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Solitary Confinement in Rachilde’s La Tour d’amour: Dehumanization and Madness of the Buried Alive

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The Palgrave Handbook of Transnational Women’s Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In La Tour d’amour (1899), Rachilde imagines the secluded life of Mathurin Barnabas and Jean Maleux, two lighthouse keepers trapped in the Ar-Men lighthouse off the coast of Brittany, France. Rachilde’s male characters are doubly marginal: geographically (they are in a tower lost at sea) and socially (they are single). In this novel, Rachilde condemns the pervasive decadent patriarchal discourse that demonizes women and leads some men to find alternatives to experiencing love with living, breathing women (Barnabas relieves his sexual urges with dead female bodies while Jean eventually decides to reject women altogether). She shows that this masculine desire to erase, bypass, or avoid the Feminine ultimately leads to perversion (necrophilia) and death, a journey the isolating and maddening lighthouse hastens. In this huis-clos, this father-and-son duo struggles to keep their humanity as the Ar-Men lighthouse, a bachelor pad, becomes a padded cell.

[The prisoner] is a man buried alive; … dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair

—Charles Dickens

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Rachilde, La Tour d’amour (Paris: Mercure de France, 1984 [1889]), 44. All references to La Tour d’amour will be indicated by LTA followed by the page number. Additionally, all translations from the French are mine. Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) was a French author whose most famous book, À rebours, is considered the manifesto of decadence.

  2. 2.

    Rachilde was the nickname of Marguerite Vallette Eymery (1860–1953), one of the most prominent female authors of the decadent movement.

  3. 3.

    À rebours can be translated as “against the grain.”

  4. 4.

    Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-bas (Paris: Tresse et Stock, 269); and Margaret Waller, “Cherchez la femme: Male Malady and Narrative Politics in the French Romantic Novel,” PMLA 104, no. 2 (1989): 143.

  5. 5.

    Elizabeth Badinter, XY de l’identité masculine (Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1992), 13; Margaret Wallter, The Male Malady: Fictions of Impotence in the French Romantic Novel (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993); and Joris-Karl Huysmans, À rebours (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 2004 [1884]), 139. Arthur Schopenhauer compared humans to hedgehogs, noting that they wanted to live close together but just wound up hurting each other. Additionally, many writers of the nineteenth century (e.g., Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Eduard von Hartmann, Friedrich Nietzsche, August Strindberg, Cesare Lombroso, and Arthur Schopenhauer) agreed on women’s inability to make good companions.

  6. 6.

    It is important to place La Tour d’amour in a context when bachelors were seen as deviants for rejecting social norms like starting a family.

  7. 7.

    Huysmans, À rebours, 160. I have shown a similar process of bachelor failure in the works of Guy de Maupassant in my two articles: “Le célibataire maupassantien: Entre ratages et dérapages,” in “La figure du raté: Perspectives comparatistes,” Post-Scriptum, no. 13 (2011), https://post-scriptum.org/13-01-le-celibataire-maupassantien-entre-ratages-et-derapages/; and “The Figure of the ‘Horla’ in Guy de Maupassant’s Short Stories,” Dix-Neuf (2016): 16–30, as well as in my book, Le Taureau triste: La Solitude du célibataire de Maupassant, Paris: CNRS Éditions (2021).

  8. 8.

    Des Esseintes calls his house “sa cellule” (his cell). Huysmans, À rebours, 89.

  9. 9.

    In Le Roman expérimental (1880; The Experimental Novel), Émile Zola urges writers to use a scientific approach.

  10. 10.

    Cf. Rachilde’s Les Hors nature (1897; Unatural beings).

  11. 11.

    Mireille Dottin-Orsini, Cette femme qu’ils disent fatale: Textes et images de la misogynie fin-de-siècle (Paris: Grasset, 1993), 29.

  12. 12.

    Robert Ziegler, “Rachilde and ‘l’amour compliqué,’” Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Cutlure and Social Justice 11, no. 2 (1986): 115.

  13. 13.

    In Éros décadent, Régina Bollhalder Myer observes that “le penchant pour l’érotisme dans lesœuvres décadentes … exprime clairement le conflit entre les sexes qui prime à cette époque” (the inclination for eroticism in decadent works … clearly represents the conflict between the sexes that is privalent at the time). Éros décadent: Sexe et identité chez Rachilde (Paris: Champion, 2002), 12–13.

  14. 14.

    For more on the crisis of masculine identity in the nineteenth century, see André Rauch, Le Premier sexe: Mutations et crise de l’identité masculine (Paris: Hachette, 2000) or Alain Corbin et al., Histoire de la virilité: Le triomphe de la virilité; Le XIXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2011).

  15. 15.

    Alexis Épaulard, Vampirisme, nécrophilie, nécrosadisme, nécrophagie (Lyon: Storck et Cie, 1901), 87.

  16. 16.

    Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), xiii.

  17. 17.

    Joris-Karl Huysmans, En ménage (Paris: Charpentier, 1881), 132.

  18. 18.

    Robert Ziegler, “Message from the Lighthouse: Rachilde’s La tour d’amour,” Romance Quarterly 39, no. 2 (1992): 160.

  19. 19.

    Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 61.

  20. 20.

    See Janet Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

  21. 21.

    Huysmans, À rebours, 45.

  22. 22.

