Rachilde: Decadence, Gender and the Woman Writer 185973555X, 9781859735558

Citation preview

Decadence, Gender and the Woman Writer

Diana Holmes

Rachilde

Rachilde Decadence, Gender and the Woman Writer

Diana Holmes

Oxford • New York

First published in 2001 by Berg Editorial offices: 150 Cowley Road, Oxford, 0X4 1JJ, UK 838 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10003-4812, USA

© Diana Holmes 2001

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg.

Berg is an imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataioging-in-Publication Data Holmes, Diana, 1949Rachilde : decadence, gender, and the woman writer I Diana Holmes. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-85973-555-X 1. Rachilde, 1860-1953. Monsieur Vaenus. 2. Eroticism in literature. 3. Decadence in literature. I. Title. PQ2643.A323 M634 2001 843'.912—dc21 2001004387

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 1 85973 555 X (Cloth)

Typeset by JS Typesetting, Wellingborough, Northants. Printed in the United Kingdom by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire.

03'/^3OO(

For Peg and Bill Cheesewright

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2023 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/rachildedecadencOOOOholm

Contents ••• Vlll

Acknowledgements Introduction

Part I A Werewolf in Paris Self-invention

9

2

Rachilde - Man of Letters

29

3

Celebrity and Survival

47

Rachilde and Feminism

69

Part II Writing as a Woman 5

Rachilde and the Decadent Novel

6

Motherless Daughters: Rachilde’s Women

113

7

The Wolf-slayer and the Drag Queen: Rachilde and Masculinity

145

8

Stories of the Self: Rachilde’s Autobiographical Writing

167

9

Short Stories, Theatre, Poetry

191

91

Conclusion

213

Bibliography

215

Index

229

♦ ♦

- Vll -

Acknowledgements

This book was researched and written with the support of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for the academic year 1999-2000. Without it, completion would have taken a great deal longer, so thanks to the Lever­ hulme Trust. Thanks too to family, friends and colleagues who have provided help and support, and particularly to Philippe and Zaza Blanchard for friend­ ship and accommodation in Paris, and to Penny Welch for generously finding time to read and discuss work in progress. Madame Romana Severini, Rachilde’s executor, kindly replied to my questions, supplying information, corrections to some of Rachilde’s own embellishments of her life story, and photographs. Father Pierre Pommarede and the Societe Historique et Archeologique du Perigord also provided very helpful documentation. With the exception of Figures 7 and 8, all photographs are reproduced courtesy of Madame Romana Severini and the Societe Historique et Archeologique du Perigord. Figure 7 is reproduced courtesy of the Bibliotheque Marguerite Durand, and Figure 8 courtesy of the Mercure de France.

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Introduction

Rachilde was a colourful, prolific, combative figure on the French literary scene for more than half a century. Her writing career coincided roughly with the life of the Third French Republic (1871-1940), a regime for which she felt a hearty anti-democratic contempt. She made a scandalous debut as the cross-dressing author of pornographic novels, and was the only woman to form part of the Decadent movement in the 1880s and 1890s. As one of the founders of the influential journal the Mercure de France and the wife of its editor-in-chief, she supported new writers and projects including Alfred Jarry and Symbolist theatre, and for over thirty years she publicized her idiosyncratic but often perceptive responses to contemporary fiction through the journal’s reviews section. In the 1920s she quarrelled noisily with the next generation of enfants terribles, the Surrealists. Above all, she wrote novels, stories, to a lesser extent plays and poetry, that express an intense, often paradoxical vision: reactionary yet furiously aware of the need to challenge fixed hierarchies of power; anti-feminist yet in passionate revolt against the role and identity ascribed to women; shaped by the realist tradition but equally by the anti-realist polemics of decadence, and diverging from both, particularly in the representation of gender. Writing a book about Rachilde raises several issues that are pertinent to any feminist study of a woman writer at the start of the twenty-first century. First, there is the question of the place of biography in the study of literature. I felt that as the first full-length study in English of a woman­ writer who had - until the 1990s - virtually disappeared from history, the book should aim to reinstate Rachilde as an important figure in the cultural history of France, which meant that a purely textual study would not be enough. Her life - like that of her heroines - also seemed to mirror, albeit in heightened, dramatized form, that of her female contemporaries, so that the biography represented another small strand in the collective project of developing a women s history. Yet since Roland Barthes’s witty demolition of the once traditional ‘man [it usually was] and his works’ approach to literature (in his 1968 text The Death of the Author), to mix biography with textual analysis is to run the risk of joining those critics

