” (Palacio, “Présentation” ii) might render it aesthetically unpleasing and unfit for certain literary canons, and yet is such a linguistic jumble of impressions and subjectivities that reflect exactly the sexual, intellectual and linguistic breakdown of its male protagonist. The novel’s opening sentence, for example, announces a theme of fragmentation and an estrangement from conventional signifying systems: “… l’obsession morne d’une contrée sans espoir, avec un déferlement de névés toujours plus

36 From Petits Lundis. Notes de critiques. Paris: Perrin, 1890, p. 31. Qutoed by Jean de Palacio in his “Présentation” of Le Possédé, p. xxiv. For studies on Lépervié’s style and linguistic idiosyncrasies, see Paul Delsemme, “A propos d’Un Mâle: Camille Lemonnier, écrivain coruscant”; Estrella de la Torre Giménez, “Happe-Chair: Révolutoin langagière expression de la révolution sociale.”

77 loin” (9). Here, the ellipsis indicates that despite conventional literary appearances—it serving as the novel’s opening phrase—, it is merely a fragmented and disjointed moment in time. This being precisely a sentence fragment with no verb, such an opening introduces a narration that appears to be breaking down before it even begins. As I will show in this chapter, Lemonnier’s stylistic attributes reflect and are deeply imbedded in an on-going attack on the male body within the text.

The woman responsible for this attack is Rakma. Claimed by one scholar to be less caricatural than her quintessential Zolian predecessor Nana,37 Rakma is nonetheless a veritable femme fatale. However thematically removed she may be from her mangeuse d’hommes forerunner, her development as a character lacks complete subjectivity and she remains as grotesque and mystifying as the typical male fantasy of the femme fatale.

Born to a Javanese mother and a Dutch father, Rakma is certainly not conventionally beautiful. The Orientalist discourse that lurks throughout the novel posits this racially female Other as androgynous and unattractive: “Cette fille, d’ailleurs, avec sa peau verte, ses épaules en sifflet et son corsage pauvrement nubile, à peine paraîtrait désirable aux autres hommes” (40). The androgyny suggested by Rakma’s small breasts is a recurring theme throughout the novel, as is her non-normative gender identity which will be examined in full later in this chapter. Her body itself is “sans beauté” (167) in its “nudité méchante de cette petite gorge raide et de ces hanches aiguës de fille-garçon” (202).

Rakma’s androgyny manifests itself principally at a corporal level, while her sexuality, as we shall see, takes this ambiguity to the next level, gendering this young “éphèbe” (166) most notably as masculine.

37 “Ses origines obscures, son nom même, son exotisme, son apparence physique singulière et sa noirceur, la profondeur biblique de son œil, disent bien qu’elle n’a pas la valeur d’un type et n’illustre pas de dessein historique” (Palacio, “Présentation” iv).

78

The Meeting of the Private and the Professional

In keeping with the novel’s connection between language and corporeality, it is not irrelevant that Lépervié is a public judiciary. Presiding over domestic cases involving such matters of divorce and adultery, the magistrate is by extension responsible for both the legal and social order of the state: he literally generates the law through its enforcement. In addition, Lépervié rules from a Tribunal consisting of all male judges, thus introducing a homosocial space of masculine discourse and power. Given this charged context, Lépervié’s professional position offers symbolic access to the consequences of his personal ruin and emasculation: his public status as magistrate signifies a larger masculine discourse. In Lemonnier’s L’Homme en amour (1897), the narrator’s conservative father comments precisely on the powerful public symbolism of judiciaries: “Je ferai de toi un juge,” he says to his son, “car à cause du caractère sacré de la magistrature, celui-là, fût-il prévaricateur et débauché, est assuré de la considération des hommes” (136). Representing social order and prestige, the judiciary is the ultimate emblem of discursive stability in Lemonnier’s œuvre. As we shall see on a more individual and concrete level, Lépervié’s eventual professional fall from grace can be inextricably traced back to his loss of authority in his familial and sexual life.

Rakma’s presence in Lépervié’s home signals both a literal and symbolic intrusion into a system of order and stateliness. Her ascending domestic authority is represented by her rule over the père de famille himself, the very marker of (masculinist) domestic—and social, by synecdoche—order:

Elle, toujours présente (lors même qu’éloignée) dans l’atmosphère de la maison, promenait ses airs taciturnes de sphinge à travers la Famille, en apparence irréprochable, comme revêtue des droits de la juste épouse à

79 côté de l’autre—seulement tolérée par un pacte tacite. Et le pis, c’est que ce faible Lépervié, autrefois si autoritaire, s’avérait la domination grandissante de l’être de dol et de péché que sa complaisance invétérait dans leur intérieur. (110-11)

Rakma appears here in direct opposition—and antagonistic—to not just the Lépervié family, but the institution of Family itself, evoked here in capitals (“la Famille”). As she prowls around the house secretly in defiance of familial authority, it is especially

Lépervié who senses his command suffer under her presence. In addition, Lemonnier’s use of the legal terminology “dol” signals Rakma’s progressive penetration into

Lépervié’s professional milieu.

As their affair progresses, Lépervié recognizes the symbolic implications of committing adultery in his own home: “il avait le sentiment de corrompre l’air sacré de la maison; un dégoût lui remontait à la gorge en nausées pour la mauvaise action honteuse”

(123). For the protagonist, the home is “sacred,” representing the structuring element behind family order and functionality. On a more specific level, Rakma succeeds in luring Lépervié to commit the ultimate act of familial betrayal by allowing his mistress access to the marital bed. Rakma understands the symbolic implications of her presence in her employers’ bed: “Ne suis-je pas votre femme, aussi?” (145). Her successful invasion of this sacred terrain is marked by a stark contrast to Madame Lépervié’s lingering innocence: “dans la tiédeur encore de la chair de l’épouse, se reversait la noire nudité,—plus noire en ces blancheurs subitement profanées” (145). This juxtaposition of white and black, of Madame Lépervié and Rakma, signals the governess’ usurping of her mistress’s role, and is equally a reminder of Rakma’s racial alterity. By positing Rakma as the racial “other,” Lemonnier further underscores the vulnerable exposure of

Lépervié’s home to hypersexual, exotic femininity. Though hesitant at first to soil his

80 marital sheets, Lépervié is eventually seduced by the treachery and debauchery that

Rakma proposes: “Mais regarde-la donc, insinua le Conseiller perfide. Plus noire en ces blancheurs! Et désirable! Assumant, en cette attitude sur l’autel, effroyables et si neuves délices! -Oh! s’écria-t-il, tu es, en effet, diaboliquement désirable ainsi! ” (145). Though ashamed of his betrayal, Lépervié cannot resist the sexual prowess of his daughter’s governess, and succumbs to commit the ultimate act of domestic treason. The dignitary even delights in the implications of his perversion: “Cette souillure du lit sacré lui eût révélé le frisson de la damnation encourue, s’il eût été plus chrétien, mais, vu son zèle tempéré, seulement irritait en lui—le Magistrat—la scélérate joie de toute loi contemnée”

(148). This reference to Lépervié’s role as a governmental figure not only reveals the inherent irony of his downfall, but also suggests a rebellious desire not to uphold the very laws he represents (“la scélérate joie de toute loi contemnée”).

Rakma’s domestic rule reaches its peak in a pivotal scene in which she refuses to leave the home peacefully despite Madame Lépervié’s insistence. Seized by rage and her penchant for vengeance, Rakma snatches Lépervié’s porcelain figurine of Themis, the

Greek goddess of justice, and smashes it to the ground. The small statue represents more than a just a gift from his wife, but also a symbol for law and order, Lépervié’s prized possession “qu’il adulait d’un culte symbolique” (277). The figurine’s destruction has implicit consquences for Lépervié: “La Thémis tombait, s’émiettait en un massacre de jolies membres épars aux pieds de Lépervié” (277). Rakma’s gesture is a self-declaration and a usurping of order and rule in the Lépervié household. Comparing herself to the figure of Themis, now shattered, Rakma nonetheless insists on her indestructibility:

“seulement, cela n’est que terre et poussière, et moi, je suis un cœur qu’on n’écrase pas et

81 qui se venge!” (278). Leaving Lépervié to literally pick up the pieces of his old system of rule and order, Rakma claims herself as the new Themis, vowing revenge and complete ruin on Lépervié’s family through her own system of “justice.”

When his adolescent daughter walks in on him and Rakma in his marital bed,

Lépervié decides to flee to southern France with his mistress. Physically removed from his family, the protagonist recognizes the repercussions that his departure with Rakma has on their respectability: “Et une pierre sembla scellée sur le trou où s’était écroulé l’honneur de la famille, une pierre qu’il n’essayait plus de soulever, qu’elle ne voulait pas qu’il soulevât, tous deux couchés sur le lit de cette pierre, par-dessus la mort de la maison enfouie là!” (302). This image of the two lovers towering over the demolished household exemplifies Rakma’s control over her lover, who though tempted to restore order and honor to his home, makes no such attempt because “elle ne voulait pas.” As though her rule over Lépervié were not enough, Rakma’s contaminating perversion even extends to the next generation of the family. Lépervié recognizes his son Guy’s progressive estrangement, despite his paternal efforts, earlier in the novel: “Il lui prit le bras, et précédant les femmes, ils s’en allaient sans rien se dire. Mais Lépervié par moments ne sentait plus à ses côtés qu’un corps se mouvant en gestes mécaniques et subissant sans ressort les impulsions qu’il lui communiquait” (214). This expanding rift between father and son is triggered by Guy’s learning of his father’s infidelity, and once again signals

Rakma’s invasion and corruption of male space.38 Guy already bears signs on a corporal level of Rakma’s influence, his body “méchanique” and transformed. This male space of father and son is doubly vulnerable, as it not only represents male homosocial bonding

38 This episode is analogous to Juliette’s seduction of Lirat, the voice of masculine reason and advocate of male homosocial space, in Mirbeau’s Le Calvaire.

82 and security, but also future generations of Lépervié’s family. Rakma’s omni-presence thus suggests complete ruin in Lépervié’s family.39 Indeed, while Guy later takes his father’s place as Rakma’s helplessly submissive lover, his sister Paule eventually dies of the grief of having witnessed her father’s vice.

Prior to his affair with Rakma, Lépervié, like a conventional nineteenth-century père de famille, exercises an authority in his household over both his family and servants.

However, a scandal among his domestic help prefigures the vulnerability of his rule and the supremacy that female sexuality holds over this stability. A domestic worker, having discovered his wife with another man, kills her in a jealous rage. Lépervié is sympathetic to the man’s cause and his devotion as a servant, and uses his power as a magistrate to negotiate the man’s acquittal. Though this fait divers is simply mentioned in passing, it carries enormous significance in the larger context of the novel. Lépervié’s compassion and defense of this man, “wronged” by an unfaithful wife, evokes masculine solidarity in the face of wayward female sexuality. However, it also ironically foreshadows the dignitary’s own susceptibility and troubles to come with a sexual promiscuous woman.

This poignant realization is made most clear later when he and Rakma rent a room from a concierge who recognizes Lépervié from past encounters. What is most troubling to

Lépervié is not his inability to recall the stranger’s face, but rather his persistent and ominous stare that plunges Lépervié into a paranoid state of fear and regret: “il ne cessait pas de voir l’homme aux yeux de reproche et d’ennui, regardant au fond de lui, comme avec le regard de la conscience” (131, original emphasis). Projecting his own guilt into

39 In an homage to his Naturalist lineage, Lemonnier equally privileges the role of heredity in Lépervié’s generational ruin. Recalling the sex scandals and alcoholism of his paternal grandfather, Lépervié acknowledges the fate of his lineage: “Je le porte en moi, il est dans mon sang, il a ressuscité dans le triste homme que je subis. Ah! tout s’explique! Et nul rachat! L’arbre de ma race, sorti de ces entrailles pourries, à présent me pourrit mes propres entrailles” (195).

83 the eyes of this stranger, the protagonist interprets his stare as both a judgment and a warning: “c’est comme si quelque malheur m’attendait” (129), he remarks to his lover. It is shortly after this episode that Lépervié understands the man’s stare, recognizing him as the servant who murdered his adulterous wife. “Ah! il y a des fatalités! se dit-il sans paraître soupçonner qu’il les portait en sa chair, ces fatalités, indécrochables comme les clous qui rivent l’homme à sa croix” (157). As Lemonnier’s commentary suggests, these very “fatalities” are more than a simple coincidence, and Lépervié’s unease upon making the connection and his significant use of the word “fatalité” links the fate of these two men and their circumstances. The servant is presented as a victim of his wife’s debauchery, thereby signaling the possibility of a similar fate awaiting Lépervié. It is thus appropriate that the two men should be reunited at the hotel where Lépervié and Rakma engage in adultery. Rakma’s presence at this encounter between judge and the acquitted embodies a significant overturning of Lépervié’s power as magistrate.

Rakma’s perverse influence affects Lépervié’s professional duties on multiple levels. His tribunal presides over conjugal lawsuits ranging from adultery to spousal abuse, and his status as magistrate overseeing domestic order is directly challenged in his own home. Though his fellow judiciaries have grown numb to their daily exposure to

“l’universalité du mal” (30) that haunts their courtrooms, Lépervié’s own susceptibility to domestic decay is prefigured by a reference to one of his judicial cases, in which a young man is “ravagé par les violences de la femme, une virago [. . .]” (30). Though mentioned in passing as a typical case that the tribunal oversees, this example foreshadows

Lépervié’s own ruin at the hands of the “virago” Rakma. It equally suggests an eventual intersection of his personal and professional lives, in which his sexual debauchery will

84 impede upon his responsibilities to uphold moral order. Indeed, when torn between his sexual desires and social and familial duties, Lépervié is conscious of these contradictory elements. During a clandestine promenade with his daughter’s governess, Lépervié is easily seduced, yet aware of his social hypocrisy: “Le sang en fusée aux tempes, dans un vertige de passion, aussitôt il lui dégrafait le corsage, baisait sa gorge, ensuite oublia toute prudence, en ce bois plein de passants, [. . . ]—à la posséder comme un très jeune homme des forêts, ou quelque pâtre,—lui, se pouvait-il, le vertueux président Lépervié?”

(108). This juxtaposition between Lépervié’s professional discretion and his unleashed sexual desire for Rakma is equally emphasized through the reference to his professional title: “le vertueux président Lépervié.” As the novel progresses and his sense of familial and social duty disintegrates, Lépervié transfers his own sexual shame and guilt onto those brought before him in court: “Il se montrait implacable à présent pour les libertinages que dénonçait la majorité des actions en divorce. [. . .] Le dédoublement professionnel, en obturant ses yeux sur ses personnels désordres, lui faisait conspuer jusqu’à la véhémence l’ordure de laquelle secrètement il se délectait” (235). Lemmonier once again suggests an encounter between Lépervié’s personal surrender to debauchery and his functions as a law enforcer, symbolically demonstrating the far-reaching effects that Rakma has on social order. In addition, the author presents the Belgian justice system, as represented by Lépervié, as being a last resort in this time of degeneration and decadence, often associated with female sexuality (the hydra) and syphilis: “Et le Mal qu’il portait en lui sans le voir, il le suspectait partout chez les autres,—le constatait matériellement comme une syphilis rongeant le genre humain, comme une hydre enroulant dans ses anneaux et broyant entre ses mâchoires l’humanité que seulement

85 défendait encore l’égide de la justice” (235-6). Lépervié’s deterioration of self is suggestive of a larger social disorder and ruin. At the conclusion of the novel, he wanders the city in a state of dementia and uncontainable sexual rut, mourning his lover’s disappearance. The novel’s last sentence confirms these larger implications, linking

Lépervié’s ruin to the future of social stability: “Un agent passa” (352). This final image juxtaposes an anonymous governmental figure with a tormented and destroyed Lépervié, and therefore serves as an unsettling reminder of the dangers of female sexuality on dominant masculine discourse.

Linguistic Consequences

Rakma’s effects on Lépervié’s command of language are palpable and progressive throughout the course of the novel and can be directly linked to her sexual attack on her lover’s body. To say that Lépervié progressively “loses” a capacity for language or naming implies a prior linguistic aptitude; indeed, Lépervié’s position as a powerful judicial figure demands an authority over speech and writing. But on a more literal level, the protagonist loquaciously boasts of his masculine authority prior to his relationship with the governess: “Une joie maligne d’humilier l’institutrice sous ses redondances oratoires, stimulait sa loquèle” (35). Significantly distinguishing himself and his social position from Rakma through a pompous and disdainful use of language,

Lépervié maliciously flaunts his masterful linguistic command at the beginning of the novel.

Though Lépervié’s loss of his command over language reaches its peak at the conclusion of Le Possédé, its complex progression throughout the novel is directly linked

86 to Rakma’s sadistic presence and authority over him. Paradoxically, Lépervié ostensibly displays verbal mastery at the height of his affair with Rakma; it is only when she leaves him that his entire physical and intellectual being collapses. As Rakma slowly begins to sexually occupy Lépervié’s body, Lemonnier indicates that she has an equal hold on her lover’s sexuality and elocution. For example, shortly after the consummation of their relationship, Lépervié experiences an unprecedented effortlessness as he composes a well-received article for a judicial journal. In his critique of components of the Belgian law, he is amazed at his own ideas and wonders, “[c]omment n’avait-il pas été frappé plus tôt par l’évidence de ces anomalies monstrueuses?” (72). It is at this moment of creative self-doubt that Lépervié’s split self—la Voix—reappears and gestures towards

Rakma: “La Voix dit: -Mais c’est elle, elle seule qui, [. . .] par sa présence en toi, te délie

à cette clairvoyance! – Cela se pourrait-il vraiment? pensa le président, avec un regret d’amour-propre” (72-3, my emphasis). Rakma’s creative influence and presence “in”

Lépervié suggests an allegorical occupation of his body that manifests itself through language.40 In other words, the magistrate’s exceptional command of language is symptomatic of Rakma’s invasion of his body. When he holds his pen, it is with her phallus that he writes. Body and language are thus inextricably linked through this episode. Conscious of the split within himself and of the “binarité de son être intellectuel” (80), Lépervié no longer recognizes himself as the author of his successful article: “Mais c’est un effroyable schisme, pensait-il; [. . .] Mais alors, il faut en revenir à

40Aude occupies the narrator’s intellectual capacities in a similar manner in L’Homme en amour. As her sexual authority over him escalates, the narrator suffers a loss of cognitive control. He recalls, “[. . .] je me surprenais quelquefois à penser et à m’exprimer comme elle. Le peu d’idées qu’accusait la forme têtue et bornée de son front s’assimila; je parus n’avoir si longtemps cultivé mon intelligence que pour la perdre plus irréparablement en ce vasselage méprisable” (242).

87 l’existence d’un moi contradictoire dans l’être pensant, car je ne pense plus un mot de tout ce que j’ai écrit” (84). Considering the intellectual abyss that exists between himself and the work that he produced, Lépervié emerges as a character torn in two, intellectually and linguistically dominated by the omnipresence of his sadistic lover. The appearance of

La Voix equally points to the progress of his fragmentation of subject, which clearly has linguistic repercussions.

Lépervié’s psychic division has similar effects on his writing. For example, as he sits down to compose a letter to a colleague, he loses control of his pen and writes his children’s names over and over, “comme un collégien essayant une plume avec le premier mot venu, d’un mouvement négligent de la main” (187). This “slip of the pen” draws curious attention to Lépervié’s juvenile command of writing (and all the sexual implications of his writing instrument):

Mais petit à petit l’écriture s’imprimait sur ce flottement gélatineux de sa rétine; il semblait que le bec de sa plume, avec les traits qui hersaient son papier, à présent crevât la taie dont se cornait l’opacité de son œil, et cette opacité de son âme! [. . .] Et il pensait: ‘Quel magnétisme, quelle volonté hors de moi m’a fait écrire là vos noms, mes petits?’ Sûrement une autre main poussait la sienne, une main qui, au fond de sa pensée, dans le sommeil de cette pensée, allait chercher leurs chers noms oubliés et comme des signes fatidiques les jetait sur la plage blanche. (188)

Already compared to an awkward “collégien,” Lépervié lacks physical command of his pen, claiming that another force (or figurative hand) has usurped its control. In addition,

Lemonnier metaphorically suggests the penetration of Lépervié’s eye by the tip of the pen (“le bec de sa plume”), in which we may not simply read the loss of the phallus (as well as ability to signify), but also blinding and emasculation. This signals once again a usurpation of his phallus by Rakma, and she is responsible for seizing his capacity for

88 language. These examples may also be read as a mise-en-abyme of the larger narrative of the novel, which also suffers from structural deterioration and linguistic disorder.

Appropriately, it is when Rakma finally leaves Lépervié that he loses his faculty for speech. As Lépervié’s body continually suffers sexual attacks by Rakma’s sadistic tendencies, he gradually loses various cognitive and cerebral skills and is unable to articulate his ideas. Lemonnier writes, “[d]epuis ces deux derniers mois, son intelligence subissait un tel déchet qu’il ne parvenait plus à abouter ses idées. Celles-ci gluaient en une bouillie épaisse comme si sa substance cervicale, barattée sans répit, se fût à la longue gélatinée” (311). While these initial symptoms of linguistic trouble manifest themselves amidst a culmination of sadomasochistic encounters, Rakma’s ultimate blow—abandoning Lépervié and fleeing with his son—is one that leaves him literally speechless. A final image of a demented and delirious Lépervié underlines his inability to name, shortly after learning of his daughter’s death:

Il ne restait à Lépervié de cette atteinte d’hémiplégie qu’une plus grave perturbation de la mémoire et une paralysie légère du bras gauche. Les laps immédiats, les délais récents s’atténuaient sans répercussion sur son cerveau. À tout bout de champ il était contraint de substituer aux dénominations usuelles des formules parasites et indéterminées, (‘chose, machin’) dont s’empâtait sa langue, à défaut de termes précis. (345)

Lépervié’s lack of precision and reliance on platitudes and “formules” can be attributed to both an inability to create (such as with his writing) and to signify. In the end, it appears that Rakma escapes with both Lépervié’s son and his command of language.

Gender, the Male Body and Narrative

On a more material level, we can trace the effects of Rakma’s sexuality on masculine language and discourse by considering her attack on the male body. Indeed,

89 her sadism coupled with Lépervié’s masochism creates a dynamic in which his physical suffering is inherently linked to his command of language. The sexual encounters between the two protagonists in Le Possédé are significantly marked by an awareness of gender codes: it is most notably through their sadomasochism that we can understand

Lemonnier’s play with gender binaries and signifiers. Following his first sexual encounter with his daughter’s governess, Lépervié prides himself on his performance as a lover, feeling rejuvenated by his conquest and his lover’s exceptional submission

(“[p]assive, elle s’abandonnait” [45]): “C’était, comme par miracle, le fraîcheur d’une jouvence coulant en ses veines le vin fort des joies viriles” (48). Though feeling rejuvenated and especially virile in the face of his new lover’s surrender, Lépervié’s masculine pride and sexual command is soon challenged by Rakma’s sadistic and domineering impulses.

It is precisely against this virile pride that Rakma launches her attack: “Ah! combien vous êtes ridicule! Mais vous n’avez donc pas senti le mépris que j’ai pour les hommes. L’immense mépris que j’ai pour tous les hommes?” (176). Rakma thus makes her objectives known to her lover, insisting that not even he is an exception to her hatred of men.41 On the contrary, personalizing her war against all men, she claims Lépervié to represent the entire male sex:

Vous, c’est le mépris que j’ai pour les hommes, vos pareils, mais triplé, décuplé, centuplé! Vous, mon cher, c’est une telle puissance de mépris que je n’ai pour vous le dire que l’abomination même de mes crasses de gourgande et que je me suis ravalée plus bas que la prostituée des rues parce que je sentais qu’alors seulement l’égalité de la bassesse pouvait indissolublement nous lier! (177)

41 Rakma’s declaration here against men is reminiscent of Aude’s in L’Homme en amour. When her lover desperately inquires of her feelings for him, Aude coldly responds, “[n]e crois pas que je t’aime parce que cette chose est arrivée entre nous. Je n’aimerai jamais aucun homme” (153).

90

Here, Rakma associates her abhorrence of men with her excessive, debauched sexuality, claiming that her vice is the very weapon with which she intends to destroy her lover— and all men by extension. Interestingly, it is also the “bassesse” of her sexual perversity that endlessly and mercilessly attracts Lépervié: it is here that her power lies. “Croyez- vous que je pourrais être la maîtresse que je suis, sans mépris?” (181), she boasts. It is at this moment that Lépervié, for one of the first times in the novel, articulates a masochistic desire. “Tiens, je suis à tes pieds. Fais de moi ce que tu veux, à présent. Bats-moi, je ne me défendrai seulement pas… Mais bats-moi donc! Hein! je t’en prie!” (181), he begs.

