Bad Books: Rétif de la Bretonne, Sexuality, and Pornography

By Amy S. Wyngaard

Bad Books reconstructs how the eighteenth-century French author Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne and his writings were at the forefront of the development of modern conceptions of sexuality and pornography. Although certain details are well known (for example, that Rétif’s 1769 treatise on prostitution, Le Pornographe, is the work from which the term pornography is derived, or that he was an avid foot and shoe fetishist), much of this story has been obscured and even forgotten: how the author actively worked to define the category of obscenity and the modern pornographic genre; how he coined the psycho-sexual term “fetish” and played a central role in the formation of theories of sexual fetishism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus this book is also about literary history and how it is written: it explores how Rétif, perceived as a bad author in both senses of the term, and his contributions were glossed over or condemned, such that the originality of his texts has still not been fully established.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781644530863

Book preview

Bad Books

Bad Books

Rétif de la Bretonne, Sexuality,

and Pornography

Amy S. Wyngaard

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS

Newark

Published by University of Delaware Press

Co-published with The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

www.rowman.com

10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom

Copyright © 2013 by Amy S. Wyngaard

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wyngaard, Amy S., 1970-

Bad books : Rétif de la Bretonne, sexuality, and pornography / Amy S. Wyngaard.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61149-420-4 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-61149-421-1 (electronic)

1. Restif de La Bretonne, 1734-1806--Criticism and interpretation. 2. Sex in literature. 3. Pornography in literature. 4. Literature and society--France--History--18th century. I. Title.

PQ2025.Z5W96 2012

843'.5--dc23

2012029988

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

To Joseph

Acknowledgments

Although I could not have known it at the time, this project was born in a graduate seminar on the materiality of the text given by Joan DeJean in the spring of 1994 at the University of Pennsylvania. In that course Joan introduced me to the author and the approach at the basis of this book project and my first book project as well. I am grateful to her for forming me as a scholar and for continuing, throughout two decades, to guide and support me intellectually and professionally.

At Syracuse University I have benefitted from the gracious leadership of LLL Chairs Gerlinde Sanford and Gail Bulman. I have been lucky to have two senior colleagues in French, Paul Archambault and Hope Glidden, who are humanists in every sense of the term. Susan Edmunds and Mike Goode have always been willing to weigh in and lend a hand. Nicole Harrison and Matthew Sandefer have provided outstanding research assistance. Karen Ames and Colleen Kepler have gone above and beyond the call of duty in helping me to bring this project to fruition.

I owe thanks to fellow Rétif scholars Barbara Abad, Catherine Lafarge, Jim Steintrager, and Pierre Testud for answering my questions, sharing their work with me, and responding so generously to mine. Marshall Brown, Christie McDonald, and the anonymous readers at Eighteenth-Century Fiction, PMLA, and University of Delaware Press have pushed my work in new and improved directions. Andrew Curran, Julia Douthwaite, and Lynn Festa have provided precious comments, advice, and friendship for more years than I—and likely they—care to count. Tili Boon Cuillé was there at the very beginning and the very end.

I have appreciated the help of Barbara Opar and the staff of Interlibrary Loan and the library delivery service at Syracuse University who facilitated my research. Special Collections librarians Elaine Engst at Cornell University and Susan Halpert at Harvard University kindly accommodated my special requests. Funds provided by Syracuse University Chancellor Nancy Cantor and Deans George Langford and Gerry Greenberg enabled the book’s publication in numerous ways.

I am grateful for the support of friends Emanuela Mallier and Janis Mayes as well as the irreplaceable help of Amber Vander Ploeg, my woman Friday. Danielle Bertrand-Pickfield has kept me entertained and inspired by her own writing. In France and stateside I have enjoyed the hospitality and friendship of David Heath and Paola Giraudo as well as Jean-François Gabriel and Laura Martin; I am particularly indebted to François and Laura for the delightful memories of our visit to Rétif’s childhood home. My family, the Doyles and the Wyngaards, continues to make all things possible.

Portions of chapter one appeared in Defining Obscenity, Inventing Pornography: The Limits of Censorship in Rétif de la Bretonne, Modern Language Quarterly 71 (March 2010): 15-49; some material from chapter two was first published in "Rétif, Sade, and the Origins of Pornography: Le Pornographe as Anti-Text of La Philosophie dans le boudoir," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 25, no. 2 (Winter 2012-13): 383-405; parts of chapter 3 are adapted from my essay, The Fetish in/as Text: Rétif de la Bretonne and the Development of Modern Sexual Science and French Literary Studies, 1887-1934, that appeared in PMLA 121 (May 2006): 663-86. I would like to thank the editors and the publishers of these journals—Duke University Press, McMaster University, and the Modern Language Association of America, respectively— for permission to republish them here.