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Rachilde savaged by Barthes for their naive conflation of author and narrator, their reduction of the text to a mere coded representation of the author’s experience and personality: ‘when the Author has been found’ as Barthes puts it, ‘the text is explained - victory to the critic’.1 Barthes’s polemics warn against a simple confusion of life and text, but feminist criticism cannot avoid the need to address the relationship between the two. The biographical circumstances that enable or impede the would-be woman author are relevant to the wider issue of women’s place in literary history. A woman like Rachilde who lived the very public life of a well-known author is a significant element of French cultural history not only through her published texts, but also through her performance of a highly visible, often controversial persona. If we are to talk about how women were or were not able to write at certain periods, about the complex juncture of subjectivity, cultural determinants and textuality, then the author’s extratextual existence as an individual in history clearly has to be considered. My aim below is to maintain a proper distinction between life and text, and to discuss the relationship between them with due regard for the nature of language and literary genre as social media (Barthes’s ‘tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’12), rather than as unmediated expression of the personal (though personal experience too is always, inevitably, mediated through culture). Rachilde’s own story is a fascinating one: the stories she wrote are fuelled by the psycho­ emotional conflicts she experienced, but are shaped too by the aesthetics of the age, by the internal logic of the textual forms she adopted, and by a multiply-determined but singular imagination. Secondly, the means to evoke, concisely, a period of cultural history already distant from our own are not self-evident. Anachronism is the obvious temptation: as Gillian Beer reminds us In the literature of the past we are presented with immensely detailed interconnecting systems: power and pleasure caught into representations so particular as to be irreplaceable’; what we need to aim for is ‘a coming to know again those beliefs, dreads, unscrutinised expectations which may differ from our own but which may also bear upon them’.3 The use of a wide range of sources, including a variety of histories, contemporary press articles and

1. Roland Barthes (1968), ‘The Death of the Author’, in David Lodge (ed.)(1988), Modern Criticism and Theory - A Reader, London and New York, p. 171. 2. ibid., p. 170. 3. Gillian Beer (1989), ‘Representing Women: Re-presenting the Past’, in Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (eds), The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism, Basingstoke, p. 68.

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Introduction

correspondence, is an attempt to avoid an over-simplified, received view of the fin-de-siecle and the Belle Epoque, the period of Rachilde’s greatest success and influence. Though I am particularly concerned here with gender and with Rachilde’s situation as a woman writer, to concentrate only on what is gender-specific in this period would produce a distorted picture: the expansion of literature as an industry at the end of the nineteenth century, the relationship between the literary avant-garde and anarchism, the powerful but contested influence of Zola and naturalism all help to shape Rachilde’s career and her writing. Gender, though, as a controlling orthodoxy and as a hotly debated issue, runs through the whole culture: Rachilde’s work also needs to be situated in relation to that of those female contemporaries she so despised, to the period’s vibrant feminist movement, and to recurring features of feminine writing that transcend any single era. The critical frameworks available for feminist literary study have multiplied over the last three decades. My approach here is deliberately eclectic, but certain theoretical works (including those of Barthes and Genette4) have been particularly useful. Freud’s models of family relations, and of the early formation of female identity, map neatly on to Rachilde’s versions of the family romance, both in her life and in her writing, and this I attribute not so much to the universal validity of Freud’s work as to the fact that Freud’s rigorous, brilliant studies of the mind and emotions are based on work done with individuals and families of Rachilde’s class and period. Freud (1856-1939) and Rachilde (1860— 1953) were near-contemporaries, separated by nationality but not by social class, and Freud’s account of subjectivity and sexuality seems to me most illuminating when historicized. Rachilde’s fictional world, like the dreams of Freud’s patients, plays out in forceful, vivid images a recurring family drama of filial love and loss that is at once intensely personal and representative of the shared dilemma of women of her class and era. The very titles of Rachilde’s best-known novels announce a desire to unsettle and reverse the gender divide: Monsieur Venus, La Marquise de Sade, Madame Adonis, and this evidence of ‘gender trouble’ makes Judith Butler’s work an obvious intertext. Butlerian avant la lettre as Rachilde proves to be, however, her life also demonstrates that gender can not be reduced to performance - or at least that the way gender can be performed is heavily determined by class, culture and the specific as well as social 4. Gerard Genette (1972), Figures III, Paris. I also refer to Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (1983), Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, London and New York, which provides a clear account of narratology based in part on Genette’s work.