This moment marks an official, verbal initiation into sadomasochism that from here on will characterize their relationship. In positioning himself at the governess’s feet,

Lépervié symbolically renounces his authority as the superior of the house and its domestics. Rakma responds to Lépervié’s plea to be beaten with satisfaction:

Alors elle lui allongeait un soufflet au travers du visage, et ce jeu l’amusant, elle finissait par le gifler coup sur coup, corroyant sa peau sous la bourrade de ses petits poignets furieux, toute grisée elle-même de son empire, prise d’un âcre besoin de lui faire mal. Il se mettait à pleurer de vraies larmes, des larmes de petit garçon fouetté. (181)

Already at her feet, Lépervié succumbs to Rakma’s sadistic pleasures, assumes the role of a punished child. Similar to the metaphors of bodily inscription in Mirbeau’s Le Jardin des supplices, this initiation into sadomasochism occurs thru Rakma’s marking of

Lépervié’s body. Peter Brooks writes that the body is a place of “signification—the place for the inscription of stories—and itself a signifier, a prime agent in narrative plot and meaning” (6). In a reading of Rousseau’s Confessions, Brooks maintains that the spanking of the young Jean-Jacques forever signs his body with the erotic signifier, because many of his narrations lead back to this decisive, masochistic moment (39, 43).

91 Similarly, Lépervié’s bruised body is now a signifying site of inscription of future sadomasochistic stories between himself and Rakma.

Appropriately, this chapter concludes “dans un spasme d’orgasme et de douleur” as Lépervié, beaten and spent, apologizes for previously having contradicted his lover:

“Ferai plus! Te jure que ferai plus!” (182), he mutters. Lépervié’s noteworthy omission of

“je” in this childlike utterance is not just a symptom of his infantilization, but also of his loss of self and will power at the hands of Rakma.42 A similar episode occurs shortly after this sadomasochistic initiation, in which Lépervié, not unlike Zola’s Muffat in Nana, delights in lowering himself on all fours so that his mistress may aggressively ride him like a horse: “Un jeu plaisait à Lépervié. Elle lui commandait de se mettre à genoux et aussitôt il s’accroupissait, se traînant à quatre pattes en gémissant. Comme une petite reine indienne, elle s’asseyait sur ses reins, lui talonnant les côtes pour le faire galoper”

(203-204). Debasing himself first as a child and then as a circus animal, the magistrate corporally surrenders his power to his lover and employee. As we shall see later, the performance of sadomasochism coupled with cross-dressing will allow for an even greater transgression of normative gender and sexuality.

Though once celebrating his revitalized virility after their first encounter,

Lépervié’s sexual authority and performance suffer through the course of the novel as

Rakma’s reign escalates. The magistrate soon loses the ability to keep up with her demands:

42 Lépervié’s childlike desire to be beaten resonates with Freud’s analysis of the three developmental stages of masochism, in which he describes the subject’s desire to be beaten or humiliated by a parent. In this Oedipal stage, the child reverses his/her sadistic pleasure of observing another child being beaten into a masochistic desire directed inwards, which places him/her as the recipient of the beating. Sigmund Freud, “‘A Child is Being Beaten’: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions.”

92 Sans cesse à le cingler de ses rages impétueuses, elle ne tourmentait le plus souvent qu’une masse inerte et pâmée, la force éteinte de l’homme sous la morsure et l’excès des baisers. – Déjà! déjà! disait-elle, furieuse de les sentir s’émousser sur la mort de sa chair, en le poignardant de ses regards plus excitants qu’un thermantique. Et elle le rudoyait, injurait sa virilité déchue, le suppliciait de caresses acérées, imaginant de mortels recours qui à la fin le reconquéraient. (203)

Lépervié’s inability to respond to his lover’s aggressive foreplay especially manifests itself anatomically: the vocabulary here calls attention to his flaccid penis (“une masse inerte,” “force éteinte,” “s’émousser,” “la mort de sa chair”). Whether he is unable to maintain an erection or prematurely ejaculates (“déja!”), Rakma associates the magistrate’s debility with his “fallen virility,” verbally insulting his manhood in an attempt to arouse him.43 This proves to be a continual problem for Lépervié, and he browses the classifieds searching for possible remedies, “honteux de toujours échouer sous ses caresses” (307). He eventually responds to an announcement to treat “la débilitation de la virilité” (307), recognizing his own symptoms in this medical euphemism (“[a]h! voilà l’affaire” [307]). Lépervié’s willing acceptance of his impotence is a product of his evolving emasculation, and it is only through Rakma’s firm and unsymapthetic insistence that he seeks a cure.

This episode regarding Lépervié’s impotence recalls his nightmare following his first sadomasochistic encounter with Rakma. In his dream, his ejaculating penis is eaten by a group of Salome-like dancing women, each resembling Rakma:

et chacune à son tour arrachait un lambeau de l’étrange pic qui lui jaillissait du flanc, le donnait à manger aux cruelles lèvres affamés de ses plaies. Et à la fin il ne restait plus, à la place de son flanc, qu’une ouverture caverneuse par où son vert intestin dégorgeait et qui laissait béer

43 In Parts of an Andrology, Lawrence Schehr claims that the presence of male impotence in nineteenth- century fiction reflects a general trend of suppressing signs of male sexuality. He argues that such writings signify “an act of complete castration” (86) and give way to the presence of the symbolic phallus. In other words, the “humanness of the penis” (87) disappears in favor of the all-powerful signifier.

93 l’ossature intérieure, dénudant la double dalle du sternum, comme si des nuées de rats lui avaient foui les entrailles. (185-6)

Lépervié recognizes the significance of this “rapt qui le dépossédait de sa virilité” (186), wishing upon waking, “[s]i du moins je pouvais récupérer ce qu’elles m’ont pris” (186).

Not only have these women consumed Lépervié’s penis, but the hollow space remaining is suggestive of a vagina. Lemonnier’s use of the intransitive verb “déposséder de” is noteworthy here in that the indirect object, “virilité”, appears as a detachable

“possession.” In other words, masculinity emerges as an ephemeral “object” that can be seized or appropriated, as is the case here. The plethora of starving mouths feed on his penis specifically at the moment of ejaculation, and Lemonnier thereby associates ejaculation with the expenditure of virility, which in this case is literally consumed—and appropriated— by Rakma’s collaborators.

When Lépervié seeks a remedy for his impotence, the stimulants initially irritate his stomach and skin. Nonetheless, he becomes aroused through their usage, and Rakma concocts her own version44 in the hopes of maintaining her lover’s attention:

[. . .] il parvenait à récupérer une excitation dont encore une fois elle abusait pour lui infliger d’âcres et voluptueux sévices. Elle exagérait pour lui une cuisine poivrée des plus salaces condiments, lui prodiguait la truffe, le gingembre, le capsique, le carry, avait recours à de déshonnêtes expédients pour sensibiliser sa chair mortifiée, sinapismes bouillants, fustigeages, cautères. Il éprouvait alors le râclement d’une herse sur l’échine, la douleur d’un dépècement sous de rouges tenailles, des chocs de merlin lui pilant la nuque et lui concassant les riens, la cuisson de résines ardentes et de corrosifs acides qu’on lui eût lentement versés sous la peau. (308)

44 This is not the first occasion in which the lovers experiment with sexual stimulants. Lemmonier describes Rakma’s “mad science” earlier in the text: “Pour éperonner son usure, elle lui inocula des ferments redoutables qui l’activèrent comme des philtres. Ils eurent recours aux expédients d’un méthodique libertinage” (119-20).

94 Rakma’s aphrodisiac is of a sadistic kind, composed of exotic ingredients that recall the text’s underlying Orientalist discourse. Rakma uses these tonics to mark her lover’s body and to inscribe her corporal authority over him. In doing so, she also claims it as her own, leaving her sadistic signature upon a body that she has maneuvered and shaped to appease her desires.45 Lépervié, tortured by the stimulants’ ingestion and topical use, is sexually responsive to their purpose. However, nothing lasts forever, and Rakma relies once again on her own physical domination over the magistrate: “À la longue, ces excitants déjouèrent leur espoir. Elle dut le violenter pour l’obtenir; il l’injuriait, ne cédait plus qu’à travers des jurons et des exécretations, une fureur d’impuissance qui ensuite se diluait dans des pleurs enfantiles ou s’éteignait en un total accablement” (309). Literally forcing herself upon Lépervié, Rakma reverses typical gender roles and emerges as the sexually and physically dominant of the two, using his body and reducing him once again to the helpless role of a desperate child.

As we have already seen, Rakma’s violence against Lépervié is symbolically directed towards all men. Her assault on the male race positions itself in relation to the male body, by way of Lépervié, and to masculinist language and discourse, through textual disturbances: the body and language are inextricably related. For example, in a rare moment in the text, the reader has access to the philosophy and methods of the

“homicide Rakma,” as the narrator employs free indirect discourse, usually reserved for

45 In Lemonnier’s L’Homme en amour, Aude’s rule over her lover’s body is juxtaposed with his own corporal alienation. Criticizing the institutional structures that taught him to shamefully fear his body, the narrator recalls that “[o]n m’avait enseigné simplement le mépris de mon corps, l’effroi et la honte des organes qui sont la vie” (109). This disconnect is further heightened through Aude’s self-proclaimed possession of his body: “Mais puisque je t’ai sous la peau tout de même!” (179).

95 the male protagonist, to reveal the thought process of this “broyeuse d’homme” (308) and how she wages her war on men:

O ma haine! sers-moi jusqu’à la fin, sers-moi bien, ma haine! Il y passera, et d’autres après lui. Ah! je m’aime en me vengeant. Haine, ô haine! sois mon amour. Maintenant le besogne avance. J’aurai éprouvé sur celui-ci les définitives recettes. Malheur à ceux qui ensuite me tomberont sous la main! (305-6)

Apostrophizing hatred in a passionate, even sexual manner, Rakma emerges as a veritable sorcière devising and perfecting a method to destroy the male sex. Honoring herself through this hatred, she celebrates her manifesto and calling, which she curiously describes as a “besogne,” a self-assigned task to which she is unequivocally devoted. The access that we have to this internal declaration occurs at a crucial moment in the text, in the aftermath of an excruciating sexual encounter: Lépervié “vomissait sa vie dans un râle, demeurait jusqu’au matin pâmé, sans souffle, algide comme un cadavre” (305).

Losing consciousness in an orgasmic submission to Rakma’s sexual persecutions,

Lépervié is temporarily removed from the narrative. In a symbolic gesture reminiscent of

Rakma’s all-powerful presence, both figuratively and textually, Lemonnier allows her a brief but noteworthy invasion into the narrative. Generally dominated by limited- omniscient narration, the novel is suddenly occupied by Rakma, and the novel’s discourse shows symptoms of breaking down.

Performing Cross-dressing and Sadomasochism

The implications that sadomasochism has for corporeality, gender play and identity in Le Possédé are best exemplified through the characters’ decision to cross- dress. The pairing of cross-dressing with sadomasochism allows for a doubly-subversive

96 dismantling of categorical constructions of power in relation to the body: it is the combination of these two performances—sadomasochism and cross-dressing—that allows Rakma to finalize her attack on the male body. I will therefore devote the remainder of this chapter to a close reading of the pivotal transvestic episode in Le

Possédé, and will conclude this section with an analysis of the theme of cross-dressing in

Lemonnier’s larger oeuvre through a brief reading of a popular novel. I begin here by first examining the ways in which Lemonnier uses cross-dressing as a means to further expose the gender identities of the two protagonists. As Marjorie Garber claims in her compelling study of cross-dressing, such a performance “offers a challenge to easy notions of binarity, putting into question the categories of ‘female’ and ‘male,’ whether they are considered essential or constructed, biological or cultural” (10). Remaining cautious not to engage in an anachronistic reading of this fin-de-siècle work, I will show that transvestism (and as it is later coupled with sadomasochism) is a practice by which

Lépervié and Rakma consciously explore, enact and articulate their own masculinities and femininities, allowing for the further deconstruction of hegemonic discourses within the novel.

When Lépervié and Rakma flee the home and escape to the south of France, they decide to travel incognito in the hopes of not being recognized. However, their choice of disguise reveals more about their individual gender transgression than it conceals their actual identity. Rather than simply wearing costumes that adhere to their respective sexes,

Lépervié and Rakma playfully choose to dress in drag.46 This noteworthy episode is

46 Marjorie Garber makes an important distinction between transvestism and drag, noting that the latter is often associated with performance in a theatrical setting (151). Though Rakma and Lépervié are not performing on a literal stage per se, I choose to employ the term “drag” (in addition to “cross-dressing”) in my analysis to stress the performative attributes of this episode. They are not simply cross-dressing in an

97 rhetorically marked by a significant rupture in the text: the chapter opens with an ellipsis, signaling a break from the pervious narrative tone and style of the novel. Reading more like a fait divers appearing in a newspaper, the narrator adopts the distanced role of an objective observer to describe Lépervié and Rakma in the present tense. Here they appear as two unknown figures, previously unmentioned:

… En un canton du littoral méditerranéen, dans un pauvre village sans hôtellerie qu’une osteria de peintres et de rouliers, un très jeune homme et une dame d’âge équivoque à petits pas montent la côte. Lui fluet, le teint mat, nul vestige pubère aux lèvres, la minceur du corps trop à l’aise dans la coupe disgracieuse d’un complet gris. La dame, corpulente, le visage chiné et talé sous un écrasis de talc, manoeuvrant en sa robe de foulard beige que d’un geste gauche elle relève jusqu’aux jarretières. (298)

These opening descriptions give no indication that the two characters are in drag, yet significantly focus on the material—and artificial—components of their attire to reveal their respective genders: “un complet gris,” “robe de foulard beige,” “visage chiné et talé,” and “un écrasis de talc,” for example. In other words, the narrator introduces the man and woman, distinguishable by their differing wardrobes, through these sartorial details, thereby drawing attention to such markers of gender. The descriptions equally suggest a lack of normative gender expression (no pubescent secondary characteristics in the man, and an awkwardness and lack of elegance in the woman). Still revealing no hints of their transvestism, the narrator plays along and adopts the pronouns appropriate to their masquerade, again establishing a distanced relationship to the two lovers as he depicts their journey through the countryside. The “young man” known as Alfred, despite his lack of facial hair, is nonetheless the more robust of the two, described as

“infatigable” and “fibreux” (299) as he scolds his female companion Rosine, the

attempt to hide their identities, but also to engage in a playful yet profound performance of drag that speaks to their own gender identities.

98 “sagouine en perruque,” for her lack of agility: “Es-tu poussive, ma grosse bête de femme!” (299). The characters’ espousal of the names Alfred and Rosine is a clear intertextual reference to the protagonists D’Albert and Rosette of Théophile Gautier’s novel of cross-dressing and gender transgression, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835).

Despite his frustration and harsh words, Alfred is aroused by his “wife’s” clumsiness, which leads her to remove her feminine clothing. The chapter thus concludes with

Rosine’s undressing and the exposure of her genitals: “Elle fait sauter son chapeau, dépose son chignon, délivre jusqu’à la ceinture ses jambes captives dans la supercherie des robes;— et apparaît la calvitie et le sexe d’un vieil homme” (299). The syntax of the phrase emphatically juxtaposes female attire and accessories, significantly described as a

“supercherie,” with the body they intend to signify. This opposition is abruptly marked by the hyphen that precedes the climactic and unexpected irony. In other words,

Lemonnier makes a clear distinction here between gender and sex, complicating it by equally opposing the “infatigable” vitality of Alfred (Rakma) with the withered and hairless genitals of Rosine (Lépervié). Lépervié’s masculinity, like his sex, appears all the more worn out when in juxtaposition with Rakma’s/Alfred’s exuberance: Rakma is clearly the more successful of the two in “playing” the role of the man. Lépervié, dressed as a woman, cannot vouch for his masculinity anatomically, for even the corporal signifier of his manhood is void of meaning. In addition, we can wonder if the two lovers exchange their own clothing (a detail that Lemonnier does not clarify), a gesture that would allow Rakma to usurp Lépervié’s (marks of) masculinity and reappropriate them as her own. In any case, the very exposure of Lépervié’s genitals marks a decisive moment in the text in which he becomes the object of the gaze through an unveiling of

99 his penis. Peter Brooks considers the uneasiness produced by the exposed penis from a

Lacanian perspective: “[. . .] the unacceptable display is of the organ of patriarchy, which in a culture where patriarchy is the basis of knowledge and power, and the gaze is phallic, must be veiled. To display the penis is to turn subject into object, a twist or per-version [.

. .]” (279). If the Law of the Father can only be maintained through the veiling of the phallus, Lépervié’s self-exposure signifies a breakdown of masculinist, hegemonic order and reverses the conventional male/subject and female/object pairings associated with the gaze: here, Lépervié is not only the object of Rakma’s gaze, but of that of the (male) reader as well.

Following this culmination of details, the subsequent chapter abandons the distanced, present-tense journalistic style that introduces the two “new” characters Alfred and Rosine and resumes the initial narrative structure. The original narrator returns to describe the process by which Rakma and Lépervié adopt clothing of the opposite sex, and their motivations for doing so. The narrator indicates that one of the lovers’ main intentions on their journey is to “déjouer les recherches” (300). The verb “déjouer,” like its root “jouer,” is especially appropriate in referring to the characters’ cross-dressing in that it underscores the performative aspect of their disguise. Intended to “throw off” potential search parties, Lépervié and Rakma engage in a theatrical-like performance, each adopting the role of an invented character that significantly happens to be of the opposite sex. The narrator details the process by which both characters, actors in their own right, “physically” transform themselves into character:

Chaque matin, avec des fards, des onguents, un laborieux maquillage au crayon et au pinceau devant la glace, elle concertait les arrois de cette fausse féminilité de son blet et glabre visage. Alfred à son tour enfilait ses grègues, comprimait ses petits seins sous le gilet, endossait le veston. Et

100 leur plaisir ne s’épuisait pas de caresser sous cette duperie de la vêture l’androgyne dont ils se leurraient l’un l’autre et qui toujours ne déroutait pas le soupçon. (301)

This meticulous description of the lovers’ “laborious” preparation centers around the artifice underpinning their “duperie de la vêture.” Indeed, Lemonnier’s use of the word

“duperie” is more than just a reminder of the characters’ hoax, as it signals the simulation of gender expression. The narrator enters the realm of the theatrical as well by adopting their chosen names and corresponding pronouns. Not only does he refer to Rakma as

Alfred, but perhaps more significantly, he describes Lépervié’s sartorial transformation using the pronoun “elle” (“elle concertait les arrois de cette fausse féminilité”). In other words, both Rakma and Lépervié exist as Alfred and Rosine respectively, even prior to their makeover and the marking of their bodies with conventional gender signifiers.

Lemonnier’s ironic juxtaposition of “elle” with “fausse féminilité” highlights the artifice behind Lépervié’s cross-dressing. As we watch “Alfred [. . .] comprim[e] ses petits seins sous le gilet,” Lemonnier gestures towards an incongruity between gender (“Alfred”) and sex (breasts). Here, Rakma must literally force her body into the conventional mold of masculinity, as represented by the “gilet.” However, signaled by her small breasts,

Rakma and Lépervié revel in their “androgynie” still present “sous cette duperie de la vêture,” under the fabricated signifiers of masculine and feminine. It is important to distinguish here between our modern-day understanding of the word “androgyne” and that of the nineteenth century. The 1889 edition of the Littré defines the term as the following: “Individu chez lequel les organes des deux sexes sont réunis; androgyne est par conséquent synonyme de hermaphrodite” (143). Synonymous with “hermaphrodite” at the turn of the century and thereby in accordance with its etymological roots,

101 “androgyne” is not about being between genders, or not subscribing to either one (in a binary system), but rather expressing traits characteristic of both masculinity and femininity. Lemonnier’s description of Lépervié and Rakma as being “androgyne” under their transvestic clothing—that is, stripped of sartorial signifiers—can be understood as a simultaneous identification with both masculinity and femininity.

When the time eventually comes for the lovers to resume their original attire,

Lépervié, saddened and distraught at the idea of “re-becoming” a man, “pleura de vraies larmes en réintégrant ses habits d’homme” (306). As he struggles with his buttons and suspenders, he does not even recognize their purpose: “Hein! aïe! qu’est-ce que c’est?”

(306). He expresses a profound mourning in resigning his role as woman: “Ah! cela m’allait si bien de n’être plus que ta femme!” (306), he moans to Rakma. Her response:

“Mais, dit-elle en riant, il n’y aura rien de changé. J’entends bien être toujours l’homme”

(306). This final retort is indicative of the limits of drag—and clothing in general—in signifying gender identity. Rakma’s gender identity transcends the theatricality of cross- dressing and continues to thrive in her relationship with Lépervié. He equally rejects the clothing intended to signify his maleness, and calls on Rakma for assistance: “Je t’en prie, fais-moi ces boutons, attache-moi ces bretelles, je n’en viendrai jamais à bout. Ah!

Alfred! mon Fred!” (306). Lépervié’s awkwardness and inability to reincorporate his male clothing suggests his increasing estrangement from normative masculinity.

Significantly, he turns to Rakma, or rather to the manhood she openly represents, to help in adjusting his attire, signaling his increasing withdrawal from his own masculinity.

Unlike Rakma, Lépervié struggles to transcend gender-normative clothing, and is not relieved by Rakma’s insistence that their drag performance will transcend their costumes.

102 He responds, “[n]on, ce ne sera plus la même chose” (306). For Lépervié, the clothes make the woman, and resuming normative garments necessarily means resuming normative gender roles. It also means engaging in a whole different performance, one that is not nearly as satisfying because, unlike drag, it does not playfully exploit the fluidity of gender.

While Marjorie Garber claims that transvestism interrogates the binary construction of sex, she also argues that cross-dressing challenges the impermeability and authenticity of other such binary social categories, creating a semiotic and taxonomic

“crisis”: “By ‘category crisis’ I mean a failure of definitional distinction, a borderline that becomes permeable, that permits of border crossings from one (apparently distinct) category to another: black/white, Jew/Christian, noble/bourgeois, master/servant, master/slaves” (16). Though it would be anachronistic to project such notions of permeability onto other historic moments, Garber’s comments are useful in conceptualizing what particular representations of drag bring to a text. When applied to

Le Possédé, we can identify moments of boundary crossing on multiple levels, but without going so far as to assume that Lemonnier is promoting what Garber articulates as

“category crises.” For example, in assuming non-normative gender roles through cross- dressing, Rakma and Lépervié equally transgress boundaries of economic class and social status. Her domineering and dictatorial edge, though unwavering since the early stages of their relationship, materializes itself in her insistence on dressing in drag. The masquerade that follows places her in charge of the practical details, such as money management (withdrawals from Lépervié’s bank account per her request) and methods of travel: Lépervié “lui déléguait la totale direction de leur vie” (312). The magistrate and

103 père de famille is thus no longer the professional head-of-the-household and master of his domestics.

Lépervié and Rakma’s cross-dressing also exposes their non-conventional practices of female sadism and male masochism. Moreover, the intersection of sadomasochism and cross-dressing equally upsets the normative sexual paradigm of female/passive and male/aggressive. The idea to cross-dress, suggested by Rakma, is inextricably linked to the couple’s sadomasochistic penchants:

Ce suprême toxique leur avait été suggéré par Rakma pour raviver la monotonie d’une liaison que d’autres aiguillons, actuellement amortis, n’éperonnaient plus. Et ce stratagème, en effet, depuis près d’un mois, comme un condiment salace en un trop usuel ragoût, les amusait d’une reprise de leur vice en cette inversion frauduleuse de leurs sexes. (300-1)

We learn here that Rakma’s “strategy” was conceived not only as a protective mechanism to conceal their identities, but also as a sexual and sadistic stimulus. It is not insignificant that this gender-role reversal is referred to as Rakma’s latest “aiguillon,” for it is her most recent sadistic invention to be used in rekindling their fantasies and pleasures. From this point until the end of their relationship, their sadomasochism incorporates this “inversion frauduleuse de leurs sexes.” For example, in a torturous night of love that leaves Lépervié literally begging for mercy, Rakma insists that there will be more pain to come, but not without reminding him of his new female status: “Mais, attendez! Je sais d’autres caresses… Nous en inventerons d’inédites et de terribles… Allons, monsieur… Allons! vous savez bien que vous ne m’échapperez pas, ma petite femme” (304, my emphasis).

Despite having resumed wearing gender-normative attire, their assumed gender identities while in drag define their relationship for the remainder of the novel. In the final pages, when Lépervié learns of Rakma’s departure with his son Guy, he not only mourns his

104 sadistic lover, but also her masculinity that serves as a complement to his femininity:

“Ah! partie! Fred! Fred!” (352), he moans. This last cry at the conclusion of the novel suggests an equally profound mourning of his own masculinity, as signified through his evocation of Rakma’s male persona, Alfred. In addition, Lépervié’s emasculation is linked to his own masochism, for he cries Fred’s name “en se dépouillant et s’abandonnant à tourmenter sa chair” (352). This final image of Lépervié links his loss of masculinity with physical self-torment, or once again a marking of his body, and confirms the novel’s association between masochism and emasculation—and even femininity. It is through cross-dressing that Lépervié’s masochism and Rakma’s sadism reach their pinnacle, forever marking their sexualities even when the transvestic episode reaches its end. After drag, there is no going back for Lépervié, and lingering traces of his female garments, though physically gone, seem to haunt him as he eventually returns to work at the tribunal: “il s’oubliait à relever les pans du même mouvement de main dont naguère il troussait ses jupes de femme, tortillant ses hanches par un reste d’habitude à croupionner sous les poufs” (314). Although he returns to his masculine position of authority and law-making, Lépervié longs to express his femininity through dress.

