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Perverting Degeneration: Bestiality, Atavism, and
Rachilde’s L’Animale
Simon Porzak
Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Volume 46, Numbers 1 & 2, Fall-Winter
2017-2018, pp. 93-113 (Article)
Published by University of Nebraska Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ncf.2017.0014
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/671600
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]Perverting Degeneration
Bestiality, Atavism, and Rachilde’s L’Animale
Simon Porzak
Critics have read Rachilde’s novel of bestiality, 1893’s L’Animale, as one of her least
perverse works. Th is judgment mirrored the declining fortunes of bestiality itself,
which remained a capital crime into the seventeenth century but was not even seen
as a true perversion by fin-de-siècle sexologists. I read the transgressive violence of
interspecies entanglement back into the novel, viewing it as a fatal satire on the force
of nature that criminologists, literary critics, and natural scientists vainly sought
to order and control. Contemporary critical receptions of Rachilde diminished
her authorial agency by using biological models that relied on hopelessly shifting
analogies between man, woman, and beast. The novel’s narrative of bestial desire
between girl and cat plays on this unstable analogical structure to restore a capacity
for language, desire, and creative transgression to both the heroine and her stray
lover, whose violent entanglement avoids capture by the masculine discourse
that seeks to put it in a proper place—an allegory for the power of evolutionary
complexity to escape the systematizing impulse of post-Darwinian natural science.
Every sexual encounter is a breaking of bounds, an intrusion into an alien realm,
every sexual encounter retains a whiff of bestiality. What use is the other person if
they are not different? You find true satisfaction only when you let yourself go.
—Midas Dekkers, Dearest Pet: On Bestiality
Je fais très peu partie de l’espèce humaine et je suis beaucoup plus proche de
l’espèce animale.
—Rachilde, Le Théâtre des bêtes
Nineteenth-Century French Studies 46:1–2 www.ncfs-journal.orgBestiality: This Perversion Which Is Not One
In L’Animal que donc je suis, Jacques Derrida declares that no attempt to confront
the question of the limit between the human and the animal has begun with
“une protestation de principe, et surtout une protestation conséquente contre
ce singulier général, l’animal. Ni contre le singulier général d’un animal à
sexualité principiellement indifférenciée—ou neutralisée, sinon châtrée” (64).
Perhaps Derrida was not the most assiduous reader of minor Decadent novels,
for Rachilde’s 1893 L’Animale offers such a protest. Originally serialized under
the title Bestialités, it traces the increasingly passionate and violently sexual
relationship between a girl and her cat.
Even the novel’s double title shatters the neutralized and neutered concept
of “the animal.” By pluralizing “bestialities,” the serialized version insists on
multiple objects of bestial desire—not one singular perversion turning from the
human towards a unified field of “the animal.” The title also locates, in the central
couple of the text, more than one “bestiality.” If bestiality is defined not as “desire
for the animal,” but as “desire across species boundaries,” then the animal in
question here may also be the subject of bestiality, manifesting a desire equivalent
(but not identical) to the girl’s. As Derrida observes, “bêtise” and “bestialité”
(asinine, beastly behaviors) maintain the very difference between man and beast
that they seemingly dissolve—since only man can so lapse into animality. If
“bestialité” for Derrida represents “une projection anthropomorphique de ce qui
reste réservé à l’homme, comme la seule assurance, finalement, et le seul risque,
d’un ‘propre d’homme’” (65), Rachilde’s title instead diffracts both the object
and the subject of “bestiality,” making it first not a proper property, and then not
a property of man.
Next, by adding a feminine «-e» to the end of “l’animale,” Rachilde returns
sex to the animal, and this sex, for once, is not castrated, neutered, gelded, or
fi xed. When “l’animale,” through the addition of a feminine ending, discovers
a sex of which it was formerly dispossessed, this division of neutral-male and
sexed-female may seemingly recapitulate a well established binary in which
the body of “the sex” must bear the marks of sexedness against a neuter, non-
corporeal masculine. However, that feminine ending also discovers the “mâle”
within “l’animale” (the novel’s heroine takes as her object “le mâle,” the eternal
masculine).1 Consequently the title makes both the she-beast and the ani-male
objects and subjects of bestial desire. The final «-e» excavates a space within
the “animal” between female and male genders, and under the present sign of
the feminine ending—rather than under the alternative presence or absence of a
phallus. Both titles, then, operate eccentrically as singulars and plurals, naming
constellations of beings and practices that cannot be reduced to the propriety of
94 Simon Porzaka concept; they, first of all and in principle, challenge the logic of “the animal” on
which a diagnosis of bestiality would depend.
In his deconstruction of the categorization of life into human and animal in
L’Animal que donc je suis, Derrida exposes himself to the gaze of a cat; he engages
with the political myth of the wolf—homo homini lupus—that differentiates La
Bête et le souverain. The cat and the wolf both stalk Rachilde’s works, liminally
domesticated animals that emphasize the omnipresence of these fleeting but
uncanny moments of entanglement between species. Rachilde’s sustained
engagement with the natural world challenges any simple reading of her Decadent
literature as characterized by a turn “against nature,” as the English translation
of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1884 breviary of Decadence, À rebours, would have it.
I would like to complement recent studies of Rachilde’s compelling counter-
narrative of feminine authorship2 to include her counter-narrative of Decadence
and degeneration theory, which seizes on nature precisely as a site of resistance to
naturalized ideologies of gender, law, and desire.
Rachilde’s revolutionary model of human-animal intercourse views natural
selection, variation, and evolution as radically complex processes that work
across and beyond the limits separating species. This model hews more closely
to the original impulse of Darwinian thought,3 particularly in contrast to
the stable, constantly meliorative model of evolution used by fin-de-siècle
degeneration theory to diagnose and condemn Decadence. What Lisa Downing
calls Rachilde’s “deliberately contentious” models of gender and sexuality (77)
satirically show how post-Darwinian science founds itself as capable of knowing
degeneration through a carefully-produced and managed failure to comprehend
the unmanageable complexities of nature.4 And this scientific knowing is never
innocent; its central conceit of “atavism” (which reduces disturbing difference
to the regularized return of repressed animal nature within the human species)
allows degeneration theorists to refuse women and other animals access to
bestiality, criminality, perversion, and even creativity. In other words, the
complex argument Rachilde makes about interspecies contact in L’Animale lies
at the heart of her assertion of a uniquely feminine form of Decadent authorship.
