Rachilde - The Tower of Love (1899)

I was a bit disappointed by Rachilde’s novel The Tower of Love. It was translated into English - for the first time - by Jennifer Higgins. Melanie Hawthorne, who has translated The Animal as well as a new version of Monsieur Venus, provides a foreword. I have no reason to question the quality of the translation, and it reads very well. I believe my issue is with the novel itself.

Well-written, oozing with dark atmosphere, and packed with the lurid content Rachilde’s known for, The Tower of Love just didn’t land with the same impact as other novels I’ve read by her. It isn’t as effective at merging its ingredients into something cerebrally challenging. It’s Rachilde-lite, and I often felt I was reading a gothic work verging of the ‘horrid novel’ variety (though clearly miles above the likes of Udolpho in quality).

Rachilde imputes plenty of creepy deviance to Mathurin Barnabas, the keeper of the titular lighthouse. He wears self-crafted hairpieces that (I’m guessing) are sourced from female shipwreck victims who float by the lighthouse. He keeps his wife’s corpse stored in the lighthouse, forever gazing out to sea, and Barnabas engages in necrophilia. However, unlike other Rachilde novels, the material doesn’t elevate to anything thought-provoking.

Which is my central disappointment with The Tower of Love. One of Rachilde’s strengths as a writer is her ability to use detailed backstories to dissect her characters’ strange psychologies. Here, Rachilde never goes much past her characters’ surface actions, and I couldn’t help wondering if the reason is that, unusually for her, the two main characters are both male. Another possibility is – twenty years after she erupted onto the literary scene – Rachilde was now “a semirespectable matron, married to a fixture of the publishing world, and was hosting a famous literary salon.”1 Perhaps she was merely ‘going through the motions’ here?

There are intriguing passages about isolation, disillusionment, or the creation of our own purgatory, but it didn’t cohere for me. In her foreword, Hawthorne identifies themes of masculinity and misogyny.2 She doesn’t elaborate and, although they are present, the novel doesn’t have much to say about them. There’s a passage toward the end that suggests an overarching theme3, but it felt stapled on rather than integrated into the narrative.

The late 19th Century French feuilleton worked off thrills, chills, and cliffhangers. Further, many quality Decadent writers made a living providing Parisian newspapers with short fiction and serials fully intended to pull readers in via shock value. As such, a certain skepticism about whether French Decadent writers were striving for much beyond succès de scandale is understandable. 

As such, I fear The Tower of Love may lend support to dismissive attitudes about Rachilde and French Decadent literature.  Perhaps I need to reread the novel at some point for, as Hawthorne points out, at the time of publication it was considered one of Rachilde’s best4, and her other work amply make a case for re-evaluating her place in the development of modern literature. 

Notes:

1. Melanie Hawthorne, “Foreword,” in The Tower of Love, by Rachilde, trans. Jennifer Higgins. (Cambridge: Wakefield Press, 2024), vi.
2. Hawthorne, v.
3. Rachilde, The Tower of Love, trans. Jennifer Higgins. (Cambridge: Wakefield Press, 2024), 110-112.
4. Hawthorne, viii.