Customer Reviews

Monsieur Venus: A Materialist Novel (Mla Texts and Translations)

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Rachilde's masterpiece, Monsieur Venus (1884), is the ultimate decadent novel. It has something for every sexual nonconformist: transvestism (both male and female), sadism, masochism, fetishism, homoeroticism, and even symbolic necrophilia. Rachilde's genius lies in her poetic ability to express the protean possibilities of gender. More than a mere reversal of stereotypical gender roles, her story destroys the boundaries of those limiting roles. The beautiful Raoule, dressed in masculine attire, seduces, violates, and keeps the feminine Jacques as her "mistress." Jacques takes quite naturally to feminine attire, as well as to the drugs and luxurious apartment provided by his lover. Raittolbe, Raoule's suitor--a virile military man--and Marie, Jacques' prostitute sister complicate the plot with their ruthless, yet stereotypically "normal" sexuality. However, it is Raoule's sexual ambiguity which threatens to undermine everyone else's gender identity--with the exception of the prostitute Marie, who is the only character with a strong gender identity. Problems begin to occur in the romantic lives of Raoule and Jacques when their mutual transvestism causes Jacques to question both his gender and his sexuality. Read symbolically, this text provides a wealth of meanings and any one of the themes enumerated above, from transvestism to necrophilia, can be explored with fascinating results. However, this is more than a symbolic text; this is a great story, a saturnalia of decadent eroticism. In my opinion, Monsieur Venus has lost none of its power to shock, provoke, and most of all entertain in the more than one hundred years since Rachilde wrote it. Thus I can think of no higher praise for Rachilde than to call her the Queen of Decadence unless, taking her own transvestism into account, I should call her the King of Decadence.

Gender inversion, sadism, masochism, exoticism, hallucinations, exploitation, the artificial creation of a perfect lover, sensuality--all of these are commonplaces of works of the Decadent movement, and, I'm sorry to say, Rachilde rarely lends any vitality or insight to these cliched devices. Add some extraneous characters, overblown melodramatic situations, and poor attention to detail, and this perfectly describes "Monsieur Venus". Unless you are a scholar of Decadence or a serious fetishist, I wouldn't read this particular work. I'd recommend Huysmans, Gautier, Wilde, Villiers, or even Sacher-Masoch in its stead.

Rachilde wrote this novella when only 20. First published in 1884, it naturally caused an outrage at the time and even read in the 21st Century it is easy to see why. Raoule de Venerande is a wealthy aristocratic Parisian, both a cross dresser and domineering woman, who falls for Jacques Silvert, an androgynously beautiful young impoverished artist. The swapped gender roles of Rauole and Jacques forms the focus of the narrative. Baron Raitolbe, whose unrequited love for Raoule, is also under her bewitching powers. With the homo-erotic ending and the necrophyllic imagery, it is easy to understand this book's classification as Decadent.

This book was first published with a preface that warned the reader to beware such a novel, for it is the fantasy of an hysteric. If it weren't for the fact that early 20th century hysteria was debunked, this would be totally true. Monsieur Venus is a crazy trip into the mind of a woman who wishes to assume the role of a man, without biologically changing anything about herself.

The main character, Raoule de Venerande, falls in love with a young, attractive young artist named Jacques. Over the course of the novel, she progressively becomes more public with her wish to be considered a man, which ultimately culminates in one of the most shocking and disturbing endings I've ever seen - but one which in retrospect seems inevitable.

If you're interested in the role that gender plays in identity and have already done some background reading, then this is a great book to turn to.

Also, see Rachel Mesch's book "The Hysteric's Revenge" for a terrific analysis of what this book is trying to show.

Perhaps the passage of time makes this book no longer as daring as it once tried to be. On the other hand, it is now quaint, in a way it never was meant to be.

Reading this novel gives you a definitely unique experience. It is as if the schoolgirlish author --- with a decidedly schoolgirlish voice in prose --- wants very, very much to write a dirty book full of all sorts of fascinating sexual fantasies. So she is all buildup and no climax: she does her best to set up a variety of situations, but her authorial lens always fogs up at the good parts.

Like most other books whose mainspring is sexual fantasy, the plot contains some non-sequiturs and unexpected developments. These discontinuities lend an ultimately dreamlike quality to the narrative, that is not dispelled by the bizarre --- and truly artificial --- denouement.

Its tale of sexual role reversal was no doubt more interesting in 1884. Those who would seek to read some kind of political statement into this fantasy are undercut by the noticeable naivete of the story itself. I also understand that Rachilde re-worked the main themes of this tale in her several later works. Still, it is definitely a unique experience.

Marguerite Eymery (aka Rachilde) was a twenty-year-old girl when she wrote MONSIEUR VENUS. Although she apparently has the writing skills to write a good book, she was fixated on issues of gender reversal of interest primarily to people who go in for that sort of thing. I, for one, do not. Having a young woman attempt to play the male role in her relationship with an effeminate young man (the "Monsieur Venus" of the title, known in the book as Jacques Silvert) for 150 pages was rather excruciating to this reader. Without passing judgment on anyone else's sexual preferences, I found that this book consisted primarily of uninteresting characters involved in uninteresting activities.