Hysteria, Hypnotism, the Spirits, and Pornography: Fin-de-Siecle Cultural Discourses in the Decadent Rachilde

Abstract

Michael R. Finn’s exploration into the dominant cultural discourses of nineteenth-century France relates these doxa to the life and fiction of Rachilde, the decadent female writer. Born Marguerite Eymery (1860–1953) in the Périgord region of France, Rachilde grew up, according to Finn, with a mentally unstable mother, a distant father, an influential grandfather and with one leg shorter than the other. She is described variously as a ‘juggler of perversion’, ‘the perfect hysteric’ and ‘the immaculate deviant’ and thus she resists any simplistic form of categorisation. The book aims to situate Rachilde’s fiction within the societal expectations, medical terminology and scientific pronouncements of late nineteenth-century France. It offers a comprehensive discussion on the convergence of medical doctrines with moral censure and utilises many of Rachilde’s lesser-known works and examples from her actual life in order to do so. The reductive nature of biographical readings of fictional texts is always a delicate or unfruitful enterprise for any scholar and Finn provides a caveat to this effect in the introduction to the text. However, throughout the text there is still the persistent conflation of Rachilde with her unorthodox female protagonists which tends to offer only a simplistic analysis of her work. The middle chapters comprise of examinations into the four main discourses of the title, namely Hysteria, Hypnotism, Spiritualism and Pornography, which are then bracketed by a biographical essay (chapter one) and a final chapter on the female fin-de-siècle writer. These explorations are often presented in a diachronic form, switching between significant instances in Rachilde’s life and fiction. This should prove confusing and disconcerting for the reader, however, Finn signposts each change of topic or theme with helpful subheadings within each chapter.