3 As Gantz notes, Raoule is “the very embodiment of Rachilde’s love of the marginal” (114). In many ways, Raoule, the novel’s protagonist, can be read as a fantastic version of her author.

2 The story’s remarkably high caliber, combined with its “trashy” thrills, made the twenty-four-year-old Rachilde a celebrity, or, at least, notorious.

Upon its publication in Brussels in 1884, Rachilde’s novel was immediately banned, seized, and prosecuted amidst a general outpouring of “outrage, astonishment and admiration” for the work and its “sometimes shocking and nearly always problematic author” (English 212 211). 1 The relation of gender to creativity is destabilised as the novel’s two main characters, Raoule de Vénérande and Jacques Silvert, move fluidly between gender identities and sexual orientations. How could it not have been? While the characters in this precocious young author’s novel play out heteronormative courtship storylines derived from eighteenth- and earlier nineteenth-century popular fiction, they do so in ways richly infused with other pathologised sexual narratives of the era, ranging from effeminacy to necrophilia. Yet, most notably, it was at first a scandal. Rachilde’s 1884 novel Monsieur Vénus opened up uncharted and particularly strange spaces for conversations about female creativity and its relation to women’s social roles, biology, sexuality, and psychosis. If I created a new depravity, I would be a priestess, while my imitators would flounder, after my reign, in abominable mud. “A tiger decked out as an Amazon”: Hysteria, Primitive Violence, and Creativity in Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus

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Monsieur Vénus by Rachilde