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Rachilde

nature of family relations. Rachildean fiction rejoices in mixing up and redistributing the signifiers of masculinity and femininity. As a writer, she insisted on her transcendence of her sex (‘Rachilde, Man of Letters’ said her visiting card), but she wrote, inevitably, out of a vision of the world emotionally, psychologically, intellectually shaped by the experi­ ence of a female subject in a highly gendered culture. Rachilde’s deliberate, impassioned disturbance of the rules of gender is just one of the ways in which, paradoxically, she writes ‘as a woman’. Finally, a single-author study raises the question of the inevitable relationship (albeit a one-way relationship) that develops between the critic and the writer under study. It is virtually impossible to spend months reading an entire oeuvre, including teenage diaries and correspondence, without experiencing some emotional response to the woman who pro­ duced this vast, uneven, controlled yet passionate body of work. My response to Rachilde has been equally composed of fascination and antipathy: fascination with the violence, eroticism and curiously ambi­ valent sexual politics of her best-known novels, antipathy for her elitism, her patrician disdain for the ordinary, her refusal of female solidarity. Contrasting this ambivalence with the almost unqualified sense of affinity I felt for Colette (the subject of an earlier book), despite the latter’s sometimes dubious politics, I recognized the irrational, subjective and temperamental element running alongside the reasoned response. Rachilde’s hostility to the maternal is what separates her most clearly from her one-time friend and protegee Colette and, for personal biograph­ ical reasons, my own worldview is much more in harmony with the latter’s. Prolonged intimacy with Rachilde’s way of seeing the world has not changed my judgement, and total objectivity in academic writing is certainly impossible - but I hope to have reached, and provided, a sympathetic understanding of Rachilde’s anti-maternal, sometimes misogynist and frequently misanthropic literary vision. Part I, ‘A Werewolf in Paris’, traces Rachilde’s life and writing career, her place within and contribution to the cultural history of a lengthy period, and - in the fourth chapter - her relationship with feminism, both as a political movement and as a broader ideological force. Part II, ‘Writing as a Woman’, is a mainly textual study of Rachilde’s work that also contextualizes the writing within the history of French culture, and within the history of women’s writing. Chapter 5, ‘Rachilde and the Decadent Novel’, examines the influence of Zola on Rachilde’s early work and her reaction against naturalism, then surveys her work in the novel genre in terms of narrative techniques and themes. Chapter 6, -4-

Introduction

‘Motherless Daughters: Rachilde’s Women’, concentrates on the five finde-siecle ‘heroine novels’ that have remained Rachilde’s most famous works, exploring their ambivalent representation of power and gender and their hostile yet nostalgic focus on absent or inadequate mothers. Chapter 7, ‘The Wolf-slayer and the Drag Queen: Rachilde and Mascu­ linity’, analyses Rachilde’s varied representations of masculinity and the extent of her challenge to a strongly enforced orthodoxy of polarised gender roles. Chapter 8, ‘Stories of the Self: Rachilde’s Autobiographical Writing’, brings together Rachilde’s explicitly autobiographical works and her autobiographical fictions, re-reading the story of her life from the point of view of the textual construction of (feminine) identity. Finally Chapter 9, ‘Short Stories, Theatre, Poetry’, studies Rachilde’s substantial and often brilliant work in genres other than the novel.

