Algemene kennis

Gangbare naam: Rachilde
Officiële naam: Vallette-Eymery, Marguerite
Pseudoniemen en naamsvarianten: Eymery, Marguerite
Geboortedatum: 1860-02-11
Overlijdensdatum: 1953-04-04
Geslacht: female
Nationaliteit: France
Geboorteplaats: Dordogne, France
Plaats van overlijden: Paris, France
Woonplaatsen: Périgueux, France
Beroepen: novelist
Playwright
essayist
Literary critic
Relaties: Vallette, Alfred (husband)
Peyrebrune, Georges de (friend)
Organisaties: Mercure de France
Korte biografie: Rachilde was the pseudonym of Margeurite Eymery, born near Périgueux, the daughter of a French cavalry officer and his wife. It is said that she attempted suicide when her family tried to force her into marriage with a much-older man, and thereafter she was able to devote herself to writing. She published her work under the nom de plum Rachilde. She joined the literary world of Paris and sometimes wore male attire. She made her reputation by producing a series of powerful and sensational novels such as Monsieur Venus (1884). According to The Literary Encyclopedia, she was a prudish pornographer, gender-bending anti-feminist, anarchist reactionary, and nemesis to the Surrealists who embodied antithetical extremes. For several decades, she was one of the most influential critics for the Mercure de France, whose editor Alfred Vallette she married in 1889. She also wrote the autobiographical pamphlet Pourquois je ne suis pas feministe (Why I Am Not a Feminist) in 1928. Her life of notoriety spanned nearly a century and ended with her death in near-obscurity in 1953.

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Der Panther: Erzählungen door Rachilde

The Panther is a short story collection by Rachilde. I read the German translation by Paul Zifferer and Berta Huber. The collection was edited by and includes an introduction by Susanne Farin, as well as an essay by Max Bruns.

The Panther is an interesting collection of rather dark stories. Their tone is often a little emo, but definitely nicely written, even if the translations are rather dusty (the book was printed in 1989, but the translations are from 1911 and 1918). Rachilde has repeating themes in her stories which makes them a little monotonous when you read them all at once. But I liked them. What I hated was the essay by Max Bruns – that was pretty much unreadable because it is filled with sexism.

Read more about each of the stories on my blog: https://kalafudra.com/2019/03/12/the-panther-rachilde/… (meer)

Gemarkeerd

kalafudra | Feb 13, 2021 |

The Juggler: Marguerite Eymery Vallet Rachilde door Rachilde

Ah, Rachilde! I fall to the floor, grasping, kissing the trailing hem of your ebony lace dress, while in my head, a radio station, relayed by a chance conjunction of diamond fillings and bridgework, seduces me with the haunting beat of The Doors, a faint sensuous organ melody and that Jim, that lizard, now whispering, now COMMANDING, "Mother, I want to ...!" I faint. I revive...to dissonance, darkness and a fluid - warm, sticky, coppery - and the realization - I have no teeth, no eyes, no...!

Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery Vallette) must be experienced to be believed - or is it, believed to be experienced? The long career of this French Creole novelist peaked at its midpoint, about 1900, when The Juggler was published. She had then already acquired - justly,considering her elegant style - the nickname "Madame Baudelaire" for her novel "Monsieur Venus", published in 1884.

The words "French" "Decadent" "Symbolist" "Pornographic" are too charged and yet too blunt to convey the complexity and subtlety of this short but compelling novel. I was reminded - not so much by the subject matter - but by the oddity and yet truth - of the movie Wise Blood. Somehow, in that film, the combined talents of John Huston, Flannery O'Connor, and Brad Dourif precipitate into a phantasmagoric Southern Gothic gem that mesmerizes with a migraine aura inducing mix of religious beliefs and psychological deformities.

The Juggler, in like manner, illuminates a bizarre triad between an older woman, her niece and a younger man - oh, yes, and a vase as a sexual object and partner - so that the whole reflects, like a disco ball, myriad sexual-political insights that may have hovered, bat like, just outside the visual field a universe of vanilla relationships.

Some might, less charmed, find The Juggler, a tale told by a cougar, full of gowns and fury, signifying nuttiness. I found it worthwhile, even fascinating, how Rachilde worked with two postulates - first, that men want only one thing, and second, that women do not know what they want - and demonstrated how they are outdated as truths yet as useful as Newtonian physics against the backdrop of string theory. By the novel's end, Eliande, the woman, achieves what she has always intended - life on her terms - while Leon finds himself, at peace, with what he didn't know he wanted ...a love he formerly found as disgusting as "poached eggs in cream".… (meer)