Bad Examples: Children, Servants, and Masturbation in Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract

B e i t i n t h e i n t e r e s t o f r o u s s e a u i a n frankness or in pursuit of a succes de scandale, Andre Gide opens his autobiography, Si le grain ne meurt (If It Die, published in 1926), with a particularly provocative scene of child’s play. The year is around 1874, and a five-year-old Andre and his little friend of the same age are hiding under a table covered with a tablecloth. Their activity is a cause of concern for Andre’s nursemaid: “‘what are you up to under there?’ my nurse would call out. ‘Nothing; we’re playing.’ And then we would make a great noise with our playthings, which we had taken along for the sake of appearances [pour la frime].” The word choice of the nursemaid’s enquiry, “Qu’est-ce que vous fabriquez la-dessous?,” suggests that the boys may be engaged in some form of pernicious yet purposeful work. Andre’s response, meanwhile, is to assert on the contrary an absence of activity—the boys are doing “nothing”—which is apparently synonymous with play—“we’re playing.” Yet that play is, we quickly learn, a sham; the toys the boys shake have been brought pour la frime, as a decoy. In truth, of course, the boys are masturbating, or engaging in what Andre will later learn are called “bad habits” (mauvaises habitudes). This activity is, nevertheless, not entirely unlike play: it is itself a kind of fun (“we amused ourselves otherwise,” Gide observes, teasingly), and, as Michael Lucey points out, the boys’ “way of noisily shaking their toys is inevitably metonymically associated with their masturbation.” The substitution of autoeroticism for social play—the boys masturbated, Gide insists, together but separately, “beside each other but not with each other” (l’un pres de l’autre, mais non l’un avec l’autre pourtant)—is an