In Rachilde’s posthumanist vitalism,5 properties such as “language” and
“eroticism” become abstract, unrecognizable forms of natural processes that
endow all living bodies with a strange capacity for action, response, and change—
expanding Darwin’s vision of evolution as the complexification of interspecies
entanglement to react against the fin-de-siècle consolidation of Darwinian theory
around the telos of man.6 Rachilde’s fiction refuses the reassuringly “humanized”
images of nature that define encounters between natural history and literature
from Victorian moralism7 to the contemporary “literary Darwinism,”8 even as
this humanization enables the industrialization of animal life that stretches from
Nineteenth-Century French Studies 46, nos. 1 & 2 fall–winter 2017–2018 95nineteenth-century slaughterhouses to today’s factory farms. For Derrida, this
pastoralization of nature constitutes the most scandalous violence man commits
against animals—man’s denial of man’s violent relation to animals, biopower’s
naturalization of “human life” as a means of repressing the multiple acts of
iterative violence, against animals and species, that perform such a naturalization.
Against this violent denial, and prefiguring recent animal scholarship that views
the coming-together of various species as a promising site for posthumanist
feminism,9 Rachildean bestiality locates the force of nature, the impulse of
evolution, as radically foreign to any human understanding of nature’s order, even
as it propels us beyond the horizon of our own speciation into new relationships,
new bodies, new extinctions and afterlives. Rachilde, I will argue, simultaneously
demonstrates the omnipresence of perversely complex interspecies relations and
insists on their capacity for violent, transformative creativity.
After Raoule de Vénérande’s forced feminization of Jacques Silvert in Monsieur
Vénus, Mary Barbe’s blood fetish in La Marquise de Sade, Éliante Donalger’s
orgasmic coupling with an amphora in La Jongleuse, and the lighthouse-
keeper’s murderous necrophilia in La Tour d’amour, Laure Lordès’s perversion
in L’Animale feels tame: she merely enters into a passionately sexual relationship
with her cat Lion. Even if Laure may occasionally caress Lion’s “mignonne corne
de corail [qui s’érige] parmi les soies rousses de son ventre” (239), the novel itself
presents this as an idle and innocuous act, and implicitly invites us to regard it
with the same “indulgence” that Laure grants to Lion’s nocturnal infidelities.
And when bestiality gets serious, as when Laure and Lion’s climactic love-making
becomes progressively violent and eventually fatal, most critics have found this
development out of keeping with the text’s seemingly more pacific exposition
of bestiality as the sharing of caresses and nocturnal peregrinations.10 If “In
creating Laure, Rachilde clearly sets out to shock her contemporaries” (Holmes,
Rachilde 133), this shock misfires: the disjunction between the novel’s project
and its narrative shock effects in effect defuses its putatively scandalous force. In
attempting a succès de scandale, L’Animale has perhaps accidentally chosen a non-
scandalous subject.
Rachilde’s contemporaries, ignoring bestiality, praised the text’s psychological
exploration of Laure in her relationship with a series of human males, reducing
Laure to a she-beast for human men with no perversity of her own. Jules Renard
compliments Rachilde on her portrait of Laure, while qualifying his judgment:
“Je ne partage pas son goût des chats auxquels elle me semble accorder une trop
grande part de ses faveurs, mais le reste m’enchante.”11 Jean Lorrain hails the book
as “le plus pervers, le plus malsain et le plus cruellement détraqué que je connaisse”
before immediately adding that “Si ton héroïne n’était pas nyctalope et si elle ne
courait pas les toits la nuit comme une chatte en humeur, ce serait ton plus beau
livre.”12 So, although the novel itself insists that Laure exhibits “toute l’audace et
96 Simon Porzaktoute la perversité d’un criminel” (20) critics find Laure’s bestiality in itself neither
criminal nor shocking. We may well wonder—is bestiality even perverse?
No, respond Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, the great
encyclopedists of fin-de-siècle perversity, who do not class bestiality as a proper
perversion. Krafft-Ebing classifies “Zoophilia erotica” as a minute sub-category of
fetishism (since beasts are things, inanimate objects) (282). Krafft-Ebing decides
that human sexual contact with animals simply gratifies “a peculiar idiosyncrasis
of the tactile nerves which, by touching furs or animal skins, produces peculiar
and lustful emotions (analogous to hair-, braid-, velvet-, and silk-fetichism)” (281).
Alternatively, coitus with animals may be a sub-category of the sadistic drive “to
stab, flagellate, or defi le females, to flagellate boys, to maltreat animals, etc.” (533).
These desires constitute displaced and defanged forms of the desire to commit
“lust-murder,” producing occasional collateral damage like a tortured chicken
(535) or a goat sodomized with a stick (538). Ellis concurs, describing bestiality
as a merely incidental detour of a human desire for other humans, “[resembling]
masturbation and other abnormal manifestations of the sexual impulse which
may be practiced merely faute de mieux and not as, in the strict sense, perversions
of the impulse” (81). In these cases of pathological zooerasty, “medical evidence”
proves the “human monster” who takes an animal as his or her object to be “a
psychically degenerate, irresponsible invalid, and not a criminal” (Krafft-Ebing
565). Because of the atavistic etiology of zooerasty, the zooerast is already more
animal than human and thus transgresses no barriers of species or law.
Krafft-Ebing gives a few examples of non-pathological bestiality: a prostitute
puts on shows with a trained bull-dog, charging her audience ten francs a head;
an otherwise-healthy provincial gentleman with a tiny penis chooses to satisfy
himself with hens (562). Here, the human treats the animal as an instrument
to satisfy a human desire, deformed by biological accident but still solvable by
economic means (buy hens). Finally, society need not worry about the zoophile—
unlike the contagious invert, the zoophile cannot pervert the objects of his desire,
since, as animals, they have no desire to pervert (570). Bestiality opens up the
field of perversion—since atavism, the return of the animal within the human,
produces all perversions—yet is excluded from the very field it defines.
