Neurosis and Narrative: The Decadent Short Fiction of Proust, Lorrain, and Rachilde Book

Renée A. Kingcaid uses the theories of Jacques Lacan to explore the relationships between the literary structures found in the short stories of three writers of the French Decadence—Marcel Proust, Jean Lorrain, and Rachilde (Marguerite Vallette)—and those psychological structures that underlie neurosis.

Kingcaid demonstrates, for example, how Marcel Proust uses fetishism to advance the plot in several of the short stories from his first published work, Pleasures and Regrets (1896). In discussing Jean Lorrain's stories from Masked Figures and Phantoms (1891?1905), Kingcaid shows how repressed childhood trauma becomes a form of metonymy that inflates to assume the entire perceptual field and then leads to moments of horrible realization. By populating her short fiction from Demon of the Absurd (1894) and Stories (1900) with characters who are more interested in inspiring sexual desire than fulfilling it, Rachilde produces love stories that, according to Kingcaid, exemplify her ability to capture the possibilities of language to express desire, even as a structure of lack.

Kingcaid's rhetorical analysis of some of Freud's case studies and her brief critique of Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex add to the comprehensiveness of her study.