Review: The Marquise de Sade, Rachilde (1887)

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started reading The Marquise de Sade, by Rachilde (first published in French in 1887). 

I’ve read books by other writers who were part of the late nineteenth-century Decadent Movement. I’ve blogged, for instance, about Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1884 À Rebours (Against Nature), which is often held up as representative of the excesses of the artistic and literary movement. I’ve read Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, some of the most famous Decadent writers in English. And I’ve enjoyed the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley, probably the most famous British visual artist in this group.

However, I had no idea until recently that there was a woman writer amongst the leading French Decadent authors—Marguerite Vallette-Eymery, who published under the pen name Rachilde.

The Marquise de Sade, Rachilde (1887)

The novel of Rachilde’s I picked up was The Marquise de Sade (1887), though her 1884 Monsieur Venus is perhaps slightly better known. Flicking through its front pages, I discovered that it had taken more than a hundred years (!!) for The Marquise de Sade to be published in English, with this translation, by Liz Heron, appearing in 1994.

An intriguing writer, a racy title, and a recent translation? I was in, and flew through the novel within days. Now I’m blogging to tell you all about it. Warning: spoilers ahead, as this one’s a little off the beaten track…

CN: Sexual Violence, Animal Cruelty, Transphobia, Homophobia 

First up, the title is pretty misleading. The novel has nothing directly to do with the nobleman, philosopher, and sexual libertine who put the “S” in “BDSM.” Rather, the feminisation of the title (this is the Marquise de Sade, rather than the masculine Marquis) is a reference to the novel’s central theme. Rachilde’s book is a bildungsroman about how a girl grows into a woman with a perverse taste for cruelty.

Second, if you’re expecting sex on every page, you’re going to be disappointed. Mary Barbe, our protagonist, is seven years old in the opening chapter and the book mainly deals with her childhood. This, of course, includes references to her nascent sexuality, but it’s only in the last quarter of the novel, when Mary is an adult, that the content becomes overtly and consistently sexual.

What I was least prepared for was how (deliberately!) funny the book was in parts. Mary is the daughter of a colonel and Rachilde’s satirical depiction of the social life of officers in the French army is incredibly entertaining. 

As a writer, I was also impressed by Rachilde’s convincing use of a child’s point of view, while the narrative still winks at what’s really going on between the grown-up characters. Even as the book plays with the excessive and the absurd (e.g. a brawl between the officers’ children over live lambs, which have been given out as gifts at a kids’ party), I felt like the writer really knew and could empathise with children—something that’s pretty rare in nineteenth-century novels.

I’m no psychiatrist, but Rachilde’s psychological portrait of Mary reads as proto-Freudian and progressive. Mary is initially a sensitive and caring child. But neglected by her family, who would prefer her to be a boy, she is starved of affection and has several early experiences that lead to her associating love and pain. Her first (pretty innocent) fumblings with a boy in her tweenage years are also linked to power play, as she convinces him to steal a prized rose from his employer for her in return for a kiss.  

As the novel progresses, her development becomes less believable. She ends the novel fantasising about murder, having tasted every other excess. And, in a strange twist I didn’t see coming, it is a “transvestite man” that she considers killing. She talks of men who sleep with other men as “fallen” and “ill-equipped to defend [themselves] against women.” And says, “her conscience would be clear if the chosen victim were among that kind!” 

While the ending is a clear escalation in violence, there are also plenty of other moments readers will find problematic, distasteful and shocking throughout the book.

There are various instances of animal cruelty. The opening scene sees Mary faint as she watches an ox being butchered and its blood drained as a cure for her consumptive mother. As a small child, Mary’s beloved companion is a cat (even though it scratches her). I won’t go into details, but, predictably, the cat and her kittens meet unpleasant ends, further cementing Mary’s misandry and misogyny. 

Mary’s own “cruelty” as an adult at first revolves around exercising her newfound power to deny men. She pretends she loves them, but refuses to have sex with them, or goads them into making sexual advances, but then blackmails them about what they have done. Eventually, one of the young men she’s been playing with rapes her, cuckolding his father in the process. The narrative suggests that he is the victim.

But it’s not only men who Mary can captivate and torture. In one of the most memorable scenes in the novel, Mary has a woman who wishes to sleep with her strip naked before her, and then, without warning, brands her with a red-hot poker. Reader, I gasped.

I’ve written before about the misconceptions people can have about the nineteenth century. This was certainly not a period when everyone was swooning at the sight of an ankle or an uncovered table leg. French Decadent literature may be more out there than the novels of British novelists in the time period, but you can be sure that many of our literary greats were reading books like this one. Overall, I’d recommend The Marquise de Sade to enthusiasts for the period with a strong constitution, and to adventurous readers with a taste for more than Fifty Shades of Grey…

Compared to The Marquise de Sade, my own novel, Bronte’s Mistress, seems almost wholesome, but, if you love the nineteenth century, please consider buying a copy for yourself or as Holiday gift this Christmas season! Want to get in touch? You can always message me on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter (no creepy DMs please), and you can also sign up for my monthly email below.