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Part I A Werewolf in Paris

-1Self-invention

What is known of Rachilde’s early life comes to us largely through her own autobiographical writing, for scattered through her long career as a writer are prefaces, interviews and essays that claim to provide a truthful account of her ancestry, childhood and girlhood, as well as novels a clef which tell the same story only lightly veiled in fiction. Given the adult Rachilde’s capacity for self-dramatization, for reasons that included the need to promote her books, allowance must be made for some element of mythifying self-invention in these texts. However, such factual sources as are available - mainly the archives and local press of her native Perigord - largely corroborate Rachilde’s own accounts, and the consistency of her memories across the years also suggests that they were founded in experience. Not only the facts of her story, but also the emotional conflicts these produced, are represented again and again in different textual forms.

A suitable ancestry Marguerite Eymery - Rachilde’s real name - was bom on 12 February 1860 in the family home of Le Cros, near Perigueux in south-west France. Her life thus began in the final decade of the Second Empire, though seventy of her ninety-three years would be lived under France’s Third Republic (1871-1940). The only child of ill-matched parents, she inherited (and sometimes embellished) a family history that prefigured the violent, transgressive elements in her own fiction. On her mother’s side, her ancestors included one Dom Feytos, a Dominican priest who was also Grand Inquisitor of Spain, thus associated with the cruelty and intolerance of the Inquisition. The son he fathered, despite his vow of priestly celibacy, was dispatched to be brought up in the Languedoc, and given the name Frangois-Marie Feytaud. By marrying a woman of the Brantome family, Frangois-Marie added to Rachilde’s legacy of violence and illegitimacy that of scandalous literary fame, for the Brantomes were descended from the abbe de Brantome (1540-1614), the author of scabrous anecdotes published posthumously as Memoirs containing the -9-

A Werewolf in Paris

lives of gallant ladies of his time. A later descendant of the FeytaudBrantome union, Urbain-Frantjois, became Canon of the Cathedral of Perigueux in the late eighteenth century, but in the period following the 1789 Revolution he left the priesthood, married and became a lawyer, devoting his energies primarily to the defence of the interests of the poor.1 Local legend maintained that a defrocked priest became a werewolf, and that his descendants to the fifth generation were also damned souls who turned into wolves on the feast of Candlemas (2 February). Rachilde was to identify ardently with the myth of the werewolf: the wild, heretical and outlawed creature feared by conventional folk chimed nicely with her self-image as a daring outsider. The marriage of the werewolf lawyer produced children, including a son Urbain, born 1807, who made a career as a journalist, becoming editor of a Perigordian newspaper, Le Courrier du Nord (in 1847) and a respected local Justice of the Peace (1870). Urbain Feytaud, Rachilde’s grandfather, thus strengthened the literary line of inheritance. He and his wife Izoline had one daughter, Gabrielle Feytaud, who led the elegantly leisured life of a jeune fille of the upper bourgeoisie, possibly including a debutante season at the Imperial Court, until she fell in love with a dashing but unsuitable young man. According to his daughter, Joseph Eymery was the ‘lovechild’ of an aristocrat, the Marquis d’Ormoy, and of one of his many female conquests, Mademoiselle de Lidonne, an impoverished ‘lady companion’ in another noble household. Local historians confirm the illegitimacy, but dispute the existence of the noble d’Ormoy.1 2 Blueblooded or not, Joseph’s illegitimacy and lack of fortune made him an unlikely suitor for Gabrielle; he was, nonetheless, a handsome, dashing young cavalry officer, already decorated for his courage in the colonial wars in Africa, and the Feytauds reluctantly accepted their daughter’s choice. Gabrielle and Joseph were married in 1859, and Marguerite was born less than a year later. If her maternal line provided a heritage of illegitimacy and demonic violence, as well as literary talent, her paternal lineage reinforced the thread of bastardy, with its connotations both of illicit love and of outsider status, and added a martial stoicism and pride.

