Frigidity at the Fin de Siècle in France: A Slippery and Capacious Concept

Abstract

To take feminine sexual as an object of study across the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries is not just a historically demanding task but a conceptually challenging endeavor. The terms froideur (coldness) and frigidite (frigidity) in French literary texts, medical treatises, and psychoanalytic writing were, by contrast with the imagined sexual organs of the female subjects identified in these terms, remarkably slippery. This article will not attempt to trace that long history in detail but will take cognizance of it while examining one of its key moments. Our focus here will be on the construction of feminine frigidity in French texts at the turn of the twentieth century as exemplified by the work of the popular medical writer Jean Fauconney (also known as Caufeynon or Dr. Jaf). Eighteenth-century libertine writing had been inclined to consider female coldness as a matter of natural temperament, thereby defining a whole class of reserved or unresponsive women without reference to any notion of disorder.1 It was not until the midto late nineteenth century, in fact, that a pathologized notion of female frigidity came into regular usage. The late nineteenth century had a range of pertinent notions at its disposal. Sexual coldness in women could be envisaged as a sign of the natural lack of sexual agency in women generally. Or it could be associated variously with sterility, with a humoral predisposition, with a sickly constitution. Indeed, all of these various accounts of it can be found in the work of Fauconney alone. Yet by the turn of the century medical and literary talk about frigidity increasingly constructed it as an aberrant behavior: a physiological disorder like male impotence or sterility or a perversion like nymphomania or lesbianism. By the period between the two world wars and after psychoanalytic definitions had constructed frigidity as a failure of penetrative receptivity in heterosexual vaginal coitus. That failure was attributed to an excess of phallic clitoral desire and was thus bound to failures of gender differentiation and feminine