Moreover, Rakma’s hold on Lépervié hits its highest point during the cross-dressing episode. It is no coincidence that their cross-dressing prefigures a rupture in their relationship: it marks one of their last interactions before Lépervié wanders around comatose and demented as Rakma strikes the final blow and leaves him for his son. Their cross-dressing therefore brings to climax the end of an era, in which both characters transgressed the boundaries of gender, sexuality and class distinctions. However, as their

“return” to “normalcy” and order illustrates (as represented by conventional clothing),

105 Lépervié and Rakma do not transition with the same ease. In fact, to use Garber’s image of border crossing, it appears that Rakma travels back and forth fluidly, infinitely, while

Lépervié’s initial crossing-over, encouraged by Rakma, doesn’t allow him any return, his debasement shutting him out from normative, hegemonic masculinity.

Quand j’étais homme: cahiers d’une femme

Published in 1907, seventeen years after Le Possédé, the lesser-known novel

Quand j’étais homme: cahiers d’une femme provides another window onto cross-dressing in Lemonnier. It is a popular novel written in the first-person about a young woman,

Andrée, and her social and economic struggles in Paris following an attempted rape by her uncle. Resolved to leave him and his home, she finds herself alone and nearly broke on the city streets. The novel recounts her trials and tribulations in various jobs, nearly all of which are tainted by aggressive male sexual predators and rape attempts. As the provocative title infers, this female protagonist, fed up with repeated sexual harassment, unfavorable work conditions and sexual double standards, pro-actively decides to change her fate by dressing in drag. Marjorie Garber refers to such transvestic motivations as making up what she calls a “progress narrative,” in which the subject is

compelled by social and economic forces to disguise himself or herself in order to get a job, escape repression, or gain artistic or political ‘freedom.’ Each, that is, is said to embrace transvestism unwillingly, as an instrumental strategy rather than an erotic pleasure and play space. (17)

Though Andrée’s motives for cross-dressing correspond to those of Garber’s “progress narrative,” and though at the conclusion of the novel she does “resume life as [. . .] she was, having, presumably, recognized the touch of ‘femininity’ [. . .] in her [. . .] otherwise

‘male’ [. . .] self” (ibid.), I believe that her gender identity and experience as a passing

106 man is more complicated and cannot be qualified as strictly instrumental. Moreover, the novel’s concern with sexual violence against working-class women points to a sensitivity for women’s social issues that is a far cry from the demonization of female sexuality in

Le Possédé. Though very different in style and theme from Lemonnier’s Decadent and

Naturalist works and lacking a femme fatale figure, this popular novel’s interest for this study lies in its genre: stripped of the aesthetics of the high culture Decadent novel, the popular novel in its accessibility and sensationalism is a trustworthy testimony to social mores and beliefs of its period. Despite its provocative subject matter, the interrogation of gender and sexuality in Quand j’étais homme was dismissed by Decadence scholar Jean de Palacio. Insisting that the novel instead be considered in the larger aesthetic production of its author, he writes that it is “une œuvre de transition ou de synthèse entre deux moments de la carrière de l’écrivain. C’est à ce titre qu’il garde tout son intérêt”

(“Camille Lemonnier” 37). 47 I choose to resurrect this forgotten novel for other interests that go beyond its place within Lemonnier’s oeuvre, believing that it can help to better position the writer’s construction of gender and sex against the backdrop of cross- dressing in Le Possédé.

Even prior to cross-dressing, Andrée describes herself as being masculine.

Recalling her childhood tomboy days, she remarks, “je n’ai pas beaucoup le sentiment d’avoir été fille” (182), signaling an alienation from her biological sex and corresponding gender expression. These impressions are still with her in her adulthood, and often the subject of conversation among her friends and neighbors. Known as the “fille-garçon”

47 Palacio also argues that Quand j’étais homme need not be read as a “dessein revendicatif des droits de la femme” (29). However, the original edition of 1907 may attest otherwise, as advertisements for contemporaneous publications appearing in the last pages target a “feminist” audience: J. H. Rosny’s Contre le Sort, subtitled Roman féministe, as well as François de Nion’s Les Tragiques travestis are both marketed as novels featuring female heroines who challenge social injustices.

107 (43)48 of the quarter, she is even suspected of being “un homme déguisé en femme”

(210), an ironic prefiguring of her forthcoming transvestism and a reflection of her traversing of gender boundaries. Andrée notes the androgynous features of her body, which facilitate her ability to pass as a man in male attire: “j’étais grande, svelte et à peine le renflement de mes seins me trahissait” (231), she comments. She also associates her natural “vigueur nécessaire” (234) with that of man, allowing her to undertake manual jobs in the male workforce. This description illustrates an innate corporal and mental identification with masculinity, all of which precede her transvestic identity.

Shortly following her decision to socially engage as a man, Andrée quickly recognizes the performative aspects of transvestism and gender: “c’était un apprentissage

à faire. Après avoir été vingt ans fille, on ne s’improvise pas immédiatement garçon”

(238). The word “apprentissage” implies a constructive element of gender, and

Lemonnier appears to gesture towards an incongruity between what we would today conceive of as sex and gender. Indeed, Andrée makes more than one reference to a lingering femininity, despite her male garments: “Mais on ne s’évade pas de son sexe comme on change de robe” (234). Andrée articulates an unease with her identity as a woman and the masculinity she chooses to perform: “Malgré tout, sous le veston et le pantalon de mon faux sexe, vivait toujours le corps de la femme” (241).

Andrée’s experiences while cross-dressing allow her to identify and reflect on sexual double standards, and offer a medium for Lemonnier to engage in a social commentary on gendered hierarchies. She remarks, for example, “[u]ne femme voit ce qu’on l’a habituée à voir: un homme au contraire voit ce qu’il voit et j’étais maintenant

48 As Palacio reminds us, the expression “fille-garçon” is equally used to refer to Rakma in Le Possédé (ibid. 32).

108 un homme” (239). It does not take long for Léon to enjoy the pleasures and freedoms that were previously denied to Andrée. Significantly, the protagonist makes note of the internalization of cross-dressing and gender exploration and experimentation: “J’avais à peine changé de sexe et déjà ma mentalité était différente” (240). But perhaps the most revealing moment of Andrée’s coming to terms with a masculine identity is when she

(he?) reflects on the “naturalness” of living as Léon:

J’avais acquis une grande sûreté dans les actes de ma vie d’homme. Surtout après que j’eus rompu véritablement avec ma sensibilité de femme, je donnai si bien le change que les méprises ne se représentèrent plus. Cet homme à cause duquel j’avais renoncé à mon sexe et que, par nécessité de lutter sur propre terrain, j’étais devenu moi-même, je le fus naturellement au point qu’il ne m’était plus nécessaire de m’observer. Les formes extérieures de mon corps, soumises à un exercice constant, s’étaient développées. J’eus les gestes que fait un homme dans les moments où la force et la décision sont en jeu. [. . .] J’avais appris à marcher du buste, les épaules hautes, au lieu de marcher des reins, comme font les femmes. Je n’étais plus une femme que pour moi. (299)

Not withstanding the qualifying remark that she makes at the conclusion of this passage reminding readers that she still considers herself a woman, Andrée enjoys the freedom and liberty of movement associated with masculinity. She adds, “[l]a vie qui avait fait de moi un homme, décidément était plus forte que la nature qui m’avait donné le sexe de la femme” (300). Though tempting, it would be anachronistic to read such comments in light of contemporary feminist debates on social constructionism and essentialism.

Instead, we must recognize that Andrée’s remarks reflect an emerging feminist interest in rethinking the legitimacy of gender hierarchies at the turn of the century.49

Despite the provocative social critique in Quand j’étais homme: cahiers d’une femme, Lemonnier concludes his novel with a return to sexual order. Having established

49 For an historical account of feminist movements in nineteenth-century France, see Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the 19th Century.

109 herself successfully by wearing the garments of a man, Andrée one day comes to realize that “sous mes habits d’homme, je demeurais une femme, avec le ventre et le sein qui sont faits pour donner l’amour et la vie” (306). In this tribute to motherhood and maternal instinct, Andrée fulfills her duties as a woman and to her species by honoring nature:

“Une femme est la loi, l’éternelle loi qui fait sortir d’un ovule la continuité des races”

(306). She thus “returns” to womanhood and decides to “renoncer aux apparences et au mensonge” (308) for the purposes of reproduction. Such charged vocabulary removes

Andrée from her previous gendered ambiguity in a claim that her masculinity was a mere façade. Though the novel ends with this embrace of normative femininity, i.e., motherhood (she reveals the intended audience of her journals to be her son), Lemonnier nonetheless allows some trace of gender transgression to remain. Explaining that her son was conceived in a casual encounter with a man never to be seen again, Andrée describes her parental role through a hermaphroditic perspective: “Je fus ainsi moralement le père et la mère de mon enfant: il sortit de mes deux sexes” (308). While this may be a simple reference to her assuming a dual parental role, her corporal metaphor (“mes deux sexes”) troubles the reestablished order at the novel’s conclusion, and her return to normativity through motherhood is disrupted through her simultaneous role as a father (“moralement le père et la mère”).

Conclusion

Returning to the cross-dressing episode in Le Possédé, we can now ask ourselves how these two literary examples, composed seventeen years apart, speak to Lemonnier’s constructions of gender and sexuality and representation of the femme fatale. Lépervié,

110 Rakma and Andrée are each referred to as “androgyne” or “fille-garçon” at certain moments in the texts, and they also express an awareness of the fluidity of gender, which they deliberately parody through drag. However, given Lemonnier’s demonization of female sexuality in both Le Possédé and L’Homme en amour, among other novels, it would be difficult to conclude that the Belgian author is a revolutionary in representing gender at the fin de siècle. What we can conclude, however, is that Lemonnier, like his

Decadent contemporaries, voiced an anxiety about the precariousness of gendered boundaries in society. More specifically, Lemonnier articulates his anxiety through an exploration of malevolent femininity’s effects on language production. In a reflection of

Lépervié’s own linguistic and intellectual deterioration, as well as the disjointed and non- linear narrative of Le Possédé, Lemonnier exposes the femme fatale’s interference with language production on levels both literal (Lépervié) and allegorical (the narrative).

CHAPTER THREE

“Ces lignes d’une fine et longue écriture de femme!”: Catulle Mendès and the Writerly Female Protagonist

Eh bien! mon poème à moi, ou mon roman, ou mon drame (elle s’approchait, le peignoir plus ouvert), le voici [. . .]. (Catulle Mendès, “Mademoiselle Laïs,” Monstres Parisiens 6)

Catulle Mendès (1841-1909), founder of La Revue fantaisiste, co-editor of Le

Parnasse contemporain and author of over a dozen novels, multiple collections of poetry and various plays, was a prolific writer perhaps best known for the richness and elegance of his texts. Actively involved in the Parnassian circle, he was a strong advocate of his father-in-law Théophile Gautier’s adage “l’art pour l’art.”50 Mendès’s preoccupation with form, “où le détail prévaut contre l’ensemble” (Laporte 193), has earned his writing the label of “écriture artiste.” His œuvre epitomizes Paul Bourget’s definition of decadent style: “Un style de décadence est celui où l’unité du livre se décompose pour laisser la place à l’indépendance de la page, où la page se décompose pour laisser la place à l’indépendance de la phrase, et la phrase pour laisser la place à l’indépendance du mot.”51

While praised for his formalism, the thematic elements of Mendès’s works attracted

50 Mendès was once married to Judith Gautier. 51 Essais de psychologie contemporaine: Études littéraires (qtd. in Laporte: 193). 111 112 controversy: he was once sentenced to a month in prison for the publication of his theatrical comedy, Roman d’une nuit, considered in 1861 to be morally offensive.

With themes such as incest, homosexuality and sadomasochism appearing in his most successful novels and short stories (such as Zo’har [1886] and Méphistophéla

[1890]), Mendès’s play with gender, sexuality and androgyny is at the forefront of his work. Like many fin-de-siècle authors, Mendès paints female sexual excess as destructive to men, and its viciousness takes numerous forms. As examples from Mendès’s novels and short stories works illustrate, his femmes fatales symbolically rewrite the dynamics of conventional heterosexuality and occupy writerly positions within his texts.

Published in 1887, La Première maîtresse recounts a virginal man’s initiation by an older, sexually experienced woman. In this novel, which is lesser-known to nineteenth-century scholars, the young effeminate writer Évelin Gerbier becomes involved with the sexually knowledgeable widow, Honorine d’Arlemont. Over the course of nearly two decades, Évelin succumbs to Honorine’s contagious debauchery and is drawn to an erotic existence dominated by sadomasochism, incest and even murder. As their relationship progresses, Honorine’s sexual authority over Évelin has damaging consequences for his spoken and written language production. Sex and writing are intricately related in this novel, and the aspiring poet suffers creative and intellectual setbacks as Honorine sexually dominates him. In return, this femme fatale benefits from her sexual and linguistic authority as she usurps Évelin’s command for words and verbally orchestrates the couple’s violent bedroom practices.

The novel’s structure is relatively traditional, divided into five “livres,” chronologically-ordered sections with clear breaks at critical moments in the storyline—

113 unlike Lemonnier’s Le Possédé, for example, with its disjointed dream sequences and stream-of-conscious journal entries. The opening chapters of the novel portray the convalescent Évelin, who is recovering from an unspecified illness (perhaps tuberculosis) and his initial encounter with his fatal mistress. The subsequent sections introduce the romantic ideals of the literary circle at the local brasserie, an exclusively male milieu whose anti-bourgeois artistic values attract the aspiring poet in Évelin. However, as the remainder of the novel illustrates, Honorine’s influence on the protagonist carries artistic repercussions as well, and her literary aspirations for Évelin gradually seduce him away from the safety of the male-centered Brasserie and its literary aesthetic. The work’s thematic preoccupation with literature and writing communities is highly satirical.

Mendès parodies literary contemporaries in this roman à clef, using the threat of female sexuality in male literary circles to launch an attack on fin-de-siècle artistic milieux and movements. By coupling it with female sexual deviance, what does Mendès claim about the state of contemporary writing?

Évelin spends the majority of the novel and his adult life negotiating Honorine’s violent authority with his poetic dreams, and though circumstances may make her come and go, he always succumbs to her fatal seduction when they are reunited. While the novel documents Évelin’s evolution as a writer, a sexual being and a man through his lifetime, it cannot be considered a traditional bildungsroman because Évelin fails in his multiple attempts to free himself from Honorine. Though he flees to Paris to join a theater troop, takes new lovers and even starts a family of his own (following Honorine’s imprisonment for murder during an incestuous ménage-à-trois gone wrong), he never succeeds in escaping her hold on his body and mind. La Première maîtresse is therefore

114 an anti-bildungsroman about intellectual, sexual and moral regression dictated by a traditional femme fatale figure.

“Avertissement au Lecteur”: the Construction of Masculine Camaraderie

Similar to Mirbeau’s Le Jardin des supplices, Mendès’s La Première maîtresse opens with prefatory commentary about malevolent female sexuality. In both novels, the introductory section serves to establish a complicity between male narrator and male reader, and warns against the dangers of excessive female sexuality. However, rather than establishing this male solidarity between fictional characters as Mirbeau does, Mendès’s preface directly addresses the reader, whose maleness makes him complicit in the story.

La Première maîtresse’s three-page “avertissement au lecteur” is printed with doubly- indented justified margins and smaller font consisting of small capital letters, all of which set it apart from the novel itself; it reads like a poem in prose in a newspaper column, divided thematically by paragraphs or stanzas. The opening lines themselves are jarring:

“Si tu as en toi l’une de ces forces suprêmes, Génie, Orgueil, Vertu, qui triomphent de tout, et accomplissent fatalement leurs destinées,/ Sois l’amant de cent femmes ou l’époux d’une seule [. . .]” (1). In equating male artistic genius with an active sexuality,

Mendès establishes a correlation between masculinity, writing and sexuality that is the basis for the novel’s satirical content. Rhetorically, his preface is startling for both its untraditional layout and sexual content, and it intimately addresses the male reader with

“tu” and the imperative tense; it reads more like a challenge to the reader than a caution of the book’s contents. Indeed, the narrator devotes two parallel paragraphs or stanzas, each beginning with the clause “Si tu es . . .,” to test the reader’s character. The second

115 reads, “Si tu es un brave homme, pareil aux autres braves gens, sans grandeur ni bassesse, sans dons ni mauvais rêves, modéré, paisible, satisfait d’être ainsi,/ Fais la Noce, marie- toi [. . .]” (1-2). Both of these examples measure the strength of the reader’s character against his seductive powers, claiming only certain men—i.e., conventionally masculine and/or artistically inclined, such as the first example— to be capable of sustaining satisfying sexual relationships with women.

The third paragraph or stanza, however, marks a break from the previous two, distinguishing the effeminate man from the conventionally masculine:

Mais si tu es l’un de ces êtres intermédiaires, n’ayant ni le suprême génie ni le sens commun, ni le serein orgueil ni l’acceptation béate de l’infériorité, ni la parfaite vertu ni l’honnêteté banale; si tu es l’un de ces artistes modernes, incertains, tourmentés, bizarres, qui peuvent s’élever, qui peuvent sombrer, dépendants des circonstances, Redoute la femme. (2, my emphasis)

The repetition of negative clauses results in a culmination of details, only to place the emphasis on the climactic conclusion: “redoute la femme.” This phrase stands alone in an isolated paragraph, accentuating woman’s sexual danger for “ces êtres intermédiaires,” a term reminiscent of scientific descriptions of the third sex, or in this case, effeminate men. Setting the subject apart from those of the previous two sections concerning a genius and conventionally masculine man, the narrator identifies the second-rate artist— writer, painter, actor, creator—as especially vulnerable to the threats of female seduction.

Mendès singles out, with a bit of irony, “ces artistes modernes,” whose creative instability and precarious disposition render them most susceptible to the malevolence of female sexuality. The narrator justifies his concerns here by enumerating woman’s noxious influence on her male lover:

116 Car la femme est la cause la plus active des énervements de la volonté, des déviations de la pensée, des abandonnements de la conscience, des vraies fonctions non remplies, du but non atteint, et, finalement, du mécontentement de soi-même, qui est la pire des angoisses. (2)

For such an artist, female sexuality represents a direct threat to creative and intellectual capacities. Mendès criticizes contemporary writers as mediocre in their talent and sexually susceptible. As we shall further see, Mendès launches his attack on modern writers through the figure of Honorine (though in the end, this femme fatale is really peripheral to the work’s aesthetic commentary).

The preface ends with an imagined dialogue between the well-intentioned narrator and his assumed male reader. In response to the narrator’s harsh warnings, the reader suddenly interjects: “Quoi! vivrai-je seul et chaste?”, to which the reader responds,

“chaste, efforce-toi de l’être; sois seul, du moins, ou indifférent,—ce qui est presque la même chose,—si tu veux te développer, selon ton devoir, dans le sens normal de tes facultés” (3-4). The narrator advises the reader to focus on the development of his artistic or intellectual capacities. By placing the narrator’s advice to the reader in dialogue form and using the pronoun “tu,” Mendès establishes a male camaraderie to frame the novel.

The novel itself presents homosocial bonds within the protagonist’s social circles, which the reader observes as they are broken, rebuilt and broken again under the intrusion of sadistic female sexuality.

Effeminacy and the Sickly Male Body

Like many other decadent anti-heros, Évelin Gerbier is not conventionally masculine. “Peu mâle encore” and with a “corps souple, frêle, long” (10), the young convalescent appears to wear his emasculating illness on his body. Though Mendès does

117 not go into detail about Évelin’s debilitating sickness, his physical weakness is nonetheless a symbolic indication of his effeminacy. Indeed, upon his first solo outing in the capital city, Évelin’s fragile body is especially susceptible to sexualized images on the streets: “il dut se retenir, pour ne pas tomber, à la colonne de bronze d’un réverbère, parce que, dans une voiture, les stores mal baissés, deux amoureux s’étaient baisés sur la bouche” (21). Évelin’s vulnerability is linked to his apprehension of female eroticism and has both corporal and cerebral manifestations. For example, Évelin’s capacity for language and self-expression suffers following a brief childhood episode with a female domestic worker:

il s’était enfui, après ce seul baiser, hagard, plein d’épouvante, et si éperdu de la peau un instant touchée, qu’il demeura deux jours sans parler, l’air d’un fou, se demandant comment il se pouvait faire qu’on n’expirât point d’effroi et de délice sous l’étreinte totale d’un corps de femme, nu! (48)

Évelin’s temporary loss of language (“sans parler”) is his noteworthy response to female sexuality and prefigures his linguistic detioration while with Honorine. Along these lines,

Évelin’s fragile health and body become a liability as early as his first promenade with his future mistress: “La fièvre lui battait aux tempes; il pouvait à peine marcher, s’appuyant à sa compagne silencieuse; l’excès de son désir surmenait ses jeunes forces, exténuées par la maladie, à peine convalescentes” (50). Évelin’s frail body threatens to relapse into its sickly and degenerative state under the presence of Honorine’s sexuality, and even bears signs of hysteria, a condition traditionally (and etymologically) associated with women.

In addition to his emasculating sickly nature, Évelin’s “gracilités de fillette” (117) lead many to mistake him for a female-to-male cross-dresser. Honorine’s sister, for example, remarks at one moment that he resembles “une fillette habillée en homme”

118 (138). For his friend and mentor Jean Straparole, this “éphèbe pareil à une vierge” could easily pass for “l’aventureuse demoiselle qui se déguise en page pour suivre dans les périls le beau gentilhomme dont elle est éprise” (108). These comparisons suggest an inability to place Évelin within the confines of a gender binary and challenge the simplicity and validity of these very categories; the protagonist is a man resembling a woman disguised as a man. Considering the novel’s content and the introductory warning against male mediocrity, Évelin’s gender ambiguities signal a vulnerability to sadistic female sexuality. They also suggest the possibility of homoeroticism. This is particularly significant given the context in which Straparole and Évelin socialize, the male- dominated circle of the Brasserie, a milieu we will explore shortly in depth.

Literary Readings of Maculinity, Romance and Sexuality

Prior to his encounter with Honorine, Évelin’s conceptions of love and sexuality are the products of readings in canonical novels and poetry, and hyperbolic romanticism prepares the virgin Évelin for his first amorous experience. Literature also instructs

Évelin on appropriate behavior in Parisian bars and restaurants during his first solo outing: “Il ne mangea guère, but un peu trop, ne mettant pas d’eau dans son vin afin qu’on vît bien qu’il était un homme; quel vin? d’abord du bourgogne; puis du champagne, comme les dames russes des romans et les viveurs des poèmes romantiques”

(26). Évelin’s self-consciousness is a product of literary representations, for he is ostensibly concerned with adhering to appropriate markers of manhood (drinking properly “qu’on vît bien qu’il était un homme”). However, he is equally inspired by the drinking habits of “les dames russes” in his readings, a symptom of his effeminacy.

119 Nonetheless, he chooses to embellish himself with an exaggerated phallic insignia, a

Cuban cigar, and the narrator pokes fun at his awkward attempts at performing conventional masculinity: “Il ne remarquait plus les personnes d’alentour, ébloui des rêves exhalés de lui-même avec la fumée de son cigare, un cigare trop gros, très fort, qu’il avait choisi avec un tact de connaisseur, dans la boîte de Havane” (26). Ridiculous in his theatrical precocity, Évelin is mockingly portrayed as an over-eager virgin whose own grandiose ideas of manhood undermine his very performance of literary, or conventional, masculinity.

Nonetheless, this same romantic literary corpus trains Évelin in the rules of courtship and conversation. Nervous and unsure of his first visit to Honorine’s home, he recalls his education in politeness and the art of conversation, most likely taken from literature: “Il ne soufflait mot, gêné, perplexe; pourtant, lorsqu’elle se tut, il comprit que, par politesse, il ne devait pas laisser tomber la conversation” (63). From the beginning of his visit, Honorine is difficult to impress, especially with words. Even upon Évelin’s official introduction, Honorine shows a distaste for his very name: “Ce nom, Évelin, ne lui plut guère. Elle l’avoua, elle le trouvait trop recherché, elle tenait pour les noms simples” (63). Not only does Honorine reject pretentious names in favor of simplicity, on a more personal level, she rebuffs Évelin’s individual identity, the name by which he is socially signified. Understanding what is at stake in the conversation, “comme il avait lu les romans du dix-huitième siècle” (24), Évelin turns again to literary rhetoric in an attempt to impress his future mistress:

deux ou trois fois, il tenta, parlant des jours de juin, de hausser le ton, de la faire songer aux belles campagnes fleuries, pleines de rayons et de chants; ce qui l’aurait charmé, c’eût été qu’elle dît, troublée d’une émotion sincère: ‘Ah! vous êtes poète, certainement!’ Mais non,—avec ce sourire

120 de dédain aux lèvres,— elle le ramenait d’un mot aux choses mesquines, aux riens bêtes d’une causerie sans élévation et sans charme. (41)

Unimpressed by Évelin’s carefully-crafted rhetoric, Honorine’s response betrays indifference and derision. Évelin’s linguistic incapacity to seduce is equally underscored by the syntax of the phrase: Honorine’s “Mais non” serves as a climactic rebuttal to the imagined response that Évelin projects onto Honorine (“Ah! vous êtes poète, certainement!”). Évelin’s unoriginality in courtship suggests a mediocrity and lack of creativity as a poet.52 His approach to seduction recalls those of Stendhal’s Julien Sorel or

Flaubert’s Léon Dupuis, two characters who draw upon novels and poetry in their awkward attempts at seduction. Given this satirical context and mocking of Évelin’s sexual and literary naiveté, the subtle intertextuality calls further attention to Mendès’s general criticism of contemporary hackneyed literary aesthetics. His parody of Évelin does not necessarily imply a complicity with Honorine who also rejects his lofty, romantic poetic ideals; in true Parnassian fashion, the parody insists upon the need to break from the clichéd literary traditions of Romanticism. Instead of relying upon stale, unimaginative rhetoric (such as a Julien Sorel or Léon Dupuis, who is also mocked by

Flaubert), Mendès advocates an innovative renewal in literary aesthetics.