How did bestiality become so tame? Even in the seventeenth century, criminal
cases of bestiality differed radically from the medico-legal approaches of Krafft-
Ebing and Ellis. On 15 October 1601, Claudine de Culam was found guilty of
“copulation et habitation charnelle” with “un chien blanc tachetté de roux”; after
various witnesses claimed to have caught Claudine and her pet en flagrante, a
court ordered a physical examination of Claudine by a team of expert midwives,
who found evidence that Claudine had practiced “copulation charnelle avec
un masle” (qtd. in Villeneuve 142–43). More damningly, once Claudine was
undressed for the examination, her dog leapt on her and began congress.
Nineteenth-Century French Studies 46, nos. 1 & 2 fall–winter 2017–2018 97Claudine’s mother protested that Claudine was “trop sage et trop innocente,”
simultaneously too wise and too unknowing, to commit such an act (141);
Claudine claimed she was three months pregnant with her dog’s child. She
received the following guilty sentence:
La Cour a declaré laditte Claudine de Culam bien et duement atteinte et
convaincue d’avoir contre nature eu habitation et copulation charnelle avec
un chien blanc tachetté de roux; [ . . . ] en consequence, ordonne laditte
Cour que laditte Claudine de Culam sera pendue et étranglée à une potence
qui sera pour cet effet dressée dans la place et marché dudit Rognon, avec
ledit chien blanc tachetté de roux, lequel sera pendue et etranglé à laditte
potence avant laditte Claudine de Culam; quoy fait leurs corps jettez dans
un feu qui sera allumé aupres, et le tout consommé les cendres jettées et
semées au vent. (145)
Bestiality explodes with that violence denied it by Krafft-Ebing and Ellis, so
noxious to social order that every potential germ of Claudine and her dog must be
removed from the earth, as if their corpses could sow the seeds of more bestiality.
The court sentences both Claudine and “le chien blanc tachetté de roux,” defining
them both as subjects of both law and desire. The ruling’s tortured, chiasmic
syntax hangs Claudine with her dog and the dog with his mistress, interchanging
them in the queerly postmortem space of the gallows. Even if the beast here only
becomes a subject in violating a law that leads necessarily to his execution, at least
he’s more than a fetish-object to employ faute de mieux.
At the fin de siècle, though, sexological discourse has transformed a
shocking crime, meriting spectacular punishment, into a mere peccadillo. The
domestication of bestiality, which implicitly depends on the de-subjectivization
of the “animal,” appears as one of many side effects of the violent transformation
of man’s (already violent) relation to the animal in the Enlightenment and the
Industrial Revolution, which Derrida defines as “les développements conjoints de
savoirs zoologiques, éthologiques, biologiques et génétiques toujours inséparables
de techniques d’intervention dans leur objet, de transformation de leur objet
même, et du milieu et du monde de leur objet, le vivant animal” (46). Despite
their Darwinian pretentions, the knowledge-production systems of sexology
and criminology participate directly and spectacularly in this violent evacuation
of life’s violence from animal and human life. Derridean biopower silences the
(perhaps constitutively) violent encounter between man and animal, in order
to more smoothly capitalize on the animal, and this domesticating denial of
the violence inherent in the encounter between species appears more ethically
problematic than that violence itself. The same violence recurs as Decadent
tastemakers attempt to domesticate and declaw Rachilde, to silence the she-beast
98 Simon Porzakwho threatens taxonomic categories of “genius” and “criminal”; to understand
her reaction to the medicalized apparatus of literary criticism that denies
her creativity, we must first consider the logic it employs to master the elusive
boundary between human and animal.
How Do You Solve a Problem like Rachilde?
In 1889, Maurice Barrès offered to introduce the first French edition of Monsieur
Vénus, the breakthrough novel by Marguerite Eymery (alias Rachilde). Barrès’s
introduction, “Complications d’amour,” seeks both to capitalize on and reduce
the particularly shocking fact of the author’s gender, by attaching a male
name to a feminine scandal. Hailing Rachilde as “Mademoiselle Baudelaire,”
Barrès’s apparent inversion of gender roles only serves to preserve a tight
linkage of masculinity and authorial mastery. This linkage becomes more
anxious and urgent in the case of Decadence, which bases its aesthetics on a
uniquely masculine sensitivity towards feminization (in the same way that only
humans can suffer from bestial desire, only men can suffer from aestheticizing
effeminacy).13 To paraphrase Leo Bersani, Barrès frames Rachilde’s authorship
as “a perversion rather than a subversion of real maleness” (13), since a natural
masculinity remains in force as the yardstick with which to measure, evaluate,
and truly know any and all forms of deviance.
Michael Riffaterre defines Decadence by its rhetoric of paradoxicality, making
Decadence about the distance between perversion and subversion, or the power
of a norm to sublate deviation.14 Decadence depends, as Barbara Spackman
argues, not on its “thematics of excess,” but instead on the extent to which the
oppositional move of the Decadent paradox could exceed the doxa against which
it articulates itself—the potentially impossible possibility that inversion could
exceed perversion and become something like subversion, in the process undoing
the taxonomic stability of these tropes of twisting (“Interversions” 48).
Barrès certainly worries about Rachilde’s potentially excessive force, to judge
from his desire to read her as purely derivative: “Ce livre-ci est assez abominable,
pourtant je ne puis dire qu’il me choque” (vii). Instead, Monsieur Vénus will
only please the reader who can register “l’émotion violente que donne toujours
à des esprits curieux et réfléchis le spectacle d’une rare perversité” (viii). Rarity
becomes a difference of degree and not of kind, and consequently the sign of an
indifference. Now, this rarity—“Ce qui est tout à fait délicat dans la perversité
de ce livre”—stems entirely from the fact that “il a été écrit par une jeune fi lle de
vingt ans” (viii) (“jeune fi lle” meaning both young woman and virgin, connoting
a double lack of experience). Too young and uninitiated into sexuality, Rachilde
cannot be performing consciously; therefore the interest of the novel comes not
Nineteenth-Century French Studies 46, nos. 1 & 2 fall–winter 2017–2018 99from Rachilde, exactly, but from her symptom: “Ce vice savant éclatant dans le
rêve d’une vierge,” “un des problèmes les plus mystérieux que je sache, mystérieux
comme le crime, le génie ou la folie d’un enfant, et tenant de tous les trois” (viii).
