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  • Hysteria, Hypnotism, the Spirits, and Pornography: Fin-de-Siècle Cultural Discourses in the Decadent Rachilde
  • Lisa Downing
Hysteria, Hypnotism, the Spirits, and Pornography: Fin-de-Siècle Cultural Discourses in the Decadent Rachilde. By Michael R. Finn. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2009. 286 pp. Hb $57.50.

Michael Finn's aim in this new work on the Decadent female author Rachilde is to redress the recent critical consensus that has sought to position Rachilde as a protofeminist writer (though one who rejected the label), an ironic commentator on Decadent mores, or a daring provocatrice aspiring to shock contemporary society with her literary descriptions of sexual perversions. Instead, Finn uses Rachilde as a 'case study' to examine the effects on the late nineteenth-century creative female psyche of a range of medical, literary, and spiritual discourses — namely the four discourses that form the title of the work. In tandem with this careful study of discursive currents, Finn takes a biographical approach to his subject matter. In particular he examines Rachilde's medical history, beliefs, and reading/writing habits in order to expose the extent to which her immersion in these four discursive trends had 'an invasive, potentially disempowering impact on the young woman and budding author' (p. 11). The agenda pursued here is, arguably, a broadly feminist one: Finn seeks to evaluate the ways in which cultural stereotypes, received ideas, and truth claims about 'woman' and 'the feminine' affect those individuals designated female who live in a patriarchal culture — here exemplified by Rachilde and end-of-century France. However, this is a precarious agenda, as, in the hands of a less able scholar, it could risk confirming the pathologizing discourses it sets out to expose. For example, Rachilde is described as physically ill, 'emotionally debilitated' (p. 11), and suffering from bouts of hysteria. Finn is careful to situate the meanings of these debilities in discursive networks rather than suggesting for a moment that they are inevitable factors of the female 'condition'. However, the refusal to consider Rachilde's textual audacity in terms of reverse-discursive, playful, knowing resistance to normative regimes, and to see it instead as the product of a range of symptoms, strikes this particular reader as selling somewhat short Rachilde's originality and determined agency. The strongest and most impressive aspect of this study is its genuinely meticulous scholarship in terms of the historical work undertaken to uncover and explore a set of discourses that operated in the fin de siècle. Finn is a peerless archaeologist of medical, scientific, and spiritualist texts, and a careful and comprehensive reader of Rachilde's correspondence and other little-known writing. Different kinds of textual production are read together to show the interpenetration of discursive fields in the period. The book is therefore an invaluable resource for every student and serious researcher of nineteenth-century cultural and medical history and of Rachilde's writing, whether or not they agree ultimately with Finn's central thesis regarding the genesis and meanings of the author's texts. In sum, Finn offers a refreshing and original approach to the life and work of an important writer and the times in which she lived. [End Page 399]

Lisa Downing
University of Exeter
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