When Évelin abandons his modest façade and proudly admits his profession,

Honorine is again unimpressed, if not revolted:

quand il eut déclaré, la voix plus forte, un peu de gloire dans l’œil, qu’il faisait des vers et se destinait à la littérature, elle parut comme effrayé, ne put se retenir de dire que cela devait être un grand chagrin pour Mme Gerbier; et, cette parole échappée, elle eut le sourire de pitié presque ironique, qui déjà avait humilié Evelin. (64)

52 Ironically, Mendès himself was criticized for a lack of originality in his works. As one English critic wrote, “[i]l va passant de fleur en fleur, toute sa nature est pleine de la volupté du papillon. Il a écrit des poésies aussi bonnes que d’autres, mais jamais écrit un vers que ses contemporains n’auraient pu écrire.” Georges Moore, Confessions d’un jeune Anglais (qtd. in: Friang 10).

121

Honorine directs her disdain at both Évelin and his profession of writing. For Honorine, writing is an unruly art form, and only worthwhile “si on s’applique à écrire des œuvres saines, convenables, n’ayant rien de choquant pour le bon goût ni pour la morale” (66).

The only writing that Honorine can tolerate is, in a word, bourgeois. This explains both her scorn for the writer and his lifestyle: “Mais ce qu’il y a de fâcheux dans la carrière littéraire, c’est la vie même de l’homme de lettres” (67), she pontificates, adding that all writers are “des vagabonds, des bohèmes, avec un air débraillé qui fait qu’on ne peut pas les recevoir dans le monde” (67). In an indirect criticism on the Brasserie and the writers who frequent it, Honorine’s remarks are also an attack on Évelin’s literary ambitions.

This antagonism between Évelin’s “bohemian” aspirations and Honorine d’Arlemont’s bourgeois (if not aristocratic) influence will play out throughout the novel, exposing the profound impact that Honorine will have on Évelin’s literary production.

In the initial stages of their relationship, Évelin remains devoted to his poetry, hoping eventually to mesmerize his lover, despite her differing literary convictions.

Honorine, however, continues to be unmoved and indifferent: “souvent, lorsque, n’y tenant plus,— et bien qu’elle eût essayé de changer de propos,—il lui récitait, avec une ardente allégresse, un poème qu’il venait d’achever, elle lui faisait remarquer que cela ne valait rien pour lui, faible de poitrine, de parler si longtemps, d’une voix haute et forte”

(114). In a reminder of Évelin’s previous illness, Honorine conflates his voice—his writing, through metonymy—with his weakened physical state, in a challenge to his masculinity. If Évelin is criticized for not being “man” enough to recite his own poetry, writing is by extension designated as a “masculine” profession. In an imaginary conversation with his mistress, Évelin accuses Honorine of emasculating each of her

122 victimized lovers. Understanding this process of emasculation to take place both sexually and intellectually, he claims “[t]u l’émascules, à la fois sous le ventre et sous le front!”

(160). For Mendès, conventional masculinity is measured on both an intellectual and sexual level. As a result, mental and sexual capacities are inherently linked. Along these lines, it is significant that Honorine’s late husband is also characterized as a poet.

Describing him to Évelin, Honorine’s sister explains,

ce jeune homme, tout jeune, qui te ressemblait un peu, qui était une espèce de poète aussi, avec un amour d’emporter sa femme vers les pays d’aventures et de soleil dont on parle dans les livres, ce délicat gentilhomme, un peu rêveur, de qui elle était adorée, elle en fit en moins de deux ans un être presque laid, toussant, crachant, aux pommettes de sang dans un visage blême [. . .]. (149)

The parallels with Évelin are unequivocal, and the fate of Honorine’s husband foreshadows that of her new lover. Her penchant for young romantics preoccupied with lofty rhetoric and poetic idealism extends beyond Évelin and her late husband. We also learn of a priest, seduced by Honorine, “qui est devenu fou, qu’on a été obligé d’enfermer

à cause qu’il disait, tout à coup, en servant la messe, des mots étranges, fous, immondes”

(152). The priest, once using his mastery of words to preach, loses his command over language, as Honorine’s libertine, “immonde” rhetoric supresses the pious discourse of the Church.53 In these three examples, male literary or linguistic capacities are most vulnerable when exposed to Honorine’s sadistic sexuality.

Significantly, Évelin initially insists on “reading” Honorine and her behaviors through his romanticized and idealized lens. Imagining her body, “[i]l lui semblait que ce corps ne devait pas seulement être fait, comme celui des autres femmes, de chair réelle et vivante, mais de sérénité, de pudeur, de tendresse pensive” (53). Trapped in his own

53 A similar episode occurs in Mendès’ short story “La Pénitente,” in which a libertine woman details her sexual adventures to a priest during confession. I provide a reading of this story later in this chapter.

123 romanticized reading of signs, Évelin’s reading of his future lover’s sexuality is flawed.

This failure further exposes the weaknesses—and ingenuousness— of Évelin’s literary training. Unfortunately for him, much of his sexual relationship with Honorine will be read through his romanticized, naïve literary lens. This is in no better place exemplified than in Honorine’s bedroom. Upon their first sexual encounter, Évelin is disappointed by the mediocrity of her boudoir, finding the setting to be unsatisfactory to his imagination:

“il se souciait bien à présent de savoir pourquoi Mme d’Arlemont l’avait conduit dans cet affreux salon blanc et or, médiocre comme elle, si différent des chambres et des boudoirs que décrivent les poèmes [. . .]” (72). In Évelin’s eyes, Honorine approaches sexuality

(revealed by her boudoir) as she does literature, preferring bourgeois simplicity to romance and passion. And yet even when Honorine does reveal her violent, sadistic tendencies, Évelin resorts to literary representations of female sexuality to explain her

“abnormal” behavior: “Il avait acquis, dans des lectures, quelque expérience de la vie; il savait que les femmes parvenues, après des années de vertu et de continence, à l’âge d’Honorine, peuvent être troublées, soudainement, par des désirs anormaux, excessifs”

(123). Évelin equates literary readings with “l’expérience de la vie,” and continues to interpret Honorine’s sadistic and hypersexual character through literary comparisons.

Mendès continually suggests that Évelin’s readings of female sexuality are flawed, once again exposing the naïveté of his personal literary and aesthetic doctrines.

However, Évelin has trouble identifying Honorine among the classically aggressive female heroines of novels and poems. Mendès distinguishes Honorine from her hypersexual literary precedents in an interesting mise-en-abyme: “elle n’égalait pas les ardentes amoureuses, impératrices ou courtisanes, messalines ou impérias, des

124 poèmes et des légendes. Elle n’était point double” (117). The narrator maintains that

Honorine’s debauchery is in a class of its own, irreducible to literary models of malevolent female figures; Honorine “n’est point double.” In denying Honorine the possibility of a literary counterpart, Mendès hyperbolizes her sexual deviance and also distinguishes her from the literary milieu and tradition she opposes.

Female Seduction through Language

From the initial stages of their relationship, Honorine dominates through language. Beginning with their very first night together, Honorine uses language to command and to immediately establish sexual authority over Évelin. Though wanting to flee, it is as if Évelin were spellbound by the force that calls him to the bedroom: “venez, je vous attends.” Describing her voice, Mendès writes, “[c]ette voix, avec sa douceur accoutumée, était impérieuse; elle ordonnait, sans dureté, mais du ton péremptoire de quelqu’un qui a le droit de commander” (73). Honorine thus establishes the verbal authority that she will exercise throughout the entire novel: each night, upon hearing the word “venez,” Évelin obeys and enters her bedroom, in spite of himself.

As their relationship progresses, language, in its perversity, plays a central role in the realization of various fantasies. In fact, words themselves become a means of seduction, the very medium through which the couple carries out its most unconventional fantasies:

Il percevait bien,—les premiers temps,—que, de ces mots qu’il écoutait ou qu’il proférait, se formait sous le souffle de leurs bouches, dans quelque démoniaque lieu de châtiment, leur supplice futur. Il avait peur, tandis qu’elle ne montrait point d’effroi. Mais, malgré ses épouvantes, malgré les griffes de la damnation au cœur, il voulait entendre les mots affreux. Et la

125 parole évocatrice faisait surgir autour d’eux, tout près d’eux, des formes vivantes, presque réelles, comme tangibles. (258-9, my emphasis)

In this passage, Honorine’s speech, though perverse, is now a mutual means of communication for both lovers. Again, like the linguistically corrupted priest, Évelin, once the romantic young man of verse, finds sexual pleasure in Honorine’s distasteful rhetoric. Moreover, it is only by appropriating her language that he can find the words to articulate his newly awakened desires:

Ce fut épouvantable quand ils commencèrent à parler, tantôt elle à lui, tantôt lui à elle, près de l’oreille, en des chuchotements. Des aveux d’ignobles désirs leur sortaient de la bouche [. . .]. L’excès où ils se ruaient seuls ne suffisait plus à leur besoin de torturante ivresse. ‘Parle-moi! parle- moi!’ et ils parlaient. (258)

The contagion of Honorine’s perversity and sexual desires is linked to a similar linguistic contagion occurring simultaneously.

While language becomes a means for the two lovers to communicate their most shameful “aveux,” Honorine’s mastery unsurprisingly surpasses that of Évelin. Having enacted their most vicious fantasies together, there remains one—the unspoken—to be realized. This ultimate vice transcends the signifying capacities of language, for even

Mendès does not identify it by name:

Il y a, dans le monde moderne, des vices si étranges, si sous-humains, considérés comme si impossibles, que l’hypocrisie universelle feint de les ignorer, et que le législateur préfère la tristesse de les laisser impunis, à l’horreur de les supposer; et il est des péchés que n’a point prévus la malédiction divine; qui sait s’ils n’échappent pas au châtiment, parce qu’ils sont au-delà de la colère du juge? (269)

While Évelin and Honorine commit this “exécrable désir” (265) that exceeds all others in its perversity and brutality, we as readers do not know what the act itself is; could it be sodomy? Necrophilia? This lacuna in the text serves to underscore the degree of deviance

126 of their crime, for it is literally indescribable. Though both Évelin and Honorine desire the unspeakable, Honorine is the first to articulate this desire to her lover, thereby transforming fantasy to possibility: “Ce fut elle, la première, qui parla” (264). This climactic phrase stands in a paragraph by itself, emphasizing Honorine’s command of language in the relationship: her linguistic privilege places her in a category separate from both Évelin and the narrator (neither can find the rhetoric to describe this extreme vice, and Mendès himself omits Honorine’s words from the text, leaving the reader guessing). Once accomplished, a shameful Évelin regrets the act, yet is continually seduced by Honorine’s voice: “Tenté encore par les paroles qu’elle savait dire, l’effrayante parleuse dans la nuit, affolé encore par la concupiscence qu’elle lui insufflait, il la désirait de nouveau, [. . .] la chose!” (272). Again, unwilling to name the devious sexual act, Mendès resorts to the very general “la chose” to designate that which remains unspeakable for all but Honorine. Évelin continues to be seduced by Honorine’s speech, no matter how vulgar or violent. Even after eight years of separation and Honorine’s murder of her own sister, Évelin anticipates the thrill of hearing his lover’s voice once again: “Il la reverrait! elle lui parlerait peut-être! Oui, elle lui parlerait avec cette voix grave et douce, lente, insinuante, dont le timbre seul lui rappellerait tant d’infâmes paroles, à voix basses, dans les nocturnes silences…” (324). Above all else, Évelin associates Honorine with her speech, underscoring the sexual powers of her voice.

Upon the murder of her sister, it is fitting that a condition of Honorine’s eight- year sentence is the prohibition of speech. Honorine and the other female offenders must submit to “la peine du mutisme” (298) as part of the prison rules: “Les femmes, dans l’étroit promenoir, marchaient une à une, sans parler, selon la règle, entre des murs très

127 hauts; aucune n’avait le droit de tourner la tête pour jeter une parole, pour faire un signe à celle qui la suivait de loin” (297). While talking is prohibited among prisoners, this passage places a particular emphasis on forbidding discussion between women. In this context, the silencing of women is an attempt to prevent (linguistic) female complicity, suggesting that language, when used by women, is linked to female deviance and is a threat to social order.

La Brasserie: Homosociality and Male Literary Ideals

The Brasserie, this “illustre tapis-franc de la littérature” (90), is a place of fairy tale inspired myths and literary idealism in La Première maîtresse. Yet it is also the meeting place of jaded, male writers struggling to reconcile their artistic convictions with the compromises of bourgeois literature. Above all, it is a place of community and solidarity: “Elle était un centre, un lieu de camaraderies, de haines aussi, groupement plus solide; quelque chose comme une patrie” (91). There is a philosophical affinity within this circle of aspiring writers, an intellectual understanding of literary creation and a refuge from capitalist literary consumerism. For a young and naïve Évelin, it is an artistic utopia, which he admires from afar at first, “osant à peine prendre sur lui de s’asseoir à leurs tables” (70). As a developing poet, Évelin projects his own literary aspirations on the Brasserie, idealizing even its failed clients and imagining their future role in his own career. Mendès both exposes and mocks the protagonist’s naïveté in a description of his first meeting with Jean Straparole, a writer whom he initially admires from a distance: “il se souvenait du tremblement qui lui secoua les jambes, un soir que Straparole, le gilet sans boutons et la cravate débraillée, lui frappa sur l’épaule [. . .]” (71). Straparole’s mere

128 physical presence sends Évelin into an uncontrollable nervous panic. His reaction to

Straparole recalls a scene in Mirbeau’s Le Calvaire between Jean and his male mentor

Lirat. Characterized as “feminine” (120), Jean’s estime for Lirat takes on amorous proportions: “je l’aimais avec crainte, avec gêne, avec ce sentiment pénible que j’étais tout petit à côté de lui, et, pour ainsi dire, écrasé par la grandeur de son génie…” (119).

Like Jean’s admiration for Lirat, Évelin’s high regard for Straparole hints at homoeroticism and underscores his artistic inexperience and susceptibility.

The portrayal of the Brasserie does not escape Mendès’s satire of fin-de-siècle writers and literature. The Brasserie is dominated by two men known as Jean Straparole and Jean Morvieux (Morveux?), whose eccentricity and affected rhetoric expose the hypocrisy and ridicule of the literary circle itself. Corresponding characters and caricatures, these two writers each contribute to the bar’s falsely artistic dynamic: “Puis la Brasserie, en face de Jean Morvieux, avait Jean Straparole. Le côté obscur, non sans grandeur, de la Brasserie, c’était Jean Morvieux; son côté chatoyant, avec un rayonnement de joie, c’était Jean Straparole” (103). According to the editors of the recent edition of Mendès’s La Maison de la Vieille, the figures of Straparole and Morvieux are recurring caricatures of two nineteenth-century writers who frequented the same literary circles as Mendès: Albert Glatigny (1839-1873) and Léon Bloy (1846-1917), respectively. As reflected in his portrayal of Straparole, Mendès was fascinated with

Glatigny and his bohemian spirit. He also published Glatigny in 1906, a theatrical piece in homage to the deceased writer. His disdain for Bloy, however, was in response to

Bloy’s anti-Semitic portrait of Mendès in Le Désespéré in 1886, one year before the publication of La Première maîtresse (Lefrère et al.). Both Straparole and Morvieux

129 make cameo appearances in other works by Mendès, including Glatigny and La Maison de la Vieille. Originally published in 1894, this latter novel is centered around the literary salons of Nina de Villard and portrays the dozens and dozens of gens de lettres that attended her gatherings, often through exaggerated caricature. Through parody and disdainful portrayals, Mendès expresses rather raw and vehement opinions of many of his contemporaries, oftentimes tainted by personal vendettas, in what has been called a

“règlement de compte” (Lefrère et al. 85). As part of the Parnassian movement,

Straparole/Glatigny appears to be both revered and ridiculed by Mendès in this novel, though with a gentleness that suggests a respect for their shared aesthetics.

Morvieux/Bloy, however, is not spared any sympathy, shamelessly embodying the quintessential bitterness of the failed poet. Though Jean Straparole and Jean Morvieux may be ostensibly polar opposites, the fact that they share a first name suggests complementarity in Mendès’s parody of contemporary writers.54

While the resentful Morvieux “faisait penser à un égout qui aurait de la haine”

(93), his caricatured counterpart is a bon vivant constantly boasting his under-appreciated talent:

répétons-le, muses héliconiades! je suis une espèce de Thespis; je tiens de Piandare, poète lyrique, et d’Aristodème, acteur de satyres, de Catullus et de Roscius; je serais pareil à Molière s’il rimait mieux, à Shakespeare, s’il ne s’était pas obstiné à écrire ses drames en anglais, une langue que personne ne comprend. (84-5)

Faithful to the verbosity reflected in his name,55 Straparole’s speech is punctuated with classic literary references, his conversation dominated by lofty allusions and poetic

54 Marie Krysinska offers a similar critique of fin-de-siècle literary circles and bars in her novels Folle de son corps (1895) and La Force du Désir (1905). In the following chapter, I explore in detail these two works, equally rich in satire, and their respective portrayals of contemporary writers and artists. 55 Similar to Lirat in Mirbeau’s Le Calvaire, both characters’s names suggest conventional male discourse.

130 citations. The narrator parodies the character’s grandiose artistic opinions and arrogant effusiveness: “Rimeur, cabotin, tombé, un soir d’étoiles, du chariot comique de Scarron et ne s’étant réveillé que, deux siècles après, sur la grande route, près de Paris, par un matin de soleil, Straparole était ignorant de la vie réelle autant que, de l’air, un poisson”

(103). Here, the narrator adopts the character’s theatrical rhetoric to best portray him, literary references and all. In doing so, he mocks his naïveté as an aspiring writer nostalgic for previous times and who is ignorant of the reality of contemporary literary aesthetics.

It is Straparole who first welcomes the fresh Évelin to the Brasserie, though not without contempt for his money and bourgeois standing: “Petit, tu es riche, c’est médiocre” (105). For Straparole and the other failed writers of the Brasserie, Évelin’s financial stability is incompatible with an artistic, bohemian lifestyle. As Straparole reasons, “c’est une étrange impertinence d’avoir, étant aède, de la monnaie dans sa poche,—puisque Homère mendiait par les routes de la Hellas et que, ce matin, j’ai emprunté quarante sous à mon garçon d’hôtel, qui me les a refusés” (106). Though he is respected for his promising poetic abilities, Évelin’s economic background prevents him from fully integrating into to the intellectual circle of the Brasserie. And yet it is to this group that Évelin most wishes to belong, among these men that he idealizes common literary poetics, in this circle that he seeks refuge from Honorine: “Une seule ressource: la Brasserie” (119).

Évelin recognizes that the Brasserie is not a place for women. The few women who frequent the bar are prostitutes, and Straparole’s companion seems to have emerged from a fairy tale, for even her name is legendary. Known simply as Tétons-de-Bois, this

131 dangerously-busted woman personifies all that is mythical of the Brasserie: “Des légendes couraient, qu’on avait mises en chansons. Rue des Martyrs, un matin qu’elle allait, en peignoir, acheter trois sous de lait, elle heurta du sein qui pointait sous l’étoffe la tête d’un petit vieux: il en eut l’œil crevé!” (86). Sometimes also referred to as “Sans

Chemise,” this female figure is the product of myth, not even possessing a given name but only nicknames derived from the sexualization of her physical appearance. What we know of her is only through rumors and “cent autres contes” (87), each of which thrive in the stories circulating in the Brasserie. Though her male companions at the bar are equally one-dimensional satirical caricatures lacking depth and development, Tétons-de-

Bois’s character and her very identity are reduced to a hyperbolized and sexualized anatomical part. Unlike the men around her, Tétons-de-Bois speaks rarely and with little eloquence—“n’étant point parleuse, elle se born[e] à dire ‘Zut!’” (87)—while her body is the subject of mockery. After lingering one night in the hopes of being offered a drink,

Tétons-de-Bois is reminded by Straparole that the Brasserie is for writers, not women:

“n’as-tu point appris que, de tous les êtres vivants, les peintres et les poètes sont précisément ceux qui sont le moins en état d’offrir des consommations aux dames?” (88).

As a simplified personification of female sexuality, Tétons-de-Bois is alienated from the

Brasserie because of her inability to master words. Her character therefore confirms the incompatibility between women and writing in this circle. However, despite the exclusive masculinity of the Brasserie, a number of the group’s constituents show signs of emasculation: “[. . . ] tous les impuissants et tous les forts réduits à l’impuissance se groupaient là” (92). The Brasserie already suffers from degenerative symptoms of both emasculation and literary impotence. As we have seen in Mirbeau’s Le Calvaire, this

132 artistic impotence is inherently related to emasculation. Mendès’s satirical portrayal thus includes a commentary on the writers’ impending emasculation which, as is established in his preface, he associates with mediocre writing. Ironically, despite the fact that the

Brasserie presents itself as a male-dominated terrain, it is not a place of conventional masculinity, but rather a microcosm of failed, second-rate emasculated authors.

Nonetheless, the Brasserie is a safety zone for male writers, a place of refuge.

Indeed, as Évelin’s “seule ressource” against Honorine’s sadistic hold, the artistic idealism of the Brasserie is where he first seeks comfort and protection: “dans cette cohue littéraire, parmi les gros mots et les grands mots, il éprouvait—se souvenant des heures passées auprès d’Honorine—un soulagement, comme de respirer le plein air au sortir d’une prison. Il s’y sentait libre dans la liberté des autres” (119). Évelin expectantly turns to this circle of artists for guidance and inspiration, and Mendès juxtaposes the space of the Brasserie with Honorine. Honorine is the antithesis of the literary asesthetics advocated by the Brasserie, a female intrusion into this literary space, for she slowly overpowers its influence on Évelin’s training as a writer. As Évelin and Honorine’s relationship progresses, he gradually loses his idealism and admiration for the circle of male writers. This is best exemplified by his distraction from Straparole’s once all- powerful, attention-commanding verbosity: “Depuis un moment, Évelin n’écoutait plus le lyrique et funambulesque bavardage de Straparole [. . .] Évidemment, il voulait s’en aller; on eût dit qu’il n’osait point” (109). Though he is reluctant to leave this safe space,

Honorine’s hold on him—“comme un oiselet entre deux mâchoires d’étau” (111)— overpowers any masculinist utopia:

Il lui était pénible sans doute de quitter la Brasserie, tous ces gens de lettres, tous ces artistes, que sa jeune imagination parait encore d’idéal et

133 de gloire. Pourtant, il s’éloigna. Dehors, c’était la rue froide et sale, sous la pluie d’automne. Il appela un cocher, monta dans le fiacre. ‘Rue François Ier, 14.’ Car, presque tous les soirs, depuis plus d’une année, Évelin allait prendre le thé chez Mme Honorine d’Arlemont. (109)

This decisive moment in which Évelin no longer responds to Straparole—the metonymical crux of the Brasserie—represents an intellectual and sexual point-of-no- return for the protagonist. As we shall see, Honorine will completely supplant the function of the Brasserie in Évelin’s poetic development.

Female Linguistic Invasion: When Her Voice Becomes His

Despite his passion for verse and the poetic ambitions advocated at the Brasserie,

Évelin succumbs to Honorine’s influence and views on writing. Abandoning his artistic ideals and projects for the safety and mediocrity of traditional, bourgeois literature,

Évelin’s gradual shift to prose, under his lover’s urging, results in a literal and metaphoric loss of his own voice. Évelin shows signs of these oral repercussions as early as his first night with Honorine. Her aggressive seduction of Évelin literally leaves the writer speechless: “Et tel devint ce regard [. . .] dont Évelin se sentait enlacé, brûlé, à travers les vêtements, sur toute la peau, et palpé comme d’une caresse chaude, qu’il trembla, balbutia, cessa de parler, pris de peur, et détourna la tête, en rougissant” (65-6, my emphasis). Honorine’s sexual dominance parallels a command of speech, and though she doesn’t utter a word, she reduces Évelin to silence. Mendès adds, “[d]epuis très longtemps, il voulait prendre congé; vingt fois il avait eu sur les lèvres qu’il se faisait tard, qu’il craignait d’être importun. Mais, ces mots, il n’avait pas eu le courage de les dire” (70, my emphasis). Évelin’s masochistic inability to resist Honorine lies in his awkward grasp of language, for he simply cannot articulate “no.” This scene

134 appropriately marks his initiation into a relationship that will have a damaging, if not silencing, effect on his writing.

