Tag: Literary Studies

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.