This symptom fits into medico-juridico-aesthetic explanations of criminality,
genius, and innate madness, and thus reveals instinctual behavior: “elle avait de
mauvais instincts, et les avouait avec une malice inouïe” (x); “Rachilde, à vingt
ans, pour écrire un livre qui fait rêver un peu tout le monde, n’a guère réfléchi; elle
a écrit tout au trot de sa plume, suivant son instinct” (xi). And the source of this
instinct is nameable: “Les jeunes fi lles nous paraissent une chose très compliquée,
parce que nous ne pouvons nous rendre assez compte qu’elles sont gouvernées
uniquement par l’instinct, étant des petits animaux sournois, égoïstes et ardents”
(xi). By describing what at first appears perplexing or confounding as merely the
usual atavism of young girls, Barrès—now the genius diagnostician—resolves all
these “complications d’amour,” straightening out all the seemingly twisty kinks
of the novel’s perversions.
Barrès reads Monsieur Vénus as a normal variation from the proper “human”
type: Rachilde’s abnormal body deviates from the norm, in stable ways subject
to the same normalizing law. This literary criticism, in turn, depends on the
science of degeneration that makes its biological logic credible. All such science
begins with a stabilizing understanding of atavism first given in Bénédict Morel’s
1857 Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce
humaine: “La constance et l’uniformité des déformations physiques chez les
êtres dégénérés, indiquent la préexistence des causes qui agissent d’une manière
invariable et qui tendent à créer des types à forme déterminée” (5). Thematizing
excess as something “constant” and “uniform” makes it into a theme with regular
variations. Similarly, Max Nordau, who synthesized the work of Morel, Cesare
Lombroso, and Jean-Martin Charcot into his massively influential Degeneration
[Entartung], simultaneously diagnoses the “arrested development” of the fin-de-
siècle European urban subject (35) and constructs a normal, ahistorical human
being by “[regarding degeneracy] as a morbid deviation from an original type” (16).
Nordau dedicates his work to Lombroso, demonstrating his debt to the
scientist who first developed the logical chain tying atavism to genius—and the
lack thereof. To understand how Rachilde resists the webs of natural science and
literary criticism that constrain the reception of her texts, we must first follow
Lombroso’s reasoning to find the strange aporia of bestiality within which
Rachilde will articulate her counter-critique. Female intelligence, for Lombroso,
differs from genius in its lack of creative power (Lombroso and Ferrero 82); the
rare “woman of genius” “can be explained as Darwin explained the colorization
of certain female birds that resemble the males of their species: by a confusion
of secondary sexual characteristics produced by a mismatch of paternal and
maternal heredity. One need only look at pictures of women of genius of our day
100 Simon Porzakto realize that they seem to be men in disguise” (83). Females of all species are thus
less intelligent—and less criminal—since their atavism is a second-hand version
of their fathers’. Although Lombroso’s male degenerates are also feminized, males
are (by nature) more sensitive, and females less sensitive, to all stimuli; atavism
exaggerates this fundamental physical and psychical division. While Sacher-
Masoch’s Severin traces his perverse desire to be enslaved to his “suprasensitivity,”
Lombroso’s anesthetized prostitutes work “totally for the benefit of men.”15
Lombroso distinguishes exuberance and conservatism by citing Darwin’s maxim
that “The male gives variation, the female the species.”16 Consequently, the logic
of atavism is rigorously non-invertable, since the atavistic male becomes a “more
perfect and more variable female” (45)—allowing for flights of true variation,
both as genius and criminality. Ironically, man’s exuberance proves his maleness.
But atavism makes men women and women animals, so Lombroso follows
this universal possibility of life all the way down the evolutionary ladder: “it was
natural for me to make zoology the foundation of the new school of criminal
anthropology, which relies so much on the modern theory of evolution”
(Lombroso and Ferrero 45). He begins with “the fascinating description of
insectivorous plants by Darwin, Drude, Rees, and Will” (Criminal Man 167).
For Darwin, the relationship between insect and plant emerges in The Origin of
Species as the key site of interspecies “complexity,” the moment where evolution
appears as a process of open-ended generation across and between entangled
organisms. In Lombroso, carnivorous plants “commit true murders of insects”
and thus demonstrate that criminality is a fundamental, excessive characteristic
of all life: “When an insect, however small, lands on the leafy disc of the drosera
(and indeed, this seems not to happen by chance, since certain leaf secretions
attract it), it is immediately enfolded and compressed by numerous tentacles.”17
Here, Lombroso arrives at his major conclusion: “These examples show the dawn
of criminality. They establish that premeditation, ambush, killing for greed, and,
to a certain extent, decision-making (refusal to kill insects that are too small) are
derived completely from histology or the microstructure of organic tissue—and
not from an alleged will” (168). In so doing, Lombroso generalizes violence and
cruelty while reserving “will”—the mark of the true criminal or genius—for the
male of the human species alone.18
Yet Lombroso’s argument rests on a series of analogies, beginning with “man :
woman :: woman : beast,” that quickly proves vertiginous. The first example given
by Lombroso is not, exactly, zoological; insectivorous plants encounter animals
as their victims, making the first example of zoological crime, perversely, a
botanical one. But these floral movements operate “in the same way that reflexes
work in animals” (168). The simile promises us animals, then delivers plants;
but these plants are reflections of the animal, at least inasmuch as the animal
is driven by unthinking, even inanimate, reflex. Even as Lombroso attempts to
Nineteenth-Century French Studies 46, nos. 1 & 2 fall–winter 2017–2018 101define an animal “zoology,” this logic of
the zoon reveals itself as a hall of mirrors
in which animal and plant reflect each
other infinitely.