These consequences assocatied with language also play themselves out on a corporal level. Upon Évelin’s return home from his first amorous night with Honorine, his mother remarks the physical traces of his new lover on his lips: “sous ses lèvres, elle sentit quelque chose de tiède et de mou qui coulait; elle se recula, se pencha; là, de la bouche d’Evelin, c’était du sang, du sang qui coulait, du sang, du sang encore, qui s’agglutinait en caillots gras, à peine sorti” (80). Bearing the marks of the metaphoric assault on his voice, Évelin is also significantly feminized in this passage, his bloodied lips recalling female menstruation. On a less abstract level, they equally signal a relapse of Évelin’s poor health that we may assume are due to a pulmonary condition such as tuberculosis. The presence of blood on Évelin’s lips is what Jean de Palacio has called “la poétique du crachat” in decadent literature, a common secretion allegory often related to

“la transgression de la morale,” most notably sexual morality (Figures et formes 2: 179).

Palacio also suggests that buccal traces of saliva, blood or mucus equally underline narrative contamination within the text. Indeed, following this first night with his first mistress, “la maladie l’avait repris” (111), and Évelin spends two weeks unconscious in his bed, unable to speak coherently, “profér[ant] dans les délires d’affreuses paroles qui détestaient et qui suppliaient” (112). Évelin’s bloodied mouth exposes his effeminacy and calls attention to the vulnerability of the novel’s masculinist discourse articulated in the preface: the narrator ominously warns, “entre tous les baisers, crains le Premier Baiser”

(2). Mendès even goes so far as to associate this first kiss with a rape, or “le viol goulu [. .

135 .] d’un long baiser infâme” (75).56 Confirming Palacio’s claim that “[t]out geste érotique

(et d’abord le baiser) devient ainsi processus d’appropriation de l’homme par la femme [.

. .]” (Figures et formes 1: 57), Honorine’s symbolic “rape” of Évelin’s body and language, through the kiss, prefigures her simultaneous usurpation of his masculinity and command of words.

Having surrendered control of his own voice, Évelin later speaks the language of sadomasochism, incest and murder, articulating these contagious desires, once only expressed by Honorine, as though his lover were speaking vicariously through him. It is

Évelin, for example, who proposes the incestuous encounter between Honorine and her sister. What results is a further estrangement from himself and his language, as “il avait horreur de tout lui-même, de ses mains, de ses lèvres, ouvrières d’abjectes délices, de sa voix, de sa voix surtout qui avait, par une affreuse magie (puissance infernale ou divine de la parole!), invoqué la présence presque réelle des plus extrêmes péchés” (261, my emphasis). Like the priest who utters profanities, Évelin’s rhetoric is corrupted by

Honorine’s debauchery.

Évelin’s incapacity for common communication parallels his estrangement from his literary convictions and his own writing. Once an admirer of the writers at the

Brasserie, Évelin develops contempt for his former mentors, modeled on Honorine’s literary standards: “Il ne conservait pas intacts les enthousiasmes des premiers jours; soit que ses yeux, d’eux-mêmes, se fussent désillés [sic], soit que les idées de Mme d’Arlemont, désillusionnantes, se fussent déjà insinuées en lui, mêlées à sa propre pensée, il commençait à moins admirer, à juger ces gloires dans un bouge, ces éloquences dans la

56 Palacio documents the Decadent “mise au féminin” of adjectives and nouns such as “goulu” and “goule”, noting that though originally masculine, such words became specific to a feminine referent during the period and were “caractéristiques de la féminité dévorante” ( Figures et formes 1: 58).

136 fumée des pipes” (119). Through Évelin, Honorine indirectly launches an attack on the ideals of the Brasserie, and the “fumée des pipes” is a reminder of the exclusively male literary circle housed there. An attack on the Brasserie is therefore an attack on masculinity, or what remains of it there. In addition, Évelin emulates Honorine not only in her contempt for certain literary aesthetics, but also in her physical gestures. “Il se surprenait, durant les soupers au café du théâtre, après les rhabillements rapides, à faire, tandis que bavardaient les cabotins, le geste de recul qu’elle eut fait, elle, Honorine, si distinguée, en les entendant. Il rougissait, de la rougeur qu’elle aurait eue; il était bégueule, comme elle” (187). Infiltrating his very body, “Honorine était en lui” (252), influencing both his intellectual and physical capacities.

“Honorine avait fait de lui, peu à peu, quelqu’un qui lui ressemblait, à elle” (253).

Évelin’s resemblance to Honorine equally depends on her influence on his writing and his literary proclivities. Once devoted to poetry and even succeeding in publishing two of his own volumes, Évelin is nonetheless persuaded to abandon verse for a career in prose.

Il fut tenté, grâce à elle, par cette ignominie: le poème bourgeois. Mais non, les vers, ceux-là même, quelle folie! Ah! il ne serait donc jamais sérieux? Des vers? Pourquoi des vers? Est-ce que les gens bien élevés parlent en vers? Elle le décida à la prose simple, claire, que tout le monde comprend; au roman sans imagination, honnête, bien écrit, qu’on peut laisser lire aux jeunes filles, et qui raconte la vie réelle de personnages sympathiques. (254)

Not only has Honorine manipulated Évelin’s creative and intellectual development, but she has permeated the novel’s narration. Her scornful views on poetry are reproduced in free indirect discourse as though they belong to the general narrative. In addition to penetrating the novel’s narrative, Honorine succeeds in fashioning Évelin to her literary and sexual liking: “Elle l’habitua aussi à travailler tous les jours, dès le réveil, jusqu’au

137 déjeuner, posément, sans rature, la pendule sonnant, à l’heure accoutumée, après la page remplie, au milieu d’une phrase qu’il achevait le lendemain. Il fut ce qu’elle voulait qu’il fût” (254). In La Première maîtresse, the sounding clock signifies only one thing in

Honorine’s daily routine: the time to lure Évelin into her bedroom. Évelin’s writing is literally interrupted mid-sentence to obey Honorine’s authority, the same authority that reigns over literary creation and sexuality, for the two are continuously interrelated.

Obeying each of Honorine’s commands, Évelin becomes a mediocre, yet widely- read author of popular, bourgeois novels. Having surrendered his idealist convictions that defined his days at the Brasserie, “[i]l se complaisait évidemment dans la médiocrité de sa gloire, et se développait, bien nourri” (251). Évelin’s fame and success are the result of his intellectual transformation under Honorine’s influence. Though the male voice of the

Brasserie—as represented by Morvieux—claims that he is compromising himself with the success of such “œuvres inférieures” ( 247), Évelin is thankful and indebted to

Honorine for his literary development:

C’était grâce à elle qu’il avait connu le néant des ambitions trop hautes, de l’héroïsme, des amourettes, des tendres fiançailles, de la poésie, de tous les rêves, de toutes les extravagances. Il s’en était peu fallu qu’il devînt un bohème enragé, comme ce Jean Morvieux, qui continuait à hurler au fond de la Brasserie, un bohème fou, comme ce Jean Straparole, disparu, oublié, qu’on devait avoir ramassé mort de faim ou de froidure au bord de quelque fossé. Elle lui avait inculqué son esprit clair et précis, sa saine raison bourgeoise, ses habitudes d’ordre, son respect du qu’en-dira-t-on. (322)

By pitting Honorine against the men of the Brasserie (Morvieux and Straparole), Mendès opposes female and male literary influences. This paragraph confirms the former’s triumph as even Évelin, once again through free indirect discourse, rejects his previous male mentors in favor of his authoritative mistress. The articulation of his new literary

138 aesthetic reads as though it were Honorine speaking, and the free indirect discourse used here appears to express Honorine’s voice, through Évelin. Ironically, Évelin insists that

Honorine has “saved” him from a life of idealism and naïve fantasies characteristic of his youth— and virginal days. Having parodied the Romantic genre, Mendès extends his criticism of literature to that of the contemporary popular novel. In writing popular novels, Évelin surrenders his creativity to Honorine in exchange for the financial securities of mundane, unoriginal writing. This is equally a commentary on the public’s reception of art, and Mendès suggests that the common reader is incapable of appreciating or comprehending genuine literary ingenuity.

Honorine, usurping Évelin’s writing as she occupies his body, rewrites his conceptions of both sexuality and literature. In fact, the adjectives “clair” and “précis” used above to describe Honorine’s influential temperament (“elle lui avait inculqué son esprit clair et précis”) are the same adjectives used in a description of the couple’s sexual lifestyle. Like the mediocrity and bourgeois security of Évelin’s novels, their sexuality is eventually grounded in routine and familiarity: “Ils étaient infâmes sans grandeur. Ils se restreignaient, même dans le délire, au médiocre, au borné; leurs crimes n’avait point l’excuse de l’évidente impossibilité. Pour éprouver les joies du mal, ils avaient besoin qu’il fût vraisemblable. Ils étaient précis, clairs, pratiques, ne perdaient pas la tête” (259, my emphasis). “Précis” and “clair,” these are the adjectives of rationalism, recalling the

“clair” and “distinct” of Cartesian reasoning, the contrary of human imagination and passion.57 Mediocre and hackneyed, the couple’s sexuality exists parallel to their literary values, and it is by subscribing to such a risk-free literary aesthetic, void of creativity and innovation, that Évelin sells books.

57 I am grateful to my colleagues at Brown University for illuminating me on these Cartesian parallels.

139

The Female Intrusion of the Male Literary Circle

Évelin’s inevitable break from the ideals of the Brasserie occurs gradually throughout the novel, from the first moment when Honorine distracts him from

Straparole’s lectures to the final rupture brought on by his professional success. Signs of his estrangement from these literary men are increasingly present as his romance with

Honorine progresses. For example, in the early stages of their relationship, Évelin longs for advice from a confidant on how to extract himself from the all-consuming affair.

Having previously turned to Straparole for guidance on many issues, Évelin now hesitates, experiencing a rift between himself and the habitués of the Brasserie.

Certainement, se confier à [Straparole], lui livrer son âme, ce n’était pas une chose possible. Il parlait tant qu’il n’écoutait jamais. Puis il ne comprendrait rien, sans doute, aux subtils tourments, aux rancoeurs maladives, aux remords qui travaillaient Evelin. L’amour tel que le concevait Straparole, c’était Eros aveuglé d’un bandeau de pourpre et lançant des flèches comme un jeune prince chasseur; pour que les femmes fussent divines à ses yeux, il suffisait qu’elles fussent blanches; Tetons-de- Bois [sic]? pas du tout; Amayllis; la vie était une mythologie dont la Brasserie, pleine de nymphes, était le bois sacré. (165)

Évelin distances himself from what he designates as the mythological setting of the

Brasserie, distinguishing his sexual and romantic experiences from the idealistic and romanticized philosophies of Straparole. The brief reference to Tétons-de-Bois is a reminder of the mythical atmosphere of the bar, of Straparole’s nymphes and fairy-tale companions, useless to Évelin now as he suffers the assaults of a real woman (as real as a femme fatale may be). Indeed, Tétons-de-Bois interestingly exists in juxtaposition to

Honorine, and Évelin, by extension, differentiates the latter from the mythical women of

140 the Brasserie. Unlike her inarticulate Brasserie counterpart, Honorine has also proven herself to have a mastery over rhetoric.

The Brasserie, contrary to all that is “précis” and “clair,” is equally scornful of

Évelin’s compromising lifestyle as a writer. Having found success among bourgeois readers and given up his genuine talent for poetry to write popular novels, Évelin has also betrayed the literary ideals of his original mentors. A bitter Morvieux laments, “il fait ses romans et ses pièces. Il gagne de l’argent et de la gloire avec son vomissement d’homme soûl de vin ordinaire. Le bourgeois par excellence, c’est lui! [. . .] Gerbier, c’est la médiocrité parfaite et triomphante!” (241). For Morvieux, Évelin’s bourgeois status has a damaging influence on his writing: “Il est irréprochable,—il est immonde. Même il écrit bien! il ne fait pas de fautes de français!” (242). Évelin’s perfection of the French language is a sign of his mediocrity, for he is trapped by the laws of grammar. In other words, his linguistic precision leaves no room for literary creativity and freedom.

Évelin’s perfect grammar and flawless spelling do not simply obey the laws of the French language, but also that of Honorine, whose discipline and literary convictions are now present in the words on his page. Given the male camaraderie of the bar, Évelin’s rift— orchestrated by Honorine—suggests that female sexuality trumps male discourse, and

Honorine’s authority over Évelin is stronger than the masculine solidarity of the

Brasserie.

Honorine’s attack on male complicity indirectly extends to the masculinist structure of the novel itself. This extension is most evident late into the novel, when

Mendès’s preface is reproduced and integrated into the prose of one of the last sections.

The narrator ironically reminds readers of his previous warnings, designating Évelin as a

141 prime example of a failed class of men. As he does in the preface, he first enumerates the other categories of men in juxtaposition to Évelin:

Il y a des chastes hommes, en proie à l’auguste idéal, contempteurs de tout le reste, qui disent à la femme, mère, sœur, épouse, maîtresse: ‘Femme, qu’y a-t-il de commun entre vous et moi?’ Ceux-là, ce sont des dieux! [. . .] D’autres, moins divins, sont assez sûrs d’eux-mêmes pour ne pas appréhender la femme, pour la posséder sans se donner à elle, pour en user sans s’y user; ils lui disent: ‘Eh! oui, tu es belle,’ et ils regagnent leur chambre de travail plus calmes, pas atteints, après les ablutions. (255)

The narrator’s greatest concern is woman’s impact on man’s productivity: the highest classes of men above are laudable for their devotion to their “auguste idéal” and work in their “chambre de travail,” despite potential female distractions. In fact, these “Godly” men are celibate, and Mendès suggests that sexuality is only a hindrance to artistic genius. Like his preface, the narrator contrasts these ideal artists with their inferiors: men who succumb to sexual desire at the expense of creative productivity. Once again, the narrator creates a climactic opposition with the conjunction “mais”:

Mais il y a des hommes que la femme saisit, torture, ne lâche pas, en qui elle pénètre, s’installe, demeure. Inférieurs? sans doute, faibles, incertains, trop dociles, mais si malheureux! la femme les tient. La femme les charme, les allanguit [sic], les édulcore; elle fait d’eux quelque chose qui ressemble à la femme. [. . .] Ils deviennent des choses qui sont faites de féminilité,—qui en ont la grâce et l’odeur: ils ressemblent à des objets de cabinets de toilette. Ils ne sont plus hommes que pour vouloir, que pour prendre, que pour garder les femmes! (255-6)

Though Évelin exhibits signs of effeminacy as early as childhood, it is his relationship with Honorine that accelerates a process of emasculation inherently linked with his writing. In this passage, the narrator expands upon his introductory warnings to focus on the emasculating effects of female sexuality. He begins by employing the verb “pénétrer”

(“en qui elle pénètre”) to signal woman’s dominance over her male lover. Though meant as a simple metaphor, in this context the verb reflects both the seizing of the phallus and

142 the man’s emasculation. Moreover, the woman is a usurper of masculinity and her femininity is equally contagious. Under her influence, the male artist—i.e., Évelin—is no longer a masculine creator commanding the phallus, but reduced to an inert femininity, the antithesis of artistic creativity. Not without irony on the part of the narrator, the opening sentence of the next paragraph places Évelin well within this class of emasculated male inferiors (or to use the parlance of the period, degenerates), specifying by example while the preface remains general: “Gerbier était un de ces languissants qu’enivre et que terrasse le philtre mystérieux de la sexualité féminine!” (256-7), he notes. Though the narrator’s remarks support our readings of gender and sexuality in the novel, the reproduction of the frame of the preface is of equal interest here. While the original preface serves as an amicable warning to the reader and seeks to establish a masculinist structure of the novel, its reproduction here seems superfluous at best, appearing too late in the text to still be effective within: Évelin, having already strayed from the narrator’s cautionary advice, thus serves as a counterexample to the novel’s general warning.

Restoring the Male Voice?

Desperate to flee Honorine at multiple moments, Évelin leaves Paris halfway through the novel to travel with Straparole, Tétons-de-Bois and their theatre troop. This significant break from Honorine is coupled with a return to Straparole and the male literary ideals of the Brasserie that Évelin came to shun. However, the transition back to artistic idealism—now advocated by the eccentric, carnivalesque actors—takes time for

Évelin, who at first judges these bohemians as Honorine would. Such initial traces of

143 Honorine’s influence are also present in Mendès’s narrative, which shows signs of breaking down and instability. For example, in the opening pages of the Livre Troisème

(which marks a rupture from the previous Livre), the narrator, in describing the actors of the troop, repeats the same common clichéd expression on multiple occasions: “Is ont je ne sais quel air de disparate” (183), “ils ont je ne sais de quoi d’étonné et d’étonnant”

(185), and “ils ont je ne sais quelle drôlerie macabre” (185), he explains. The repeated “je ne sais” is particularly striking because this is its first appearance in the narration, it is used three times in just two pages, and though an everyday expression, it nonetheless emphasizes the narrator’s self-doubt as a story-teller. In other words, not only is he forced to rely on clichés to describe certain characters, but the very cliché itself is one which reveals his incapacities to narrate events with authority and confidence. At this point in the novel, though Évelin has finally left Honorine, the narration already shows symbolic signs of her literary damage.

And yet the damage is not irreparable. As the months go by, Évelin allows himself to admire the actors around him as he would have prior to meeting Honorine:

Maintenant, à cause d’un peu de joie rénovatrice des illusions, Evelin se plaisait parmi ces comédiens fantasques; il démêlait ce qu’il y avait d’éternelle aventure, de lumineux haillon en leur misère errante. Même, toujours enclin aux exagérations, il les estimait plus originaux, plus étranges, qu’ils n’étaient en effet, presque glorieux vraiment! (194).

Évelin’s admiration for the troop is reminiscent of his early days at the Brasserie, and his naïve admiration for these performers can only mean intellectual distance from Honorine.

Indeed, Straparole’s presence plays a part in Évelin’s return to his artistic ideals. Mendès notes, “[e]t Straparole, dont la présence continue et la turbulente faconde, durant les premiers mois du voyage, l’avaient un peu fatigué, l’enthousiasmait à présent, comme

144 aux soirs des premières rencontres, à la Brasserie” (195). Their restored friendship, as it was in the early days prior to Évelin’s estrangement, finds its greatest source of inspiration in literature. Often isolating themselves to take walks, Évelin and Straparole spend their time together reciting poetry: “ils disaient, vidant leur mémoire, les poèmes des maîtres! Ils avaient de furieux éclats de voix vers la fin des périodes, avec des gestes

énormes [. . .]” (196). Mendès’ revealing coupling of their thunderous voices and grandiose gestures suggests an association between speech and the performance of masculinity. Significantly, it takes a distancing from Honorine to recover both of these.

It is also during this time that Thérésine, a member of the theatre troop, seduces

Évelin. While Honorine had an oppressive, if not muting effect on his writing, his new mistress and the company of Straparole encourage Évelin to compose poetry once again, and the results are fruitful:

Ce fut en ce temps-là,—écrivant sur des feuilles de carnet pendant la longueur du voyage, ou, la nuit, à la lueur de la seule bougie, tandis que Thérésine dormait, un bruit d’abeille aux lèvres,—ce fut alors qu’il composa ses plus fantasques et ses plus hardis poèmes; souvent Straparole, qui s’y connaissait, lui dit: ‘Par Castor et Pollux, tu as du talent, gamin!’(196)

Having regained the praise of his most esteemed critic, Évelin has also regained access to the Brasserie and all that it represents. Indeed, Straparole’s apostrophe of the great Greek mythological twins Castor and Pollux unites the two male writers through powerful parallel.

Yet his most prominent muse is a young girl that he notices one day sitting in a window. Immediately captivated, Évelin leaves Straparole and the theatre troop and rents an apartment across from Félicie (whose name alone foreshadows the possibility of a break from his troubled past with the ironically-named Honorine). Évelin spends the next

145 few months contemplating the figure in the window—and writing: “Depuis ce jour, ce fut sa vie, pendant des semaines, pendant des mois, de rêver à des poèmes, d’écrire des vers, en invoquant par instants, des yeux, l’inspiratrice, de l’autre côté de la rue” (204). Having stumbled upon a new muse, Évelin welcomes the poetic inspriation that Félicie provides, and once again embraces romantic and romanesque visions of love and sexuality,

“imaginant ce roman intime en collaboration avec des souvenirs de Dickens, Evelin admirait la jeune fille, qui ne le regardait pas” (202). The contrast between Félicie and

Honorine is evident, as is their differing influence over Évelin’s writing. This juxtaposition becomes even more striking as Évelin “writes” his own story about the mystery girl, imagining her to be innocent and chaste. As we recall, he wrongfully assumes the same of Honorine upon their first meeting. Here, however, Évelin correctly

“reads” the girl in the window, who is indeed a literary ideal: “Il s’était informé; la vraie histoire de Mlle Félicie différait peu de l’honnête roman qu’il avait imaginé” (205).

Unlike with Honorine, Évelin shows literary mastery and command with Félicie before even officially meeting her. This prefigures the poetic productivity and conventional sexuality that will soon define their relationship. It is equally at this time that Évelin’s development as a writer parallels his development as a man:

Ce n’était plus le temps des villanelles étourdies et des ballades approuvées par Straparole, ce fou! Il ordonnait son imagination, rêvait moins, pensait mieux. Il écrivit pendant ces trois mois, dans cette petite chambre, des pages presque graves, presque belles, dignes, peut-être, de n’être pas dédaignées par l’oublieux demain. Il serait un homme, cet enfant, dont la virilité naissante avait failli être à jamais brisée, avilie, dispersée par d’affreux baisers. (207-8)

Évelin’s distancing of himself from Straparole must not be read as a rejection here as it previously has, but rather a coming of age moment as a writer. In short, Évelin has found

146 his own voice. And this development is once again linked to his masculinity, for he believes that writing reflects his “virilité naissante,” recovered after having once been usurped by Honorine. Unfortunately for Évelin, such literary command and promises of virility come to an end when Honorine finds her way back into his life, as she continually will throughout the novel.

Monstres parisiens

Mendès’s Monstres parisiens is a collection of short stories set in the capital city.

It was originally published in 1882 in two volumes and again in 1902 in one definitive edition.58 As its title promises, the common themes of nearly each story center around sexual “monstrosity,” i.e., vice, and most notably among women. Commenting on its gratuitous content, Barbara Spackman notes, “[a]t its worst, it marks the point at which decadence fades and declines into soft porn” (823). Soft porn or not, Monstres parisiens offers an additional glimpse into the sexual and gender politics revolved around writing in Mendès, but minus the deafening satirical commentary on contemporary literary figures. Originally published in the periodical Gil Blas, many of the stories feature femmes fatales whose vices of choice include sadism, lesbianism and adultery. While many of Mendès’s short stories in this series—as well as in others59—depict malevolent female sexuality, there are three stories of particular interest in Monstres parisiens that contribute to my study of deviant female sexuality, linguistic command and the usurpation of masculinity.

58 The stories I will be discussing appear in this latter edition. 59 See Boudoirs de verre (1884) and Lesbia (1886).

147 Monstres parisiens’s opening story “Mademoiselle Laïs” sets the tone for the entire collection. It consists of a monologue by the eponymous heroine on behalf of female prostitutes, in which she describes her sexual awakening. Though it is told in the first person by a male narrator who is also a writer, the majority of the story is a reproduction of Mademoiselle Laïs’s words during their encounter. The narrator’s own words in the conversation are omitted, replaced by summaries or indirect discourse (“Je parlai durement de l’avenir [. . .]” [9]). It is thus the female voice, though interpreted and recorded by a male narrator, that occupies the text from the very first pages.

In this story, Mademoiselle Laïs defends female prostitution and sexual liberation against the constraints of social mores. In doing so, she evokes various literary metaphors:

Maintenant, étant bien perdue, étant une de ces créatures qui se donnent ou se vendent, [. . .] je m’épanouis dans l’accomplissement de mon sort, dans la satisfaction de mon instinct, dans toute l’expansion de mes forces, comme le musicien ou le poète, dont la vocation fut longtemps contenue, s’apaise et se réjouit de son œuvre réalisée! (5)

Mademoiselle Laïs compares her prostitution to an art form, the realization of an internal passion or creativity. In addition, she likens her sexual lifestyle to that of a writer, adding,

“[j]e ne veux pas plus être appelée ‘honnête fille’, que vous ne voudriez être traité d’‘honnête écrivain” (6). These literary comparisons establish Mademoiselle Laïs as a writer herself, though not of traditional genres, but of her own sexuality: “Eh bien! mon poème à moi, ou mon roman, ou mon drame (elle s’approchait, le peignoir plus ouvert), le voici, et je réclame pour lui tout le brouhaha, glorieux des admirations passionnées. Il les vaut bien, je vous le dis!” (6). Likening her body—or sexuality—to her written masterpiece, Mademoiselle Laïs establishes herself within the text as a literary creator.

