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This dissertation examines clinical and literary representation and performance of hysteria in nineteenth-century France. Engaging with fin-de-siècle prose and poetry, the project analyzes literary performances of hysteria in conjunction with the clinical demonstration of the female hysteric. Focusing on Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, Rachilde’s La Jongleuse, and Rollinat’s Les Névroses, the chapters interrogate writerly movements, stylistic choices and socio-political themes that emerge from the hysterical framework popularized in a positivist culture by Jean-Martin Charcot. The dissertation begins by situating the curiosity for hysteria in medicine and culture of fin-de-siècle. Drawing on scholarship in the field of hysteria studies and French cultural history, I offer a reading of hysteria as a phenomenon or a performing body in which both the patient and doctor are conjoined by the enigma of the malady. From there, the dissertation turns to critical readings of literary works. Each chapter closely examines Charcot’s diagnostic practices and applies the lineaments of the hysteric stages, i.e., the phases of the malady as organized in his nosography, to discern an aesthetic developed from the clinical representation of hysteria. The first chapter, on Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, expands on the recurrence of paralysis in the novel as a thematic and stylistic motif. By drawing connections between Charcot’s demonstration of pathology and Zola’s naturalist writing I substantiate how Thérèse Raquin, while aligning with scientific objectivity of Charcot, goes beyond a superficial exhibition of physiology to expose the sensations of an ailing body. Chapter two probes Charcot’s notion of “clownism,” which is the second stage of hysteria. By analyzing the cultural significance of the clown figure and carnivalesque aesthetics, the chapter draws attention to the performance in the diagnostic practices of clinicians treating female hysterics, and argues that Rachilde’s La Jongleuse challenges performative agency, queer sexuality, and female autonomy. The final chapter turns to the final stage of the hysteric model, called “delirium,” which is placed in dialogue with Rollinat’s Les Névroses. This chapter situates the mode of fantastique in Rollinat’s poetry as also manifest in the clinical narratives of hysterical delirium. Analyzing the mortuary aesthetic in the poems, the chapter argues that both, textual and clinical bodies, portray the liminal paradox of the living-dead.

“Spectacular Flesh: Erotic Horror as Feminist Praxis in Women’s Literature & Film” asks, “What happens when women take horror to heart?” The query that inevitably follows—why would they want to? —is perhaps even more provocative. In order to answer these questions, I look back to what I identify as a genealogy of women writers whose work serves as literary precedents for the viability of erotic horror as a feminist tool, beginning with Rachilde at the fin-de-siècle and ending with Angela Carter’s postmodern fantasies in the 1970s. Three film directors are then presented as case studies. I begin with Jesús “Jess” Franco because his films are a useful baseline for low-budget erotic horror and offer a compelling example of the genre’s interest in feminine performance. With Franco’s work as a touchstone, I turn to horror films directed by women, including the robust and groundbreaking filmography of Roberta Findlay, whose work throughout the 1970s and 80s combines horror and pornography in productive and surprising ways, and Anna Biller’s The Love Witch (2016), a contemporary feminist horror film that is in many ways indistinguishable from 70s erotic horror. “Spectacular Flesh,” by articulating the links between erotic horror film and an antecedent genealogy of women’s literature, crafts meaningful connections between feminist film studies and scholarship on women’s literature. The literary foundations laid in Chapters One through Three supply evidence for a longstanding interest on the part of women writers in the horror genre as a site for feminist praxis. Taking psychoanalysis as its main theoretical approach, the project grapples with established readings of novels and films that are generally assumed to be “bad” or, possibly worse, complicit in patriarchal misogyny. Ultimately, this project identifies horror as the key for negotiating a more egalitarian theory of gendered gazing and an opportunity for thinking about women’s phenomenological experience in our contemporary moment, which many would argue is itself a kind of horror film.

