Content area
Full text
A "rhetoric of fiction," to borrow Wayne Booth's familiar phrase, involves different positions and attitudes on the author and narrator's part, depending on the generic choice s/he makes and effects s/he seeks as s/he endeavors to make the reader accept the "reality" of the universe produced by the fiction. Irony, paradox, and denial lie at the core of the overall rhetoric of Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. The following reflections will explore the ways in which Villiers uses these strategies to construct gender identities. In the wake of Baudelaire and Poe, with a great admiration for Wag- ner, Villiers is associated with the development of French symbolisme and can be viewed as a significant participant in the culture of the fin de siècle. His fiction, in par- ticular the Contes cruels (1883) and Nouveaux contes cruels (1888), contributed to the production of a kind of dark humor characteristic of the period.1 His tales-which should be read with his novel, L'Eve future (1886) in mind-construct gender identities which both adhere to the heteronormative binaries (male/female) and undermine them, because of social and historical determinations: the fin de siècle, aesthetic and the elite dandyism which characterized it. More effete or softer models of masculinity are set as positive alternatives to traditional, more aggressive, even violent stereotypes.2 Ironic and/or paradoxical strategies contribute both to re-articulate a quirky hetero- normative framework and to undermine this very framework.
Logically, in Villiers as later in Proust, a rhetoric of identity will revolve around names and naming, and all the devices that pertain to them. Not only does Proust ex- plicitly devote pages to the topic of names,3 the Recherche is haunted by an anxiety of identification. On his last appearance in society, Swann has become the Hebrew prophet, and Charlus functions as a prototype of the homosexual, to the point that his name becomes an antonomasia to name the whole species (the Charlus). In Villiers' collections, several tales revolve around an eponymous female character whose name, thrown as it were into the reader's face as an enigma, calls for an elucidation (Antonie, Sylvabel, La Reine Ysabeau [Queen Ysabeau]).4 At least two, instead of a name, present a characterization which functions as an antonomasia (L'Inconnue, L'Incomprise [The Unknown Woman, The Misunderstood Woman])....