148 The narrator’s dialogical omission from the story is linked to Mademoiselle Laïs’s hypersexuality, which he is unable to influence through linguistic persuasion: “tout ce que j’aurais pu répondre n’eût été d’aucun effet” (11). The narrator’s discouragement and inability to sway Mademoiselle Laïs from prostitution may help to explain why his words are strikingly absent from the text, in particular against the profuse words of the heroine

(who even dictates the story’s title). He views his words as useless against Mademoiselle

Laïs’s prolific sexuality and not worth repeating.

The narrator concludes this story about writing with an ironic wink, offering the following advice to readers: “comme je suis porté à tirer de toute chose une morale, je conclus de l’aventure—en allumant un cigare—que les mères de famille feraient sagement de ne pas laisser lire tous les livres à leurs jeunes demoiselles [. . .]” (11). With its stories’ consistent theme of unbridled female sexuality, Mendès’s Monstres parisiens could easily be considered to number among these unsavory titles. The narrator’s warnings against literature and their objectionable influence on young girls is a response to Mademoiselle Laïs’s sexual development: she remarks at one moment to the narrator,

“ce que je voulais, je l’ai bientôt su, à cause des livres, qu’on lit la nuit, et qui font comprendre” (4).60 This also recalls Honorine’s description of the acceptable—i.e., bourgeois— novel, a genre “qu’on peut laisser lire aux jeunes filles” (La Première maîtresse 254). Through his warning to readers quoted above, the narrator of

“Mademoiselle Laïs” equally attempts to reclaim the phallus through the mention of lighting of his cigar. These final comments that close the story are thus both a symbolic

60 The narrator’s warnings against literary contamination in young women echoes a commonly held medical sentiment of the late nineteenth century. Having “witnessed” what he calls “le saphisme par littérature,” French doctor Julien Chevalier holds that “le roman contemporain [. . .] est le plus actif parmi les agents de contamination et de propagation du mal” (251).

149 and literal return to a masculine voice in a text that is dominated by female discourse and sexuality.

This opening story introduces the thematic elements of excessive female sexuality that lend the collection its name and that are at the forefront of its contents. In

“Mademoiselle Antigone,” Geneviève is the sole caretaker for her grandfather, a retired poet, “à peu près oublié maintenant, mais que l’on aime encore quand, par hasard, on se souvient de lui” (214). Though once well-known in his prime, the forgotten elderly writer, who significantly remains nameless, is a victim of his own mediocrity. Geneviève, because of her loyalty and devotion to the poet, is revered as “bonne, simple, auguste”

(215), and of “ce charme suprême, presque divin: la pureté” (216). The narrator even comments on the decency of her speech, which, though rarely perceived, carries the grace and innocence of a chaste, devoted young woman: “Les paroles qu’elle dit, rares, peureuses, douces, ont le son du cristal des ingénuités parfaites, laissent entrevoir de saintes ignorances” (216). The narrator, in fact, appears to associate the scarcity of

Geneviève’s voice with proof of her sexual innocence; language for a female locutor thus becomes a sign of sexual knowledge. Language is a masculine tool for which only men— such as Geneviève’s grandfather—are worthy.

However, like Évelin upon his initial encounters with Honorine, the narrator in

Mendès’s short story engages in a faulty semiotic reading of Geneviève. Anything but linguistically “pure,” the young woman is revealed as the author of a pornographic work when a potential suitor accidentally stumbles upon the drafts on her desk. Describing his shocking discovery, the narrator writes, “les lignes qu’il lut,—ces lignes d’une fine et longue écriture de femme!—décrivaient avec des mots abjects, les plus monstrueuses

150 scènes d’une abominable débauche” (221). The syntax of this passage exposes the conflation of writing and masculinity: the parenthetical reminder that the writer is a woman serves to underline the paradoxical coupling of women and erotic literature.

Nearly unable to control his own pen, the narrator interrupts his description to remind readers that such pornographic passages are the work of an ostensibly innocent and chaste granddaughter. As though this juxtaposition wasn’t enough of a shock, the narrator specifies that the drafts were the “épreuves d’un livre célèbre et immonde, dont un

éditeur belge annonçait la publication prochaine” (221). If we recall the status of her grandfather’s disregarded poetry, Geneviève emerges as linguistically dominant, for her writing, in its “profanity,” will not be forgotten, but rather celebrated in an upcoming work predicted to be successful and relatively widely-read. Female sexuality, directly connected to the usurping of language, once again trumps masculine narrative in Mendès.

Like her successor Honorine, the heroine of “La Pénitente,” a title not lacking in irony, uses language to seduce—and ruin—the man underneath the Catholic robe. This unnamed baroness—“une esquise mondaine pourtant!” (335)— is on her way home from an adulterous encounter when suddenly, amidst her sexual reveries, “[l]e fiacre passait devant une église” (336). This sentence is its own paragraph, and its syntax and isolation from the rest of the text establishes a jarring juxtaposition between the baroness’s sexuality and the symbolic purity of the church. Moreover, it is exactly this juxtaposition that appears to pull the baroness from her erotic daydream, and its syntactical abruptness mimics her orders to stop the car at the religious edifice. Mendès interprets the baroness’s sudden interest in the church through corporal clues:

Comme si elle se fût avisée tout à coup de quelque chose d’encore inéprouvé, son regard, sous le voile, eut une lueur vive, étrange dans ses

151 yeux doux,—la première étincelle d’un désir ou d’une curiosité qui s’allume; pendant qu’un rire lui venait aux lèvres, sournois, cruel, un peu narquois, joli pourtant. (336)

Mendès’s sexualization of the baroness, though hidden under her the conservative confines of her veil, exposes her incentives for visiting the church.

Upon entering, the baroness heads directly for the confessional, where a young, unsuspecting priest awaits her discourse. At this point in the story, the narrator, playing the devil’s advocate, defends the baroness and her decision to repent for her sins of just hours ago. “Pourquoi non? Est-ce que l’on ne peut pas être une bonne chrétienne parce qu’on fut une amoureuse? [. . .] Les bouches qui ont balbutié de folles et coupables paroles veulent proférer les aveux qui demandent grâce” (337). Here, the narrator’s focus on language reflects the baroness’s weapon of choice in her (sexual) assault on the priest.

Indeed, what follows is a structural break in the story marked by three asterisks signaling the baroness’s sudden linguistic dominance in the story. It is at this moment that the narrator reproduces the baroness’s “confession” word for word in direct discourse. The priest is thus not the only male listener forced to succumb to the deliberately sexually- charged confession, and it is perhaps here that the story slips into something resembling soft pornography, as Spackman claims. “Hors de lui” (339), the priest’s breathing escalates as the baroness’s pornographic monologue progresses.

Dévotement barbare pour elle-même, elle n’épargna à sa pudeur aucun des pénibles aveux. Toutes les délices abominables du lit adultère, les ruses de l’amour pervers, les caresses conseillées par l’essaim des mauvais anges nageant des les plis des rideaux et toujours renouvelées jusqu’à l’heure où l’aurore, qui glisse à travers les dentelles, met à son tour des baisers sur les lèvres pâlies, elle raconta tout, tout, abondamment, longuement, avec des emportements de pénitente affolée et de minuties de casuiste, tant qu’enfin, épouvantée de sa damnation définitive, elle se mit à sangloter et à mouiller de larmes désespérées le satin et la peluche du corset noir et rose. (340, original emphasis)

152

This passage is worth quoting in length so as not to detract from its climactic rhythm. The progressive details, repetition (“tout, tout”) and excessive use of punctuation, particularly commas, lead to an eventual point of linguistic climax. The syntax of this passage is highly eroticized, the baroness ejaculating tears into her handkerchief as the confession reaches its peak of vulgarity. Mendès juxtaposes the baroness’s uninhibited effusion with the priest’s startling incapacity for speech; following this passage, the narrator notes, “[l]e confesseur se taisait” (340). This abrupt stylistic change—from complex, culminating details to brevity and simple straight-forwardness—reflects the priest’s loss of language in the face of the sexually loquacious woman. In addition, the phrase “le confesseur se taisait” is isolated from the previous textual elements, standing alone as a paragraph and jarring the reader through opposition with the baroness’s highly descriptive confession.

Mendès’s style therefore mirrors the priest’s reduction to silence. In addition, the reader has no access to the priest’s subjectivity, and the narrator describes the priest’s actions through the baroness’s perceptions (“elle entendit le bruit qu’un homme près de choir ferait en se retenant à une cloison” [340]). Authentic male subjectivity is absent because it is filtered through the female protagonist’s interpretation: in a sense, she has replaced the possibility of an omniscient narrator, as well as the typical male narrator of novels such as La Première maîtresse, who portrays female subjectivity through his own masculinist lens.

The baroness’s linguistic and sexual dominance over the priest equally reflects her invasion into the institution of the Church. As she leaves the confessional,

elle avait dans les yeux et aux lèvres, sous le voile, son mauvais petit rire! Au moment de pousser la porte elle se détourna, le regard attiré vers un autel latéral par un tableau où l’on voyait Satan parlant sur la montagne à

153 l’oreille de Jésus. Une fusée de soleil, à travers un vitrail, éclaira, fit vivre la face du démon; et l’on aurait pu croire, en vérité, que le tentateur de Dieu complimentant d’un sourire la petite baronne. (341)

This description likens the baroness’s presence in the church to demonic temptation, and

Satan whispering in Jesus’s ear becomes a clear allegory for her role in the confessional.

Language, privileged in both the painting and the confessional, is the baroness’s method of seduction and attack, just as it is Mademoiselle Laïs’s, Geneviève’s and Honorine’s.

Conclusion

As La Première maîtresse and short story selections have shown, language and female sexuality are inextricably linked in Mendès’s works. The figure of the femme fatale is most notably dangerous because of her command of language, which she orchestrates through excessive and non-normative sexuality. The women in question are therefore unconventional writers in a masculine literary world, rewriting their own stories and sexualities and seizing language within the male-dominated text. This all occurs at the expense of their companion, who simultaneously loses his linguistic capacity, whether it be in the form of creative writing or conversational speech. The sexually malevolent woman represents the greatest threat to artistic production, and it is through her that Mendès parodies the intellectually degenerative state of the modern writer.

According to the caricatures in Mendès’s corpus, genuine (male) literary talent thrives best in the absence of female sexuality.

However, La Première maîtresse’s warning against the dangers of non- conventional female sexuality underscores his critique of fin-de-siècle writers and schools. Mendès’s satirical portrayal of literary circles draws on contemporary models

154 and associates contemporary aesthetic deterioration with emasculation and sexual vulnerability. As exemplified by Évelin’s character, contemporary writers exhibit signs of artistic decline that recall the preoccupation with sexual degeneration that haunted the fin de siècle. For Mendès, the state of modern writing is best symbolized by a deterioration in language production: men are gradually losing their authority over speech, and women are emerging not only as usurpers of language and masculinity, but also contributors to new discourses.

CHAPTER FOUR

“Point fatale ni perverse”: Krysinska and the Poetics of the Femme Fatale

[L]e bas-bleuisme bouleverse la langue comme il bouleverse le bon sens. (Barbey d’Aurevilly in response to the feminisation of the substantive “professoresses,” xvii)

In the introduction to her poetry collection Intermèdes, Marie Krysinska (1857-

1908) advocates an independent, unconventional literary aesthetic proper to the individual writer:

En art, il ne s’agit pas du tout d’être un Jésus accompagné de ses disciples, mais simplement un artiste ayant éprouvé en la sincérité de sa conscience, le désir de s’exprimer, de toucher à quelque corde neuve et s’étant choisi, à cette fin, la formule qui lui convenait le mieux; sans la moindre prétention d’être suivi, avec, au contraire, l’espoir de ne l’être pas. (xxxvi)

This passage attests to the literary non-conformism of Krysinska’s poetry and prose.

Though she is now recognized as an originator of free verse poetry, Krysinska’s poetic contributions to the Le Chat Noir in 1882 were eclipsed by Gustave Kahn who claimed to be the “inventor” of the vers libre in 1886.61 A growing body of criticism62 attests to

61 See Krysinska’s introduction to Intermèdes entitled “Sur les évolutions rationnelles.” See also her article appearing in La Révue indépendante, “De la nouvelle école.” In his Introduction to Rythmes Pittoresques, Seth Whidden provides a chronological account of the publication of free verse poetry. Though he maintains that Krysinska published her works well before Kahn, he cites Arthur Rimbaud as having written free verse as early as 1875. Krysinska, however, may have been the first to publish her vers libre. 62 See Florence Goulesque (2000 and 2001), Tracy Paton (2004-2005), Gretchen Schultz (2008) and Seth Whidden (2003). See also the forthcoming Marie Krysinska. Nouveaux rythmes critiques, ed. Adrianna M. Paliyenko, Gretchen Schultz, and Seth Whidden, proceedings of the “Colloque International Marie Krysinska” held in Paris November 14-15, 2008. 155 156 Krysinska’s poetic innovation and resistance to convention, each of which are reflected both structurally and thematically in her poetry and prose. Florence Goulesque links

Krysinska’s poetic non-conformism to that of her personal life:

Marie Krysinska a écrit, dans une langue bien à elle, la ‘jouissance’ du corps qui danse et libère l’inconscient. Changeante, elle cherchait la meilleure formule pour exprimer sa musique intérieure, ou ses voix, en dehors des normes et en dehors des écoles. Son désir de vers libre était donc un geste symbolique de liberté personnelle. (“Le Hibou”)

Indeed, like her writing, Krysinska’s life was anything but conventional. Born in Poland in 1857,63 Krysinska migrated to Paris as a young girl to begin classes at the

Conservatoire de Musique. Though she abandoned her musical studies shortly after, she continued to nurture her aptitude in harmony and composition as the only female member of the Hydropathes, Montmartre’s illustrious group of artists and poets, where she began by composing music to accompany readings of Baudelaire and Verlaine poems, among others. While some scholars have insisted on Krysinska’s musicality in her works,64 she is less known for her musical accompaniments than for her innovative contributions to free verse poetry. Though the two works I examine in this chapter—Folle de son corps

(1895) and La Force du Désir (1905)—are novels, their unique narrative style at times reads more like prose poetry. Characterized by sentence fragments and a generous use of italics,65 these two novels convey Krysinska’s harsh irony and social commentary. Her innovative stylistic choices in both her poetic and prose work reflect a social critique present in both novels. In a discussion of Krysinska’s free verse form, Tracy Paton claims that Krysinska often reappropriated certain “rhetorical strategies by which she rewrote

63 Until relatively recently, biographical details of Krysinska’s life, including the date of her birth (often cited as 1864), remained equivocal. Seth Whidden provides a reliable biographical account in his Introduction to the 2003 edition of Rythmes Pittoresques. 64 Florence Goulesque (2000 and 2001). 65 All italics appearing in quotations are original, unless otherwise noted.

157 and subverted themes and tropes that male poets had designated as the ‘feminine’” (148).

In no way is this more apparent than with the representation of the femme fatale, traditionally the product of masculine discourse. In Folle de son corps, Krysinska rewrites the figure as a site of resistance to misogynistic literary and social tropes through a self-conscious exploration of her own poetics. As Gretchen Schultz notes,

l’on pourrait lire Folle de son corps comme à la fois défense et illustration d’une sexualité non-conformiste et, sur un plan symbolique à la lumière de ses écrits théoriques et paratextuels, comme la quête d’une poétique anti- conformiste qui part à la recherche de l’imprévu. (“Folle de son corps”)

Beginning with a close reading of the novel’s Préface, this chapter will explore the connection between the figure of the femme fatale and the aesthetic and social ideas

Krysinska puts forth throughout Folle de son corps. I will at times advance a decade and turn to La Force du Désir, a novel that does not feature a major femme fatale figure in its story-line but whose preoccupation with female sexuality, writing and artistic creation complements my reading of Folle de son corps.

Krysinska’s novels attest to the resistance of a woman writer to male representations of the femme fatale, a resistance that I consider to be aesthetic and political, rather than the manifestation of some innate sexual difference. Indeed, given the social and intellectual context of the late nineteenth-century, whose anti-feminism

Krysinska explicitly criticizes, it would be impossible to ignore the social implications of a femme de lettres’s rewriting of the femme fatale, which I read as an ideological response to masculine literary and cultural traditions.

158

Preface Poetics

Folle de son corps documents Madge Harding’s intellectual and aesthetic search for self-understanding through an unconventional lifestyle of sexual predation and independence. The novel begins as a bildungsroman, as it depicts Madge’s childhood in

New York City and her sexual coming of age in the literary city of vice, Paris. In her preface, Krysinska begins her rewriting of the femme fatale, stylistically and structurally distinguishing Folle de son corps from contemporaneous, male-authored Decadent works. In a gesture not unlike those of her Decadent confrères, Krysinska constructs an intimate camaraderie with her reader through a direct introductory dedication. However, unlike Mendès’s La Première maîtresse or Mirbeau’s Le Jardin des supplices,

Krysinska’s Folle de son corps is addressed to a female readership. The dedication reads

“A ma lectrice éventuelle” (v) and immediately creates an intimacy between author and reader that is based on their common gender. Addressing her intended reader as

“Madame et chère Inconnue,” Krysinska refuses the conformist masculine narrative frame (as evidenced by Mendès’s “Avertissement au lecteur” in La Première maîtresse or

Mirbeau’s dedication of Le Jardin des supplices to the priests, soldiers and judges “qui

éduquent, dirigent, gouvernent les hommes”). Krysinska’s address to a female reader must therefore be understood in the larger context of such conventional Decadent works in which a masculine framework defines the novel’s narrative and reception from the first pages. As we have seen, such introductory sections often serve as a warning to male readers against dangerous female sexuality. Krysinska’s opposition to this literary tradition manifests itself in the establishment of a female-centered dedication and narrative frame.

159 What is perhaps most significant about this dedication, however, lies in the content of the preface itself, which challenges normative representations of female intelligence and sexuality. Immediately problematizing “la prétendue galanterie des rapports d’hommes à femmes de lettres” (vi), Krysinska launches her defense of the femme de lettres against contemporary stereotypes and prejudices:

La moindre des injures, prodiguée avec candeur aux femmes qu’attirent les occupations intellectuelles, c’est l’accusation de masculinité. Le mot bas bleu, cette banalité imbécile et dénuée de sens, ne fait reculer personne quand il s’agit de cataloguer une femme qui, simplement plus et mieux femme qu’aucune autre, pousse la coquetterie jusqu’à s’orner plus complètement. (vi-vii)

Krysinska addresses the gendering of intellectual pursuits and the tendency of many of her contemporaries to denote writing as a masculine endeavor. The reference to the label of “bas bleu” is a direct counterattack on contemporary writers such as Barbey d’Aurevilly, who claim that women writers, or the bas bleu, are void of femininity: “les femmes qui écrivent ne sont plus des femmes. Ce sont des hommes,—du moins de prétention,—et manqués! Ce sont des Bas-bleus. Bas-bleu est masculin. Les Bas-bleus ont, plus ou moins, donné la démission de leur sexe” (xi). Given the gendering of writing as masculine, the woman writer not only masculinizes herself but also threatens male masculinity and the social order itself:

nous mourons en proie aux femmes, et émasculés par elles, pour être mieux en égalité avec elles… Beaucoup de peuples sont morts pourris par des courtisanes, mais les courtisanes sont dans la nature et les Bas-bleus n’y sont pas! Ils sont dans une civilisation dépravée, dégradée, qui meurt de l’être, et telle que, dans l’histoire, on n’en avait pas vu encore. (ibid. 342)

Comparing the dangers of the “unnatural” woman writer with those of the “natural” courtesan, Barbey d’Aurevilly represents the intellectual woman as another kind of

160 femme fatale: both prey on and emasculate men. Indeed, Krysinska notes that “[t]outes les médiocrités mâles se conduisent alors comme si l’auteur féminin les avait attaquées et outragées grièvement [. . .]” (viii). These “médiocrités mâles” signify Krysinska’s male peers, unimaginative writers threatened by women. The fin de siècle satirical poet

Laurent Tailhade, for example, exhibited his craft for both puns and misogyny when he referred to Marie Krysinska as “Marpha Bableuska” in his poem “Intimité” (qtd. in

Whidden: 9). By addressing male critics’ tendency to demonize the woman writer and to portray her as a threat to masculinity, Krysinska foreshadows the novel’s contents, which also targets male literary circles. She suggests a cultural association between the woman writer and the femme fatale, each equally threatening to dominant literary and sexual discourses and norms. She thus defends each figure in her preface against such demonization, claiming that neither the woman writer nor the sexually aggressive female protagonist is guilty of obliterating the social order.

The image of the “Bas bleu” is not the only one to which Krysinska responds. In addition to masculinizing images of women writers, many nineteenth-century hommes de lettres likened women writing to acts of sexual indecency, even prostitution. Rachel

Mesch identifies the common conflation of women writers with prostitution at the fin de siècle as a backlash to women’s increasing “assertion of intellect or subjectivity” that

“represented an equally unspeakable truth, that which—like the woman’s body—had to be covered over, refuted, or criminalized through the language of illicit sexuality” (40).

As Parnassian poet Louise Ackermann once wrote, “[é]crire, pour une femme, c’est se décolleter; seulement il est peut-être moins indécent de montrer ses épaules que son

161 cœur” (qtd. in Schultz, The Gendered Lyric: 38). Commenting on the comparison of the woman writer with the exhibitionist, Gretchen Schultz notes:

metaphors of nudity were repeatedly used to describe the self-exposing woman poet. A great danger for a respectable nineteenth-century woman was to exhibit herself in public: to find herself in an inappropriate place, to offer herself to the eyes of men, to reveal a wrist or an ankle. Sometimes more dangerous, even obscene, was the immodesty of a woman writer grappling with issues of identity in writing. For this, women poets were frequently accused of a figurative kind of exhibitionism [. . .]. (The Gendered Lyric 37)

In her preface, Krysinska addresses this very trope of the woman writer as exhibitionist.

Employing a vocabulary of vestimentary seduction to describe female intellect,

Krysinska compares intellectual pursuits with ornamentation: “n’est-ce point se parer pour l’agrément des esprits délicats comme on se pare pour une fête, de séduisantes

étoffes dont l’habile disposition, fera la joie des yeux” (vii), she proposes. For Krysinska, writing does not preclude femininity, and though she does not necessarily refute the image of the woman writer as exhibitionist, she makes use of the trope as a response to the accusation of masculinity. Similarly, in an antagonistic gesture against emerging feminists, Krysinska adds that the woman writer possesses “la grâce souple et frivole caractéristique de son sexe” that distinguishes her from the “professionnels féministes

[qui] s’essayent lourdement à [l’]imiter” (viii). Kyrsinska’s telling use of italics here serves to distance both herself and women writers from political feminism.66

Krysinska claims that Folle de son corps “est la fiction d’une nature très féminine; ni méchante ni bonne complètement; point fatale ni perverse—le ciel l’en préserve!—dangereuse d’autant plus avec son charme de barque à la dérive” (xii-xiii).

66 Krysinska’s anti-feminist gesture prefigures that of her contemporary Rachilde. In her vehement essay “Pourquoi je ne suis pas féministe” (1928), Rachilde complicates her own stance on conventions of gender and sexuality, despite her ostensible resistance to such norms in her personal and professional life.

162 Insisting on the innocence of this “very feminine nature” that is her protagonist, Madge

Harding, Krysinska questions naturalized femininity by refusing adjectives typically associated with demonized female literary figures (“fatale,” “perverse”). Krysinska’s emphatic rebuttal and her ironic parenthetical— “le ciel l’en préserve!”—mock the purported decadent threat of female sexuality. In other words, Krysinska resists typical fin-de-siècle representations of malevolent female sexuality. Instead, she goes against the

Decadent grain of the figure of the femme fatale by refusing to associate her female protagonist with the adjectives “fatale” and “perverse,” despite the grave and even deadly consequences of Madge’s excessive sexuality. I am not particularly interested in the label of femme fatale and how it can or cannot be applied to Madge, but rather how Krysinska refuses to subscribe to conventional decadent literary tropes.

In her defense of Madge, Krysinska appeals to her female reader by drawing comparisons between her protagonist and reader. “Elle tient de vous et de moi et de beaucoup qui dériveraient, comme elle, sans le salutaire frein des conventions si— comme Madge—elles se trouvaient livrées, désarmées, à leur libre fantaisie” (xiii).