1. Claude Dauphine (1991), Rachilde, Paris, Mercure de France, p. 26. Father Pierre Pommarede, President of the Perigord Historical and Archeological Society, confirms the broad truth of this story, but finds records of Rachilde’s ancestor as a simple priest rather than a canon. P. Pommarede (1993), Le sol et le sang de Rachilde, Bulletin de la Societe Historique et Archeologique du Perigord, Tome CXX, p. 808. 2. Pommarede, Le sol et le sang, p. 804.

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Self-invention

Figure 1. Rachilde as a child

The family romance Le Cros, set on low ground and surrounded by dark woods, provided a dank and lugubrious setting both for Marguerite’s childhood and transmuted into fiction - for several of her subsequent novels (for example Les Rageac, L’Amazone rouge). From her own accounts, the first ten years of her life were divided between periods at home, where her mother’s absorption in music and the social commitments of a captain’s wife meant that Marguerite was consigned to the care of servants and the company of the local peasant children, and periods spent travelling around from one garrison town to another as Captain Eymery’s company moved quarters. Born too soon to benefit from the 1881 laws that made primary schooling compulsory, her education at this time was minimal, and she claimed to have reached the age of eight unable to read, ignorant of - 11 -

A Werewolf in Paris

religion, geography and history, her imagination fed only by the fables of La Fontaine and the ‘incoherent tales’3 of her nurse, Lala. Her tenth year was that of the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian war and the end of the Empire. The humiliation of France coincided with that of her father. Joseph Eymery had already suffered a period of harsh imprison­ ment when he was disciplined by his superiors for pursuing a duel, against their express orders, with a fellow officer who had referred publicly to his illegitimate birth. Though he led his troops bravely in the 1870 war, he was captured and imprisoned by the Prussians, and this second spell of incarceration left him disfigured by smallpox and profoundly deaf. Retired from the army, he retreated to Le Cros, where relations with his wife became increasingly cold. 1870 seems to have marked the definitive end of any sexual or even friendly relationship between the couple, with Joseph possibly seeking compensations among the local women.4 Gabrielle had lost her dashing hero and withdrew from the gruff, uncom­ municative husband who was now permanently in residence, into depres­ sion, indifference to her family and the household, and later insanity. Marguerite spent her later childhood and her adolescence between parents who clearly disliked each other and who offered little attention or warmth to their only child. Her reaction to this emotional deprivation was entirely different in the case of each parent, and was to inform her subsequent characteriza­ tions of sexual difference. To the little girl, despite his frequent boorish­ ness, her father was a glamorous figure invested with the prestige conferred by military honours, and by apparent mastery of the world beyond the home. He was, as she wrote much later in life, ‘the idol of my childhood’,5 ‘for reasons that are childish in a particularly feminine 3. Rachilde summarized her early (lack of) education in the preface to A Mort (Paris, 1886). ‘Religious instruction? None at all! ... History of France? A few battles . . . Geography - I didn't know where to find Germany on the map . . . Accomplishments: drawing, music, la Fontaine's fables and the incoherent tales of Lala.’ ('Instruction religieuse?. . . neant! . . . Histoire de France? Quelques faits d’armes . . . Geographic, ignore la position de FAllemagne sur la carte. . . . Talents d’agrement: dessin, musique, fables de la Fontaine et les contes incohe rents de Lala?), p. vi. 4. In Quand j'etais jeune (1947), Rachilde suggests that Joseph Eymery may have fathered illegitimate children in the region before or around the time of her own birth (see Cesarien, pp. 120-5). She also described him as a ‘Don Juan who changed mistresses as often as he changed garrisons'. (Organographes du Cymbalum Pataphysicum [1983], p. 7). Rachilde dates the end of any sexual relationship between her parents either immediately after her own conception (in Pourquoi je ne suis pas feministe [1928], p. 15) or in 1870 (Quand j'etais jeune , p. 129). 5. Tidole de mon enfance’, Quand j'etais jeune, p. 49.

