Taboo

Corporeal Secrets in Nineteenth-century France

Hannah Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351547208
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Langues

French realist texts are driven by representations of the body and depend on corporeality to generate narrative intrigue. But anxieties around bodily representation undermine realist claims of objectivity and transparency. Aspects of bodily reality which threaten les bonnes moeurs - gender confusion, sexual appetite, disability, torture, murder, child abuse and disease - rarely occupy the foreground and are instead spurned or only partially alluded to by writers and critics. This wide-ranging study uses the notion of the taboo as a powerful means of interpreting representations of the body. The hidden bodies of realist texts reveal their secrets in unexpected ways. Thompson reads texts by Sand, Rachilde, Maupassant, Hugo, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Mirbeau and Zola alongside modern theorists of the body to show how the figure of the taboo plots an alternative model of author-reader relations based on the struggle to speak the unspeakable. Dr Hannah Thompson is a Senior Lecturer in French at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her first book, Naturalism Redressed: Identity and Clothing in the Novels of Emile Zola, was published by Legenda in 2004.

Part I
The Body

Chapter 1
Secrets and Suggestions: The Silenced Sexuality of Sand and Rachilde

Desire and Transgression

The presence of the female body and the sexual encounters it occasions is an almost banal reality in nineteenth-century prose fiction and has in recent years attracted a great deal of critical attention.¹ But engagement in pleasurable non-procreative sex outside marriage was one of nineteenth-century France's strongest taboos, indeed it remains a taboo today in many cultures. As Allan and Burridge point out, 'in most cultures, the strongest taboos have been against non-procreative sex and sexual intercourse outside of a family unit sanctioned by religion and lore or legislation.'² A tension exists, then, between the readerly and writerly fascination with the eroticized female body on the one hand, and the problem of how to depict the taboo subject of sex in literature on the other. Despite the sexualized appeal of the female body, there are aspects of this body which remain largely unspoken in both the texts themselves and the vast amount of secondary material devoted to the subject. In the canonical literature of the period, the physicality of the female body — what we might call the mechanics of human copulation: what women do to give and gain pleasure sexually — is rarely, if ever, described in detail. Indeed, the various kinds of self-and state-censorship in operation throughout the century meant that it became inevitable that the sexual act was alluded to, rather than overtly named, in all but the most self-consciously pornographic of texts.³ Between 1819 and 1880, books published in France were subject to a law banning work which was deemed to be an 'outrage à la morale publique et religieuse et aux bonnes mǽurs' [an outrage to public and religious morality and to accepted standards of behaviour].⁴ The laws were relaxed in the 1880s although some material was still deemed too explicit for publication in France. Melanie Hawthorne demonstrates that in the 1880s authors such as Rachilde in fact benefited from the French sensitivities by finding lucrative publishing deals in Belgium.⁵ In order to avoid penalties such as fines or even imprisonment, those authors who wanted to be published or read in France had to find ways of evoking sexual relations without any explicit references to the body or its actions.⁶ Equally, French readers learnt to search for clues in the texts and transform them into elements of the sexual act in their imagination. As Harrison points out, 'a nineteenth-century reader would have considered it relatively unproblematic to expand the text beyond its written limits according to shared presumptions and conventions concerning the appropriate demands of a writer's self-censorship which made such extrapolations effectively part of the text'.⁷ The mechanism described by Harrison, whereby writers use language to prompt readers to develop their own imaginary scenarios is strikingly similar to Steven Marcus's description of the place of language in nineteenth-century English literary pornography and thus in literary pornography more generally. According to Marcus, 'language is for pornography a bothersome necessity, its function is to set going a series of non-verbal images, of fantasies, and if it could dispense with words it would.'⁸ Although the genres being discussed by Harrison and Marcus are markedly different, the similarity between their respective formulations (which I render here in italics) demonstrates that in the nineteenth century, the sexual frequently existed not in the text itself but in the mind of the reader.

