Anatomy of a Gaze: Body-Reading as Perversion in Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus

By Maria Scott, Associate Professor of French Literature and Thought, University of Exeter

In 1884 a strange novel was published in Belgium by a young French woman, Marguerite Eymery Vallette, more usually known as Rachilde. The book was banned for obscenity, and a fine and prison sentence were imposed on the author. Five years later, in 1889, Monsieur Vénus was published in France, with some of its most scandalous passages and details omitted. It was accompanied by a preface by the right-wing author Maurice Barrès, who claimed that the novel would interest reflective readers primarily on account of the fascinating portrait it offered of the soul of a young virgin (the author) afflicted by an incongruous perversity. He quotes the novelist Jean Lorrain’s description of Rachilde’s limpid and ignorant eyes, concealing other eyes that search out and discover scandalous pleasures. This focus by both male authors on the female author’s strange gaze is telling: that gaze is both ignorant and knowing, a placid object of male attention that is also active and mobile and daring. Barrès recommended that Monsieur Vénus be read as ‘le spectacle d’une rare perversité’ (the spectacle of a rare perversity), as ‘un symptôme’ (a symptom), and as ‘une anatomie’ (an anatomy).[1] It is hard not to think of André Brouillet’s famous contemporaneous painting A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière (1887), which depicts the body of a supposedly perverse young woman being subjected to the fascinated medical gaze. The crucial difference is that, in the case of Monsieur Vénus, the anatomised woman stares right back.

An ‘anatomie’ is an object, often a body, subjected to study and dissection, or it is the study and dissection of that object (etymologically, ‘anatomy’ means ‘cut up’). For Barrès, Rachilde is clearly the intended object of analysis, an interesting case for the reader’s psychological scrutiny. However, Rachilde, as Barrès’s preface partly acknowledges, is herself an accomplished analyst, despite her ostensible ignorance. Her text offers an interesting ‘anatomie’, or body for analysis, as Barrès suggests, but it also offers its own analysis (or ‘anatomie’), not least of the analyst’s gaze.

An ‘anatomie’ can also be an artist’s model. Throughout the novel, the female protagonist, Raoule de Vénérande, a talented artist with an apparent penchant for male nudes, treats her lover Jacques Silvert as an ‘anatomie’ in the sense that his body is, for her, the focus of her aestheticising and desiring gaze: his golden chest hair, the curves of his heels, his buttocks and thighs, the dimple on his chin, are all described, in parts of the narration that are focalised by Raoule, in fine and sensuous detail. To read Monsieur Vénus as the ‘anatomie’ of a perverse young female author’s soul, as Barrès suggests, is, then, to study the anatomy of an anatomy: it is, in other words, to study the female author’s depiction of a female protagonist’s fixation upon the minutely observed details of a male body.

The feminisation of the male body by the female protagonist, along with her playful self-identification as male, are the most obvious symptoms, in the text, of her (and by extension her author’s) alleged perversity, characterised by a fictional young doctor as hysteria. However, the desiring and analytical nature of Raoule’s female gaze is also, arguably, a symptom of her apparent illness. To read a physically male body as an object of female pleasure, a ‘pêche’ (peach), is a sure sign of a pathological condition in a world where only men had the right to a sexual appetite. In addition, the reduction of a male body, however feminised, to its material, aesthetic qualities, was surely, for contemporary readers, at least as unsettling as the final scene of the novel still is for many readers today.

In the last line of Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus, different meanings of ‘anatomie’ collide in the reference to a ‘chef d’oeuvre d’anatomie’ (anatomical masterpiece). The anatomical masterpiece in question is the wax-work dummy and sex robot that replaces Jacques. The dummy is an ‘anatomie’ insofar as it is firstly an anatomically correct representation of a human body, secondly an object that is subjected to the text’s analysis, and thirdly the result of an actual physical dissection: Raoule has sacked Jacques’ dead body for reusable parts.

In this novel and its preface, it is the anatomising protagonist who is explicitly characterised as perverse, not her anatomised object. To the extent that readers are regularly obliged to see partly through the eyes of the alleged hysteric, who focalises much of the narrative, they experience something of this body-reading illness as they read. In the final passage, however, there is no focalisation of the narrative by any character. The reader is ultimately left in the distanced position of the analyst, which is also, probably not coincidentally, the position of the sexual voyeur. The analytical gaze is difficult to separate, in this novel, from the perverse gaze.

The case of Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus suggests that the way in which bodies were read and anatomised in the late nineteenth century could itself be construed as a symptom of illness, depending on the sex of the reading and read bodies. What was understood to be an appropriate way of reading, when conducted by or upon a body of one sex, was not always an appropriate way of reading when conducted by or upon a body of another sex. If the reader detects a more general critique, here, of the gendered and potentially perverse clinical gaze, this is bolstered by the implied parallel between the wax male puppet with which Monsieur Vénus concludes and the female wax dummies often used in surgical demonstrations at the time. These were called, fittingly enough, anatomical Venuses.