Bad Books by Amy S. Wyngaard

Author:Amy S. Wyngaard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Published: 2012-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 3

Conceptualizing Fetishism: Rétif and the Advent of Modern Sexual Science

3

Sade’s contributions to the fields of sexology and psychology are commonly known, even if the details of the advent of the concept of sadism have long been forgotten by nonspecialists. The term “sadism” was coined by Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his famous compilation of case studies of sexual perversion, Psychopathia sexualis, first published in 1886. In the early twentieth century, Sade’s Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome, a catalog of deviant sexual behaviors ranging from sodomy to incest and pedophilia, became known as “the first Psychopathia sexualis” among literary critics and medical doctors alike.[1] Rétif’s contributions have not fared as well—the term “retifism” never successfully entered medical language, let alone the vernacular. Nonetheless, Rétif’s life and works played a key role in the formulation of theories of fetishism, the perversion that Foucault argues served as a model in the scientific analysis of sexual deviation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[2] Rétif was one of the first cases of foot fetishism to be diagnosed after Alfred Binet distinguished amorous from religious fetishism in his 1887 essay, “Le Fétichisme dans l’amour”; perhaps most importantly, in his works Rétif anticipated the modern psychosexual use of the term. Between 1887 and 1934, Rétif rivaled, and even surpassed, Sade as the poster boy for sexual perversion: during this time period, no fewer than fifteen medical treatises and articles were published that drew upon Rétif’s works to diagnose foot and shoe fetishisms as well as a variety of sexual dysfunctions and manias, including impotence, senile salacity, and pulsions toward incest.

Whereas Sade’s graphic depictions of sexual violence are certainly hard to forget, and Rétif’s playful portrayals of women’s shoes and feet may easily be lost in a corpus totaling more than fifty-seven thousand pages, there are perhaps less obvious reasons behind the effacement of Rétif’s status as foot fetishist par excellence. While both Sade and Rétif studies owe much to the pre-Freudian sex doctors for stimulating interest in the two authors, who were largely ignored and condemned by the nineteenth-century literary establishment, since the early 1930s Rétif scholars have worked to distance the writer from a critical tradition perceived as troubling. In what is often cited as a turning point in Rétif studies, in the September 1934 issue of the medical journal Hippocrate, Henri Bachelin published an essay defending the literary merit of the author’s works, alongside articles by Louis Charpentier and Maurice Heine providing the psychosexual readings of Rétif’s œuvre typical of the time. As late as 1988, Jean-Marie Goulemot referred to the “fetishistic cult” of Rétif—a term that can be seen as evoking the sexologists as well as literary scholars focused on biographical approaches—as part of a past that must be left behind in order to draw attention to the literary qualities of Rétif’s corpus.[3] Rétif’s defenders have seen the medical use of his works as counterproductive for his literary reputation, as well as insulting. This scholarly commitment to the elevation of Rétif’s

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