Rachilde () was the pen name and preferred identity of novelist and playwright Marguerite Vallette-Eymery (11 February 1860 – 4 April 1953). Born near Périgueux, Dordogne, Aquitaine, France during the Second French Empire, Rachilde went on to become a Symbolist author and one of the most prominent women in literature associated with the Decadent movement of fin de siècle France.
A diverse and challenging author, Rachilde's most famous work includes the darkly erotic novels Monsieur Vénus (1884), La Marquise de Sade (1887), and La Jongleuse (1900). She also wrote a 1928 monograph on gender identity, Pourquoi je ne suis pas féministe ("Why I am not a Feminist"). Her work was noted for being frank, fantastical, and always with a suggestion of autobiography underlying questions of gender, sexuality, and identity.
She said of herself, "I always acted as an individual, not thinking to found a society or to upset the present one."
Biography
Early life Marguerite Eymery was born in February 1860 to Joseph and Gabrielle (Feytaud) Eymery. Marguerite was born with one leg shorter than the other, giving her a lifelong limp that set her apart from others from the very start. She grew up on the estate of le Cros as an only child. She was unwanted by her parents and received less affection from them than did the family's pet monkey, who was even granted such social graces as a seat at the table. She received some affection from her maternal grandmother, but Gabrielle taught the child to dismiss her grandmother as frivolous and simple. Nevertheless, it was her grandmother and her grandfather who encouraged Marguerite's imagination through play and reading, and offered her glimpses of fantastical escape.
Joseph Eymery was a soldier, and that had a distinct impact on his wife and daughter, through various absences and stresses. At the extreme end, Joseph was imprisoned for dueling for four months in 1867 and then was imprisoned as an enemy soldier by the Prussians from 1870 to 1871 after surrendering his unit to them. During this separation, at least in Marguerite's mind, the distance between uninterested wife and unfaithful husband became wider and more permanent. Both offered her abuse, but her father's abuse had a perverse hope at the end of it.
At twelve, Marguerite began writing anonymous pieces in the local newspaper. She then asked her father to read to her, an indication of her split relationship with herself that would be the hallmark of her life. Even at a young age, some of what she wrote was inappropriately decadent. She began to write on a commission at fifteen, taking on the name Rachilde for the first time and creating a new persona for herself.Kiebuzinska, Christine. "Behind the Mirror: Madame Rachilde's 'The Crystal Spider'"Modern Language Studies, 1994: 24(3), 28–43.
As a bold young woman with a passion for writing, she wrote to idol Victor Hugo and received encouraging words in reply. This fueled in her a desire to move to Paris and become part of the literary culture there. Her father did not understand that, and it appears that in the mid-1870s he tried to set up an engagement for her as an alternative to literary pursuits. She rejected that engagement. Perhaps linked to this, she later claimed to have attempted suicide around this time.
Adult life in Paris
Between 1878 and 1881, Marguerite moved to Paris with money that her father had raised by selling his prize hounds. She shed "Marguerite" and asserted "Rachilde" in every way she could. Free to explore her own identity and challenge both herself and the world, she cut her hair short, went out publicly in men's clothing, and intentionally shocked the society around her with suggestions of gender ambiguity. Her cousin Marie de Saverny had introduced her to famous actress Sarah Bernhardt, who was known for her libertine interests and her own willingness to create her own identity. Bernhardt used her connections to help make sure that Rachilde's career could get off to a good start.
Rachilde began to hold a salon in her apartment each Tuesday and it quickly became gathering place for young nonconformist writers and their allies, placing her at the center of activity for the Symbolist and Decadent movements.
In 1884 she published her first successful novel, Monsieur Vénus. It was so scandalous that she was tried for pornography and convicted in absentia in Belgium, where the initial editions had been published. She was sentenced to two years of prison, essentially ensuring that she remain in France after that.
She met Alfred Vallette in 1885 and they married in 1889, despite his disapproval of her writing and her sometimes shocking public behavior. With their marriage, she regrew her hair and adopted a more subdued presentation of herself. A few months after their civil ceremony wedding, their only child was born. Rachilde named their daughter Gabrielle after her own estranged mother. By most accounts, she disliked motherhood and prioritized writing and supporting other writers over her daughter.
In 1890, Vallette launched the avant-garde magazine Mercure de France, "the most influential avant-garde journal of arts and literature of the era".:95 Rachilde served as the journal's literary critic, and as a "creative advisor to her husband".:95 There, she not only got to write her own material, but helped select and refine the work of others and to express her opinions in a way that would help define literature for fin de siècle France. Rachilde began to hold her Tuesday salon in the Mercure offices. She took great pride in the luminaries who attended, a group which included not only the established inner circle of Symbolist writers, but other notable countercultural figures such as Alfred Jarry, Oscar Wilde, painters Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin, composer Maurice Ravel, and many others.Gerould, D. (1983). "Madame Rachilde: 'Man' of Letters". Performing Arts Journal, 7(1), 177–122.Youker, T. (5 Feb. 2014) On the Avant-Garde. University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga. Lecture.
