Decadence: Obscure literature of the fin de siecle and Belle Epoque - and other literary obsession

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, T he 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 f...

Lauren Fischer made an excellent choice in selecting The Animal as a new Rachilde novel to translate for English readers. Not only can we expand our exposure to her oeuvre, but the plotting and characterization in The Animal is another example of her brilliantly provocative, if oftentimes bizarre, exploration of sexuality and gender. And, as with her other novels, The Animal is replete with the interior psychological angst and alienation that underlies the best French Decadent literature.   Eleanor Keane’s foreword is helpful guidance to approaching the novel and its author. She notes how the Decadent movement “reveled in dismantling traditional gender roles and offered new and challenging perspectives on concepts of sexual dissidence, transgression, and pleasure.” As a result, it “offered Rachilde a valuable outlet for her creative potential and subversive imagination”. 1 Indeed, both the author - and the Decadent Movement in general - aimed to challenge traditional social a...

One of the challenges in reading French Decadent literature is a shortage of English translations. Many works by key Decadent writers, such as Jean Lorrain, Catulle Mendes, J.-K. Huysmans, Octave Mirbeau, and Rachilde lack recent (or any) English translation. This hampers the ability to study a literary movement that, in my opinion, played a significant role in the transformation of literature from Romanticism and Naturalism to Modernism. In the case of Rachilde, I believe her only novel in English was – for a long time – an old translation of her succès de scandale Monsieur Vénus (1884). In the 90’s, access to her oeuvre broadened somewhat. Melanie Hawthorne translated The Juggler (1900), and Liz Heron translated The Marquise de Sade (1887). Later, Monsieur Vénus itself received a much-needed new translation from Hawthorne. However, this was still only a glimpse of her fin de siècle output.  The problem with old translations of Decadent literature is they’re inherently unrelia...