Rewriting the Perverse: Rachilde and the Erotic Body

Abstract

The work ofjin-de-siecle writer Rachilde has been described as 'un breviaire de I' amour decadent'. 1 Indeed Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery) was frequently condemned as irredeemably perverse, even pornographic, by her mostly male contemporaries. However, more than one hundred years after the publication of her first novels, Rachilde' s work can be reclaimed, demarginalized and re-read as an insightful and innovative insertion into language of the once unspeakable and unwriteable subject of female pleasure. With reference to a number of Rachilde's early novels, namely Monsieur Venus (1884), La Marquise de Sade(1887),L 'Animale (1893) and La Jongleuse (1900), I will be suggesting that Rachilde' s texts use references both literal and metaphoricalto decorative obj ects, as a means of articulating the powerful urges of the female body.2 By displacing the expression of female desire away from the body onto flowers and ornaments, Rachilde signals the troubling sexuality of her heroines without overt description of it. Instead she leaves a series of clues in her texts for the careful reader to pick up as s/he goes along. This examination of her heroines' relationships to the objects both animate and inanimate which surround them, will enable a greater understanding ofRachilde's project to write the sexual body in language. Rachilde's perceived perversion has led to her inclusion in a tradition of male erotic writing which can be traced from Sade and Laclos, via Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Lautreamont, to Gide and Prouse Yet any reader turning to Rachilde for titillation is likely to be disappointed. The novels of this 'Mademoiselle Baudelaire' contain very few explicit references to sexual acts. Indeed one reader of Monsieur Venus has suggested that asexuality could be considered the greatest perversion of the novel's heroine Raoule de Venerade. Other, more optimistic, readers see true love, a rare thing indeed injin-de-siecle literature, as the main perversion detailed in the novel,5