Krysinska thus further strengthens the intimacy with her reader by evoking similarities between the three female literary figures: the author, reader and protagonist. Madge appears as a potential allegory for the reader herself, who, unlike the liberated heroine, is trapped by the limits of social convention. The conditional clause (“si—comme Madge— elles se trouvaient [. . .]”) underscores the female reader’s social immobility, and

Madge’s sexual liberation, through juxtaposition, emerges as an ideal for the reader, who under such optimal conditions, “dériveraient” from the social norms herself. Because

Krysinska maintains this metaphor throughout the novel, later describing Madge as “une

163 gracieuse barque à la dérive” (58, my emphasis), she implicitly asks the reader to compare herself to Madge beyond the Préface. With these concluding remarks in its

Préface, Folle de son corps can be read as a response to fin-de-siècle representations of malevolent female sexuality, proposing instead a celebration of female desire and non- conformism. While introductory chapters or prefaces of other decadent novels (Mirbeau,

Mendès) prepare the male reader for the wrath of the femme fatale, Krysinska spends her preface taking apart and redefining this literary figure within a narrative frame whose author, intended reader and protagonist are all women. We shall see that Folle de son corps remains faithful to the polemics addressed in its preface and maintains a self- consciousness about literary creation throughout the narrative. Indeed, as the novel unfolds, Krysinska consistently brings her reader back to the poetic and social themes introduced in the preface, whether it be through syntactical, stylistic parallels (such as the metaphor cited above) or thematic references aligned with those established earlier.

“Point fatale, ni perverse:” Madge Harding

Though purportedly “point fatale, ni perverse,” Madge nevertheless wields her excessive sexual drive to the economic, intellectual, moral and emotional expense of a seemingly incalculable number of men. At a cursory glance, Krysinska’s defense of

Madge against the Decadent demonizing of female sexuality seems contradictory if not entirely faulty. Afterall, Madge’s sexual whims and manipulations lead to the financial or intellectual ruin of a substantial number of men, not to mention the deaths of an unfortunate few driven by passion or desperation (suicides, duels, etc.). In a scene reminiscent of Zola’s Nana admiring herself in her mirror, a pubescent Madge examines

164 her developing body as a source of power over men: “lorsque le soir, en se déshabillant, elle voyait ses épaules aux lignes déjà nobles et ses jeunes seins illuminés comme par de naissantes aurores, elle s’insurgeait contre le peu de gloire dévolu à ces splendeurs ignorées; rêvant déjà—très vaguement—les triomphes intimes qui lui étaient dus” (28).67

This self-admirative moment of sexual discovery develops into full-blown sexual aggression and dominance, satisfying Madge’s “joie longtemps convoitée, de régner sur un cœur d’homme en toute puissante souveraine” (30). Through careful calculation,

Madge exerts sexual and emotional control through her body: “Il lui eut été aussi facile de torturer ses amoureux par des rigueurs; mais un infaillible instinct l’avertissait que, mieux encore, le don de son corps enivrant garrottait les cœurs, les lui livrait à merci”

(33). Married, Madge indulges her boredom through recurrent infidelity, confessing her liaisons to her husband in unbearable detail, “pour voir la figure qu’il ferait” (33), “tout en se disant à part soi qu’elle devait être jolie comme tout, ainsi” (32). The end result:

Madge’s husband kills her lover in a duel before dying of grief.

A significant number of Madge’s conquests are writers of sorts. On the voyage from New York to France, Madge makes the acquaintance of Alphonse Quevilly, a young journalist who “écrivait dans un des grands journaux de Paris des chroniques fantaisistes et contemptrices de toute actualité et de toute norme ou logique quelconque”

(40). Writing about contemporary Paris and its social “norms,” Alphonse not only embodies his subject matter, but also, as a journalist, has the power to shape it. He is therefore Madge’s symbolic initiation into both literary and social norms and

67 A similar moment of self-admiration occurs in La Force du désir. Luce emerges from her bath, “en tenant entr’ouvert son peignoir pour contempler encore complaisamment les tétins alertes et doux comme deux jeunes ramiers, le ventre mutin, dont le nombril est une oeillade, les cuisses et les jambes d’un coloris éblouissant, jusqu’à l’éclair rose et poli des ongles, qui parent les orteils et semblent deux fins colliers d’agathe, tombés sur le tapis” (103).

165 conventions. Though their relationship concludes relatively cordially, Alphonse is the first of a series of writers to fall under Madge’s scheming seduction. The fact that a notable number of Madge’s lovers are fiction writers, poets or journalists is symptomatic of her critique of contemporary literary circles. In addition to the poet Jacques Marçay,

Madge also becomes involved with Félix Guessagne, an ex-officer who leaves the army to become a journalist. Félix’s career as a writer is as short-lived as his initial serenity with Madge: surrendering to Madge’s impractical financial wants, Félix is professionally and economically ruined by an addiction to alcohol and gambling. Upon losing his job at a Parisian newspaper, Félix laments Madge’s commanding influence: “Ah! c’était bien fini cet amour qui lui a tout coûté! Tout: l’honneur, le courage, le droit de vivre sans mépris de soi… sans dégoût de soi!... Tout!...” (199). Madge then seduces Félix’s brother

Philippe, a well-known poet of the Latin Quarter. Philippe dies in the resulting brotherly brawl, and Félix’s ruin goes from economic to intellectual, even linguistic:

Quant à Félix, on dût le conduire dans une maison d’aliénés; bousculé de crises violentes, hurlant, menaçant, avec des répits plus sinistres d’attendrissement, où il appelait son frère, Philippe, d’une voix caressante et mièvre, redevenue enfantine dans le naufrage de sa cervelle d’homme. (225)

Once a journalist for a Parisian newspaper, Félix is reduced to a demented state of infantile expression, having relinquished to Madge his capacity for speech and reason. In unrelated though similar circumstances, Madge’s seduction of the affluent Richard

Grafton also has noteworthy implications in language. Though Grafton does not lose his capacity for speech per se, his helpless submission to Madge, this “petite sirène moderne” (294), lies in her voice: “Une attitude évoquée, le son de sa voix, la simple réminiscence du nom de Madge, le faisait s’effondrer, mourant, aux creux des fauteuils”

166 (197). The hold that Madge’s voice exerts over Grafton has tragic proportions: devastated by his lover’s inevitable abandonment, he decides to take his own life.

All of these examples seem to point to characteristics and behaviors typical of conventional fin-de-siècle representations of the femme fatale. What then differentiates this protagonist from demonizing depictions of excessive female sexuality? How do we reconcile the fact that Madge exhibits behaviors in line with her Decadent femme fatale counterparts? How does Krysinska explain such a characterization of Madge? In order to answer these questions, we must examine other components of the novel that contribute to the unconventional portrayal of this female protagonist, most notably the function of female friendships and networks in the larger economy of the novel and Madge’s physical, intellectual and aesthetic connection with Jean Presle.

Female Social Networks and Literary Exchange

Krysinska’s narrative frame privileges female readership and female networks of exchange, networks that become a major thematic element of the novel itself. While much of text is dominated by Madge’s multiple love affairs, friendships among women also occupy a significant place in the plotline. Krysinska’s privileging of female camaraderie distinguishes her from male authors in this study, who favor male addressees and homosocial networks of male friends or intellectual mentors, to the exclusion of women (Mirbeau’s Le Calvaire, Mendès’s La Première Maîtresse). Beginning in her infancy, Madge is surrounded by an exclusive network of women. When Madge’s father abandons his wife and child, Ellen Harding chooses to raise her daughter among the women of her boarding house. In this this feminine space, “les hommes [sont] absents”

167 (21) and “[d]e braves pauvresses compatissantes et affectueuses y vivaient à peu près en commun d’une vie de gynécée antique” (21). It is here that Ellen forms an unspoken alliance with women whose husbands are as absent as her own: “Ellen n’était pas apparemment plus seule que ses compagnes” (21). These female bonds trickle down to the next generation. As an infant, the “jolie petite Madge était toujours entre les bras d’une des ménagères” (21-22). The influence of feminine solidarity on Madge reveals itself in her adulthood, as Krysinska continues to privilege female camaraderie throughout the entire novel.

While female friendships occupy a central place in the text, those based on literary exchange are of greatest interest here. In his study on the demographics of reading in the nineteenth century, Martyn Lyons notes that sharing literature was a way in which women formed their own social networks, independent of male mediators such as husbands or relatives who often dictated women’s access to books: “Reading was a social experience for many women, and exchanging books attached them to networks of female sociability” (114). In La Force du Désir, Krysinska privileges female networks of literary discovery and exchange within female social circles. Hélène, for example, receives her literary and sexual education simultaneously at a girls’ convent: “Un mélange de naïveté et de perversité faisait le fond de ces rêvasseries de jeunes imaginations battant la campagne, équipées de bribes de renseignements saisis de ci, de là: dans une conversation de bonnes écoutée sous la porte, sur un fragment de feuilleton déchiré” (47).

Krysinska honors literary exchange among women through a portrayal of female homosocial circles. These circles also provide a space for young women to explore their sexual curiosities and desires through dialogue or erotic relationships with each other

168 (“des baisers amoureux, de furtives étreintes, entre élèves” [49]). They are conducive to women’s sexual and intellectual self-discovery and are a site of exchange of both corporal and cerebral knowledge.

In Folle de son corps, women also read together and to each other, such as

Suzanne and the ailing Rose. For Madge Harding, female literary bonds form as she gains access to exclusive male literary spaces, represented by the cafés and brasseries. The aspiring actress Lucie Geffrin, with whom “[u]ne intimité était née” (58), accompanies

Madge into the homosocial space of literary cafés similiar to those represented in

Mendès’s La Première maîtresse. However, unlike in Mendès, women are not one- dimensional, sexualized wallflowers, but rather take an active part in assessing the literary milieu from which they are typically excluded:

Elles allèrent garçonnièrement dans les cafés littéraires et se divertirent à voir la pontifiante bêtise des book-makers des lettres qui font l’achalandage et la cote de leurs produits sans valeur par un manque de tenue grossière, sous prétexte de perversité exquise et de vice charmant dans lesquels coupe la badauderie idiote du public. (63)

As we can recall, Mendès’s depiction of the Brasserie and its clientele has strong satirical undertones reflecting the author’s criticism. Krysinska’s critique of the literary circle bases itself on Madge and Lucie’s relayed impressions: the two women invade this exclusive space, evaluate it severely and transmit their criticism through Krysinska’s pen.

Krysinska’s use of the adverb “garçonnièrement” disrupts the initial gendered dichotomy, which posits social literary circles as masculine. In other words, because Madge and

Lucie’s “garçonnière” mobility and permeation of this space are paradoxically marked as masculine, Krysinska, through ironic reversal, parodies the legitimacy of the gendered

169 categories upon which such literary circles are based. Metonymically, access to these circles represents access to the profession of writing.

Like Mendès, Krysinska satirizes the literary café, revealing its hypocrisy through the impressions of Madge and Lucie:

Plus nauséabond encore leur parut le genre contempteur qui se compose généralement d’un provincial venu à Paris—du fond de la plus escobarde et goitreuse province—POUR FAIRE DE LA LITTÉRATURE. Ce jeune inspiré de quarante ans cuit dans son jus d’envieux pendant quinze lustres, injuriant dans des revues à huit abonnés les journalistes qui osent occuper des places qui lui iraient si bien et où il prodiguerait tant de génie. De ce génie, qui se trouve être à l’instar de beaucoup d’autres, il donne, dans des œuvres complètes de 80 pages, des échantillons plutôt faits pour inspirer de la méfiance. (65)

With sarcasm consistent with the novel’s overall tone, Krysinska condemns the hypocrisy and triviality of the literary café and its presumptuous tenet, “faire de la littérature.” Such a critique occurs parallel to her portrayal of the writers, poets and journalists that are ruined by Madge’s inexorable sexual command.68 Krysinska not only dismantles the permeable gender boundaries of the literary café through Madge and Lucie, but also questions its artistic legitimacy. This being established, the clientele’s refusal to take

Madge and Lucie seriously is further ridiculed by the reader’s inability to take this circle of aspiring male writers seriously. As the narrator explains, “[c]ar ces cerveaux d’élite leur reprochaient amèrement de n’être point dénuées d’esprit, les traitaient de bas-bleus, confessant ainsi la vulgaire et misérable joie qu’ils auraient eue à se sentir supérieures par comparaison, près de quelque monstrueuse dinde” (67). Krysinska’s ironic use of italics once again ridicules the intellectual and artistic hierarchy maintained by the café’s

68 Krysinska’s parodying of literary circles is equally ubiquitous in La Force du Désir, where Parisian promises of fame compromise authentic artistic talent: “C’est un monde de bourgeoisie parvenue à la réelle ou fausse notoriété parisienne—cela revient à peu près au même—des hommes de lettres, des avocats, des journalistes—ceux-là très choyés pour l’appât d’un écho, le lendemain, où se puissent désaltérer les petites vanités” (10-11).

170 exclusionary practices. Are these men really the “cerveaux d’élite”? Their conduct towards the female protagonists reveals their own artistic and sexual anxiety, as

Krysinska has already suggested in her preface.

The literary café is not the only male circle that Madge infiltrates. When Philippe

Guessagne organizes gatherings for a group of artists and writers, “ce fut pour Madge un enchantement, et comme l’ivresse héroïque d’un guerrier au champ de combat longtemps déserté” (131-132). Relying on her beauty and reckless flirtation, Madge not only premeates this circle, but becomes the center of attention of its poets and artists:

“L’hommage de tous ces regards d’hommes volant à elle,—comme les phalènes aux lampes,—la ravissait” (132). As one poet remarks, “[v]ous êtes la reine de tout le monde qui est ici” (138), suggesting the authority she exercises over the male writer and literary circle. Madge also gradually begins frequenting—and seducing—many of “des amis de son amant” (163), an expression whose syntax underscores her invasion into a particularly masculine space. Indeed, Krysinska defines Madge’s liberty of movement as masculine: “À dater de ce jour commença pour Madge une véritable petite existence de garçon, parfaitement plaisante” (163). Madge’s exploration of exclusively male spaces and social activities, such as gambling, constitutes a creative project. The narrator notes,

“[d]es commencements de roman s’ébauchaient” (163). Access into such spaces and crossing conventional gendered boundaries therefore has intellectual implications in the novel. As Madge develops a growing interest in Félix’s gambling, she once again expresses a desire to explore a circle typically reserved for men. “Madge se rappela que

Guessagne était joueur et il n’en fallut pas d’avantage pour lui donner une folle envie de jouer aussi. Tant il est vrai qu’au fond de toute femme, il y a un singe qui dort—singe

171 sublime s’il y a quelque chose de sublime à singer” (165). In striving to permeate male spaces through imitation, Madge dismantles their gendered hierarchy and makes them her own. Krysinska adds, “[s]il est juste de chercher la femme derrière les crimes ou les hauts faits des hommes—cherchez l’homme aussi derrière les sottises ou les actions belles de la femme” (166-67). The sentence signals an ironic rewriting of common nineteenth- century criminological discourses advanced by Cesare Lombroso—such as those appearing in the frontispice to Mirbeau’s Le Jardin des supplices—that locate women as having a natural penchant for crime. Transforming Alexandre Dumas père’s famous adage “cherchez la femme!” into her own version, Krysinska reappropriates both literary and scientific discourses and rewrites them by reversing the objectification onto men. She extends this gesture in her description of the other women who are present at the gambling circle, noting, “[i]l y avait des femmes; les cheveux dépeignés, le visage ruisselant de sueur; elles dégrafaient leur corsage—sans coquetterie aucune—pour moins crever de chaleur” (167). Krysinska attenuates potential sexual details of the woman gambler (“cheveux dépeignés,” “elles dégrafaient leur corsage”) and insists upon her practicality instead of her coyness. She adds, “[p]our la Dame de Pique elles étaient capables de tout; elles l’avouaient fièrement: elles étaient de vraies joueuses, bien sûr”

(167). In Krysinska’s text, the women gamblers’ competitiveness eclipses any sexual objectification, and these “vraies joueuses” circulate freely and as equals of men in this masculine circle. Though she does not directly compare to two figures, Krysinska’s italicized reference to the Dame de Pique is an ironic wink to the typically one- dimensional figure of the femme fatale. Again, the author complicates the figure through a desexualization that is uncharacteristic of contemporaneous portrayals. These

172 perspiring, unsightly Dames de Pique are aesthetically and sexually far-removed from their hyperbolically eroticized Decadent sisters.

In La Force du Désir, Hélène also permeates the homosocial bond between Jean de Saint-Aulde and Fabien. The intense friendship between these two men is based on a common interest in philosophy and aesthetics and much of their time together is spent in search of “une cause esthétique et philosophique à la création” (171). Hélène, however, has much to contribute to their discussions. From their very first encounter, Krysinska insists upon the mutual respect shared between the three: “ils causaient à l’aise” (173), and Hélène frequently “intervient” (175) in their musings on art, literature and philosophy. On a more intimate level, Hélène and Jean engage both sexually and intellectually: “Dans les interrègnes de leurs caresses, Hélène et Jean causaient librement comme de vieux amis” (171). In comparing Hélène and Jean’s dynamic to that of “de vieux amis” (such as Jean and Fabien), Krysinska underscores their cerebral egalitarianism and yet characterizes it as masculine, thus parodying the conventional gendering of “intellectual” professions such as writing. Like Madge, Hélène transcends gender boundaries and permeates intellectual circles designated as masculine, revealing their precariousness as gender-specific spaces.

Despite the thematic effectiveness of this particular author in resisting preconceived literary ideologies, Krysinska’s interest in exclusive female social networks such as those discussed above does not preclude the hints of misogyny that complicate her oeuvre. In line with the Folle de son corps’s pervasive satirical content, many of

Madge’s female friends and acquaintances in other circumstances are constantly referred to as “linottes” or “bibelots.” Even Lucie, in her theatrical aspirations, is depicted as

173 naive and flippant, capricious in her decision to leave a man she once claimed to love madly for the unpredictability of the stage. And yet she insists, “je suis une ARTISTE

DRAMATIQUE” (154), the use of capital letters not any less sardonic than those applied to the aspiring café writer looking to “FAIRE DE LA LITTÉRATURE.” In addition,

Krysinska’s parody of certain male social circles extends itself to reveal the comparable hypocrisy among female friends. For example, at a “déjeuner de dames seules” (72), not noted without a hint of sarcasm, the narrator exposes the two-facedness and pettiness of a group of female acquaintances, whose “flamboyants jugements [sont] portés sur une amie absente” (74). The “friend” in question appears and “devient la proie des interviews féminines” (77). Even the discussions among these women are described as “véhémentes et mièvres” (72), centered around such “sujets palpitants” (72) as a hat observed at a concert or the tactlessness of a shoemaker. Krysinska’s sarcasm is palpable. Despite the pervasiveness of such disingenuous female social networks in the novel, Krysinska sets

Madge apart from this group, noting that her descriminating character “s’étonne de voir que l’amour, même la galanterie, prennent si peu de place dans les préoccupations de ces prêtresses de l’amour” (74). Though we may be tempted to understand such characterizations of female social networks as misogynist, I would like to suggest that such portrayals are a product of the novel’s general satirical tone and pervasive social criticism looming in many of Krysinska’s descriptions. Madge, however, is set apart from these “têtes de linotte,” and the novel nonetheless privileges female friendships as potential sites of resistance to exclusionary patriarchal social mores.

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Madge’s Literary Coming of Age

If Folle de son corps puts into practice the poetic aesthetic of its author, it is also a novel that depicts a woman’s evolving relationship with reading, literary creation and storytelling. The development and refinement of Madge’s own personal aesthetic is first signaled by her active interest in reading. Krysinska links Madge’s literary discoveries with her sexual ones, for reading is for her a sensual experience: “Elle respirait avec des pamoisons [sic] les nostalgiques Fleurs du mal, saturées des aromes pris au natal pays de l’Ame, et se parant dans leur exil des prismatiques larmes de la Lune” (113). Madge thus devours literature as she does her male lovers, in “des rages de lectures” (112) that define her own femininity: “Avec l’instinct sûr d’une femme,—si extraordinairement femme,— elle se jetait aux chefs-d’œuvre” (112-113). Once again evoking Madge’s “nature très féminine” as she did in her Préface, Krysinska rewrites common conceptions of femininity by attributing to this “femme si femme” (30) an ardent intellectual passion for the poetry of Baudelaire. Indeed, Madge’s intellectual interests have a sexual component, even replacing at times her sexual purusuits with men: “Étirée comme une chatte sur un large divan de son salon vieil or et bleu—Madge se passionnait pour un commencement de roman de Dickens, ayant presque oublié son aventure avec Guessagne” (103).

In a similar moment in the novel, Rose accesses Philippe’s library in his absence.

“[E]lle se livrait à une gloutonne lecture” (188), and “[s]a paresse de chatte y trouvait son compte” (188). The animalistic sensuality with which Madge and Rose approach literature bridges their sexual and intellectual penchants. As a result, Krysinska reconsiders the typical fin-de-siècle trope of excessive female sexuality by giving it an intellectual component. However, unlike Madge who reads the contemporary, avant-

175 garde works of quintessential modern poets such as Baudelaire, Rose engages in conventional readings of the classics: “Toute la bibliothèque de son grand homme y passait: les classiques, les livres de vers ornés de fulgurantes dédicaces ‘au cher maître’, les livres en vieux français, même les bouquins de science” (188). As reflected in her conformist choice of authors, Rose’s engagement with literature lacks the creativity and ingenuity of Madge’s who, contrary to her friend, prefers the consummate revolutionary poet Baudelaire to normative, canonical works. Nonetheless, Rose’s penetration into

Philippe’s library underscores the destabilizing effects that women’s readership has on patriarchal literary conventions. As Lyons remarks, reading afforded nineteenth-century women an autonomous space serving as a “temporary refusal of their reproductive and domestic roles” (101). Women’s readership thus represented a resistance to common nineteenth-century tenets claiming that reading could lead to hysteria or even a loss of fertility in women (Lyons 87). In other words, women who read threatened the gendered division of social roles and were viewed as traitors to their reproductive and domestic duties. With this context in mind, Madge’s developing interest in literature and Rose’s invasion into Philippe’s literary space signify more than simple leisure activities: through reading and occupying an intellectual space socially designated as male, the female protagonists challenge the very same literary idées reçues that Krysinska addresses in her introductory remarks.

As Lyons has further illustrated, nineteenth-century women were also dissuaded from reading out of a fear that it would lead to writing: women who wrote were a greater threat to the gendered social order because of their active public participation (84).

Madge emerges figuratively as a storyteller or writer at various moments in the novel, her

176 sexual coming of age existing parallel to creative processes generally reserved to men

(Félix and Philippe Guessagne, Jacques Marçay, Alphonse Quevilly and Jean Presle).

Throughout Folle de son corps, Krysinska employs writerly metaphors and rhetoric that suggest Madge’s penchant for literary creativity. For example, on the boat from New

York to Europe, Madge’s curiosity about the lives of her shipmates leads her to imagine—or “write”—her own version of their “stories.” “Madge était préoccupée de reconstruire leur pauvre petit roman,” writes Krysinska. “Se sont-ils aimés?” (37). Here,

Madge’s questioning appears in free indirect discourse as she momentarily occupies the text’s narration in a symbolic gesture suggestive of her own authorial inclination.

Krysinska equally characterizes Madge’s sexual lifestyle as a product of her creativity, a

“jeu inventé par elle” (285), once again associating her liberated sexuality with a propensity for artistic creativity.

Such metaphors for writing and creative production are not exclusive to Madge’s character. Between Richard Grafton’s “feuillet du roman commencé de sa vie” (147), the youthful Rose’s “roman à peine ouvert” (242) and Madge and Alphonse Quevilly’s

“court et pittoresque roman qu’ils vécurent” (52-53), Krysinska’s recurring use of literary metaphors signals a certain reflexivity on her part regarding her own literary aesthetic. In other words, this preoccupation with literary creation and constant comparing of romantic and sexual discovery with textual production reveals a self-consciousness about the exploration and mise-en-place of her own poetics. Such examples of this mise-en-abyme of Krysinska’s own literary creativity are equally present in La Force du Désir. The coquettish and idealistic Luce, for example, is forced to submit to “les lassitudes grises des fins de roman” (34), while Hélène Romanel’s pale skin tone is “suggestif des plus

177 romanesques clairs de lune” (52). These examples of the many literary metaphors common to both novels reveal the aesthetic self-consicousness of their author: the works both emerge as novels about writing.

Despite Krysinska’s ostensibly affirmative position regarding women readers and writers, Madge’s dual role as literal reader and symbolic writer is complicated by certain satirical descriptions of Madge’s readership. As both Lyons and Janet Beizer (1994) have shown, fictive figures such as Emma Bovary reflect anxieties about women who read present in medical discourses:

excessive reading of novels was to be avoided, since they aroused the emotions, played on the reader’s inner feelings and could overwork the imagination. Women were held to be volatile and perverse: qualities which were the opposite of the stability and reason appropriated by the bourgeois male. (Lyons 85-86)

Madge appears to be stricken with the same bovarysme that haunts both novels and medical texts at the turn of the century relating the social and moral “consequences” of women who read. Madge imagines a dramatic dénouement to her chronic infidelity: “Si

Félix allait la tuer! …” (143). The ellipses here accentuate Madge’s exaggerated reaction, as does the subsequent paragraph: “Elle se voit tombée dans une admirable pose, une belle blessure près du sein” (143). Madge’s vain theatricality recalls that of Flaubert’s eponymous heroine, echoing nineteenth-century fears of reading’s influence on women’s

“volatile” imagination. One night when Félix is late returning home, Madge’s imagination is her own worst enemy: “Des idées d’assassinat l’obsédaient, elle ne doutait point que son amant fût mort; s’attendait à le voir apporté méconnaissable, sanglant”

(161). Krysinska’s mocking of Madge’s dramatic, literary-inspired imagination must be understood in the larger context of the novel. Borrowing certain characteristics from the

178 bildungsroman, Krysinska succeeds in depicting Madge’s intellectual and creative maturity throughout the text, as she moves from unoriginal, melodramatic moments such as these to the maturity of her own literary and artistic aesthetic. In parodying such romanesque clichés, Krysinska simultaenously rejects the literary conventions that seem to haunt Madge.