The structure of Genlisea ornata
“exactly” [precisamente19] copies the
design of eel-pots and lobster traps,
so “true murder” [vere uccisioni] must
correspond to fishing, or predation.
Lombroso tries to explain this by saying
that “killing for food” “corresponds
to human crimes rooted in hunger
or indigence,” but stealing food or
killing for food is quite different than
eating one’s victim.20 So what, then, is
“murder”? We cannot gloss “uccisioni”
as simply “killing,” given that we are
looking for the origins of crime. But in
Lombroso’s most basic examples, there
Carnivorous plants, from Lombroso, is nothing that would analogically
Uomo delinquente, 1897.
compare to murder, since in all these
examples (including the one “exactly”
like the case of humans killing eels) there
is no murder, no killing of like by like. Unless the killing of anything living—by
anything living—would be murder. And in that case, life would be nothing but
a universal orgy of murder, since any organism’s life must necessarily entail the
death of other organisms. Life starts to look like an analogy for the cutting irony
of a Decadent novel.21
Lombroso illustrates this chapter with a plate placing the carnivorous Drosera
around two other relationships: the symbiosis between plant roots and nitrogen-
fi xing bacteria,22 and the commensalism between a jellyfish and a jack, two
images of the mutualism exemplified by Darwin’s bee and flower. Now, symbiosis
looks like degeneration, with the giant tubercules on the plant’s root recalling des
Esseintes’s dream of syphilitic flora in À rebours. In commensalism, one species
benefits, and the other species is unaffected. Does the juvenile fish living in the
protection of the jellyfish’s tentacles commit a crime? Does the fish profit from
the jellyfish without providing anything in return, in some sort of “victimless
crime”? Does mutualism figure crime (perhaps the worst kind of parasitism) or
vice-versa? Does the logic of the zoon lead, over and over again, to more and more
sophisticated and strange ways of life and death?
102 Simon PorzakEven as Lombroso perfects the atavistic analogy allowing him to describe
human deviance as the return of bestiality, this logic proves too promiscuous.
In this relay of overlapping analogies, we cannot determine the direction of
any “atavism,” nor fully coordinate the differences between human, plant, and
animal; mutual assistance and differentiating violence; coexistence and crime.
It’s not animality that returns in Lombroso’s atavism; instead, it’s the way in
which any living being cannot stand alone, the way in which any species that
encounters other species must mark them, and be marked by them, with desire
and violence. In other words, atavism is bestiality, if “bestiality” names those
encounters between forms of life that exceed the definitions of “animal” and
“human.” This slippage between perversion, crime, and genius provides Rachilde
the force for her satire of those critics who sought to domesticate her novelistic
creation, and her own genius.
Chacun cherche son chat
L’Animale traces a relation of “bonheur animal” between “deux simples créatures,
si naturellement compliquées” (234–35)—a relationship of natural fortuity
(“bonheur”) that conjoins and concatenates simplicity and complication. The
novel, like Rachilde’s other Bildungsromane of perversion (most notably 1887’s
La Marquise de Sade), tells a simple story: Laure Lordès is raised by conventional
and provincial bourgeois parents, in a small house entirely covered in angelica
bushes, which either create or activate a tendency towards sensuality in Laure.
As a pubescent, she tries to seduce the village priest, and amuses herself with her
father’s deformed, one-eyed clerk. Her engagement to the prim Henri Alban
causes the clerk to drown himself in the town well after informing Laure’s
parents and Henri of her sin, although the priest convinces Henri to marry
Laure anyway. In Paris, Henri, disgusted by his wife’s sensuality, waits for
her to commit adultery and provide him with reasonable grounds for divorce.
Laure, instead, begins to crawl around the rooftops at night and adopts a stray
cat she names Lion. Eventually, Henri finds an excuse to abandon Laure; alone
in the house with scarcely any money, Laure and Lion grow progressively closer.
But once Laure can no longer feed him, Lion scampers off and Laure turns to
prostitution. Her first client offers to take her away to Africa; he leaves to finalize
the arrangements for their departure. While he is gone, Lion returns; enraged,
cat and girl violently tear at each other, first in bed, then on the rooftops. The two
plummet to their deaths just as the nameless gentleman arrives to claim Laure.
L’Animale first describes Laure’s inclination towards perversity as vegetal,
communicated to her by the angelica bush that surrounds her childhood home;
as a child she is “une sorte d’angélique destinée à étonner la ville” (30), or “un
Nineteenth-Century French Studies 46, nos. 1 & 2 fall–winter 2017–2018 103enfant angélique, un végétal” (33), while as an adult she lives “une vie de plante,”
“ses instincts l’attirant en bas comme des racines, lui vrillant le crâne comme des
branches à floraisons vénéneuses” (172–73). Like Lombroso’s Drosera, the angelica
bush ravenously swallows its environment: it grows large on the fertilizing
mixture of “épluchures,” “entrailles d’animaux,” and “eaux de vaisselle” cast
off from the house (32). Like the perverse angelica, which can be used to make
children’s candy and rat poison, Laure is “pourrie, d’une jolie pourriture de
champignon blanc et brodé,” even “naturellement décomposée” (31). Natural
decomposition and natural complexity converge in Laure’s dream of marriage as
“un cloître où l’on se trouverait deux de sexe différent, perpétuellement en tête-à-
tête sur des coussins de velours” (62). Overlapping singular and plural—“deux de
sexe différent”—Laure’s novel heterosexuality overlaps similarity and difference,
and views bodies of both genders as sexed (rather than just the female body).
