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

1889, OCTOBER 25: The Cultural Legitimacy of the Woman Writer: In which Rachilde’s daughter is born and questions are raised about legitimacy

1889, october 25 The Cultural Legitimacy of the Woman Writer In which Rachilde’s daughter is born and questions are raised about legitimacy When Rachilde married Vallette, a married woman could not legally enter into a contract. In some senses, then, women writers were all operating illegally to the extent that they entered into writing contracts (both in the strict sense of publishing contracts and in the broader sense of the writer-reader contract). By entering into a marriage contract in 1889, Rachilde underscored the illegitimacy of her writing. The strict legal interpretation only served to highlight a sense of illegitimacy that dogged Rachilde even before the question of marriage arose, however. The decision to marry merely extended Rachilde’s sense of illegitimacy into yet another realm (some of the issues around Rachilde’s sense of “authority” have already been discussed [see “1877: Authority, Authorship , and Authorization”]). There would be yet another encounter with questions of legitimacy when Rachilde’s daughter was born on October 25, 1889.1 This event extends the consideration of legitimacy from Rachilde’s own sense of authority as a writer to the way in which legitimacy may be expressed and mediated through motherhood. Illegitimate offspring always have a mother, but what they lacked in nineteenth-century France was a socially recognized, “legitimate” father. (The right to establish paternity by bringing legal suit was an early feminist demand, but that would not be granted until 1912.) Despite the ambivalence that Rachilde expressed about her own mother, “the angel Gabrielle,” when the time came to name her first child, a daughter, Rachilde nevertheless chose to name her after her mother. The decision was neither obvious nor predetermined. Rachilde ’s parents had christened her Marie-Marguerite, for example, instead of naming her after one of her grandmothers (Jeanne Eymery and Marie-Etiennette Izaline Desmond). Rachilde, on the other hand, chose to emphasize the maternal connection. Given the commonplace about books being an author’s children, Rachilde’s choice concerning her real child has implications for her literary offspring as well. In both cases, Rachilde strengthens the maternal link to offset the perceived lack of legitimate paternity. Although this strategy will have hidden costs (some of which are discussed here, others in “1900: Women and Education”), the focus here will be on Rachilde’s debt to her mother, a debt that has often gone unacknowledged in accounts of her writing but that is tacitly acknowledged in the naming of the child who would become known as Gabrielle Vallette. The only picture many readers get of Rachilde’s mother is that of the madwoman she came increasingly to represent. This is the side Rachilde often emphasizes, for example, in the memories of her mother’s unaffectionate behavior that she shared with Auriant (referred to in “1870: The Ambivalence of the Paternal”) and in the accounts of increasing instability that emerge from Vallette’s letters (see “1885: Marriage and the Woman Writer”). Such later recriminations have covered up the traces of a sense of debt, and a closer reading suggests that Rachilde’s mother was a strong, early influence who helped Rachilde launch her career. Some of the ways Gabrielle Eymery helped her daughter get her start as a writer have already been discussed. Gabrielle’s genealogical connections to writers (mythologized connections to writers such as Brantôme as well as real connections to professional writers such as Rachilde ’s maternal grandfather) were important to Rachilde in viewing and presenting herself as destined to become a writer as well (see “1860: Women as Outsiders”). Gabrielle may have played an important role in providing her daughter with the enabling fiction of the Swedish gentleman “Rachilde” (see “1876: Woman as Medium”), a role that may well extend to being an ally, a “coconspirator” in Rachilde’s early writing.2 This chapter considers some of the other debts that are acknowledged in the naming of Gabrielle Vallette. Rachilde’s memoirs Quand j’étais jeune end with the chapter “Une Dangereuse Explication” in which she recounts a conversation with her father. The two discuss why he had wanted to marry her off, his good intentions in wanting to get his daughter away from what he perceived as the dangerous influence of her mother. These memoirs, then, leave the reader with a sense of Rachilde’s reconciliation with her father and their complicity against her mother. The final picture, however, freezes the players in this configuration and obscures the ways in which all...