Mutating Bodies: Reproductive Surgeries and Popular Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract

This article reads Jane de La Vaudère’s 1897 novel Les Demi-Sexes within the context of the historical trial that allegedly inspired it and debates surrounding surgery and sterility at the fin-de-siècle. The novel exploits contemporary fears that modern surgery posed a new kind of threat to binary sex in ways that challenge distinctions often made in the history of sexuality between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Keywords:

• Jane de La Vaudère
• demi-sexes
• ovariectomy
• history of sexuality
• trans

Notes

1 According to an 1897 Figaro article “Ovariotomie et belles lettres,” Les Demi-Sexes was one of three novels inspired by the Boisleux-La Jarrigue trial (29 juin 1897, p. 4).

2 See Beizer, Janet. Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France. Cornell UP, 1994 and Mesch, Rachel. The Hysteric’s Revenge: French Women Writers at the Fin de Siècle. Vanderbilt UP, 2006.

3 Rachel Mesch also notes that Dr. Richard’s “confession” of Camille participates in the larger institutional overtake of the Church by medicine (97).

4 Rothfield, Lawrence. Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Princeton UP, 1992.

5 Donaldson-Evans, Mary. Medical Examinations: Dissecting the Doctor in French Narrative Prose, 1857–1894. U of Nebraska P, 2000.

6 See Finn.

7 Mesch’s article analyzes the novel in the context of fin-de-siècle representations of marriage as a reproductive contract. Michael Finn analyzes representations of ovariectomy in multiple fin-de-siècle texts, compellingly situating fictional representations within the context of the panic surrounding France’s plummeting birthrate.

8 According to Sedgwick, “the term ‘open secret’ designates […] a very particular secret, a homosexual secret” (164).

9 Finn records that in the nadir year of 1895, there were merely 834,000 births to 852,000 deaths in France (3). See Pick for an analysis of how degeneration theory intensified anxieties surrounding reproduction and sexual difference: Pick, Daniel. Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918. Cambridge UP, 1989.

10 Critics have, however, identified other fictional portrayals of this esoteric medical procedure, to which I would add Dubut de Laforest’s Le Docteur-mort-aux-gosses, which appears the following year.

11 In his preface to the English edition of the autobiographical writings of Herculine Barbin, the only nineteenth-century “hermaphrodite” to have left them, Foucault identifies the “one-body one-sex rule”: “Henceforth, everybody was to have one and only one sex. Everybody was to have his or her primary, profound, determined and determining sexual identity; as for the elements of the other sex that might appear, they could only be accidental, superficial, or even quite simply illusory” (viii).

12 Hausman, Bernice Louise. Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender. Duke UP, 1995.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anne E. Linton

Anne E. Linton (PhD, Yale) is Associate Professor of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French at San Francisco State University. She has published on a wide range of interdisciplinary topics in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Yale French Studies, The French Review, Romanic Review, and Representations. She is currently finishing a book manuscript titled Prescribed Fictions: Representations of Hermaphrodism in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Medicine. This article comes out of work on her second book project on the nineteenth-century roots of the contemporary trans movement.