Pathologized feminine sexuality in Russian and French literature of the 19th Century

Pathologized feminine sexuality in Russian and French literature of the 19th Century

Women’s place in history is a subject which has been discussed at length by feminist and other academics worldwide. However, not enough attention is always given to the link between actual societal circumstances and how they are expressed in the literature of the time in question, which can inform us about contemporary attitudes and everyday inequalities through the author’s or narrator’s description, or indeed through a pointed avoidance of description. When we in turn notice similarities in the depiction of women between works whose respective countries of origin have historically met and/or clashed with each other, we can put forward theories about the views those cultures held, and what influence or dialogue they established which mutually informed their literary methods.

In this dissertation I will analyse a link as I perceive it between two countries whose cultures thus collided in the 19th century: France and the then-Imperial Russia. In a century rife with revolutionary changes throughout Europe, before which some intellectual exchange was already beginning to take place between East and West, the relationship between these countries was not only damaged by politics and war, but also strengthened by a continuing mutual fascination. Two cultures that were primordially dissimilar would naturally be intrigued by each other, even ironically showing similarities or echoes in the motifs or points of view we are presented with in certain texts. The theme of women’s sexuality and its pathologized standing is notably one of these, particularly in relation to doctors and medicine of the 19th century- a quickly advancing world that garnered a grotesque fascination from those outside it, particularly artists of different kinds.

In their explorations of the private desires and anxieties of various social classes they observed, French writers like Émile Zola or Honoré de Balzac and Russian ones such as Anton Chekhov or Fyodor Dostoyevsky preoccupied themselves with the sexuality of their female characters, which was often a central issue of their text. For the purposes of my argument, I will first discuss two of Chekhov’s short stories: Khoristka, “The Chorus Girl” (1886), and Staryi dom, “The Old House” (1887). I will explore how Chekhov, originally a skilled doctor by trade himself[1], informed his writing with his impressions of the zhenskii vopros- “women question”- in his society through his female characters. Indeed, Chekhov often used French in his writing when parodying the upper classes of his society[2], particularly in relation to romantic affairs- French was taught as a matter of course to the youth of high Russian society, and French culture was often associated with flirtation, decadence, and pleasure. At this point I will take the opportunity to explain this European influence on education and courtship at more length.

I will then turn to Zola’s full-length work Nana (1880), the ninth instalment in a 20-part series Les Rougon-Macquart. While Zola was not a doctor himself in any sense, he was inspired by the works of biologist Claude Bernard to develop a Naturalist form of writing following an idea that “the author is made up of an observer and an experimenter”[3], in a series with the quasi-scientific purpose of allowing for “experimentation” on the psyches of its characters in the influences of their natural environment: he claimed to “carry out the same analysis that surgeons do on corpses on…living bodies”[4]. At this point we can note that the exchange between cultures was perhaps less than equal, evident from the mostly positive references to French (bourgeois) society in Russian texts, and the considerably less frequent references to Russian society in French texts. However, a different form of appreciation was still accorded to Russian philosophies and styles of writing, especially in exchanges between intelligentsia. Zola was an example of this, even acknowledging Russia in his preface to the fifth edition of Le roman experimental for the “welcoming and adoption of my works at a time when not a newspaper in Paris accepted or tolerated my literary struggle…by giving me a platform and…the most informed and passionate of readerships”[5]. I will in turn explore French attitudes towards Russian culture of the time, the positive and negative clichés that were contradictorily expressed, and the tension this created in intercultural meetings.

In underlining similarities and differences in these texts’ treatments of female sexuality, I will explore to what extent these writers ‘experimented’ with their characters to condemn their societies’ values, as well a