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A Victorian Alphabet: Z is for Zuleika

After 25 letters in my Victorian Alphabet, I’m cheating a little bit here, as Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson, or An Oxford Love Story wasn’t actually published until 1911. But, having recently finished reading Rupert Hart-Davis’s Letters Of Max Beerbohm, 1892-1956, and seen how Zuleika, as a character and a novel, is such a strong presence in Max’s life long before the text’s publication (he began writing it in 1898), I feel justified in using her to round off this very Victorian series.

Zuleika Dobson is a satirical novel about a girl so attractive she makes the students at Oxford University commit suicide en masse, destroying the city and its institutions. An untalented magician, Zuleika’s appeal is partially due to her beauty and partially to the contradictions of her character which make her unable to love anyone:

“I could no more marry a man about whom I could not make a fool of myself than I could marry one who made a fool of himself about me. Else had I long ceased to be a spinster”.

While the novel moves away from Zuleika at times – whether to the history of Oxford’s most elite drinking society, to the birds which are harbingers of death for holders of a particular dukedom, or to the muse of history Clio – she dominates the novel, and also seems to have dominated its creation.

In his letters, Max even uses the word ‘Zuleika-ing’ to denote the act of writing and, in 1904, not only does he seem to have a very clear idea of the eventual plot, but he’s also personifying his work, talking about his inability to write a ‘skeleton’ of the rest of the novel, without it becoming a ‘full-fleshed figure’.

At the novel’s appearance, Max writes the following note to Robert Ross (who had been a close friend of Oscar Wilde):

‘My dear Bobbie, Poor old Zuleika! She is at length to be dragged out, blinking and staggering, into the light of day. And Heinemann [his publisher] will be sending her to the Reform Club, to wait for you there. Be kind, be courteous, to the hag. Incline your ear to her mumblings. Pretend not to hear the horrid creakings of her joints. Tell her she does not look a day older than when you saw her or at any rate her head and shoulders all those years ago. Don’t hint to her that she makes a goblin of the sun. Yours affectionately, Max’.

Here we see Beerbohm referencing the long gestation period his novel has been through. And we also see him using an identification between Zuleika the woman and Zuleika the novel to reference the faults in his writing (mere ‘mumblings’ with ‘creaking…joints’), while simultaneously pleading for kind critical judgement on them (without seeming to plead for himself).

With the reference to Zuleika’s head and shoulders as having appeared first, Max also seems to be alluding to one of the most famous stories of male birth, the emergence of Artemis from the head of her father Zeus. Writing a novel as a sort of pregnancy is an idea he returns to again in a letter to Arnold Bennett:

‘You mustn’t expect from me a ‘diabolically ingenious defence’ of Zuleika, any more than you would expect a woman who has just borne a child to be diabolically ingenious of defence of that child… “Madam, this baby is in many respects a very fine baby. I observe many inimitable touches of you in it. But, Madam, I am bound to say that its screams are more penetrating than a baby’s screams ought to be. I notice in its complexion a mottled quality which jars my colour-sense. And I cannot help wishing it were” etc. etc.… Will the young mother floor you in well-chosen words?’

Max’s easy and familiar references to ‘Zuleika’ in his letters demonstrate beautifully the strong connection between artist and work (even an artist as humorous and, at times, flippant as Beerbohm). They also show the fascination ‘she’ as a character and as a project held over Max across several decades. Zuleika’s appeal may have decimated Oxford, but it has cemented Beerbohm’s place in literary history.

This is the last in my Victorian Alphabet series, so let me know if you have any new series ideas – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist. And, if you want to find out more about Beerbohm’s Oxford, then click here for my top tourist tips for Victorianists who find themselves in England’s best city!

A Victorian Alphabet: Y is for Why Yellow??

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) is a staple nineteenth-century text for students of literature in the English-speaking world, and especially the US. The 6,000-word short story is an account written in the first person of a woman, Jane, who has been confined to an upper room in a secluded house by her husband John as a result of a nervous disorder. There, having been prescribed a ‘rest cure’ for her hysteria, separated from her baby, and barred from writing, she goes slowly mad, convinced there is something living behind the room’s yellow wallpaper.

Even this straightforward summary raises lots of questions (and contains plenty of content for future blog posts!), but one central question stood out to me the first time I read the text (and seems to have occurred to multiple other students turning to Yahoo Answers for clarity!) – why is the wallpaper yellow, rather than any other shade?

The choice isn’t an accidental one, and is closely linked with contemporary ideas about the colour. Here’s how Jane introduces it first:

The colour is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.

Two important and recurrent associations with yellow are noticeable – yellow is the colour of putrification and also of a milder kind of fading, caused by the passage of time.