Laure’s bestial perversion emerges in a masculine rhetoric of atavism, delivered
piecemeal by a series of provisional father figures, and aimed precisely at reducing
Laure’s queerly heterosexual, vegetal exuberance. When Laure begins her
seduction of the village priest, she brings him an angelica sprig, but he sees only
her “bouche féline et torturée d’amour” (66). The parental order that evicts her
from her family home and dispossesses her of her name also ultimately reduces
the scope of her decomposition: “[Ses parents] ne se souvenaient plus de la belle
et fière angélique tant désirée, si bien cultivée! Ça, ce n’était plus ni la petite, ni
Laure, ni mademoiselle Lordès! C’était une chienne que les chiens viendraient
flairer sous leur toit, une prostituée dont les vices éclataient subitement comme
un feu infernal . . .” (132). Laure runs to the church, “d’une course folle de bête
traquée par la meute” (133) and the metaphorics of Lombrosian atavism have
fully crystallized: Laure is simultaneously criminal (prostitute), madwoman,
and animal. Without a patronym, Laure becomes what the masculine discourse
surrounding her always supposed her to have been—a “simple et naturel”
animal—her wildness tamed by the rhetorics of atavism.
Henri, meanwhile, imagines conventional bourgeois marriage as a constant,
plodding carriage, “attelée d’une aimable jument poulinière, supportant le frein
dans les descentes et venant prendre le sucre sur la main de son maître, sans
qu’on ait jamais besoin de fouet” (107). Saying “Je te forcerai à m’aimer, sinon
je deviendrai le pire des animaux, moi, que tu prends déjà pour une bête” (115),
Laure accepts but radicalizes Henri’s image of wife-as-pony. Laure’s devoted
care for the stray kitten that will become Lion, inspired by a universal female
love for the child, leads her to adopt more of the poses of the cat: on all fours,
she looks like a panther. But “cet autre genre d’exagération sensuelle” (143)
scandalizes Henri, since if she dotes excessively on the cat, she will never have
time to commit adultery and thus provide him with grounds for divorce.
Perversely, Laure’s excessive eroticism makes her a better wife, a mare so securely
104 Simon Porzakhitched to the marital carriage that the carriage driver cannot extricate himself
from the apparatus. Pet ownership, that conventionally “domestic” extramarital
arrangement, gives a perverse twist to adultery; could the contemporary
bourgeois ménage include multiple overlapping bestialities? Midas Dekkers, the
Dutch biologist and writer, observes that, in terms of our excessive adoration of
our pets, only decadent Egypt and Rome can claim to be our equals, suggesting
that “preferring pets is a sign of decadence, a short-circuit in the network of
affection” (189).
Laure defines herself as a beast for men and a woman for beasts, defining
women as “les intermédiaires entre l’espèce féline et l’espèce humaine.” Her love
moves between reason and bestiality, owing to her “spéciale nature de brute,”
her “entrailles de bête correspondantes aux instincts délicieux du petit chat, car
les chats sont, dit-on, tout simplement des esprits dévoyés qui rôdent, vêtus de
fourrure, pour s’efforcer de reconquérir leur ancien corps féminin” (151). Since
Laure is exiled from humanity, she must be a cat—which means she must truly be
a woman, or a cat looking for its true woman’s body, which possesses an anatomy
that carries only a cat’s instincts. We can’t oppose the body of beast and human,
so we can’t speak precisely of atavism; cat and girl inseparably reflect, refract, and
define each other, without this reflexivity demolishing their difference (the space
between them for desire, antagonism, and the hunt). Laure and Lion exchange
their characteristics, changing their positions in the field of their bestialités: “Le
petit chat [ . . . ] prenait des allures d’enfant, devenait humain, tandis que la jeune
fi lle, plus bestiale à se frotter contre cette fourrure de bête, devenait féline” (175).
This perverse reflexivity of cat and girl is not merely “rhetorical”; L’Animale
does not simply “deconstruct” the discourse of Lombrosian atavism, it also
deconstructs the difference between science (as writing about nature) and
nature, by entangling language within the complex interspecies relationships
it describes.23 When Laure sees Lion licking up her tears, she feels “un de ces
étonnements profonds qui apaisent les douleurs les plus violentes, puisqu’ils
bouleversent l’ordre établi dans la nature” and thanks Lion “de lui avoir parlé”
(193). This is not a metaphor; language here appears as a series of biological gestures
that pass between various kinds of different beings (think, for instance, of the
Drosera that evolves the capacity to secrete certain compounds that will attract
its insect victims). So language becomes something strangely material, linking
all living bodies in a physical, diff use communication with other living bodies.
Spoken language forms only a small subset of these other acts of communication.
Language begins with genetic evolution, the iterative exchange of genetic material
leading to species divergence, encounter, and competition, and encompasses all
such dangerous exchanges—including a cat licking a sad girl’s tears.
This kind of “body talk” also grounds the love between Laure and Lion.
