Dilts, R;
(2019)
‘The Queen of Decadence': Rachilde and Sado-Masochistic Feminism.
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, Article 1. 10.14324/111.1755-4527.095.
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Abstract
In 1884, the novel Monsieur Vénus took the French literary world by storm, and inaugurated its controversial female author, Rachilde, the ‘queen of decadence.’ Many critics did not believe that a young, aristocratic woman could possibly have devised such a salacious story. A literary press which specialized in erotica first published the book, but it was banned regardless, and Rachilde was even condemned to prison for pornographic writing. Subsequent editions therefore required fake male co-authors and introductions by famous male writers that consigned the novel not literature at all, but the case study of a hysterical woman. Rachilde also publicly denounced the feminism of her moment, a proclamation that affected the twentieth-century reception of her writing. Yet, following new French and English editions published in 2004, Monsieur Vénus has been hailed a queer forerunner in contemporary academic circles, even while questions about Rachilde’s feminist affiliations persist. This paper goes beyond the biographical details that have dominated conversation about Rachilde’s writing to closely interrogate the use of sexual violence in Monsieur Vénus, and in her much lesser-known novel, La Marquise de Sade (1887). Based on the definition of sadomasochism Gilles Deleuze outlines in his book, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (1991), the respective use of masochism in Monsieur Vénus and of sadism in La Marquise de Sade places its female characters in the unlikely positions of masochist and sadist to offer a provocative critique of the decadent moment, and its representations of sexuality, the body, and even nationalism.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | ‘The Queen of Decadence': Rachilde and Sado-Masochistic Feminism |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.14324/111.1755-4527.095 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.14324/111.1755-4527.095 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2019 Rebekkah Dilts. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) 4.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
| Keywords: | Decadence, Rachilde, Monsieur Vénus, La Marquise de Sade, Gilles Deleuze, Sadomasochism |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10079966 |
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