Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth-Century French Literature (review)

L'amour and la mort are near homophones, and in the nineteenth century, an age that glorified "la belle mort," it is not surprising to find death linked to sexuality. Lisa Downing examines the extreme point of this association, an original topic for a full-length study. She does not attempt to survey the whole range of necrophilia in nineteenth-century French culture and literature; rather, she tackles theoretical and psychoanalytical questions and deals mainly with the works of Baudelaire and Rachilde. The result is a well focused, convincing analysis.

In a chapter on "Sex and Sexology," Downing mentions the historical conditions that made death so prominent, like high infant mortality rates, cholera epidemics, and wars (one might add the still-vivid memory of the Terror). They led to "visible signs of mortality" such as visits to the morgue and elaborate funerary practices. Although this is not a historical study, I would have been interested in more on these topics, especially on death as spectacle, which we find in paintings and photographs of the dead and in the rise of embalming. There is no reference to historians of death like Vovelle and Ariès. Some of the latter's conclusions have been contested, but he is a rich source of information about material culture. Downing does look at contemporary literary and sociocultural texts that associate death with the erotic, including Berlioz's memoirs, the Goncourts's journal, Krafft-Ebing and other sexologists, and degeneration theorists of the mid- to late century. A particularly helpful section mines them for what can be deduced about the reception of Sade. Downing outlines the construction of a medical, pathological view of necrophilia, drawing out the ambivalences in Krafft-Ebing's analysis of necrophiliacs. It would be interesting to compare his analyses with criminological discourse on similar cases.

In her second chapter, Downing reads Freud as a product of the culture of the period and lays out the aspects of his theories that will inform her own work. She argues that Freud is mistaken in opposing Eros to Thanatos, rather than maintaining them as complementary and intertwined. Considering the theories of Laplanche and Bersani, who link the death drive to the libidinal, Downing stakes a claim for necrophilia, instead of sadomasochism, as the more likely candidate for fusing the two. The threat of castration, as in myths of decapitation, may be interpreted as a metaphor for death, rather than the other way around. It is sometimes difficult for critics to use Freud, who can provide a powerful explanation for such otherwise unacceptable and incomprehensible phenomena, and at the same time to provide a critical reading of his work; it's rather like having your theory and eating it too. Downing succeeds in negotiating this territory, though the death instinct is particularly counter-intuitive and, as she notes, often rejected.

Turning to literature, Downing argues that Baudelaire's fascination with mortality and the erotic should be read together and further, that they are linked to his artistic "risk-taking." Necrophilia, rather than sadism, is the "imaginative paradigm which best characterizes" him. First, she examines texts that represent a desire for death. As for all desire, its accomplishment is its end (c'est le cas de le dire); furthermore, death is inaccessible to representation because it is literally unimaginable. She then studies poems that associate death with sexuality, like "Je t'adore à l'égal de la voûte nocturne" and "Une charogne," with sensitive attention to imagery, rhetorical devices, and sonorities. The reading of "Une martyre" is particularly fine. She links Baudelaire's transformation of horror into beauty to that of death into pleasure and finds a similar process at work in his commentary on Delacroix's Madeleine dans le désert. One might disagree with certain points or wish to qualify them: that two perfectly regular alexandrines in "À une madone" are "decentered" (78); that "murder wholly replaces sex" in the necrophiliac poems (84); or that Baudelaire interprets Delacroix through...