“Laure sentit que Lion était amoureux d’elle” (234): whenever Lion grows
Nineteenth-Century French Studies 46, nos. 1 & 2 fall–winter 2017–2018 105insistent, Laure “sentait son sexe se troubler à ces appels déchirants d’un autre sexe”; Lion, meanwhile, grows aggressive on those days “où [Laure] sentait plus fort la femme, se rapprochait davantage de la femelle” (236). This doubled feeling, conveyed by a pheromonal language that can be diverted or misread, invents both creatures as responses to the sex of the other. The text’s double use of “sentir,” meaning both “smell” and “sense,” highlights how the lover’s body becomes physically marked by the other’s sex, as well as the non-identical symmetry of Laure’s and Lion’s response to this marking. Like the spiritual marriage of same beings “de sexe différent” dreamed of by Laure, these lovers possess different sexes, and become lovers as their sexes change in the presence of other sexes. Laure’s menstruation only becomes significant through the unprecedented effect it has upon Lion. Laure and Lion become subjects through the unforeseeable acts of communication performed by their bodies, as Rachilde eliminates the difference between the discourse of atavism and the universal information exchange of biodiversity. Finally, the novel’s terminal satire matches Laure with the unnamed gentleman client. Strong, sensual, not bound by societal conventions— apparently the ideal counterpart to the Rachildean heroine—he offers to conclude the text by forming a perfect union with Laure (Holmes, Rachilde 136); after celebrating her as a “créature à la fois fière et soumise” (258), and finally as “la belle bête intelligente que je considère comme représentant la femme désirable,” he declares, “Je t’enlève au monde” (261) to “un vilain pays brûlant où rugissent tes sœurs, les lionnes!” (259). He thus recapitulates Henri’s ideal of marriage as the link between a coachman and a mare; even this sugar daddy views Laure as a stably animal object (as did the Catholic Father and Laure’s sweet-toothed dad). Placing Laure in Africa with her lioness sisters, the unnamed man maps atavism onto the imaginative geography of colonialism, in which colonial spaces contain “primitive” temporalities; Lombroso similarly equated the vulval abnormalities of African women and criminal European women. Insidiously, Laure’s patron proposes to put her on a nature preserve, an asylum-like space containing those who share her atavism, according to a zoo-logic that would place all the lions in the same pen. By phrasing this invitation to confinement as a romantic “invitation au voyage,” Rachilde darkly satirizes the structural complicity between sexology, criminology, and the colonial-administrative project. These paternal discourses seek to produce a docile subject of perversion, and locate her within a managerial apparatus that keeps human and human-animal in the right places. The sugar daddy dreams not of an escape from the system of bourgeois biopolicing, but instead of the total triumph of this system. But as the unnamed man leaves to make arrangements, Lion returns, and he and Laure violently consummate their relationship, brutally fighting, “comme tous deux possédés par une suprême rage de désespoir” (265). This “rage,” both a 106 Simon Porzak
contagious disease and an affectively contagious metaphor, feeds back into itself:
Lion attacks Laure with renewed vigor as she bites and claws at him in defense
and anger. Lion splits Laure’s lower lip in two, pierces her dimpled chin, rips off
her nipple, covers her stomach in tangled furrows, slashes her thigh, and tears off
an eyelid; “ayant vraiment l’air de se venger,” he attacks “toutes ces merveilles de la
femme comme d’autres bêtes dont jadis les rages luxurieuses l’avaient cruellement
offensé” (267). “Rage” (like Lombroso’s “crime”) infects all the bodies of the text,
both characterizing and provoking violent encounters. If Laure’s body parts are
like beasts that have slipped—atavistically—into lustful rages, then the logic of
atavism has slipped down, from man to woman to beast. Correspondingly, the
novel no longer differentiates between Laure and Lion, and the couple’s final
physical encounter becomes an infinite mirroring:
exaspérée par la douleur cuisante des blessures horribles [que Lion] lui
faisait, [Laure] essayait de se l’ôter en tirant frénétiquement sur cette
couleuvre qui s’enroulait autour de ses membres nus, le mordait à son tour,
lui enfonçait ses doigts dans ses flancs creux, se retournant sur lui pour
l’écraser, tâcher de lui briser les reins sous le poids de ses reins, et toujours
le chat la tenait entre ses griffes d’acier, d’où giclaient de minces fusées de
sang” (266).
The shock of the lovers’ encounter reinforces itself as one and the same rage that
nevertheless operates differently in different bodies.
Laure, having forgotten the meaning of language, raises her head as Lion
begins to bite her mane of hair:
elle vit, en face d’elle, prêt à bondir, un félin diabolique, un monstre
inconnu, effroyable . . . Une bête, le museau rongé au ras des dents, le nez
coupé, camard, exhibant deux ovales noirâtres, une bête sans paupières,
les yeux couleur de rubis, une bête aux mamelles pendants et fendues,
aux larges pattes palmées, toutes rouges, l’échine aplatie sous une toison
splendide, une fourrure brune que le chat prolongeait et qui se terminait en
queue jaune annelée de velours.
À travers son voile de sang, Laure s’était vue dans la glace. (268)
Does Laure see herself in the mirror, or in the mirror provided by Lion, her
inverse self? Does she see her human body, or her animal body, or her body as
an axis of reflection between human and animal? Laure’s body—like Lion’s—
produces constant reversals that cannot be simple inversions. She is a true cat;
that is, a woman in the form of a cat; that is, a true woman; that is, a cat. The
regressive logic of atavism ends in a short circuit without beginning or end,
undoing the logic of directivity that makes the diagnosis of regression, atavism,
and inversion possible.
Nineteenth-Century French Studies 46, nos. 1 & 2 fall–winter 2017–2018 107And so “Ensemble les deux bêtes enragés” tumble along the roof, tremble on the edge of the gutter, and “du même élan se précipitèrent à l’abîme.” In another ambiguously reflexive gesture, they either throw themselves, or each other, or are thrown, into the abyss, crashing to the ground as the unnamed man turns the key in the lock, slowly, so as not to wake Laure (269). And so the final father figure finds his empire over Laure outplayed by the very force of the rhetorical figuration of bestiality with which he had plotted to coordinate and control her. This is no anticlimactic interruption of the novel’s psychological marriage plot, but the perfection of its logic of marriage. The novel writes a queerly tongue-in- cheek satire of the sexological case study by following perversion in even more “scientific” detail than the scientists ever would. The fact of Laure and Lion’s bestiality, their radical entanglement, proves to be complex beyond the scope of any project to define their desire as “bestiality,” to locate it on any evolutionary matrix, whether that be sexological, criminological, aesthetic, or colonial. And the novel insists on the violence of this policing project, as the sugar daddy’s noiseless insertion of the key into the sleeping Laure’s chamber figures a form of silent and silencing rape. The novel dares us to desire, not the nameless man’s quiet possession of Laure as a docile, alluringly yet temperately perverse, object, but instead the noisy and disfiguring encounter between Laure and Lion, as a model of explosive interspecies entanglement beyond any circumscribed logic of “bestiality.” The nature of Laure’s perversion reveals itself to be so slippery, so epistemologically ungraspable, that it cannot be reduced to “desire for the animal”; bestiality becomes a general feature of all relations between individuals, of the same and of different species—a universal characteristic of life—and atavism fails to function, precisely because it slides all the way down the evolutionary scale, to and even beyond the origin of life. Decadent bestiality argues that all biology must be thought not on the basis of the progression and development of certain species-forms, but instead as the ongoing series of entanglements and ramifications that link the organic world in complex relations of competition and exchange. “L’amour se prouve par la mort” (121), Laure comments mordantly upon hearing of the clerk’s suicide. Here, death proves the interconnectivity of life, as a kind of infectious, raging love. “L’érotisme,” Georges Bataille argues, is “l’approbation de la vie jusque dans la mort” (17, original emphasis). Saying yes to the forces of life takes us not just up to the point of death, but into death, into new, undreamed-of forms of experiential relationality. Isn’t this what L’Animale discovers by giving its total endorsement to the encounter between Laure and Lion? Th is persistent affirmation of a life that becomes something posthumous to itself is also a definition of Darwinian evolution, the force of life that transforms sexual reproductivity into the endlessly productive creations of new forms of life—which may carry with 108 Simon Porzak
them the death of earlier forms of life. Consequently, we cannot conclude, with
Bataille, that mere reproduction, as sexual activity, is common to sexed animals
and humans, while eroticism (a little something extra) is unique to man. Instead,
the fact that animals once became men proves that eroticism, as a force of excess
that propels life forward into and beyond its own death, has always worked as
reproduction’s shadowy other. Evolution and eroticism are perhaps two names
for the same force: that which turns sexual activity, perverts sexual reproduction,
by opening it up as the origin of new, radically other species. If our sex can lead
to the subversion of our species, then there is no sex without the specter, or the
germ, of some past and future bestialities.