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Self-invention

Figure 2. Captain Joseph Eymery - Rachilde’s father

way: because he could look straight into the sun, as eagles can; because he was a skilled horseman and had fought in the war’.6 It was obvious to her even as a small child that this warrior hero would have much preferred a son (‘My father, magnificent brute that he was, could not forgive me for being a little girl’7), and that the only way of gaining his attention and approval was to try to become the missing male child. At the same time, Joseph Eymery was a conventionally minded man of his time and his profession, who strongly disapproved of female emancipation as of any other defiance of social orthodoxy. Marguerite found herself in a 6. ‘pour des raisons d’une puerilite toute feminine: parce qu’il pouvait regarder le soleil en face, comme les aigles; parce qu’il montait tres bien a cheval et qu’il avail fait la guerre’, Pourquoi je ne suis pas feminists (1928), p. 17. 7. ‘Mon pere, la plus magnifique des brutes, ne me pardonnait pas d’etre une petite fille . . .’ Dans le puits ou la vie inferieure 1915-1917 [1918], p. 36.

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A Werewolf in Paris

double bind: ‘masculine’ skills, activities and freedoms took her closer to becoming her father’s ideal son, but since her female identity was an insuperable fact, this transgression of the gender rules also ran the risk of incurring his anger. Thus, although she was a small and not particularly sturdy child, she fought valiantly with the local boys, learnt to ride well and to fence, wore trousers apart from on special occasions, and by making full use of her grandfather’s extensive library (including the works of the Marquis de Sade) provided herself with a broad, unstructured but also uncensored education that was the very reverse of the bland, domestic and Christian training normally recommended for middle-class girls. When, in her mid-teens, she succeeded in being sent as correspondent for the local newspaper to report on the staged military manoeuvres led, in part, by her father, she was able to ride well enough to keep up with the cavalry as well-as playing the masculine role of ‘war’ journalist. In a potentially perfect moment of wish-fulfilment, the commanding general mistook her for her father’s son. But would the latter really be pleased? Rachilde remembered the moment - narrated in a vivid present tense as one of terror: the general’s mistake would ‘ fill my father with joy . . . or with terrible sorrow. I tremble.’8 His reasonably good-humoured explanation to the general causes her relief rather than jubilation: she has not been totally rejected in her borrowed masculinity. In psychoanalytical terms, the daughter’s desire to be accepted as the son, to imitate and inherit the father’s masculinity, suggests a difficult and finally insoluble Oedipal conflict - for the girl can never ‘have’ the phallus, and in classical Freudian terms must relinquish this ambition and settle for ‘having’ her father as the object of her desire, rather than becoming him. This desire to be acknowledged as her father’s daughter, or in her specifically female (and heterosexual) identity, co-exists and conflicts with the will to paternal identification in Rachilde’s account of relations with her father. Again the memoir of the military manoeuvres is revealing. After the event, a dinner is to take place, to which the general specifically invites the androgynous young correspondent. Her father will also be there, and although she is weary and more desiring of sleep than socializing, she must also succeed in the role of daughter. Recreating the scene, Rachilde remembers the dress, the necklace borrowed from her (very feminine) grandmother, the pink face powder and her anxiety before the mirror: ‘Did I look ridiculous? Did I look enough like a woman?

8. ‘. . . comble[r] mon pere d'une joie . . . ou d’une affreuse peine. Je tremble’, Quand j'etais jeune, p. 78.

