The Hysteric's Revenge: French Women Writers at the Fin de Siècle

Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Marcelle Tinayre, Renée Vivien, Liane de Pougy, Odette Dulac—these are not exactly household names in the French literary canon. In The Hysteric's Revenge: French Women Writers at the Fin de Siècle, Rachel Mesch does much more than rescue these women writers from scholarly oblivion. Mesch argues that through the development of a counter-discourse, these and other women writers successfully challenged the prevailing assumptions of female intellectual inferiority that dominated the late nineteenth-century cultural imagination. Mesch interprets fin-de-siècle women writers in the context of their critical reception by male critics as well as against the background of contemporary medical and scientific discourses on female sexuality and the female body. The book examines a paradoxical moment in French literary and cultural history. On the one hand, during the decades spanning the fin de siècle and the Belle Epoque, a record number of female-authored novels was published in France. On the other hand, this period also witnessed an obsession with female sexuality and fears of female depravity that traversed literary, scientific, and medical discourse. Mesch sees the two phenomena as closely related. Her contention is "that the widespread interest in female sexuality among doctors, writers, and scientists during this period has obscured an equally dangerous perceived threat to the nineteenth-century social body—that of a female mind. The anxiety that women have a potential to produce literature as well as men reveals itself consistently in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sociological, literary, and medical theories that argue the necessity to keep women in the private sphere" (5). The idea that a woman could possess an intellect equal to a man's was perceived as a threat to the fundamental structures of French patriarchy. The result of this anxiety was a tendency on the part of male writers to denigrate the literary merit of women's writings and to associate female authorship with moral depravity and mental instability. The woman writer was thus construed in the dominant male discourse as a figure akin to the prostitute or the hysteric. The Hysteric's Revenge reconstructs the ways in which fin-de-siècle women writers confronted the culturally presumed association of intellect and virility, and challenged it by engaging in counter-discourses that "deploy the mechanisms of the dominant discourse" (7). Bringing these novels together for the first time, Mesch examines how women writers claim their authority and subjectivity by explicitly engaging with the discourse of sexuality.

The book consists of five chapters. Following an extensive introduction that lays out the theoretical and historical framework for her study, the first chapter, "Literary Science and the Female Subject," is devoted to Emile Zola's Nana, a novel that serves as a counterpoint for subsequent discussions of female writers. A text that exemplifies the overlapping of patriarchal literary and scientific discourses of the time, Nana is above all about the dangers of female sexuality. Yet at the same time, as Mesch demonstrates, even in this novel the threat of female intellect is present. She reads Nana "as a discursive struggle between a male writer and the fantasmatic demon he is attempting to master" (26)—precisely the type of anxiety surrounding female sexuality that fin-de-siècle women writers were compelled to write against.

Chapter 2, "Memoirs of the Fille Publique," considers three autobiographical novels by women whose identities were tightly interwoven with their public roles—Liane de Pougy's Idylle saphique, Renée Vivien's Une Femme m'apparut, and Colette's La Vagabonde. Mesch terms these women writers filles publiques, to play on the nineteenth-century association between a female public role and sexual promiscuity. Through their autobiographical writing, Pougy, Vivien and Colette construct alternative identities that allow them to resist the association of their public personae with sexual depravity. Moreover, these novelists' experimental writing style serves as a form of resistance to the overarching narrative and symbolic tropes of naturalism and decadence.

Chapters 3 and 4 of The Hysteric's Revenge turn to women writers who adopt the opposite strategy and challenged the link between virility and intellect by explicitly appropriating the dominant male-authorized discourses of naturalism and decadence in their novels. Mesch's guiding question in these two chapters is "Can a master's tool dismantle a master's house?" (80). Chapter 3, "Virility and the Intellectual Woman, or, Can a Woman Be a Decadent?," focuses on experimental novels by Marcelle Tinayre (La Maison du péché) and Lucie Delarue-Mardrus (Marie fille-mère), in which the authors appropriate naturalist discourse as a way to contest the dominant view of the female body as a source of contamination and degeneration. A rewriting of Zola's La Bête humaine, Marie fille-mère adopts the tropes of naturalism to propose a new theory of female sexuality. Chapter 4, "Can a Woman be a Decadent?," is devoted to Rachilde's Monsieur Vénus and La Jongleuse, novels in which "Rachilde displaced the female body from its traditional role in the nineteenth-century narratives of hysteria and made the male body the battleground for intellectual and sexual power" (22). Mesch interprets these novels as an attack on the structures of virility in which Rachilde reinvents the terms of sexual warfare which were typical of decadent writing. The fifth and final chapter, "The Right to Pleasure: Sex and the Sentimental Novel," considers four novels—Anna de Noailles's Le Visage Emerveillé, Gyp's Autour du mariage, Colette's L'Ingénue libertine, and Odette Dulac's Le Droit au plaisir—in which the quest for female pleasure is presented as a path to female knowledge. The novels thus create what Mesch terms a "countersexology" (22) that shapes the relation between female mind and body as a direct challenge to the prevailing ideas of female sexuality.

The Hysteric's Revenge successfully combines cultural history with literary criticism. Meticulously researched and historically grounded, Mesch's analysis crosses generic boundaries to interpret a wide array of medical texts and works of moral hygiène, which she reads alongside writings by nineteenth-century literary critics. Moreover, readers will be indebted to Mesch for excellent close readings of several novels by women writers that previously received little critical attention. The book also contains fascinating biographical information about the writers she discusses, including their often vexed relationships with contemporary women's movements. In The Hysteric's Revenge, Rachel Mesch relates a heretofore unwritten chapter not only in the history of women's writing, but in the history of French literature and French cultural history as a whole.