To the Lighthouse: Fictions of Masculine Identity in Rachilde’s La Tour d’Amour

To the Lighthouse: Fictions of Masculine Identity in Rachilde’s La Tour d ’ Amour Melanie C. Hawthorne I SA PEN A METAPHORICAL PENIS? ’’asked Gilbert and Gubar in their study of women writers, encapsulating the question of the role of gender in women’s writing in the nineteenth century.1The cultural assumption of a link between writing and gender explains in part the difficulties women had to overcome in order to write. But Gilbert and Gubar’s study focused on British women writers; when turning to the French context, the question must be more nuanced. For one thing, the French nineteenth-century novel is not dominated by women in the same way as its British equivalent. As Joan DeJean writes: “in the nineteenth century, when both the novel and English women’s writing reach what from today’s perspective is considered their fullest expression, the French female literary presence is, with an occasional exception, most notably that of George Sand, at its nadir.” 2Naomi Schor has suggested that, in part, this relative paucity of women writers is related to the domi­ nance of realism, a genre inimical to women’s voices.3What is striking, however, is that despite hostile cultural assumptions and psychological handicaps, women did write, continuously and prolifically, throughout the century. Like their British counterparts, they also inscribed their “anxiety of influence,” the ambivalence they faced when taking up the pen, as well as reflecting the cultural assumptions about gender and writing. Gender cannot be divorced from authorship in the history of nine­ teenth-century French literature. To the extent that writing was a male prerogative, women who wrote were anomalies and subject to various social penalties. The cultural prescription of maleness had several conse­ quences for women writers. Women disguised themselves as men in a number of different registers in order to write: they put on a male mask in public by using male pseudonyms, for example; or they assumed a male appearance by cross-dressing; they proclaimed a hidden male essence despite a female appearance by claiming or acknowledging “virile” qualities in their writing. The history of this male identification is far from monolithic in the nineteenth century, however, and women appropriated different aspects of male roles at different times. The VOL. XXXII, No. 4 41 L ’E sprit C réateur various issues at stake can be illustrated by the examination of one moment in the career of the writer Rachilde, a moment which offers a rich and complex inscription of what Hélène Cixous has called the “com­ ing to writing.” 4 By placing this fin-de-siècle example in the context of the nineteenth century as a whole, I hope to show both some recurrent features of the pattern as well as those particular to this case. Rachilde’s life encompassed many of the issues that were paradig­ matic for French women writers of the nineteenth century. She accepted the unspoken assumption that writing was a masculine activity, and set about fitting that mold. She adopted male pseudonyms to authorize her writing, cross-dressed during the launch of her literary career, and announced on her visiting cards that she was an “homme de lettres.” At first glance, her coming to writing, then, appears to have been mediated by the paternal, the “nom-du-père” ; however, Rachilde’s case also sug­ gests that writing could be a defiance of paternal authority. Women writ­ ers may adopt a male persona to rival their fathers, not to imitate them, to oppose rather than reaffirm patriarchal power. For some women writers, such as Marie Dumas and Judith Gautier, the association of writing with the paternal is a given, but for others, fathers offered different influences, forces that shaped their writing but not as role models. Two examples, one from the beginning of the nine­ teenth century and one from the end, together form something resem­ bling parentheses enclosing the experience of nineteenth-century women. Germaine de Staël idealized her father, Jacques Necker, but he did not approve of women writing and had already persuaded his wife to give up her literary pretensions.5He ridiculed his daughter, mockingly referring to her as Monsieur de...