In the 1884 in Belgiumfrom a publisher specializing in erotic literaturea strange novel titled Monsieur Venus. The author is Marguerite Eymerywhich he has been using since his debut, with the serialized novel La Dame de bois of 1880, the pseudonym of Rachele – which according to the author herself was the name of a 16th century Swedish gentleman, with whom she came into contact during a seance and who would dictate the words with which to write her literary works: an ingenious solution for the positioning of an author who writes stories that a woman shouldn’t even have imagined.
It is no coincidence that, in the editorial team of the Parisian edition of 1889, Maurice Barrès, who nicknamed Rachilde “Mademoiselle Baudelaire”, he will write that the themes of Monsieur Venus are attributable to Rachilde’s medical conditions, his nervous breakdown and its perversion, following a well-known cliché about decadentism that medicalized i erotic themes and scabrous of fin de siècle (and just read Degeneration which the doctor and sociologist Max Nordau published in 1892).
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And the title is enough to warn you that this woman moves through rough terrainin an “unknown region where inversion seemed to be the only regime allowed” (these are words from chapter 5 of the novel), and “inversion” is a strictly medical term that clearly refers to degeneration (and more than one of Rachilde’s titles plays on inversion, such as The Marquise de Sade of 1887 or Madame Adonis of 1888).
Monsieur Venus (whose subtitle is no less significant: Materialistic novel) he comes immediately censoredRachilde fined and sentenced to prisonthe work was then reprinted with modifications and further modified for the Paris edition.
The scandal and the censorshipalong with the accusation of having invented a new viceof course, only contribute to the fame of the novel – which still remains Rachilde’s best-known.
In Italy it was only translated in 1982 by Edizioni delle donne, and having long since disappeared from bookshop shelves and from memory, it is finally available again in a new translation by Matteo Pinna for WOM Edizioni.
Monsieur Venus opens with Raoule de Vénérandethe degenerate protagonist, who is immediately presented to us through an object that immediately functions as a signal of the realm of inversion into which we are venturing: “his cigarette case”, which immediately points us to Raoule’s non-standard character, her not being an ordinary womana woman identified already in the sixth line through a thing (and we know how important objects are in the decadent novel) as a man.
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The same happens for Jacques, who, like a Greek mythological character, is immediately presented adorned with flowers, “around his chest, on his fluttering coat, a garland of roses was wrapped in a spiral”. Raoule is a noblewoman looking for a young dressmaker, but who finds his brother in his place and immediately falls in love with him. Jacques, when he sees her, asks her: “Does the lady wish…?” and the courtesy request is immediately the theme of the novel: the desire of the lady or, perhaps better, of the Mr de Vénérande, as Raoule herself is called.
Desire at the center of Monsieur Venus it is indeed a desire in which gender roles are continually overturned, inverted, ambiguously confused: while Raoule becomes more and more manly, Jacques becomes more and more feminized.
It’s a short step from pronominal confusion to cross dressing, and the novel seems to describe this parable, in which initially the inversion is only linguisticand then become real role play and rely on cross dressing – a not so harmless practice in the 1880s, when there was still a law that prohibited women from dressing as men and vice versa: it is no coincidence that Rachilde herself had to ask for special permission to go around with men’s clothes (appealing to the ease of movement when going around Paris for his reportages).
The clothes soon become flesh and the characters, first language, then objects, then finally bodies accept these new identities: in particular Jacques who refuses, in the end, the possibility of having an experience with a woman and tries to seduce Mr. de Raittolbe who, in response, will kill him in a duel.
The disguise, as often happens in the late nineteenth-century novel (Franca Franchi showed it in The metamorphosis of Zambinella. The androgynous imagination between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) makes clear what it should hide, that is, the onset of a homosexual desire. And in fact there are many references in code tohomoeroticism in Rachilde’s novel: from the omnipresent Antinous, to the panel depicting “Henry III distributing flowers to his favourites” (Henry III of France was in fact known for his “mignons”, and was often evoked as a coded reference to homosexuality).
But Monsieur Venus it doesn’t simply resolve itself into a novel about homoerotic desire (and as Marjorie Graber writes in Rigged interests the cross-dresser also exists in his literalness); Rachilde’s is indeed above all a libertine treatise on desire and revolt against natureis an exaltation of the body (Jacques’ body is defined as a poem: what perhaps Jean Genet will remember?), of physical beauty.
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It is no coincidence that the seventh chapter (censored after the first edition) is in fact a micro-essay on desire, on voluptuousness: “We forget the law of nature, we tear up the pact of procreation, we reject the subordination of the sexes”. What is at stake above all is overturning, inversion, confusion, union (the myth of the androgyne is explicitly evoked), but also the subversion of genders. And the inversion also affects, not surprisingly, the great mythological model of Rachilde’s novel.
Monsieur Venus it is in fact, in some ways, also a rewriting of Myth of Pygmalion, but doubly reversed: firstly because Pygmalion, the artist, is Raoule, a woman. And also because here, in perfect consonance with that passion for the artificiality of decadent literatureit is not the work of art that we want to bring to life, but it is life that is mechanically reconstructed: the novel ends in fact with a mannequin equipped with “a spring mechanism, placed inside the hips,” which “corresponds to his mouth and makes it move while at the same time making him part his thighs” (and in addition to decadence there will perhaps be erotic obsession at play reversedif we find this same reversal of the myth in Autopsy of obsession Of Walter Siti?).
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This desire is also a form of violencenot only in the sadomasochistic roles played (and experienced in the flesh) by Raoule and Jacques, nor in the violent death of the latter. That of Monsieur Venus it is also a desire clearly classy: she is a noblewoman who, thanks to her economic power, can seduce and transform a young proletarian. That “shiver of disgust” that Raoule feels while examining the attic where she meets Jacques on the first page of the novel is to all intents and purposes part of her desire (which is also a desire for possession, being Raoul the master and Jacques is slave). And ultimately the beauty of Monsieur Venus lies exactly in its ambiguities, in the ways in which it complicates and refracts the mechanisms of the erotic drive on great binary oppositions of modern culture.