Earlier in the century, Dickens had used yellow in the same way, frequently linking the colour to particular characters who are older and somehow linked to decay. This is how Pip first describes the home of Miss Havisham, perhaps the character in the English canon most associated with physical deterioration and the passage of time, in Great Expectations (1860-1):

I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre and was faded and yellow. 

In The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman is at pains to highlight that the paper is a yellow of these very associations of festering age, rather than say a sunny yellow:

It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw—not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.

Jane even links the rotting smell she finds pervading her room with the yellow paper itself:

The only thing I can think of that it is like is the COLOUR of the paper! A yellow smell.

In doing so, she is not merely exhibiting an increasing monomania with the paper. ‘Jane’, isolated though she is, is acting just like many other writers of the 1890s! For many (especially European) writers of the Fin de Siècle, yellow was the defining colour of the period, with its associations with degeneracy, the wasting away of the age, a sickliness brought on by inbreeding, boredom or excess.

There was a practical link too. In the nineteenth-century, scandalous French novels were bound in yellow paper to warn browsers of their racy contents. It is one of these books which helps to corrupt the impressionable Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, published the year before Gilman’s story.

Lord Henry gives Dorian a ‘book bound in yellow paper, the cover slightly torn and the edges soiled’. Note how its state of dilapidation is similar to Jane’s paper:

It is stripped off—the paper—in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down.

Later, in Wilde’s novella, Dorian pins the blame for his moral decline squarely on this book:

"Yet you poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that. Harry, promise me that you will never lend that book to any one. It does harm."

This suggestion – that a book, even a yellow book, can really poison a mind – is one which Wilde rejects firmly:

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

But it is interesting to note that Dorian’s book is not generic. It has a particular model as Wilde’s description of it makes clear. It is À Rebours (1884), by Joris-Karl Huysmans (which I reviewed on this blog in September 2013), a novel which is the quintessential story of the degenerate (French) life.

Here’s the effect the novel has on Dorian:

It was the strangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.

Dorian’s feelings of discovery and revelation here before a later fall match perfectly with the early stages of Jane’s fixation with the yellow wallpaper. The novel and the paper feel incomplete, raiments, something torn, but they inspire what could be described as creativity – Jane’s writing, Dorian’s beautiful life – but could also be identified as self-destructive madness.

When it came to naming a quarterly literary journal in London in 1894, its founders were in no doubt what to name it – The Yellow Book was the perfect descriptor of the age although it (fittingly!) died out before the end of the century (1897). With contributors including Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, H.G. Wells and Henry James, The Yellow Book shows just how much yellowness meant to writers of this period.

It is within this context too then that The Yellow Wallpaper should be read. The question is not ‘why is the paper yellow?’. It might rather be ‘how do these ideas of degeneracy, and this link to the Aestheticism of the period, play into to Gilman’s other concerns, with gender, motherhood and madness?’

We’re nearly there! What should be 'Z' in my Victorian Alphabet?? It’s a tricky one so send me your suggestions – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

A Victorianist's Guide to Oxford

‘Towery city and branchy between towers’ – the opening line of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem ‘Duns Scotus’s Oxford’ has always summed up for me the appearance of England’s first university city on a sunny morning. One of Oxford’s greatest attractions is this sense of continuity with the past – the idea that the city looked much the same over a century ago and even further back than that. So for any Victorianists looking to take a trip to Oxford in the near future, I’ve compiled a list of attractions which could help you feel even closer to the Oxford of Hopkins and his contemporaries:

Print of Merton College, Oxford

Have a pint in Hardy-named pub: Jude may not have made it into a Christminster college but you can visit his namesake pub in Oxford – Jude the Obscure in Jericho. There’s also a Far from the Madding Crowd more centrally.

The library at the Oxford Union

Admire the pre-Raphaelite murals in the Union: The Oxford Union, Oxford’s student debating society (founded 1823), boasts beautiful buildings, as well as an illustrious history. Commissioned by John Ruskin, the library murals depict scenes from Arthurian myth (think Tennyson) and were painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.

Visit Keble College: Contrasting strongly with many of the older colleges, Keble (founded 1870) is every bit as grand, but strikingly different with its neo-Gothic red brick buildings, designed by William Butterfield.

Watch a play in Ancient Greek: The Oxford Greek Play has a tradition going back over130 years (you can read my post on the history of the Cambridge Greek Play here). The next production will be in Autumn 2014 at the Oxford Playhouse (and don’t worry, there are surtitles!).

Take a peek in Max Beerbohm’s room: Essayist, theatre critic and parodist Max Beerbohm (also known for his Oxford-based novel Zuleika Dobson (1911)) was at Merton College in the 1890s. A small set of rooms appended to the college’s Old Library now hold many of his satirical drawings and other items of interest.

Do you know of any other top spots for Victorianists among the dreaming spires? Let me know here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!