A similar episode occurs in La Force du Désir when Hélène compares her real- life adultery to its literary equivalent: “Elle remémore, avec un haussement d’épaules, des romans lus où la passion adultère arrive à inspirer aux amoureuses la haine du mari, l’horreur de son contact, une sorte de vertu ridicule en l’honneur de l’amant” (197).

Unlike Madge, Hélène is uninfluenced by these fictitious clichés. Instead of being repulsed by her husband, “Hélène, au contraire, retrouve auprès de Jacques les meilleures heures du commencement de leur union” (197). Hélène’s non-conventional response suggests her own subjectivity as a character and inability to be reduced to a literary cliché. The wronged husband, a writer, is unaware of his wife’s infidelity and responds to her newly-awakened affections in a productive burst of creativity: “Jacques, sous le stimulant de cette nouvelle flambée, a promptement achevé un livre. Et c’est le plus excellent qu’il ait produit” (198). Though Madge and Hélène’s level of susceptibility to conventional literature may differ, Krysinska uses both protagonists to directly challenge literary clichés, whether through satire (Madge) or direct refusal (Hélène). While the conventional Decadent hero suffers a creative block in response to excessive female sexuality, Jacques, catalyzed by Hélène’s nascent—though unfaithful—sexuality, produces a masterpiece. Krysinska insists upon her positive artistic influence, for “Hélène s’en réjouit, l’applaudit et s’applaudit” (198). However, upon the tragic death of her

179 daughter, Hélène, guilt-ridden, abandons Jean, vows fidelity to her husband and returns to convention.

La Création à Deux

If there is one sexual encounter that marks a rupture from Madge’s typical femme fatale behavior, it is with the painter Jean Presle. It is precisely because this encounter is not merely sexual but rather intellectual and aesthetically-inspired that Madge’s development as a fictional character and artistic figure becomes most evident. From the first time she meets Jean Presle, Madge experiences a genuine admiration for the painter and his work. “Pour la première fois,” writes Krysinska, “Madge se trouvait devant cette chose anormale et sublime: la divinité humaine—un véritable artiste” (219). This moment marks a rupture from previous amorous encounters. “Remuée si réellement par une

émotion élevée” (219), Madge experiences an intellectual affinity with a potential sexual partner for the first time in the novel. As she visits his studio, Madge observes Jean, unaware of her presence, as he paints. Krysinska thus reverses the subject and object of the typical (male) gaze; Jean and his work appear under Madge’s scrutinizing inspection.

Along these lines, Jean is not conventionally masculine. Describing him to Madge, Rose giggles, “[i]l a de très beaux yeux noirs…, timide avec cela comme une jeune fille, c’est très drôle” (204). Later referring to Jean’s “moustache de félin noir” (272), Krysinska animalistically characterizes him with a trait typically reserved for women: that of the feline. Jean’s femininity is also associated with his intellectualism, considered mutually exclusive with physical vigor: “toute manifestation de force était subordonnée à la domination cérébrale” (271). Like many male “victims” of the Decadent femme fatale,

180 Jean’s potential sexual vulnerability is suggested by his failure to adhere to conventional masculinity. However and as we shall see, Jean’s relationship with Madge nonetheless diverges from classic portrayals of masochistic men and their sexually-aggressive, one- dimensional predatory mistresses.

Madge circulates among the paintings in Jean’s studio, many of which are portraits of female models:

Des visages de femmes inquiétants et rayonnants. Vus sur nature sans doute, mais vus avec des yeux de rêve. Car chaque coin d’ombre était signifiant, chaque lumière expressive et d’une main sincère; mais sur tout cela planait une hautaine synthèse de la forme et du charme propre à chaque type traduit. [. . .] Et rien pour la blague, aucun cabotinage dans les attitudes; les figures ne faisant jamais de l’œil à l’acheteur par-dessus le cadre. (218)

Jean’s artistic portrayals of women are honest and reflect a profound aesthetic thoughtfulness, with no hints of affected eroticism meant to seduce a potential (male) voyeuristic buyer. It is with these same “yeux de rêve” that Jean observes Madge, as though she were the incarnation of his artistic ideal: “‘Comme vous êtes belle’ dit-il gravement, sans trouble; comme estimant que cela devait être ainsi…” (220). The coming together of these two artistically creative individuals “devait être ainsi,” for “c’était la seule chose logique au monde” (220). Krysinska’s emphatic evocation of reason and logic to characterize Madge and Jean’s union signals a rupture from the protagonist’s previous relationships. Here, the author insists upon an intellectual compatibility between these two characters and distinguishes their artistic alliance from the purely sexual interactions that Madge generally has with men.

Shortly following this passionate encounter, Madge and Jean embark on a trip to

Holland. The artistic implications of this journey for both characters are substantial: “Et

181 d’y aller avec l’unique Bien-Aimée, rêvée depuis toujours—elle aussi,—l’Eve première à qui il donnait toute son âme, tout son corps, tout son cœur, possédés par l’Art seul jusqu’à présent, n’était-ce pas un Rêve dans un Rêve?...” (228). Madge provides Jean with a long-awaited realization of his aesthetic vision, previously achieved only on canvas. As Krysinska explains, “[l]a Beauté de Madge était pour lui comme une subtile synthèse d’Art, matérialisée “ (269). Interestingly, like Richard Grafton, Jean is particularly drawn to Madge’s voice: “La voix de Madge portait en elle seule la fascination des musiques perverses et suaves: Toutes les brûlantes inflexions de Bach et de Berlioz, toutes les coquetteries railleuses de Mozart et tous les sanglots délicieux de

Chopin frissonnaient en elle” (270). Jean evokes prominent composers to aesthetically liken Madge’s voice to musical representations of female sexuality and flirtation

(“coquetteries,” “sanglots,” etc.). Through this comparison, Jean privileges language and discourse as an instrument of female seduction.

“Madge aussi trouvait auprès de Jean tous ses songes réalisés” (270). While Jean experiences the realization of his artistic ideal, Madge is equally fulfilled with the aesthetic—and sexual—creativity engendered through their union. Krysinska distinguishes this relationship with Jean as an emotional and intellectual, even spiritual, novelty for the protagonist. “L’âme de Madge était effectivement née avec cet amour”

(231), she affirms, adding, “[c]hez lui, c’était le corps qui naissait” (231). Juxtaposed with Jean’s sexual awakening for which Madge is a mentor, Madge’s spiritual illumination takes thematic precedence as a major event in this bildungsroman. Rachel

Mesch glosses several references to “âme” in fin-de-siècle women’s writing, noting that in some instances the “âme” is a metonym for part of a woman’s body or, on the

182 contrary, may exist in total opposition to her corporality as “an affirmation of separateness” from the sexual act (166, 181). Italicized here by Krysinska and in juxtaposition to Jean’s nascent sexuality, Madge’s “âme” is the focal point of this union, taking priority over any corporal pleasure. While Mesch notes that such separation of the body and soul allows for the privileging of female sexuality as an independent entity, I would like to suggest that Krysinska instead favors a metaphysical development in

Madge that transcends the bodily discovery with which she is already familiar.

That is not to say that Madge’s corporal desires go unfulfilled: “ils s’aimaient candidement et somptueusement, impudiquement et saintement” (231). The couple’s rigorous sexuality is characterized as an art form, a “chef-d’oeuvre de leur passion”

(231), an aesthetic creation that surpasses traditional heterosexuality. In line with

Madge’s general non-conformism, “[l]a norme physiologique même leur semblait une absurdité, une fable inventée par les misérables qui n’ont jamais aimé” (232). Madge and

Jean reinvent heterosexuality, not unlike Krysinska’s rewriting of the femme fatale, as an ideological and artistic response to conventional representations of sexuality. In these idealized states of passion, Madge’s ardent aggression rivals that of a traditional femme fatale: “C’était la crise terrible où l’amante devient l’égale des farouches femelles qui tuent le mâle—rendues féroces par la névrose aphrodisiaque, intoxiquées de volupté”

(273). Though Madge’s violence suggests the aggression and hypersexuality of the

Decadent femme fatale, her character differs from such classic representations in that her brutality contributes to a larger aesthetic quest shared by both Madge and Jean. Jean is not the victim of Madge’s aggression, but rather an active participant expressing an artistic vision through sexuality.

183 As we have seen, Madge disrupts the literary and artistic careers of many of her former lovers, in traditional femme fatale fashion. However, she insists that Jean does not

“se laiss[er] entraîner à la dérive des exquises torpeurs” (232, my emphasis). The recurring use of “dérive” to refer exclusively to female protagonists or readers extends here to Jean Presle. As a result, Krysinska rhetorically positions the artist with the major female figures of the novel, suggesting an intellectual, if not existential, solidarity between Madge and Jean. Madge “exigeait du talent de Jean Presle la glorification de son corps d’amoureuse” (232), demanding that he transpose his ardent sexual desires for her onto canvas. Unlike her fictional femme fatale counterparts and her previous inclinations towards cruelty, Madge serves as Jean’s muse, insisting that he create in her honor. The result is “Ariane,” an allegorical painting recognized by true artists and even an ignorant public as “le Beau le plus hautainement idéal, devenue tangible, devenu presque matériel, devenu familier même” (233). Jean’s material rendering of this aesthetic ideal is also a transposition of the artistic vision that his relationship with Madge embodies. Madge thus serves as a catalyst to her lover’s productivity, urging him to create the masterpiece that earns him the title of “maître” (234) by his peers.

An analogous union exists between Hélène Romanel and Jean de Saint-Aulde in

La Force du Désir. For Jean de Saint-Aulde, who uncoincidentally shares a name with

Jean Presle, Hélène is the incarnation of artistic beauty: “il la retrouvait amoureuse et miraculeuse, personnifiant tous les caractères de beauté perçus au travers les changeants aspects des pays, des époques évoquées par les œuvres de l’art” (117). Like Jean Presle’s first impression of Madge, Jean de Saint-Aulde finds that Hélène embodies an atemporal aesthetic that he has only previously witnessed in “[des] oeuvres de l’art” (117). As

184 Madge and Jean’s sexual union in Folle de son corps is considered in artistic terms as “un chef-d’oeuvre,” Hélène and Jean de Saint-Aulde equally evoke literary comparisons during their most intimate moments. During a sexual encounter, for example, Hélène recalls poetic verse and associates her physical union with Jean de Saint-Aulde with literary creation, thereby exposing its cerebral component: “Ces vers d’un poète chantent

à son oreille” (114). Krysinska further employs literary metaphors to insist upon the artistic creativity suggested by this union. Together, Hélène and Jean live “les nuits de poésie à deux” (125), tapping into “ce qu’il y a de meilleur en eux de poésie” (123).

Krysinska also likens the two protagonists to literary couples, writing, “pour Hélène et

Jean, ce n’est que la saison anniversaire des amants, la fête de Paul et Virginie, de Roméo et Juliette” (148). While the numerous literary comparisons underscore the artistic creativity engendered by their union, Hélène and Jean nonetheless transcend literary norms: “Enfin, ils ont échappé à l’emprise tyrannique de la fiction, c’est maintenant, ouverte devant leur amour, l’inéluctable réalité” (110). In order to celebrate their own aesthetic, the two characters must leave the realm of poetry for reality. Indeed, Hélène and Jean are most artistically productive as a couple, “ces âmes d’amants devenus pareilles à des lyres” (118), the symbol of poetic creation. Appropriately, Jean de Saint-

Aulde muses at the conclusion of the novel, “peut-être, la Force créatrice du Désir existe- t-elle en effet” (270). Krysinska seems to think it does.

Nevertheless, in Folle de son corps, Madge and Jean’s contentment is only temporary, and the heroine eventually longs for the sexual freedom and independence of previous times. Krysinska articulates the boredom of Madge’s routine in literary terms,

“une journée d’ennui au milieu de livres déjà lus” (282). Madge’s relationship with Jean

185 has finally lost its artistic novelty, and if literature once provided Madge access to an intellectual and aesthetic world, her metaphoric novels with Jean now fail to stimulate.

Jean also undergoes an unproductive period where the “belle lucidité de son cerveau était comme enfumée, sa volonté incertaine, errante et de mauvais conseil, la main même, rebelle et lente à obéir” (282). Madge and Jean’s concurrent artistic dry spells further distinguish this female protagonist from the typical decadent femme fatale who not only lacks complete intellectual subjectivity but benefits from the obstacle she poses to her partner’s creative output. In Krysinska, both individuals equally suffer from a waning creative drive, a sign that their relationship has simply run its course and that it is time to look elsewhere for stimulation to fulfill personal artistic pursuits.

The novel’s conclusion must therefore not be interpreted as symptomatic of

Madge’s potential regression (and return to typical portrayals of malevolent female sexuality), but rather an indication of her refusal to sacrifice her creative and sexual sense of self for the sake of convention. Though engaged to be married to Jean, the security of convention and a desire to return to New York City pull Madge “[d]ans deux directions diverses” (284). Krysinska explains Madge’s existential inquiry by considering the pressures of social conventions for women: “Une femme si complexement et si complètement femme, que les joies—dont une seule suffit à remplir l’existence de la plupart des autres femmes—devaient flamber toutes ensemble sur cet autel de vie passionnelle où elle se consumait elle-même aussi; première victime” (284). Emphasizing

Madge’s gender (“si complexement et si complètement femme”), Krysinska relates her intellectual and sexual quandries to social norms of femininity. The author’s use of the noun “victim” to describe Madge’s dissatisfaction is a critique of conventional views of

186 femininity that are at odds with a woman’s personal discovery of self. Amidst Madge’s doubts about her future marriage, an encounter with Jacques Marçay reminds her of her growing unfulfillment with Jean. As she “[suit] le poète dans sa chambre” (288), Madge makes an active decision to continue her drive for independence and creative inspiration at the sacrifice of convention and traditional femininity. Occurring with a poet, this momentous act of infidelity gestures one final time towards Madge’s literary instinct and drive.

The final image of the novel—Madge awaiting the departure of her ship to

America—does not only close Madge’s adventures overseas but also opens the possibilities for her as she returns to New York. The ostensibly cyclic structure of the novel does not serve to “close” the text by returning to the beginning and coming full circle, but rather refuses any unequivocal and satisfying conclusion. Textually, it also marks a rupture from the novel’s third-person, past tense omniscient narration as it is written in the future tense: “Le Rhynland va partir” (291). This shift to future tense is also a shift to the unnarratable, for Madge’s quest for self-discovery goes beyond the pages of this bildungsroman. The protagonist’s final rejection of social conventions thus mirrors that of the author: like Madge, Krysinska directly challenges literary conventions in her

Préface and resists them in the contents of the novel.

Conclusion

Folle de son corps is not a novel about dangerous female sexuality but the poetic aesthetics of its author and protagonists. As Krysinska advocates in Intermèdes for a personal literary aesthetic independent of contemporaneous schools, she also reinvents

187 the ubiquitous fin-de-siècle figure of the femme fatale. With Jean Presle, Madge no longer inhibits artistic creation in typical femme fatale fashion, but rather forms an aesthetically-inspired union from which both benefit artistically. Krysinska therefore rewrites the self-destructive Decadent heterosexual couple, and man and woman emerge as cerebral and corporal subjective beings in both Folle de son corps and La Force du

Désir.

Madge is, to say the least, a figure of contradictions. From her initial predatory sexuality to her artistic and literary drive for fulfillment to her final act of infidelity and liberation, Madge’s character exhibits ostensible traits of both a typical femme fatale and woman in search of a larger aesthetic meaning. Despite the temptation to reduce Madge to either a literary trope or an incoherent, undecided figure, I believe that it is her very inconsistency that not only distinguishes her from one-dimensional representations of female sexuality but also serves as a site of resistance to fin-de-siècle literary conventions. As Florence Goulesque notes, “en peignant des portraits de femmes empreintes de mystère, changeantes, pleines de contradictions et de dualités enrichissantes, Krysinska redéfinissait l’émancipation féminine en ses propres termes, c’est-à-dire comme une liberté dans l’ambiguïté” (“Impressionnisme poétique” 323).

Folle de son corps’s mise-en-abyme is striking: Madge’s literary non-conformism is

Krysinska’s aesthetic and ideological response to contemporary discourses on poetics, female sexuality and what it means to be a woman who writes.

CONCLUSION

In his “Carnet vert,” J. K. Huysmans associates the artist’s creations with his sexual pleasure:

Il semble que les artistes aient, seuls, le pouvoir de pécher mieux—un réel privilège—s’exciter, par exemple, sur Esther—coucher nocturnement avec elle, c’est coucher avec une créature artificielle, née de soi—c’est un inceste onaniaque. Il y a du succubat. Coucher avec la Salomé de Moreau, c’est coucher avec la créature née de l’âme de l’homme. C’est pis que la bestialité. La bestialité, la sodomie, sont naturelles. Le baisage avec une morte serait moins grave. Car elle est. C’est le péché suprême, commis avec un être sans vie, n’existant pas, n’étant pas directement créé par Dieu, étant l’artificiel. (qtd. in Dottin-Orsini: 125, original emphasis)

In sexualizing the relationship between the artist and his work, or more specifically, between the artist and the women that figure in his work, this passage confirms the fin- de-siècle association of fatal femininity with artistic production. By virtue of her artificiality, the female figure seduces her very creator in a relationship that is akin to incest. And yet because it is the artist who “s’excit[e]” over his own creation, Huysmans also points to the masturbatory element (“onanique”) in artistic portrayals of female sexuality. Whether it is the virtuous figure of Esther or the sexually dangerous femme fatale icon of Salome, Huysmans’s artist allows himself to be aroused by projections of his imagination. Like the voracious women haunting and consuming Lépervié in his dreams, or the enigmatic Clara of the Torture Garden, a suspected product of the narrator’s imaginary (“[e]xiste-t-elle réellement?...”), the femmes fatales in the novels that I have examined are not far removed from Huysmans’s “succube.” These figures are

188 189 products of anxiety about artistic creation and female sexuality, reflections of both aesthetic exploration and artistic vulnerability. Huysmans’s passage suggests an additional understanding of artist figures and femmes fatales that proliferate in Decadent literature. Perhaps more than just a site reflecting apprehension about female sexuality and male writing, Huysmans invites us to consider the femme fatale as a medium through which the writer can be experimental, transgressive, and even explore his own sexual fantasies. To return to Annelise Maugue comment, “l’on voit la femme n’être toujours à l’homme qu’un miroir” (632), the femme fatale is specifically a mirror of the male artist’s sexual and aesthetic desires.

In this context, we may reconsider a previously cited passage from Mirbeau’s Le

Calvaire in a slightly different light:

Juliette!... Certes, je l’aimais… Mais cette Juliette que j’aimais, n’était-ce point celle que j’avais créée, qui était née de mon imagination, sortie de mon cerveau, celle à qui j’avais donné une âme, une flamme de divinité, celle que j’avais pétrie impossiblement, avec la chair idéale des anges?... Et encore ne l’aimais-je point comme on aime un beau livre, un beau vers, une belle statue, comme la réalisation visible et palpable d’un rêve d’artiste! (214)

In line with Huysmans, Mirbeau suggests, through simile, an intimate, even erotic relationship between the author and his novel, the sculptor and his statue, the fin-de- siècle Pygmalion and the woman of his creative imagination. These comparisons might explain why the femme fatale not only survives the story line of the Decadent novel, but is immortalized as an artistic figure. Distinguishing herself from many of her sexually malevolent forerunners, such as the Marquise de Merteuil, Emma Bovary, or Nana, each of whom were punished through physical deformity or death, the femmes fatales of

Mirbeau, Lemonnier, Mendès and Krysinska do not only escape unscathed at the novels’

190 conclusions, but show signs of continuing their ascendancy well beyond the pages of the novels they inhabit: Mirbeau’s Clara will return once again to the Torture Garden,

Lemonnier’s Rakma will prolong her reign over a future generation of men, Mendès’s

Honorine will continue to haunt Évelin’s memory, and Krysinska’s Madge will abandon convention and resume her sexual adventures in New York. These figures will also live on in the male authors’ imagination, immortalized on the page. Neither sexual, moral, nor narrative order is reestablished, and the Decadent femme fatale is symptomatic of an aesthetic investment in innovative conventions that break from coherent and linear literary trends and genres.

However, if the femme fatale is a projected male fantasy, are we as readers meant to identify with the male protagonists and artistic figures? Or the author himself? In order to answer this question, we cannot discount the pervasive element of satire present in

Decadent novels concerning dangerous female sexuality. The femmes fatales of Mirbeau,

Lemonnier, Mendès and Krysinska have a lot in common, and the preceding chapters point to satire as a perhaps unexpected common denominator. In their respective portrayals of fatal femininity and its influence on the fin-de-siècle artist, each of these authors employs satire at various moments in their texts. Mendès, for example, mocks the literary circles of his time, Mirbeau satirically juxtaposes European scientific discourses with “uncivilized” Eastern methods of torture, and Krysinska reappropriates and parodies the very trope of the femme fatale. I do not believe that the omnipresence of satire in novels featuring femmes fatales is coincidental. In fact, it points to the self-consciousness of the Decadent movement itself. In a discussion of Octave Mirbeau, Emily Apter claims that he often “used the decadent mode as the butt of satire” (“Sexological Decadence”

191 962). She continues to claim that parts of his oeuvre can not be categorized as Decadent, but rather “a parodic counterdiscourse of decadence” (ibid.). She cites, for example, the exotic plants of the Torture Garden as a pastiche of the Baudelairian “Flowers of Evil.”

More specifically to this dissertation is the possibility that the figure of the femme fatale is a literary medium through which Decadent authors can explore, through satire, the aesthetics and structures of their own genre.

In addition, as readers, satire brings us to question the sincerity of a narrator, the genuineness of a protagonist, and to simply suspend our trust in the novel’s face value. In the case of the femme fatale and female sadism, the ostensible male victim may in fact bear the brunt of an author’s ridicule, discouraging readers from sympathizing with his debasement. In Mirbeau’s Le Jardin des supplices, for example, the blood-craving, sex- starved Clara advocates discourses on torture so absurd that Mirbeau can only be parodying the society of his own narrator and protagonist. Clara is thus not simply a femme fatale to despise and annihilate, but rather the satirical spokesperson for an author engaging in a severe critique of Western social values. Similarly, Krysinska’s Madge stands for an ironic overturning of the masculine trope of the femme fatale, her hypersexuality and disturbing ambivalence to the pain she incites in the men around her are eclipsed by her subjectivity and quest for a greater sense of self. Through hyperbolic example, Krysinska rewrites the femme fatale as one who atypically reaches out to

(female) readers for understanding and identification.

Mendès’s La Première maîtresse invites male readers to identify with the protagonist through a prefatory warning about female sexuality. However, as a naïve, aspiring writer, Évelin does not escape Mendès’s satire of fin-de-siècle literary circles.

192 Yet nor does Honorine. As Évelin is ridiculed for compromising his aesthetic values and buckling under Honorine’s pressure to write mediocre bourgeois novels, he, along with his mistress, emerge as representative of a contemporary literary movement that Mendès seeks to criticize. Given the narrator’s derision, identification with and compassion for

Évelin is nearly impossible. As a writer, Mendès distinguishes this protagonist from himself, suggesting that the figures of the writer in these fin-de-siècle texts are not necessarily representatives for their respective authors. In Le Possédé, Lemonnier parodies Lépervié’s capacity as a judiciary figure when he demonstrates nothing but bad judgment in his sexual life. Difficult to identify with a character saturated with irony, if not hypocrisy, the reader may instead sympathize with Rakma’s metonymic attack on governing systems. All of these examples open the door to additional readings of the femme fatale that not only address projections of male anxiety, but also the aesthetics and ideologies of satire.

Such is also true of the narrative breakdown of the novels that I examined. My dissertation has shown that the femme fatale is not simply a destabilizer of normative masculinity, but also of its representative discourses. The femme fatale interferes with masculine language production, at times seizing an authority for words from her writerly lover. Under the femme fatale’s attack, narrative layers and networks between male authors, narrators, protagonists and readers are precarious. However, the break-down of language of the male protagonist and narrative frame serves an innovative, aesthetic purpose in the larger economy of the text. The deterioration of the narrative frames in

Mirbeau and Lemonnier, for example, as well as the progressively disjointed, incoherent narrative sequences in their novels, is suggestive of a larger aesthetic problematic

193 concerning the Decadent genre. Guy Ducrey’s notion of a “crise du roman” (xlix) allows us to revisit the aesthetic ramifications of the femme fatale’s disruption of narrative flow and storytelling conventions. This interest in narrative trends also invites narratologists to further consider the narrative structure associated with the femme fatale, or linguists to examine language and male subjectivity. Overall, this study of the femme fatale encourages additional investigation into the aesthetic implications of her masculinity and its corresponding influences on language and narrative trends.

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