In this chapter we will be concerned with the ways in which two female authors, Sand and Rachilde, use language to trigger their readers' imagination in ways similar to those suggested by Harrison and Marcus. Unlike the writers discussed by Marcus, neither Sand nor Rachilde are primarily concerned with the erotic or the pornographic (although Rachilde did write some works which verge on the 'properly' erotic).⁹ Both writers, though, are interested in sharing the secret desires of their sexually active heroines with their readers and this chapter will investigate how these taboo experiences are first encoded in the texts and then communicated to the reader.

Peter Brooks has famously and persuasively shown that desire motivates the reader to get to the end of the narrative. In Reading for the Plot, Brooks explains the centrality of desire to the experience of reading:

We can, then, conceive of the reading of plot as a form of desire that carries us forward, onward, through the text. Narratives both tell of desire — typically present some story of desire — and arouse and make use of desire as dynamic of signification.¹⁰

Here Brooks is using 'desire' in its widest sense but in his later Body Work he focuses more closely on sexualized desire, showing that, 'on the plane of reading, desire for knowledge of that body and its Secrets becomes the desire to master the text's symbolic system, its key to knowledge, pleasure and the very creation of significance.'¹¹ It has been generally accepted by students and scholars alike that this desire is almost exclusively masculine: whilst desiring women are undoubtedly present in the nineteenth-century novel, it is male (or masculine) desire for the female body which mainly drives and generates nineteenth-century narratives.¹² The prevailing subject position adopted in the nineteenth century is overwhelmingly that of the desiring male who admires and yearns to attain the passive female object of desire and the novel is more often than not the story of this attainment. Stendhal's Le Rouge et le noir and many of Balzac's Parisian novels might be cited as examples here, although it is worth noting that throughout the century novelists also knowingly manipulated this model. Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale, for example, subverts the Stendhalian and Balzacian paradigms by evoking a hero whose yearnings can never be satisfied by his half-hearted and directionless actions.

If the male desiring hero is a familiar figure in the nineteenth-century novel, the same cannot be said for the female desiring heroine, who is much rarer. Emma Bovary is the nineteenth century's best-known desiring heroine. Yet her desires, which she learns from books, are idealized notions of chivalry and romance rather than expressions of sexual desire. Unlike both Julien Sorel and Frédéric Moreau, Emma does not desire sexual fulfilment with specific partners. Rather, she is in love with the idea first of marriage and then of an illicit adulterous passion. The unrealistic and unachievable nature of Emma's desire ultimately results in her dramatic suicide. Flaubert's vision of female desire as misplaced and ill-judged is not echoed in the texts of Sand and Rachilde. By looking at some less well-known desiring women we shall see in this chapter that female authors can find ways to gesture towards their heroines' desires even despite the difficulties of expression inherent in such a project.

Speaking the sexual is doubly difficult for female authors like George Sand and Rachilde. Not only must female authors, like their male counterparts, negotiate the morally strict representational codes of the nineteenth century discussed above, they must also break the 'cultural injunction' to keep quiet which, as Hawthorne demonstrates, was imposed on nineteenth-century women like Rachilde.¹³ If sex was largely absent from the surface of nineteenth-century texts, female sex was almost unheard of. Although it was widely accepted in the nineteenth century that women experienced sexual pleasure, medical practitioners could not agree on precisely how this pleasure was achieved, nor on the form it took. According to Laqueur, women were eventually asked their opinion on the subject as late as 1892.¹⁴

Women writers were obliged to find ways of articulating the difficult subjects of female desire and pleasure without appearing to undermine the patriarchal system within which they were living, working, and writing, and which the very presence of such subjects threatened. Although largely absent from nineteenth-century discourse, the notion of female jouissance, or orgasmic sexual pleasure, is a familiar term in twentieth-century French feminist theory. This term represents both the female orgasm and the difficulty of representing this intense sexual pleasure in words. Jouissance exists outside language and écriture féminine sought to provide a means of expressing it by subverting the inherently patriarchal structures of language.¹⁵ Neither George Sand nor Rachilde is included by Hélène Cixous in her list of examples of écriture féminine.¹⁶ Yet whilst remaining within the patriarchal confines of the nineteenth-century novel, both Sand and Rachilde find ways of expressing the inexpressible notion of female sexual pleasure in language. The decisions of Aurore Dudevant and Marguerite Eymery to write as George Sand and Rachilde respectively signal a need to create an authorial persona through which to express thoughts and feelings which could otherwise not be spoken. Hawthorne argues that this process of dédoublement was crucial to the development of Rachilde (and by extrapolation of Sand) as a writer, because it gives them a legitimate voice in a male-dominated world.¹⁷ I would argue that the notion of doubling is also important to the way Sand and Rachilde relate to the taboo subject of female sexuality. My investigation of the means by which the desiring female body is evoked in female-authored texts will reveal how the texts of Sand and Rachilde use the double-bind of the spoken and the unspoken to both understand and articulate the notions of female desire and pleasure. In this chapter we shall see how the taboo becomes a barrier to be overcome, as well as an impediment to be negotiated.

