Rachilde’s La Tour d’amour (1899): A Translated Extract

Abstract

Rachilde’s La Tour d’amour tells a story of loneliness, guilt, and sexual obsession set in the perilous world of a lighthouse off the Brittany coast, creating a gripping psychological drama. Although this novel stands among Rachilde’s finest work, it remains relatively little-known and has never been translated into English. Rachilde, who was born Marguerite Vallette-Eymery (1860-1953), published the story in 1899. At this time, she was already well-known in Parisian literary circles as the author of several novels exploring non-conformist, fetishist, or obsessive sexuality, usually from the starting-point of a female protagonist. These early novels include those for which Rachilde is now best remembered, such as Monsieur Vénus (1884), in which a French noblewoman rejects her aristocratic male suitor in favour of a poor man whom she transforms into a ‘wife’, a culturally feminine figure, and La Marquise de Sade (1887), whose sadist female protagonist takes revenge on men for injustices she suffered as a child. These women, and those in many of Rachilde’s novels of the 1880s and 1890s, seek escape through unusual or cruel sexual behaviour from the identity and sexuality that society imposes on them. In this sense, La Tour d’amour is different: its protagonist is a young man, and he is drawn into a world of depravity rather than creating his own depravity in order to escape from the bonds of conventional society. This difference sets it apart and could perhaps explain why the novel is frequently omitted from accounts of Rachilde’s oeuvre, despite its quality.