Introduction

This book reconstructs how the eighteenth-century French author Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne and his writings were at the forefront of the development of modern conceptions of sexuality and pornography. Although certain details are well known (for example, that Rétif’s 1769 treatise on prostitution, Le Pornographe, is the work from which the term pornography is derived, or that he was an avid foot and shoe fetishist), much of this story has been obscured and even forgotten: how the author actively worked to shape and define the category of obscenity and the modern pornographic genre; how he coined the psychosexual term fetish and played a central role in the formation of theories of sexual fetishism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by virtue of his detailed narrative explorations of the phenomenon.[1] Thus this book is also about literary history and how it is written: it explores how Rétif, perceived as a bad author in both senses of the term, and his contributions were glossed over or condemned, such that the originality of his texts has still not been fully established.

In recounting this history, the comparisons between Rétif and the marquis de Sade are inevitable. As I will discuss in chapter 2, Rétif’s modern brand of pornography hinges on a critique of the Sadean model; chapter 3 juxtaposes their respective contributions to sexual science and the clinical study of perversion with the advent of concepts of sadism and retifism, or foot and shoe fetishism, at the turn of the twentieth century. Equally interesting, however, are their opposing literary fates. Bitter enemies during their lifetimes, the two had very different receptions in both the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. Whereas in his time the prolific Rétif enjoyed popular success and managed to avoid the Bastille, Sade has attained canonical status today. Sade’s critical rehabilitation—begun in the first decades of the 1900s by the avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire; taken up by Maurice Heine, who edited the first critical edition of his work in France in the 1930s; continued by Gilbert Lély, who published Sade’s correspondence and the first serious biography of the author from the 1940s to the 1960s; and solidified by Georges Bataille in his 1957 study La Littérature et le mal—sparked the intense interest in Sade’s works shown by figures such as Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Philippe Sollers that has ensured the author’s legacy.[2]

Rétif has not fared nearly as well, in part because overall his writings—with their sentimental touches and moralistic overtones—do not have the same dangerous seductiveness that has enticed Sade’s modern readers.[3] From the late 1800s until recently, the field of Rétif studies has more often than not been dominated by what Jean-Marie Goulemot has called the fetishistic cult of the author, which has effectively limited the understanding and appreciation of his works.[4] Well-intentioned critics, many favoring bio-bibliographical approaches, took up the defense of the author that began just after his death in 1806 (when his daughters published a response objecting to the funeral notice published in Le Journal de Paris), and was cemented by the writer Michel de Cubières-Palmézeaux’s elegy to Rétif in his introduction to the posthumous Histoire des compagnes de Maria (1811), in which he lambastes Rétif’s detractors and declares his works monuments of French literature.[5] Further, the attacks on Rétif posed by the appropriation of his works by the sexologists at the turn of the twentieth century (which I will discuss in detail in chapter 3) and by social historians in the 1970s provoked responses on the part of critics bent on reclaiming the author for literary studies. The reactionary scholarship that has defined Rétif studies from its inception has resulted in the effacement or denial of precisely what may be most compelling about his texts—their potential value not only in reconstructing a social history of the eighteenth-century French peasantry or of revolutionary Paris, but also, and most important here, in (re)writing the histories of sexuality and pornography.

To be sure, from the beginning Rétif scholars have had their work cut out for them. Although Rétif was one of the most prolific writers of the French Enlightenment—producing an estimated 57,000 pages and 187 volumes—he was also one of the most maligned.[6] Despite the fact that many of his works sold well, as evidenced by numerous reprintings, pirated editions, and translations, the author was known as le Rousseau du ruisseau, le Voltaire des femmes de chambre [the Rousseau of the gutter, the chambermaids’ Voltaire], and other similarly pejorative monikers early in his career. This was due in part to the uneven quality of his rapidly produced works, some of which he composed directly on the printing press without a manuscript (he claimed, for example, to have written the 530-page Le Pied de Fanchette [1768] in eleven days).[7] His reputation for licentiousness was largely of his own making. The self-dubbed livre vivant [living book] continually blurred the lines between fiction and reality, recounting tales of hundreds of sexual liaisons and illegitimate children, incestuous encounters, foot and shoe fetishism, and rape of a beloved mother figure in his autobiographical and semiautobiographical works. Throughout his career, Rétif struggled with an official disdain that belied his popular reception, was continually haunted by censors and the authorities, and was ultimately refused entry into the newly formed Institut national in the last years of his life. The signature placed on his works, or lack thereof, attests to both the marginality and daring that defined his career: he signed his first work M. de la Bretone (adopting the name of the familial farm in Sacy, but dropping the double consonant he disliked); published a number of works—including Le Pied de Fanchette and the first edition of Le Pornographe—anonymously or under pseudonyms; wrote Le Paysan perverti (1775) as N. E. Rétif de la Bretone; preferred Rétif Labretone (without the pseudoaristocratic de) during the Revolution; became N. E. Restif de la Bretone in the 1790s; and returned to Rétif de la Bretone with his last work.[8]

