Rachilde and French Women's Authorship: From Decadence to Modernism (review)

Widely known as the decadent author of Monsieur Vénus, Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery, 1860-1953) produced an impressive range of work well into the twentieth century. But until Melanie Hawthorne's biography, which argues for Rachilde's place in the modernist canon, Rachilde's post-decadent contributions have been largely overlooked. While Hawthore's biography is one of the most sophisticated examples of biographical writing, persuasively and sympathetically tracing the gender crisis running through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it makes only a partially convincing case for recasting Rachilde as a modernist writer.

The profile of Rachilde that emerges is unsurprising for an author who is known as "the queen of decadence" (76). A virginal "pornographer" and cross-dresser, Rachilde mobilized and disrupted conventional expectations about gender in a conscious effort of self-promotion. Equally decadent are her wavering support of homosexuality and her disavowal of feminism, as if in anticipation of Oscar Wilde's dictum that "an ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style." ¹ Hawthorne reads Rachilde's self-dramatization against the background of a childhood of neglect and a culture that is coercive about gender roles. Likewise, she contextualizes Rachilde's xenophobia and her anti-Semitism. Hawthorne explains them, in part, as the effects of the Franco-Prussian war that "created a generation of patriots and xenophobes" (41). While Rachilde went to great lengths to exaggerate her own singularity, Hawthorne goes to these lengths to emphasize her exemplarity.

By claiming that Rachilde is representative of her cultural moment, Hawthorne contradicts the portrait that has been painted in previous biographies, all of which highlight Rachilde's eccentricity. ² Early in her research, Hawthorne discovered that these biographies got the most basic facts about Rachilde's life wrong, facts as ostensibly neutral to character as date and time of birth. The source of the misinformation—for example, the transposition of the hour of birth from the prosaic six A.M., to the poetic and Poe-esque hour of midnight—was Rachilde herself. But while the habit of presenting oneself through lies with such systematic rigor is hardly common, the claim that Rachilde is unexceptional, itself exaggerated, serves several purposes. First, it allows Hawthorne to expose errors in received Rachildean folklore (caused by the naïve reading practices to which her own work is a good corrective). Second, the fact that the most banal cornerstones of a life story become suggestively destabilized lends intrigue to Hawthorne's own narrative. And finally, by presenting Rachilde neither as an isolated eccentric, nor as simply the female representative of decadence, but as a forgotten though significant "woman of the Left Bank," (218) a forerunner and participant in modernism, Hawthorne makes Rachilde's most egregious trait, her politics, less specific to her.

It is because of Rachilde's politics, and largely those concerning identity, that Hawthorne classifies her as a modernist. Yet by Hawthorne's account, Rachilde resisted modern life. One form of this resistance was her hostility to surrealism; this Hawthorne attributes to its exclusionary misogyny without, however, pointing out the equally pronounced role of misogyny in decadence, a movement also concerned with gender. ³ Hawthorne explains Rachilde's hostility to surrealism as a political gesture that should be read through her unintentional and unpoliticized feminism (she actually wrote against feminism). In other words, Rachilde turns to the past (appearing to be reactionary) in order to resist misogyny (a resistance which appears progressive). For Hawthorne, Rachilde's nostalgia—"deployed" in order to "avoid dichotomous views about progress" (227)—should not be taken at face value. And when Hawthorne announces Rachilde as a fascist sympathizer, she does so in order to link Rachilde to modernist women who aligned themselves with the fascist movement even when they opposed Nazism: women such as Natalie Barney, Colette, and Gertrude Stein (209). Although Hawthorne is careful to admit...