La Belle Époque Des Amours Fétichistes by Martina Díaz Cornide
2020; American Association of Teachers of French; Volume: 94; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tfr.2020.0049
ISSN2329-7131
Autores Tópico(s)History of Science and Medicine
ResumoReviewed by: La Belle Époque Des Amours Fétichistes by Martina Díaz Cornide Hope Christiansen Díaz Cornide, Martina. La Belle Époque des amours fétichistes. Garnier, 2019. ISBN 978-2-406-08275-0. Pp. 417. The point of departure is an 1874 nouvelle by Charles Cros, "La science de l'amour," which proposes love as an objet de savoir, a concept that psychologist Alfred Binet (who invented the first practical IQ test) took to heart thirteen years later by subjecting the erotic worship of an object or a body part to medical analysis. Díaz Cornide asserts that it was thanks to literature that fetishism—which she links to the rise of capitalist society and a burgeoning market in interior decorating—ended up extending beyond the field of medicine: Decadents, Symbolists, and Naturalists "mettent en scène une névrose collective et une attirance pour la sexualité morbide qu'ils interrogent dans son rapport à la norme" (20). Drawing on the theories of Havelock Ellis, Paul Garnier, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Albert Moll, and many others, Díaz Cornide argues persuasively for the interdependence of medicine and literature, "[qui] ne cessent de dialoguer et de s'emprunter récits, concepts, questionnements et procédés d'écritures, sur un fond en constante tension de rivalité et de complémentarité" (21). Doctors encouraged patients to tell the tale of their secret desires, for instance, then reworked those narratives into medical treatises replete with spicy sexual details, thereby blurring the line between science and fiction. Likewise, the research of Jean-Martin Charcot (eminent neurologist at La Salpêtrière) and Valentin Magnan [End Page 216] (psychiatrist at Sainte-Anne) on perversions found its way into myriad literary works. Díaz Cornide's corpus is wide-ranging, featuring texts by Rétif de la Bretonne, Adolphe Belot, Émile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Armand Dubarry, Rachilde, Jean Lorrain, and Georges Rodenbach, to name just a few. Woven into the dense analysis are numerous tantalizing facts: until the nineteenth century, women did not wear undergarments under their skirts (70); high-heeled shoes disappeared with the Revolution, "qui impose des souliers plats pour incarner le nivellement des classes par celle des démarches" (183); Rétif de la Bretonne preferred women to have small feet since big ones meant "de grandes ouvertures ailleurs" (184); only one doctor, Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault, was interested in the problem of female fetishism, devoting two mémoires to women's erotic passion for fabrics, silk being particularly desirable because of the "cri" it emits, according to one patient's testimony (134). Clearly this book is not for the faint of heart. References to genitalia abound, as do descriptions of various fetishist practices by the likes of frotteurs, piqueurs de fesses, and coupeurs de nattes, with objects of erotic interest running the gamut from handkerchiefs to boot nails to night caps and beyond. Díaz Cornide demonstrates the timeliness of her study by looking at the appropriate sections of that bible of American psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which lists the most common objets fétiches as women's underwear, shoes, leather, and latex (vibrators apparently only qualify if used for more than six months) (378). Meticulously documented, La Belle-Époque des amours fétichistes will be of interest primarily to specialists in the history of psychiatry and in Belle-Époque culture and literature. Hope Christiansen University of Arkansas Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French
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