Monsieur Vénus Reading Order

Monsieur Vénus (1884) by Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery) is the most notorious novel of the French Decadent period, a deliberate inversion of the gendered conventions of desire: the aristocratic Raoule de Vénérande takes the working-class Jacques Silvert as her lover, dresses him in women's clothing, and constructs a relationship in which the man plays the passive, decorative role conventionally assigned to women. Rachilde published the novel at twenty-four, under the pseudonym Rachilde with the subtitle 'roman matérialiste', and it was prosecuted for obscenity in Belgium (where it was first published) and made her instantly famous — and infamous — in Paris. The novel is not simply a gender-inversion fantasy: Rachilde is analyzing the structure of desire itself, arguing that dominance and submission, activity and passivity, are social constructions rather than natural categories, and that a woman who desires actively produces a man who is desired passively. The novel belongs to the same moment as À Rebours (published the same year) and shares its Decadent thesis that the categories of nature are insufficient — that artifice, construction, and the will can remake gender as they can remake the natural world. Raoule is one of the great characters of French Decadent fiction: imperious, clear-eyed, completely without the guilt that conventional morality would demand, and ultimately as imprisoned by her own construction of desire as Des Esseintes is by his artificial paradise.