Department of English and Comparative Literature
Columbia University
Notes
1. Many of Rachilde’s other heroines devote themselves to the pursuit of this ideal,
notably Mary Barbe in La Marquise de Sade, who finds herself spurred onward into serial
killing when no male presents himself to her; Éliante Donalger—the titular Jongleuse—
once was married to such a paragon of virility, but finds that his power has been lost
forever.
2. See Holmes, Dauphiné, and Hawthorne.
3. See Bowler.
4. Whitney Davis comes to a similar conclusion in his study of Huysmans and Darwin,
although I believe that he does so somewhat by reducing the more anti-systematizing
gestures of Darwin’s work to the simplified forms they would assume as the nineteenth
century continued on.
5. Th is appeal to vitalism resonates, in a minor key, with Jane Bennett’s “vital
materiality” (Vibrant Matter); for Rachilde, affective and linguistic intersubjectivity and
interactivity germinate in the rabies virus that passes ambiguously between the bodies
of her characters. Rachilde’s Decadent vitalism is always shot through with death and
dissolution, with the viral materiality suggested by des Esseintes’s exclamation, upon
reviewing the results of his botanical researches, that “Tout n’est que syphilis.”
6. For a recent example focusing on the specifically French history of natural history,
see Stalnaker.
7. The anti-Darwinian thrust of Victorian literature is only now being remarked on by
scholars of English, as in MacDuffie.
8. In this essay, I do not want to directly participate in the debates surrounding the
“literary Darwinism” promoted by Brian Boyd, Joseph Carrol, and Jonathan Gottschall.
However, I will say that this essay implicitly argues that the deconstructive view of
nature that emerges from Rachilde and Derrida lies closer, ironically, to the Darwinian
Nineteenth-Century French Studies 46, nos. 1 & 2 fall–winter 2017–2018 109conception of “nature” that literary Darwinists claim to wield against such “postmodern”
theories. Furthermore, the explicitly antifeminist drive of “literary Darwinism”
founders when confronted with the simultaneously more nuanced and much stranger
understanding of evolution that Rachilde helps us rediscover in Darwin. For a good
introduction to the debate over literary Darwinism, see Kramnick and Fletcher.
9. See, most notably, Haraway.
10. See Holmes, Rachilde 137.
11. Jules Renard, letter to Rachilde, 21 April 1893, rpt. in David 60.
12. Jean Lorrain, letter to Rachilde (undated), rpt. in David 62. Lorrain goes on to state
that, were it not for “l’horreur finale” (the climactic encounter between Laure and Lion),
he could have “tout pardonné.”
13. See Spackman, Decadent Genealogies.
14. See Riffaterre.
15. 62. Consequently, “the female equivalent of the male born criminal is the
prostitute and [ . . . ] she shares the same atavistic origin,” while at the same time “she is
less perverse and less harmful to society” (37), even offering safe release for the natural
perversions of men.
16. 44. The argument is in fact found in The Descent of Man, in which Darwin observes
that in most cases the male of the species is more obviously variable in its secondary sexual
characteristics than the female, owing to “the males of almost all animals having stronger
passions than the females” (256). In other words, in the majority of cases, sexual selection
selects for male traits. However, Darwin observes that there are many cases in which the
females of a species bear secondary sexual characteristics, and many cases in which both
males and females of a single species bear them. In this way, for Darwin, sexual selection
is a “less rigorous” (262) law than natural selection; it is the law of a variation that varies
in unpredictable ways, to the point where the very stability of its “law” may be called into
question.
17. 167. A brief comparison between Lombroso and Darwin is helpful here, as always.
Darwin, in Insectivorous Plants, gives a count of the tentacles on a Drosera leaf: “the
average number was 192; the greatest number being 260, and the least 130.” Lombroso,
on the other hand, simply counts “about 192 per leaf, which surround [the insect] in ten
seconds.” He thus preserves the number 192 while abandoning the massive variation
observed by Darwin. He misses the point of Darwin’s study of morphological diversity
by normalizing a mean, which Darwin only introduces to highlight the degree of variance
that for him is nature’s abnormal norm. See Darwin, Insectivorous Plants 4.
18. Lombroso occasionally blurs the limits between true crime and the quasi-crimes of
females and animals. For example, taking Enrico Ferri’s identification of 22 distinct types
of animal crime, Lombroso highlights several that are “analogous to crimes in our own
penal code” (168). These include theft, unjust war (motivated solely by the desire to kill),
child abandonment, and even organized crime. Pausing to ask rhetorically whether these
phenomena are “crimes or simply the necessary effects of heredity,” Lombroso dilates on
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