“A Terrible Ordeal from Every Point of View”: (Not) Managing Female Sexuality on the Wedding Night

Abstract

To j u d g e b y p u b l i s h e r s ’ l i s t s from the first decade of the twentieth century, self-appointed doctors of sexual pathology must have abounded in France at the time. Or if, as one suspects, they were in fact few in number, they managed remarkably well to “multiply themselves,” as the French would say, being both active and increasingly numerous. Not only were they prolific publishers, but they also used noms de plume (often simply identifying themselves as a docteur without a full name) and borrowed liberally from each other’s texts. Moreover, the milieu in which they published produced its own effect of multiplication, as medical texts were offered for sale alongside fictional stories of passionate eroticism, prurient studies of exotic or ancient cultures, and flagellation pornography. So even as these compendia worked to establish a newly orthodox understanding of such made-to-order medical topics as syphilis, impotence, and abortion, they were laying equal claim on behalf of sexual medicine to topics like hysteria, hypnotism, and morphinomania. Their activity and the place in which they conducted it effectively defined the range of the sexual, and that range was vast. One topic regularly included within the scope of sexual knowledge was marriage. The fifth volume of the bibliotheque sexuelle du Docteur Desormeaux (Dr. Desormeaux’s Sexual Library) is entitled Le mariage (Marriage), and the twentieth volume of Dr. Caufeynon’s bibliotheque populaire des connaissances medicales (Popular Library of Medical Knowledge), Le mariage et son hygiene (Marriage and Its Hygiene). Attention often focused in these texts on the quality of amorous relations between husband and wife: Dr. Desormeaux added a separate volume to his library entitled L’amour