Beyond poetry and prose, one stated goal of Mercure de France was to encourage the development of Symbolist theater. Rachilde was especially involved in working with Paul Fort and his Théâtre d'Art. That theater would be home for her dramas La Voix du sang (1890) and Madame la Mort (1891). Continuing her desire to support Symbolist theater, but also feeling inspired to encourage the production of plays by French authors, she became involved in supporting Théâtre de l'Œuvre. Her own drama The Crystal Spider (1894) would eventually be produced there, establishing a refined model for Symbolist theater.
Throughout her life, Rachilde's most infamous friendships were often tortured by the inability of her (generally male) friends to decide whether they admired her, lusted for her, or pitied her, as publicly exemplified by Maurice Barrès in his preface to a later edition of Monsieur Vénus. Good friend Jean Lorrain referred to her and his other female friends as high-strung, sex-addicted pervert, to which she said that he and her other male friends were also neurotic, just in a more balanced way. Even so, she often went out of her way for them, as when using her connections to arrange hospital care for Paul Verlaine.
It is less discussed, but Rachilde developed important relationships with women as well. Despite having poked fun at bas-bleu women in her preface to À Mort! (1886), she formed a complex relationship with writers Camille Delaville and Georges de Peyrebrune. These women were friends and supporters but also critics, often with a frank yet maternal tone. Rachilde also befriended Léonide Leblanc and publicly supported the one-time courtesan's efforts to enter legitimate theater. She was an early friend and supporter of fellow writer Colette and American expatriate Natalie Clifford Barney.
Rachilde remained socially active for much of her life, appearing around town with young men even into her sixties and seventies. There were naturally rumors of licentious adultery, but she had always preferred the company of gay men and men like Maurice Barrès, for whom there was pleasure in the torture of restraint. In 1935, however, when Rachilde was 75 years old, her husband Alfred Vallette died at his desk. Her truly bohemian phase had ended with her marriage to Vallette. Her active social presence ended with his death. After more than fifty years, her Tuesday salons came to an end.
In her Parisian apartment adjoining the Mercure de France, on Saturday, 4 April 1953, Rachilde died at the age of ninety-three.
Gender and sexuality Although Rachilde was married to a man, her experience was not typical of a woman of her day. She distrusted women and envied the privilege of men. She referred to women as the inferior brothers of men. Rachilde was known to dress in men's clothes, even though doing so was in direct violation of French law.Hawthorne (2001), p. 103 Her reasons are not entirely clear, as there is both boldness and polite reserve in a request she filed for a permit to do so:Dear Sir, please authorize me to wear men's clothing. Please read the following attestation, I beg you and do not confuse my inquiry with other classless women who seek scandal under the above costume. She did refer to herself as androgynous, but her definition was functional and pragmatic. There was such a thing as a man of letters, not a woman of letters. Hence, she was both a woman and man. Nor was she shy about that, identifying herself on her cards as "Rachilde, homme de lettres", a man of letters.
Her views on gender were strongly influenced by her distrust of her mother and her envy of the privileged freedom she saw in men like her philandering father.I never trusted women since I was first deceived by the eternal feminine under the maternal mask and I don't trust myself anymore. I always regretted not being a man, not so much because I value the other half of mankind but because, since I was forced by duty or by taste to live like a man, to carry alone the heavy burden of life during my childhood, it would have been preferable to have had at least the privileges if not the appearances.Apart from her marriage and her often flirtatious friendships, Rachilde did engage in love affairs. She had an early affair with a man named Léo d'Orfer, to whom she dedicated Monsieur Vénus. Just prior to writing Monsieur Vénus, she had a fruitless passion for Catulle Mendès. Though she would later deny even a slight attraction to women, Rachilde also had a relationship with the enigmatic Gisèle d'Estoc, a bisexual woman of some notoriety at the time. It was an affair that unfolded in playful secrecy and ended with tremendous drama in 1887.
It is unclear just what her thoughts were about sexual pleasure and sensual attraction. Her friend and admirer Maurice Barrès quotes her as suggesting that God erred in combining love and sensuality, that sensual pleasure is a beast which should be sacrificed: "Dieu aurait dû créer l'amour d'un côté et les sens de l'autre. L'amour véritable ne se devrait composer que d'amitié chaude. Sacrifions les sens, la bête." In her work, while she certainly portrays sexual pleasure, she also portrays sexual desire as something powerful, beyond control, and perhaps frightening.