Rereading the Femme Fatale: Female Readership and Sexual Discovery in Krysinska’s Folle de son corps

As a disputed inventor of the vers libre and only female member of Hydropathes, Montmartre’s legendary group of artists and poets, Marie Krysinska (1857–1908) consistently advocates for a rebellion against both literary and social conformism:

En art, il ne s’agit pas du tout d’être un Jésus accompagné de ses disciples, mais simplement un artiste ayant éprouvé en la sincérité de sa conscience, le désir de s’exprimer, de toucher à quelque corde neuve et s’étant choisi, à cette fin, la formule qui lui convenait le mieux; sans la moindre prétention d’être suivi, avec, au contraire, l’espoir de ne l’être pas.

(Intermèdes, “Introduction” xxxvi)

Krysinska’s push for an individual, independent aesthetic is a dominant trend in her fiction, poetry and critical essays. In her theoretical quest to “atteindre au plus de Beauté expressive possible” (Joies errantes vi), Krysinska breaks from the prosodic rigidity of contemporary schools in an exploration of free verse and the refinement of her own poetics.¹ Cited by Florence Goulesque as a symbolic refusal of “le moule d’une forme classique, patriarcale, déterminée à l’avance” (“‘Le Hibou’” 229), Krysinska’s aesthetic pursuit materializes in her non-conventional portrayals of women as both sexual and intellectual beings. At the fin de siècle, a moment when representations of malevolent female sexuality abound, Krysinska reappropriates the ubiquitous figure of the femme fatale and complicates it by drawing parallels between female eroticism and artistic creativity. A product of the masculine imagination and the Decadents’ celebration of the artificial, the deviant, non-reproductive femme fatale traditionally lacks subjectivity and depth and is characterized solely by her sadistic and destructive sexuality. However, Krysinska does not equate uninhibited sexuality in women with maliciousness. Instead, in her appropriately-titled novel Folle de son corps (1895), female protagonists are defined not by the same excessive, sinister sexuality as their fictitious contemporaries, but rather by their evolving literary interests and complex aesthetic ideologies.

Krysinska was born in Poland in 1857 and migrated to Paris as a young girl to study at the Conservatoire de Musique.² Although she eventually abandoned her formal studies in music, she marked her initiation in the group Hydropathes by composing musical pieces to accompany readings of avant-garde poets such as Baudelaire and Verlaine. Today, Krysinska is most commonly recognized as an originator of free verse poetry, her name having survived years of controversy and debate. However, many of her groundbreaking poetic contributions to Le Chat noir journal in 1882 were eclipsed by Gustave Kahn in 1886 when he declared himself the “true” inventor of the vers libre. A bitter debate and rivalry between the two poets followed, and it was not until relatively recently that Krysinska’s poetic innovations have been critically acknowledged.³ Reaching her professional apogee as a writer at a time when women were publishing novels in unprecedented numbers, Krysinska was also a victim of the ensuing social backlash that deemed women writers as traitors to their sex and society.⁴ For critics such as Barbey d’Aurevilly, writing was an exclusively masculine endeavor that was under attack by the “Bas-bleu,” pejorative parlance for woman writer in 1878:

les femmes qui écrivent ne sont plus des femmes. Ce sont des hommes,—du moins de prétention,—et manqués ! Ce sont des Bas-bleus. Bas-bleu est masculin. Les Bas-bleus ont, plus ou moins, donné la démission de leur sexe.

(xi)

Like many women writers of the time, Krysinska was a target of such misogynistic discourses.⁵

Given the vehement sentiments towards women’s emergent role in intellectual public life, Krysinska’s thematic emphasis on the female mind in her fiction must not only be understood as resistance to the social mores of the time, but also as an adamant declaration of her own aesthetic project. Specifically, her novel Folle de son corps features a sexually promiscuous yet intellectually-driven female protagonist whose ostensible malevolence is complicated by her developing interest in literature. Equally noteworthy, the text...