Review: The Animal, Rachilde (1893)

I very much enjoyed reviewing French Decadent writer Rachilde’s 1887’s The Marquise de Sade for this blog back in 2020, which was one reason why I was so delighted when publisher Rachilde & Co. got in touch about their new translation/edition of her 1893 novel, The Animal. 

The Animal, Rachilde (1893)

Available in English for the very first time, The Animal tells the story of Laure Lordès, a woman with a love of sex, food, and cats. Move aside Mary Barbe (heroine of The Marquise de Sade)—Laure is potentially an even more shocking nineteenth-century heroine. Precociously sexual, she introduces all the neighborhood boys to sin before even reaching puberty. Casually cruel, she drives her father’s one-eyed clerk to suicide, following their affair. And distinctly feline herself, both in appearance and attitude, she reaches a violent end at the hands paws of the one living creature she really loves.

Intrigued yet? You should be. This is a novel that will make you revisit your assumptions about the nineteenth century and potentially understand the perspective of those British Victorians who were so alarmed by the literature of the French on the other side of the Channel. 

But the importance of The Animal isn’t just in its shock value. Some of the book’s most memorable moments, for me, were about not Laure, but the more conventional characters surrounding her. Laure’s in-born love of sex is contrasted with the transactional nature of intimacy in the social sanctioned arenas of both sex work and marriage. In one passage, Rachilde passes this damning verdict on Laure’s lover, whose approach to both eating and lovemaking is functional and prosaic:

“He would marry because romantic relationships are not very safe despite numerous pharmaceutical discoveries, and he would have children modeled after him, other samples of the irreproachable modern bourgeois factory: molds from other molds, loaded in the belly with the same meter that regulates both the needs of the stomach and those of love…! No, these men do not have the gift of loving, even like animals do; they are, in the scale of beings, below animals, between the mineral diamond and the mineral oyster shell!”

Overall, I’d like to thank Rachilde & Co. for such a fascinating read and to recommend this novel to every English-speaking adult—mostly because I want more people to talk about it with! Read The Animal already? Let me know—here, on Instagram, on Facebook, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. Want regular updates from me? Sign up to my monthly email newsletter.