Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France by Rachel Mesch (review)

This provocative study of what "trans before trans" might mean in postrevolutionary France offers a corrective to the practices of dismissing Jane Dieulafoy, Rachilde, and Marc de Montifaud as eccentrics; labeling them as proto-feminists; and/or presuming them to be attracted to women without taking gender identity into account. Reminding readers often of the risks of applying modern terminology to the women's experiences (there was not even a concept of gender distinct from biology in nineteenth-century France), Mesch proposes that we think about them not exclusively as women but as individuals "for whom the appropriate gender designation remains an open question" (10). For Dieulafoy, wearing men's clothes—while sharp-shooting in the Franco-Prussian war, excavating the palace of Artaxerxes, etc.—was an act of patriotism. Writing helped her grapple with her gender expression: in her travelogues she documents both her experiences abroad and her "shifting sense of self" (45); in her novel about Joan of Arc she inscribes her own story "in a familiar tradition of heroism and martyrdom" (93). However successful Dieulafoy was in domains traditionally coded as male, she did not consider herself a modern woman and was a self-proclaimed enemy of divorce (96). Mesch suspects that Dieulafoy's conservative values made her men's attire and cropped hair seem less threatening and that she escaped social repercussions for her unconventional life because transgender identity "had not yet been named as something to be feared or contained" (120). Moving on to Rachilde, Mesch dispels the notion that the writer was a shameless self-promoter who wrote and did shocking things just for fame and fortune, arguing that she was simply trying to survive. Though she quit wearing men's clothes after marrying, she "did not embrace her femininity any more than she abandoned the feminism that she never espoused" (195). In fact, she claimed to be a werewolf, perhaps as a means of marking her difference from other humans, "of reaching beyond gender" (200). As for Montifaud, she was preoccupied neither with "the why of her difference" (as was Dieulafoy), nor with "the what" (as was Rachilde), but with nothing less than "being a man through her writing" (211). She was repeatedly sentenced to prison—negotiating for time in a mental institution instead of in Saint-Lazare, where prostitutes and violent female criminals were housed—for her writings, including a history of Mary Magdalene that portrayed Mary as a courtesan and Jesus's lover, and another that featured depictions of the sexual pleasures of important Christian figures. Mesch submits that Montifaud's aggressive writing and behavior (challenging Barbey d'Aurevilly to a duel, slapping a critic at the Comédie-Française) allowed her to affirm her difference (235). This eloquently argued study closes with reflections on the Academy's 2017 ruling that la langue inclusive represents a "mortal threat" to the French language (284), and on the idea of using the word trans with an asterisk for figures like the three women brought to life here with such grace and sensitivity.