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Self-invention

What would my father say?’9 This the reader never finds out: the point of the narrative is the intensity of desire for his approval. Her father’s harshness and refusal of love only confirmed his status as the unattainable hero, symbol of the spatial and social freedom of the (masculine) world beyond the home, possessor of the phallus his daughter lacked. Her mother’s failings were less easy to forgive. ‘The angel Gabrielle’, as her daughter ironically referred to her, conformed super­ ficially to the late nineteenth-century feminine ideal: beautiful, an excellent musician, elegant and chaste. As a wife and mother, her daughter perceived her as icily cold (a ‘marble statue’l011 ), self-centred, opinionated (given in particular to lengthy discourses on ‘the duties of virtuous women and the turpitudes of guilty men’11), and wholly lacking in affection as in desire to care for her family. There is almost certainly a factual basis to this portrayal: Gabrielle may well have been a spoilt and selfish only daughter of indulgent parents, and the bleakness of her married life with an often absent, unfaithful and later deaf and rough-tempered husband seems to have led to fits of depression. Marguerite was obliged to run the household from her early teens, as her mother withdrew increasingly into her private world. Gabrielle’s interventions in her daughter’s literary career (see Chapter 2) were damaging and possibly symptoms of developing mental illness, for she ended her life in the mental asylum at Charenton. But Rachilde’s characterization of her mother, which was to shape her views on feminism and her fictional portrayal of women, is fuelled by more than just Gabrielle’s shortcomings. The Freudian scenario whereby the daughter holds the mother responsible for her own lack of the phallus is surely relevant here. In ‘On Female Sexuality’, Freud observed the tendency of adolescent girls - in the patriarchal families that inevitably formed his corpus for study - to turn away from the mother and towards the father, deprecating the former as ‘castrated’, resenting both the mother’s failure to provide sufficient love, and her failure ‘to provide the little girl with the only proper genital’.12 Rachilde idealizes her father, despite his failure to provide love, because he represents the power and freedom she wishes to acquire; conversely she denigrates her mother with some bitterness, mocking her attempts to claim authority through her

9. ‘Etais-je ridicule? Avais-je assez Fair d'une femme? Que dirait mon pere?’, Quand j’etais jeune, p. 89. 10. Pourquoi je ne suis pas feministe, p. 14. 11. Ibid., p. 19. 12. Sigmund Freud (1977), On sexuality: three essays on the theory of sexuality and other works, London, pp. 381-2.

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A Werewolf in Paris

domestic role (describing her as ‘the woman who is declared strong, she of . . .the modern Scriptures who talks all the time about her duties and rises before dawn’13), wholly rejecting the mother’s attempts to undermine paternal authority: to Gabrielle’s enjoinders to ‘refuse to obey that man because a man is a “‘vile and selfish creature’’ who has no right to exercise his detestable influence over virtuous people’, Rachilde opposes the child’s tenacious admiration, ‘Secretly I admired my father and made no attempt to recognize his faults’.14 Rachilde hates in her mother not only the absence of maternal love, but also the powerlessness, expressed as futile anger, that she most fears for herself. Freud’s concept of penis-envy makes most sense when historicized: as Nancy Chodorow has pointed out, it is in a strongly patriarchal culture that girls are likely to identify the mother with ‘dependence, regression, passivity, and the.lack of adaptation to reality’,15 and to reject her, simultaneously and painfully rejecting a part of themselves. The metaphor of the wolf is telling here. Rachilde’s much prized consanguinity with the wolf came to her from her mother’s side of the family. As a retired officer after 1870, Joseph Eymery took on the post of ‘lieutenant de louveterie’, or chief wolf hunter for the region, where wolves were still a significant danger. At a symbolic level, this actualized the threat to her own well-being posed by paternal authority, but by granting to the humiliated soldier an official, virile role, it also restored that supremacy of the masculine to which Marguerite, like her older self Rachilde, largely subscribed. Writing of her feelings for her father in the years after Joseph’s return, his daughter evokes conflicting emotions: sympathy (‘He is now no more than the shadow of his former self. He has no age, no rank, no . . . job’), passionate adoration that welcomed his restored status as wolf­ slayer (‘I love my father with a strange, unique love full of the terror that only a god who is both cruel and unknown can inspire’) and fear, for wolves ‘after all, are our brothers, my mother’s and mine, according to the legend! I fear the father whom I love. . .’.16 Rachilde accepts the threat

13. kla femme declaree forte, celle de LEcriture . . . moderne qui parle tout le temps de ses devoirs et se leve avant 1’aube . . .', Pourquoi je ne suis pas feministe, p. 20. 14. ‘m'abstenir de toute obeissance vis-a-vis de cet homme paice que 1’homme: “animal immonde et egoiste” n’a pas le droit d’exercer sa detestable influence sur les gens vertueux.' . . . lEn secret j’admirais mon pere sans essayer de me rendre compte de son indignite.’, ibid., pp. 16-17. 15. Nancy Chodorow (1978, 1999), The Reproduction of Mothering - Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, p. 82. 16. Quand j'etais jeune, pp. 74-6.

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Self-invention

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