Les Romans de la Salpêtrière. Réception d'une scénographie clinique: Jean-Martin Charcot dans l'imaginaire fin-de-siècle (review)

In this detailed thematic study of Jean-Martin Charcot's cultural legacy, Bernard Marquer analyses the impact of the famous neurologist's medical theories on the literary imagination of the fin-de-siècle. By combining a thorough socio-historical presentation of Charcot's work and of the gradual elaboration of his medical empire with a sensitive reading of the literary texts influenced by the 'Maître de la Salpêtrière', Marquer's work highlights the tremendous cultural impact of Charcot's medical praxis as it was developed during the famous 'leçons du vendredi', and, more importantly, the way in which his theories were simultaneously adopted and subverted by contemporary writers. Without minimizing the impact of Charcot's efforts to annex the sphere of literary and artistic production by asserting the importance of clinical exactitude in aesthetic representations (Les Démoniaques dans l'art), Marquer convincingly argues that in adopting the nosological figure of the 'grande hystérique' as it had been developed by Charcot, novelists were not slavishly conforming to his medical doxa, but reinventing it to suit their own aesthetic ends. Through in-depth analyses of certain key texts such as Zola's Lourdes, Lemmonier's L'Hystérique or Maupassant's Le Horla, Marquer shows how writers used the suggestive image of feminine hysteria as it had been 'staged' by Charcot in order to vent deep-seated anxieties about national decline, the corrupting influence of urban life, and about the ever-present threat of madness and of subjective fragmentation. Charcot's precise medical type was thereby transformed into a convenient screen onto which authors could project their own phantasms, including their ambivalent attitude towards a feminine nature seen as both alluring (the hysteric as a 'cataleptic Venus' (p. 341)) and profoundly threatening (the hysteric as a demonic femme fatale (p. 199)). Simultaneously informative and engaging, this study further commends itself by the richness of its primary and secondary source material; Marquer draws on medical texts by Charcot, his disciples and his rivals, on the work of historians and critics like M. Gauchet, G. Swain, M. Dottin-Orsini, G. Didi-Huberman, J. Goldstein or J. Rigoli, as well as on a wealth of literary material: Zola, Lemmonier, Claretie, Maupassant, Mirbeau, Lermina, Lorrain and Huysmans are studied alongside less well-known writers like André Dubarry, Henri Nizet, Léo Trézénik or Daniel Lesueur. One could perhaps deplore the absence of any photographic illustrations in the section devoted to the (in)famous Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, and the very limited use Marquer makes of iconographic sources as opposed to novels: only once does he base his analysis on a drawing, an 1887 newspaper illustration by Daniel Vierge (pp. 140–41). The intricate structure of the study could also be considered to detract somewhat from the work's overall coherence, by making the thrust and flow of the argument less apparent. On the whole, however, this is a very rich and well-written study which should appeal not only to those interested in the cultural impact of nineteenth-century science, but, more widely, to anyone working in the field of fin-de-siècle French literature.