Abstract“Constellations of Sappho: Texts, Translations and Sexuality,” is centered on a group of writers based in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century who comprised the literary and erotic movement, “Sapho 1900.” The group took the Greek poet Sappho as their literary and personal exemplar, producing unconventional translations of Sappho’s poetry in French, as well as memoirs, novels, and manifestos variously dedicated to Sappho’s perceived homosexuality and freedom of literary expression. While much of their work remains unpublished, unknown, and understudied, my research forwards that their experimental literary contributions prefigure contemporary conversations and debates about queerness, sexuality and the body by linking together social, scientific and spiritual concerns resonant in the present.Chapter I of my dissertation, “(Un)veiling Sappho: Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien’s Radical Translation Projects,” argues that Barney’s and Vivien’s unconventional translations and literary representations of Sappho are part of a feminist intervention that aligns with theorist Luce Irigaray’s rewriting of the ancient Greek canon to destabilize phallocentrism. Indeed, the Sapho 1900 writers enlist Sappho in the forging of a spiritual practice that could transcend patriarchal fantasies by fashioning of a “third-sex.”In Chapter II, “Sappho l’androgyne: Queerness and Spirituality,” I examine the way Vivien and Barney harken back to Aristotelian conceptions of the French androgyne to offer emancipatory renderings of queer bodies as a response to nineteenth-century French medico-legal debates about adding the hermaphrodite as a legal “third-sex” category. I argue that these renderings anticipate contemporary conversations about queerness advanced by scholars like Amber Musser. Yet not all radical nineteenth-century female writers viewed Sappho as a liberatory figure. Rachilde rebukes the Sapphic movement in her censored, “anti-feminist” novel Monsieur Vénus (1884), and articulates other radical sexuality and gender alternatives that have found resonance in the twenty-first century. The final chapter of my dissertation, “‘Être Sapho, ce serait être tout le monde !’: Rachilde and Textual Afterlives,” analyzes how the female characters in Monsieur Vénus and the lesser-known La Marquise de Sade (1887) assume the roles of sadist and masochist to offer an alternative fin-de-siècle feminism. Monsieur Vénus’s recent popularity, and the persistent interest in the biographies of Rachilde, Barney, Vivien and Sappho, reveal the complex relationship between feminist politics and female authorship – both in the late nineteenth-century and in the present.

Cet article se propose d’offrir une analyse des rapports entre l’espace et les personnages dans La Tour d’amour, roman de la Décadence dont l’auteur est Rachilde. En particulier, ce travail cherche à étudier comment l’espace a atrophié le langage et les capacités communicatives de l’un des personnages et, par réaction, en fera de même avec l’autre. À partir de l’utilisation des mythes par la romancière, des références à la divinité et, notamment, des nombreux exemples de la corruption du langage, on postulera que le phare où ils habitent peut être interprété comme une sorte de Tour de Babel décadente. In this article I analyze the relationships between space and the main characters in La Tour d’amour, by Rachilde. More specifically I focus on how space has already stunned one of the character’s speech and communicative abilities and it is now in the process of impairing speech in the other. By analyzing the novelist’s use of myths, references to the divinity and, especially, the many instances that offer evidence of widespread corruption in the characters’ language, I show how the lighthouse in which the characters dwell can be interpreted as a decadent Tower of Babel.

This article considers the theme of prostitution in the decadent writings of the fin-de-siecle French author, Rachilde. It proposes that an analysis of this critically-neglected trope of her work reveals new connections between the erotics and aesthetics of her fiction. As a vector for considering tensions between fantasy and truth, and illusion and reality, prostitution, in Rachilde's texts, invites us to reflect on two of the most common cultural manifestations of decadence: sexual non-conformism and the cult of artifice. The article focuses in particular on the (male) prostitute-body of Monsieur Venus, arguing that, in its transcendence of nature, reality and utilitarian purpose, it is elevated to the status of art in Rachilde's fictional world.

A year after the French success scandal that Rachilde had with her decadent novel Monsieur Vénus, a novel by the Swedish writer Victoria Benedictsson, Money [Pengar], is published in Sweden in 1885. The two novels focus on young women having to find their identities within society's new possibilities, as well as the new gender roles; developed by the new society. In their relations with both conventional and non-conventional male characters, the two female characters transgress society's former established and given norms. In this article, the aim is to present how two female protagonists, the French Raoule and the Swedish Selma, are given different background conditions and qualities that finally can contribute to picture and explain their outstanding independence. Moreover, the new gender roles and their impact on the two female characters are discussed within themes and terms such as the "new woman", androgynity, sexuality and other explicite ingredients and symbols often discussed in a decadent context. Through the comparisons, this article shows how the two female portraits express the decadent transgressivity, in several aspects similarly, with individual voices, despite their two separate literary milieux.