Restif de La Bretonne - Bad books: Rétif de la Bretonne, sexuality, and pornography

Bad Books

Rtif de la Bretonne, Sexuality,
and Pornography

Amy S. Wyngaard

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS

Newark

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wyngaard, Amy S., 1970

Bad books : Rtif de la Bretonne, sexuality, and pornography / Amy S. Wyngaard.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61149-420-4 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-61149-421-1 (electronic)

1. Restif de La Bretonne, 1734-1806--Criticism and interpretation. 2. Sex in literature. 3. Pornography in literature. 4. Literature and society--France--History--18th century. I. Title.

PQ2025.Z5W96 2012

843'.5--dc23

2012029988

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

To Joseph

Although I could not have known it at the time, this project was born in a graduate seminar on the materiality of the text given by Joan DeJean in the spring of 1994 at the University of Pennsylvania. In that course Joan introduced me to the author and the approach at the basis of this book project and my first book project as well. I am grateful to her for forming me as a scholar and for continuing, throughout two decades, to guide and support me intellectually and professionally.

At Syracuse University I have benefitted from the gracious leadership of LLL Chairs Gerlinde Sanford and Gail Bulman. I have been lucky to have two senior colleagues in French, Paul Archambault and Hope Glidden, who are humanists in every sense of the term. Susan Edmunds and Mike Goode have always been willing to weigh in and lend a hand. Nicole Harrison and Matthew Sandefer have provided outstanding research assistance. Karen Ames and Colleen Kepler have gone above and beyond the call of duty in helping me to bring this project to fruition.

I owe thanks to fellow Rtif scholars Barbara Abad, Catherine Lafarge, Jim Steintrager, and Pierre Testud for answering my questions, sharing their work with me, and responding so generously to mine. Marshall Brown, Christie McDonald, and the anonymous readers at Eighteenth-Century Fiction, PMLA, and University of Delaware Press have pushed my work in new and improved directions. Andrew Curran, Julia Douthwaite, and Lynn Festa have provided precious comments, advice, and friendship for more years than Iand likely theycare to count. Tili Boon Cuill was there at the very beginning and the very end.

I have appreciated the help of Barbara Opar and the staff of Interlibrary Loan and the library delivery service at Syracuse University who facilitated my research. Special Collections librarians Elaine Engst at Cornell University and Susan Halpert at Harvard University kindly accommodated my special requests. Funds provided by Syracuse University Chancellor Nancy Cantor and Deans George Langford and Gerry Greenberg enabled the books publication in numerous ways.

I am grateful for the support of friends Emanuela Mallier and Janis Mayes as well as the irreplaceable help of Amber Vander Ploeg, my woman Friday. Danielle Bertrand-Pickfield has kept me entertained and inspired by her own writing. In France and stateside I have enjoyed the hospitality and friendship of David Heath and Paola Giraudo as well as Jean-Franois Gabriel and Laura Martin; I am particularly indebted to Franois and Laura for the delightful memories of our visit to Rtifs childhood home. My family, the Doyles and the Wyngaards, continues to make all things possible.

Portions of chapter one appeared in Defining Obscenity, Inventing Pornography: The Limits of Censorship in Rtif de la Bretonne, Modern Language Quarterly 71 (March 2010): 15-49; some material from chapter two was first published in Rtif, Sade, and the Origins of Pornography: Le Pornographe as Anti-Text of La Philosophie dans le boudoir,Eighteenth-Century Fiction 25, no. 2 (Winter 2012-13): 383-405; parts of chapter 3 are adapted from my essay, "The Fetish in/as Text: Rtif de la Bretonne and the Development of Modern Sexual Science and French Literary Studies, 1887-1934, that appeared in PMLA 121 (May 2006): 663-86. I would like to thank the editors and the publishers of these journalsDuke University Press, McMaster University, and the Modern Language Association of America, respectively for permission to republish them here.

This book reconstructs how the eighteenth-century French author Nicolas-Edme Rtif de la Bretonne and his writings were at the forefront of the development of modern conceptions of sexuality and pornography. Although certain details are well known (for example, that Rtifs 1769 treatise on prostitution, Le Pornographe, is the work from which the term pornography is derived, or that he was an avid foot and shoe fetishist), much of this story has been obscured and even forgotten: how the author actively worked to shape and define the category of obscenity and the modern pornographic genre; how he coined the psychosexual term fetish and played a central role in the formation of theories of sexual fetishism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by virtue of his detailed narrative explorations of the phenomenon. Thus this book is also about literary history and how it is written: it explores how Rtif, perceived as a bad author in both senses of the term, and his contributions were glossed over or condemned, such that the originality of his texts has still not been fully established.

In recounting this history, the comparisons between Rtif and the marquis de Sade are inevitable. As I will discuss in chapter 2, Rtifs modern brand of pornography hinges on a critique of the Sadean model; chapter 3 juxtaposes their respective contributions to sexual science and the clinical study of perversion with the advent of concepts of sadism and retifism, or foot and shoe fetishism, at the turn of the twentieth century. Equally interesting, however, are their opposing literary fates. Bitter enemies during their lifetimes, the two had very different receptions in both the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. Whereas in his time the prolific Rtif enjoyed popular success and managed to avoid the Bastille, Sade has attained canonical status today. Sades critical rehabilitationbegun in the first decades of the 1900s by the avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire; taken up by Maurice Heine, who edited the first critical edition of his work in France in the 1930s; continued by Gilbert Lly, who published Sades correspondence and the first serious biography of the author from the 1940s to the 1960s; and solidified by Georges Bataille in his 1957 study La Littrature et le malsparked the intense interest in Sades works shown by figures such as Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Philippe Sollers that has ensured the authors legacy.