Recommendations
Books Like Monsieur Vénus
Best books to read after Monsieur Vénus by Rachilde
Readers who respond to Monsieur Vénus's inversion of gendered desire, Rachilde's forensic Decadent method, and the novel's treatment of will and construction as alternatives to nature will find the wider tradition of French Decadent and feminist fiction.
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La Marquise de Sade
by Rachilde
Rachilde's 1887 novel is the direct continuation of Monsieur Vénus: where Monsieur Vénus shows the dominance of the aristocratic woman expressed through her control of a man, La Marquise de Sade shows it expressed through cruelty — the same forensic analysis of feminine desire as active and constructing rather than passive and receptive.
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Les Hors-Nature
by Rachilde
Les Hors-Nature (1897) is Rachilde's most sustained novel and the most fully realized expression of her fictional method: the two brothers' mutual destruction shows what happens when Monsieur Vénus's logic of construction-as-desire is applied to a same-sex bond rather than a heterosexual one.
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À Rebours
by Joris-Karl Huysmans
À Rebours (1884), published the same year as Monsieur Vénus, is the closest male-authored parallel: where Des Esseintes constructs an artificial world to replace nature, Raoule constructs an artificial gender to replace the natural one — both novels are Decadent manifestos about the superiority of will and artifice to the given orders of nature.
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
Wilde's 1890 novel shares Monsieur Vénus's treatment of the beautiful young man as aesthetic object to be constructed and possessed: where Dorian is constructed by Lord Henry's philosophy, Jacques is constructed by Raoule's desire — both novels show the Decadent logic of treating a person as an artwork.
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Mademoiselle de Maupin
by Théophile Gautier
Gautier's 1835 novel about a woman who disguises herself as a man is the founding French text of gender transgression in fiction: Mademoiselle de Maupin's exploration of female desire and gender performance is the nineteenth-century predecessor of Rachilde's more systematic and more radical Decadent analysis in Monsieur Vénus.
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Orlando
by Virginia Woolf
Woolf's 1928 novel about a character who lives for centuries and changes sex is the most important twentieth-century continuation of the gender-transgression tradition that Monsieur Vénus belongs to: where Rachilde treats gender as a social construction that can be inverted by will, Woolf treats it as a historical construction that changes over time.
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Monsieur de Phocas
by Jean Lorrain
Lorrain's 1901 Decadent novel is the male-authored parallel to Monsieur Vénus in its treatment of desire as an obsessional construction: where Raoule constructs her beloved deliberately and rationally, Lorrain's Fréneuse is constructed by his obsession involuntarily — the comparison shows the range of the Decadent novel's treatment of desire as construction.
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Le Vice suprême
by Joséphin Péladan
Péladan's 1884 Rosicrucian novel is the Decadent contemporary that most explicitly opposes Monsieur Vénus's logic: where Rachilde's Raoule asserts her will over gender conventions without any spiritual framework, Péladan's Merodack asserts his spiritual superiority over the femme fatale through Rosicrucian initiation — the contrast shows the two available Decadent responses to the problem of desire.
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