    Jean Borie, Huysmans, le diable, le célibataire et dieu (Paris: Grasset et Fasquelle, 1991), 87, emphasis mine.

  23. 23.

    Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 13.

  24. 24.

    Lisa Downing, Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and the Nineteenth-Century French Literature (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2003), 104.

  25. 25.

    For more on questions of androgyny and sexual inversions in Rachilde, see the works of Melanie Hawthorne, Katherine Gantz, Alison Finch, and Lisa Downing, among others.

  26. 26.

    “Barnabas the troubadour becomes the outrageous androgyne incarnate.” Alison Finch, “Rachilde and the Horror of Gender Confusion,” in Women’s Writing in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 216.

  27. 27.

    Nathalie Prince, Les Célibataires du fantastique: Essai sur le personnage célibataire dans la littérature fantastique de la fin du XIXème siècle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), 283.

  28. 28.

    Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 101–3.

  29. 29.

    Melanie Hawthorne observes that Marie “has the maternal promise of a Madonna, but the sexual nature of a Magdalene.” “To the Lighthouse: Fictions of Masculine Identity in Rachilde’s La Tour d’Amour,” L’Esprit Créateur 32, no. 4 (1992): 48.

  30. 30.

    Jean de Palacio, Les Perversions du merveilleux (Paris: Séguier, 1993), 29.

  31. 31.

    Dottin-Orsini, Cette femme, 253.

  32. 32.

    Dottin-Orsini, Cette femme, 360.

  33. 33.

    Hawthorne, “To the Lighthouse,” 49.

  34. 34.

    Dottin-Orsini, Cette femme, 38; and Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (London: Rebman, 1899), 392.

  35. 35.

    Hawthorne, “To the Lighthouse,” 49.

  36. 36.

    For more on the representation of this severed head in La Tour d’amour, see my article “Isabelle Eberhardt, Rachilde and Queer Sexualities: Pygmalions Nécromanciens and Mortes amoureuses,” French Forum 47, no. 1 (2022): 155–72.

  37. 37.

    Ziegler, “Message from the Lighthouse,” 163.

  38. 38.

    Morgane, Leray, “La Tour d’amour de Rachilde: L’hybris des sens, la démesure de l’écriture.” In “Transgressions.” Malice, le Magazine des Littératures et des Cultures à l’ère numérique, no. 4 (2014), https://cielam.univ-amu.fr/malice/articles/tour-damour-rachilde-lhybris-sens-demesure-lecriture.

  39. 39.

    Jean de Palacio, Figures et formes de la décadence (Paris: Séguier, 1994), 54.

  40. 40.

    The lighthouse is likened to a snake (LTA, 16), and its girth and length are emphasized (LTA, 14).

  41. 41.

    Finch, “Rachilde,” 217.

  42. 42.

    Justel, “Espace et langage: La Tour d’amour de Rachilde et la Tour de Babel,” Cédille, Revista de Estudios franceses, no. 12 (2016): 189–90.

  43. 43.

    Peter Scharff Smith, “The Effects of Solitary Confinement on Prison Inmates: A Brief History and Review of the Literature,” Crime and Justice 34 (2006): 488. For more on the effect of solitary confinement, see Stuart Grassian, “Psychopathological Effects of Solitary Confinement,” American Journal of Psychiatry 140, no. 11 (1983): 1450–54.

  44. 44.

    Guenther, Solitary Confinement, xi.

  45. 45.

    Armand Lanoux, Maupassant le “Bel-Ami,” (Paris: Fayard, 1967), 205. Cf. Émile Zola, La Bête humaine (Paris: G. Charpentier et Cie, 1890).

  46. 46.

    Justel, “Espace et langage,” 199.

  47. 47.

    Prince, Les Célibataires, 189.

  48. 48.

    Emile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 1: 260.

  49. 49.

    Justel, “Espace et langage,” 186. Also, Jean observes: “nous étions un joli ménage, le vieux et moi” (LTA, 64; the old man and I made quite a couple). Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881; Bouvard and Pécuchet) is a novel by Gustave Flaubert about two Parisian clerks who decide to move in together in the countryside and spend their days reading.

  50. 50.

    For more on the topic of homosociality, see Eve Kosofsky Sedwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

  51. 51.

    For Émile Durkheim, the lack of strong ties between an individual and his family, friends, peers, and/or society can only have lethal consequences. Le Suicide: Étude de sociologie (Paris: Alcan, 1897), 208.

  52. 52.

    Hawthorne “To the Lighthouse,” 47.

  53. 53.

    Maurice Gning, “Nihilisme identitaire dans Lord of the Flies de William Golding et A Slight Ache de Harold Pinter,” European Scientific Journal 13, no. 32 (2017): 127.

  54. 54.

    Gning, "Nihilisme identitaire,” 124, 127.

  55. 55.

    Guenther, Solitary Confinement, 3.

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  1. Modern Languages Department, Ursinus College, Collegeville, PA, USA

    Céline Brossillon

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Correspondence to Céline Brossillon .

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  1. Department of Romance, German, Russian Languages and Literatures, California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA, USA

    Claire Emilie Martin

  2. Department of Romance, German, Russian Languages and Literatures, California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA, USA

    Clorinda Donato

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Brossillon, C. (2024). Solitary Confinement in Rachilde’s La Tour d’amour: Dehumanization and Madness of the Buried Alive. In: Martin, C.E., Donato, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Transnational Women’s Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40494-8_21

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