The tension with which I am primarily concerned can be represented as the constant negotiation between the authors' urge to speak the truth of the desiring body and their inability to transgress the moral boundaries which regulate what can and cannot be said. My main concern here is to ask how female desire, the very possibility of which destabilizes the male superiority upon which patriarchy depends, can be voiced in a century whose prose, although frequently explicit about a host of subjects, cannot name the bodies whose acts are the clearest expression of this desire.

Georges Bataille's discussion of eroticism usefully defines it in relation to the tension which resonates in the female-authored texts under discussion:

Si nous observons l'interdit, si nous lui sommes soumis, nous n'en avons plus conscience. Mais nous éprouvons, au moment de la transgression, l'angoisse sans laquelle l'interdit ne serait pas; c'est l'expérience du pêché. L'expérience mène à la transgression achevée, à la transgression réussie, qui maintenant l'interdit, le maintient pour en jouir. L'expérience intérieure de l'érotisme demande de celui qui la fait, une sensibilité non moins grande à l'angoisse fondant l'interdit, qu'au désir menant à l'enfreindre. C'est la sensibilité religieuse, qui lie toujours étroitement le désir et l'effroi, le plaisir intense et l'angoisse.¹⁸

[If we heed what is forbidden, it we submit to it, we are not aware of it. But at the moment of transgression we experience the unease without which the forbidden would not exist: this is the experience of sin. This experience leads to completed transgression, to successful transgression, which maintains the forbidden, maintains it for our pleasure. The internalization of eroticism requires of those who experience it no less a sensitivity to the anguish on which the forbidden is founded than the sensitivity accorded to the desire which leads us to transgress it. This is religious sensitivity, which always tightly binds desire and terror, intense pleasure and anguish.]

Bataille's rather convoluted definition suggests that 'l'erotisme' is the pleasure gained (by reader, writer and protagonist) from a combination of the anguish experienced by an individual when he or she transgresses and the desire which inspires this transgression. This definition of 'l'erotisme' as an embodiment of 'le jeu alternatif de l'interdit et de la transgression' [the alternate play of the forbidden and its transgression] has important implications for our discussion of the difficulties surrounding the representation of desire, specifically its manifestations on the body, in the nineteenth century.¹⁹ Bataille's notion of the erotic is not defined by (though it is necessarily related to) the content of the texts but, rather, by the experience of those both writing and reading them, as well as, on a different level, by the experiences of the protagonists themselves. The texts of Sand and Rachilde become erotic not (or not only) by virtue of what the writers write about sex, but through the means by which their descriptions of sex are written, in the moments when the writers transgress into the forbidden through their evocation, however covert, of the problematic subjects of female desire and pleasure. These moments are the textual equivalent of the flashes of skin between two items of clothing which make the striptease so enticing for Roland Barthes.²⁰ Indeed the fact that this evocation remains covert increases the Bataillian 'eroticism' of the texts by emphasising the forbidden nature of what is being said. The reader in turn experiences this eroticism as he or she experiences the thrill of discovering the forbidden concealed within the text.

Scholars of Sand's work have repeatedly remarked upon the tension between the speakable and the unspeakable which can be found in her texts without, however, making overt reference either to Bataille's notion of the erotic or nineteenth-century mechanisms of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Translations
• Introduction: The Taboo in Theory
• PART I: THE BODY
• PART II: THE READER
• Conclusion: A Corporeal Secret
• Bibliography
• Index