This chapter focuses on novels by George Sand, Marcelle Tinayre, Rachilde and Colette, along with a series of lesser-known works from the July Monarchy to explore the relation between gender and the novel in nineteenth-century France. While it would be impossible to write a history of the nineteenth-century English novel without making women writers central to the analysis, the same has not been true for histories of the French novel of this period. The chapter explores how women grappled with their outsider status and the different strategies which they adopted in order to legitimate their voices in an often hostile literary world. While drawing attention to similarities of both content and form in women’s novelistic practice, it also considers and illustrates the diversity of literary practices which characterises women’s writing of the period, and highlights the important ways in which gender shaped separate but interconnecting histories of male and female authorship of the nineteenth-century French novel.

This chapter focuses initially on the impact of late nineteenth-century medical theory (hysteria, hypnotism, etc.) on the novel and the burgeoning of medically-inflected fiction. Post-hypnotic suggestion led to stories of crime and sexual manipulation and introduced the figure of the unscrupulous doctor/hypnotist, usually bested by a good-hearted physician expert in hypnotism techniques. Ambient medical research on mind-control and dual identity influenced Maupassant’s fiction, most notably in his story ‘Le Horla’. Substantial tales (‘Boule de suif’, ‘La Maison Tellier’) foreshadow and feed the drama, irony and humour of Maupassant’s novels. Three of these are studied here: the raucous, ferociously ironic Bel-Ami, the family drama of illegitimacy and identity, Pierre et Jean, and a story of the despondency of ageing and lost love, Fort comme la mort. The chapter closes with a discussion of the novels of Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery), seen increasingly as an important figure of France’s decadent period. Her early novels Monsieur Vénus and La Marquise de Sade played daringly with the notion of gender reversals and sadism, exercised against men; such themes suggest today an underlying feminist persuasion, an affiliation she denied. Later novels, many-textured such as La Tour d’amour, or La Jongleuse, a male/female confrontation on seduction and love, reveal the broadening of the novelist’s talent.

The complex mix of transgression and conservativism in the sexual politics of Decadence is well explored through the Decadent turn back to the ancient world. Looking back to antiquity at the end of the nineteenth century was an complex aesthetic performance, reflecting both genuflection to traditional cultural authority and transgression of modern political frameworks. The Decadent imagination was interested in the aesthetics of collecting. Decadent writers became fascinated by androgynous and hermaphroditic bodily forms, which they viewed as a symbol of decadent collecting culture – an assemblage of pleasurable, sensuous experiences. But the ambiguously gendered body of ancient art, so venerated by Decadent writers, revealed the ambivalences of their gender politics.

Notions of decadence, decline, and decay are intrinsically linked to the history of art. The discipline’s three recognized forefathers ? Giorgio Vasari, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and Heinrich Wölfflin ? all relied on the concept of decadence (and its antonym, progress) to make sense of the history of the visual arts and to evaluate the art of their times. A developmental model of art was central to the interpretative schemes of these art historians. In this organicist model, earlier developments prepare the stage for what comes later; and after a particular style flourishes for a time, its decline is inevitable as newer styles overtake it. Decadent artists such as Gustave Moreau and Aubrey Beardsley mock aesthetic standards and moral rules, precluding universal appreciation, and proudly so. Decadent artists and decadent audiences are estranged from their society and feel disdain for those who are scandalized by decadent art’s innovative form and immoral subject matter.

Decadents were the heirs of the Enlightenment libertines who took the liberty of exploring ethics in a world in which morality was no longer handed down by God. In such a secular environment, sexual freedom was an offshoot of political and moral philosophy; free love and free thinking went together. The Marquis de Sade embodied the libertine for the eighteenth century, but the fin de siècle expanded the repertoire to admit not just sadism, but also masochism, bestiality, homosexuality and lesbianism, heterosexuality (the word was first coined to name a perversion), voyeurism, fetishism, and all manner of paraphilias (frottage, paedophilia, priapism, transvestism, and vampirism, to name but a few). These topics were mostly explored through imaginative writing (novels, plays, poetry) rather than in lived experience ? what philosophers might call ‘thought experiments’ ? but such bold discussion of taboo subjects came to characterize decadent literature in works by Swinburne, Huysmans, Rachilde, Wilde, and others.