J.-K. Huysmans – The Vatard Sisters (1879)

As a side assignment within my French Decadent immersion, I’m reading J.-K. Huysmans’ novels in their published order. Since Huysmans kicked-off the French Decadent movement with A rebours (Against Nature or Against the Grain), I figured exploring his progression from Naturalism to Decadence might be useful insight into the latter movement. His second novel is The Vatard Sisters (1879).

The Naturalism movement to which Huysmans belonged dismissed the idealistic, impassioned works of Romanticism as cotton candy. I like to think, for example, that the lingering influence of Naturalism is what makes us roll our eyes at drippy sentimentality or pat happy endings in movies or books. Naturalism called out such devices as phony, preferring to depict life as it was. Authors conducted extensive research to create an accurate ‘slice of life’ and did not shy away from subject matter considered taboo in polite society. 

Huysmans’ 1876 debut (Marthe: The Story of a Whore) didn’t sell, but it gained him notoriety and acceptance by Naturalism’s leader Emile Zola. As a result, The Vatard Sisters drew much more attention, largely in the form of the scathing reviews usually given to Naturalism. I read the Dedalus translation of The Vatard Sisters by Brendan King, which includes a terrific introduction contextualizing the novel with contemporary letters and reviews. For example, on his novel’s poor reception Huysmans wrote to a friend: “I’ve received nothing but insults: which makes me happy, as nothing is better for a book’s sales.”

The Vatard Sisters is much longer than Marthe, but Huysmans still eschews drama or significant plotting as he relates the romantic liaisons of two working class sisters in Paris. His intensely detailed, you-are-there depiction of their seedy milieu explains why Zola embraced him. Though not of the same calibre as a Zola novel, The Vatard Sisters is an excellent example of French Naturalism. Even Huysmans’ critics grudgingly acknowledge his talent while blasting him out of the water. 

However, despite Huysmans’ general compliance with Naturalism’s norms, I picked-up a sensibility in this novel that is very different from Zola, Maupassant, or other French Naturalists. First, Huysmans’ ink contains a lot of venom. His disgust with the petty squabbles and crass manners of his characters - especially the women – wafts off the page. He repeatedly uses scathing similes and metaphors to describe them and, at one point, compares the scent of women to “cat piss”. Since Marthe was no different, it’s a safe bet Huysmans was a misogynist. 

While Huysmans’ attacks on women are harsher, he also skewers his male characters for their amorality and sham machismo. To some degree, his vitriol arises from disdain at how the sexes behave during courtship. More deeply, however, Huysmans seems fundamentally disgusted by his working class characters and their milieu, so much so that he can’t work up much empathy for them. For example, even as Huysmans paints the limited options for working class women, he continues to throw his acerbic daggers at the characters. This hardly invites reader sympathy.

This is significant because Naturalism’s slice of life approach was often employed to call attention to darker aspects of French society. In England, Victorian writers such as Dickens, Gaskell, and Eliot were much less subtle. Their novels were naked pleas for the poor, delivered with a level of melodrama Zola's crew probably would have found crass. In contrast, Huysmans’ palpable disgust feels like ‘pearl clutching’ or a leering fascination with destitution akin to a child turning over a rock to see the squirming insects underneath. He already has much in common with the yet-to-emerge Decadent sensibility.

Decadents wrote a lot about the lower classes, but not in a way that inspired pity or charity. When they weren’t using the lower classes for shock value, they positioned their rise as fueling an effluvium of middle-class mediocrity that was corroding the culture, art, and intellectual fiber of French society. The Vatard sisters are to them (and Huysmans) what the Visigoths were to the Romans. Far from aligning with Naturalism, reactions such as Huysmans were often denigrated, lampooned, or used as a mark of evil in the movement’s literature.

The divergence between Huysmans’ emotionally loaded treatment of his characters and Zola’s Naturalism feels even more pronounced in The Vatard Sisters than it was in Marthe. As a result, it’s not surprising to find the novel devoid of any social justice agenda, overt or tacit. As with Marthe, some contemporary critics interpreted this as an extreme adherence to Naturalism. Some even accused Huysmans of out-Zola-ing Zola when, in fact, it may be a sign of just how far away he was already drifting from his mentor. 

No author can be unaware of their feelings about their subject when they are so apparent to a reader. Huysmans would have had to explore this and, given what his opinions seem to be, it’s hard to imagine the results of such exploration leading him anywhere but into conflict with the Naturalist credo. If so, this could be a driving cause for Huysmans’ eventual break with Zola and Naturalism and his embrace of the claws-fully-extended Decadent movement that much better suited his temperament.