Just as had been the case with his seventeenth-century libertine predecessors, Cyrano de Bergerac and Tristan L’Hermite, who played similar onomastic games, Rétif’s rejection of the sacredness of his name and all it stood for may have provided, in the words of Joan DeJean, the initial impetus in the process of [his] own ostracism from the literary establishment.[9] It is perhaps not surprising that, as with Sade, Rétif was first pulled out of literary oblivion by another free-thinking writer, the protosurrealist author Gérard de Nerval, who consecrated a lengthy section of his 1852 Les Illuminés to Rétif. While Nerval was primarily interested in highlighting the communist aspects of Rétif’s thought, he paints a sympathetic portrait of a gifted and visionary author whose faults and weaknesses kept him from reaching his potential. Nerval praises Rétif’s imagination and verve, arguing that these could have produced masterpieces, if only he had been plus correct [more conventional], like Denis Diderot, or plus habile [more artful], like Pierre Auguste Caron de Beaumarchais.[10] Nerval reminds the reader that although Rétif was ostracized by critics (in part because he hated them), he was an extremely popular writer in both senses of the term, providing portraits of the bourgeois and lower classes that attracted an enthusiastic following. The text not only revives Rétif’s importance for literary history and the history of ideas, but also establishes him as a kind of literary underdog: a flawed but likeable everyman, seemingly in keeping with Nerval’s socialist agenda.

Nerval’s account traced the parameters of the rediscovery of Rétif in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the cult of Rétif first developed. Following Nerval, several critics, also writers themselves, attempted to establish Rétif’s literary importance while pushing aside moral condemnations of the author and his works. In 1854, Charles Monselet published the first critical study of the author, Rétif de la Bretonne, sa vie et ses amours, which picks up where Nerval left off. Attacking the prejudicial judgments of the author as infâme, perdu, horrible, souillé, impossible à lire, comme un romancier lépreux dont le nom salit la mémoire [foul, lost, horrible, tainted, impossible to read, like a leprous novelist whose name sullies the memory], he proclaims: Rétif de la Bretonne est mieux qu’une curiosité, qu’une difformité littéraire; ce n’est pas un homme de talent, mais c’est presque un homme de génie [Rétif de la Bretonne is better than a curiosity, a literary deformity; he is not a talented man, but he is almost a man of genius].[11] Monselet’s bio-bibliographical text includes the first complete, descriptive catalog of Rétif’s works, which hints at the interest collectors were showing in them at the time. In his 1875 Restif de la Bretonne, Firmin Boissin dubs this trend Restifomanie, which he attributes to the rarity and increasing value of Rétif’s works as well as to the passionate defenses of the author undertaken by figures such as Monselet, who demonstrated that tout n’était pas à dédaigner dans ces romans effrontés, dans ces drames touffus, dans ces dissertations cyniques, dans ces autobiographies interminables [not all was to be disdained in these shameless novels, abstruse dramas, cynical dissertations, interminable autobiographies].[12] Paul Lacroix Jacob’s 1875 Bibliographie et iconographie de tous les ouvrages de Restif de la Bretonne builds on Monselet’s text while claiming to establish some distance from blind and exaggerated apologies of Rétif, aiming instead at une sorte de rehabilitation de ses ouvrages, qui [. . .] n’ont pas encore été appréciés à leur valeur [a kind of rehabilitation of his works, which are not yet appreciated at their worth].[13]

