Rachilde (French pronunciation: [ʁaʃild]) was the pen name and preferred identity of novelist and playwright Marguerite Vallette-Eymery (11 February 1860 – 4 April 1953).
She was unwanted by her parents and received less affection from them than did the family's pet monkey, who was even granted such social graces as a seat at the table.
[3][5][6] As a bold young woman with a passion for writing, she wrote to idol Victor Hugo and received encouraging words in reply.
Free to explore her own identity and challenge both herself and the world, she cut her hair short, went out publicly in men's clothing, and intentionally shocked the society around her with suggestions of gender ambiguity.
Her cousin Marie de Saverny had introduced her to famous actress Sarah Bernhardt, who was known for her libertine interests and her own willingness to create her own identity.
She took great pride in the luminaries who attended, a group which included not only the established inner circle of Symbolist writers, but other notable countercultural figures such as Alfred Jarry, Oscar Wilde, painters Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin, composer Maurice Ravel, and many others.
[5] Throughout her life, Rachilde's most infamous friendships were often tortured by the inability of her (generally male) friends to decide whether they admired her, lusted for her, or pitied her, as publicly exemplified by Maurice Barrès in his preface to a later edition of Monsieur Vénus.
[18] Her reasons are not entirely clear, as there is both boldness and polite reserve in a request she filed for a permit to do so:Dear Sir, please authorize me to wear men's clothing.
[4] Though she would later deny even a slight attraction to women, Rachilde also had a relationship with the enigmatic Gisèle d'Estoc, a bisexual woman of some notoriety at the time.
[7][17] She was well known at the time for her close friendships with gay men, including such prominent and notorious dandies as Barbey d'Aurevilly, Jean Lorrain, and Oscar Wilde, who brought his lover Lord Alfred Douglas to her salons.
This allowed her to shift the blame for her perverse writings to spiritual possession, but that also gave her an internal explanation for why she felt unnatural and unlike the others around her.
One little-known serial novel (La Joise d'Ameir) was published in 1885 under the name Jean Yvan, but that was a brief and unsuccessful experiment and she returned to Rachilde.
[2][25] Unafraid to interact with an artificial identity, Rachilde herself wrote a lengthy and personal review of the de Chilra novel L'Heure sexuelle.
[27] Maurice Barrès certainly put her in the company of the early Decadents when he described as writing as a dreamlike extension of life, intending primarily to titillate but also to explore la maladie du siècle, the ennui and disillusion of the age, which in women was known at the time to result in hysteria.
[7][14] Her writing embraced or at least explored many different forms of sexuality at odds with the morals and expectations of her society, often shocking for their depravity rather than any explicit descriptions: prostitution, cross-dressing, gender ambiguity, homosexuality, sadism, incest, bestiality, Pygmalionism, necrophilia, and more.
[16][17] Obsession is common thread throughout her œuvre, but Rachilde also dealt with characters whose entire lives are formed or constrained by other overpowering psychological conditions such as delirium or terror.
[14] Her novels continued to explore gender identity and the power structure of relationships through sexual experimentation in a shocking and extreme way that was typical of the Decadent movement.
In it she uses eroticism and violent imagery to both subvert traditional sex roles and at the same time to satirize the "new woman", the feminist ideal of her day.
[25] Both novels are also more introspective than the others published up to this point, invoking sexual guilt and raising questions about the relationship between sex and abusive violence.
She herself wrote and directed Symbolist plays, stretching the ability of the theater and of audiences to accommodate rich and complex supernatural symbols.
It shows you other realities, where your desires are more powerful than you are, and it also calls into question which side of the mirror is real and which is illusion, which of you is the free person and which is the trapped reflection.
She released collections of the stories along with other material, including Le Démon de l'absurde (1894), Contes et Nouvelles (1900), and The Theater of Animals (1926).
One such story, originally written for Mercure de France in 1892, is "La Dent", a dark and disturbing tale about the two sides of sensual experience, the nature of womanhood, and identity horror, all centering around a lost tooth.
In typical Rachilde fashion, the main character begins to experience a sexualized obsession and drowns in a mixture of memory, fantasy, and fact.
[11]:96 In her biography of Jarry that she established the myth of the infamous opening night right of his play Ubu Roi at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre.
In this book she discloses an upbringing in which her mother Gabrielle (Feyaud) Eymery assertively devalued her father, remained cold and distant, and insulted young Marguerite at every opportunity.
At the same time her father Joseph Eymery was abusive and liberated to pursue his own sexual pleasures outside of marriage, something Gabrielle made clear was not appropriate for a proper lady.
[3][4][16] During this latter phase of her career, Rachilde also published collections of letters and a variety of memoir volumes, most of which demonstrate flexibility and creativity in their varying presentations of her life story.
It is also when she clearly recounts a dreamlike memory that even she doesn't trust of meeting an illegitimate half-brother and staring at him, realizing how much alike they look, and feeling as if really he was a male reflection of herself.
Intimate in friendship and dedicated to supporting the careers of others, Rachilde was nevertheless always an outsider, forced to explain her thoughts and beliefs in terms of possession, because what was natural to her seemed to be so unnatural to everyone around her, including to herself as she tried to sort out what was in her and what was in the reflection.