Such attempts to rehabilitate the author were quickly overshadowed by the sexologists’ discovery of his works in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As I will discuss in chapter 3, the sexologists’ mining of Rétif’s texts for case studies of fetishism had profound effects on Rétif scholarship, earning the author dismissive and damning mentions in classic turn-of-the-century literary histories by Ferdinand Brunetière, Gustave Lanson, and others. Significantly, at the same time as Rétif’s texts were being appropriated by the sexologists, they also drew the attention of social historians looking for documentation of the lives of the eighteenth-century peasantry.[14] Literary scholarship on Rétif from the late 1920s and 1930s is marked by the tension created by these competing claims on the author’s work, resulting in increasingly strong stands concerning his literary merit. Frantz Funck-Brentano’s bio-bibliographical Rétif de la Bretonne (1928) takes on Brunetière’s view of Rétif as an abject pornographer, noting that Rétif—to his mind the best eighteenth-century French writer in his best moments—was considered by his contemporaries as l’un des écrivains les plus moraux et les plus recommandables [one of the most moral and commendable authors].[15] In his 1932–33 study, Pierre Trahard similarly attacks Brunetière’s and Lanson’s assessments, comparing Rétif favorably to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and emphasizing his role in preparing the triumph of romanticism.[16] Henri Bachelin’s 1934 Restif de la Bretonne, écrivain et moraliste responds to the medical study of Rétif by positing the author’s importance to the development of realism and naturalism in France.[17] During this period, Rétif’s champions challenged not only the author’s detractors, but also each other: Adolphe Tabarant, in his 1936 Le Vrai Visage de Rétif de la Bretonne, criticizes his predecessors for providing a distorted vision of the author and singles out Funck-Brentano as a prudish glorifier.[18] Tabarant’s statements reflect an awareness of the extremes that dominated critical studies of the author, which up until the 1940s tended to oscillate between praise and condemnation, or which held up his works as sexual or historical documents to the exclusion of their literary status, and vice versa.

Mid-twentieth-century literary studies strove to present a more objective view of the author by focusing attention on his texts rather than on his life. Two bibliographical studies—Armand Bégué’s 1948 Etat présent des études sur Rétif de la Bretonne and James Rives Childs’s 1949 Restif de la Bretonne: Témoignages et jugements—set the stage for a reevaluation of the author’s works by summarizing the existing critical corpus and signaling areas that remained underexplored. Marc Chadourne’s Restif de la Bretonne, ou Le Siècle prophétique (1958), while still encumbered by biographical issues, importantly places an emphasis on Rétif’s new and singular ideas as a prophet and precursor of social security, Louis Pasteur, Sputnik, and communism, among other developments.[19] In the 1960s and 1970s, Charles A. Porter, Raymond Joly, and Mark Poster distanced themselves from l’homme et l’œuvre approaches to Rétif in order to examine his contributions as a novelist and a thinker. However, by skirting or downplaying issues surrounding sexuality and perversion, these texts did both a service and a disservice to Rétif scholarship; while they liberated scholars to leave a certain critical past behind, they also hindered the full exploration of his works by effacing potentially troubling aspects of his life and texts.

Rétif’s critical fortunes changed dramatically in the 1970s, ushering in the mainstream reception and study of his texts. During this time his works were at the center of a debate between social historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and literary critic Georges Benrekassa surrounding the use of literary texts as historical documents. Le Roy Ladurie’s ethnographic analysis of La Vie de mon père, which focused on the insights the work provides into the world of the eighteenth-century French peasantry, appeared in a chapter of L’Histoire de la France rurale (1975). In turn, Benrekassa defended the status of Rétif’s work as literature in a 1978 essay, using the author’s writings to stake out the territory of the textologue who grasps their fictional and aesthetic value.[20] As with earlier sexological debates, this exchange put Rétif and his texts in the critical spotlight; it also renewed assertions of the author’s literary worth. Concurrently, Pierre Testud’s 1977 Rétif de la Bretonne et la création littéraire set a new standard by pointing out the historical deficiencies in Rétif scholarship and calling for an examination of the totality of the author’s corpus. Following Testud, over the past thirty years numerous scholarly editions and monographs, special issues of journals, essays, and conferences have affirmed Rétif’s status as an important, if noncanonical, eighteenth-century author; in 1985 he acquired institutional imprimatur with the foundation of the Société Rétif de la Bretonne and the serial Etudes rétiviennes.[21] Nonetheless, recent studies of the author can still be marked by a defensive and justificatory posture that links them to a troubled critical past. Despite historians’ recognition of Rétif’s importance to the invention of modern pornography and the development of theories of fetishism, Rétif specialists have for the most part sidestepped these topics.[22] The cult of Rétif seems to have persisted, and scholarly fans of the author—perhaps not wishing to see Rétif placed in the same category as his old nemesis, Sade, or not wanting to lose ground in the lengthy battle to establish his literary value—have focused instead on less racy (albeit compelling) themes prevalent in his works, such as the country and the city, the figure of the father, utopia, and autobiography.

The history of Rétif’s critical reception, perhaps even more than that of Sade, bears witness not only to the processes behind the formation of the French literary canon, but also to how a writer’s critical fortune—and particularly his