Swords and daggers, bayonets and scalpels: all the pointed instruments men use for invading others' bodies are appropriated by the women characters in the novels of Rachilde. In the evolution of "l'amour compliqué" [Maurice Barrès, Preface, Monsieur Vénus] that Barrès sees emerging in these works, the men are stripped of masculinity and weapons. They become vulnerable and sexless while the women turn into predators and warriors. Indeed, one need only consult Praz's list of "Belles dames sans merci," figures like Huysmans' Madame de Chantelouve or Clara, the torture-loving nymphomaniac in Mirbeau's Le Jardin des supplices, to realize how frequently such characters appear in "fin-de-siècle" fiction. In this respect, Rachilde's works differ little from the writings of her contemporaries. Still, her novels which show the conjugation of aggressiveness and female sexuality deserve attention, not just because they examine from a woman's standpoint the same questions dealt with by her peers, but because they point out the result of such a view of domination, sex and love, show it leading to a kind of suicide, the extinction of all feelings for another and, finally, for oneself.

Born in 1860, Rachilde, née Marguerite Eymery, emerged as a prolific writer whose works appeared well into the present century. Friend to the notorious Jean Lorrain, candidate for the affections of Catulle Mendès, later wife of Alfred Vallette, editor of Le Mercure de France, Rachilde took pains to cultivate the image of her eccentricity. Yet there can be no doubt it was in her fiction, not in her life, that she advanced her boldest thoughts, there that she explored as few had done before her "ces formes d'amour qui sentent la mort" (Barrès).

Monsieur Vénus, La Marquise de Sade, La Jongleuse: In these three novels by Rachilde, texts which Claude Dauphine regards as "les véritables jalons de l'oeuvre," one can see at once the author's changing attitude toward the conflict between the sexes. From the experiment with transvestism, the chaste voluptuousness of Raoule de Vénérande, who keeps her pretty boyfriend in a sumptuous apartment and lavishes on him gifts of hashish, clothes and flowers, to Eliante Donalger, the juggler of knives who kills herself with one of them to preserve her passion's purity, one sees in Rachilde's works the emergence of a death-dedicated love, one that does more than fight against the dominion of "les phallocrates" but that submerges sexuality in a true "pulsion de mort."

It is primarily in La Jongleuse (1900), the last of these three novels, that the ultimately suicidal nature of these characters' pursuits, the consequence of love's repudiation, at last becomes apparent. Earlier in Monsieur Vénus, Raoule had mentioned that women looked on love divorced from its expression as the greatest aphrodisiac. The same holds true for Eliante, who sees love not as Eros, the binding of the two attracted partners in a union that transcends them, but as the enhancement of the individual who feels that love within her. There is no focusing of consciousness on that which one desires and an attendant sense of emptiness until one merges with it. Love does not entail a yearning for its object. For Eliante it is not a future- or goal-oriented feeling, but is rather more inclusive. "Je suis réellement amoureuse de tout ce qui est beau, bon, me paraît un absolu …," she says. "Mais ce n'est pas le but, le plaisir; c'est une manière d'être." Instead of joining with the being on whom attention narrows, the loving person takes in everything, enjoys an environmental fullness. "J'ai le dégoût de l'union," she says. "Je n'y découvre aucune plénitude voluptueuse. Pour que ma chair s'émeuve et conçoive l'infini de plaisir, je n'ai pas besoin de chercher un sexe à l'objet de mon amour" (La Jongleuse).

From this standpoint the love she feels for Léon Reille, the man who would possess her, is but one increment of the total emotional charge that ties her to the world. For Eliante, the more indiscriminate the love, the greater is the range of objects to which it may attach. Thus the alabaster vase she bought in Tunis can affect her with its symmetry, its human shape and beauty, can bring her to a climax as much as can a lover whose inconstancy she fears. As Léon watches her be overcome by flattering her urn—"ce fut plutôt une risée plissant l'onde mystérieuse de sa robe de soie—et elle eut un petit râle de joie imperceptible, le souffle même du spasme" (La Jongleuse)—he reacts with outraged disbelief at this assault on his male ego. "Il fut ébloui, ravi, indigne.—C'est scandaleux! Là … devant moi … sans moi? Non, c'est abominable! Il se jeta sur elle, ivre d'une colère folle.—Comédienne! Abominable comédienne!" (La Jongleuse). But of course the truth of Eliante's orgasm is really no pretense, no performance meant to embarrass him and wound his vanity. Yet he is right in calling her an actress, not because the reactions she expresses are simulated, false, but because Eliante is usually more intent on acting out her feelings than sharing them with him and risking their dilution: "je vous ai donné ce que je peux montrer d'amouràun homme, as she pointedly remarks (La Jongleuse).

In this cult of love where Eliante is priestess, it is unimportant what triggers the emotion, the words and acts through which it is expressed. Eliante's amphora, her collection of erotic Chinese carvings, even her idealized impression of Lé on, function simultaneously as many things. They are the sensual/esthetic forms that arouse the love she values, they are that through which her love must pass to be further sublimated and that which, through their shape, their words or the figures they depict, confirms the beliefs she holds most dear. For this reason what Eliante brings to her sanctuary-bedroom must act as object of devotion, medium and testimonial all at once. Léon imagines it is his person that stirs this love inside her and that at length she must respond with the surrender of her body. He has failed to realize that once Eliante identifies him as a disciple of love's god, it no longer matters whether he is there with her or not. His effect on her has been assimilated into her religion of the beautiful, so that his continued presence is merely a redundance. As a performer, Eliante is her own most valued audience; what she is in love with is the chance to elaborate on her own self-created myth. Eliante, more than Raoule de Vénérande and Mary Barde in La Marquise de Sade, is completely self-sufficient. Apart from her perverted husband, who had died some time before, she uses men as reiterations of her own views on love.

One way to understand more clearly the evolution of Rachilde's heroines is by examining the meaning of the knife/sword/dagger imagery that occurs in many of her texts. In La Jongleuse, the function of these figures is even more important, since the title of the book alludes to juggling with knives, one of which kills Eliante as she lets it plunge into her chest. With its deadly point, its ability to pierce, the danger that the knife holds out is often reinforced, but in the early pages of the book, the woman is referred to as a weapon that is usually kept sheathed, concealed inside "sa robe noire, cette gaine satinée presque métallique" {La Jongleuse). The clothed body of the woman is like her gloved hand—"la femme étira le bout de ses gants, ce qui lui ajoutait des griffes pointues" (La Jongleuse)—in that the lethal power both represent is latent. Still Léon Reille looks on Eliante and hopes that underneath, inside its envelope, he will find an instrument of pleasure, not destruction.

On one occasion, he learns from Eliante how she had learned in Java the art of juggling with daggers, a skill she put to use for performing at the teas she held for her niece Missie and her friends. These performances meant more to her than mere parlor room amusements: they allowed her to define herself before an audience comprised of men as well as girls. As she stood exposed in her maillot before male onlookers entranced "devant la forme non déguisée" (La Jongleuse), she would catch and then release again the knives so rapidly, that in motion they created an invisible but cutting wall that separated her from others. A dialectic of interdiction and desire, the act consisted of an implied seduction, invitation or offering of self and a withdrawal, denial or retraction of the promise. Thus Léon saw her "séparée de sa famille, de la société, du monde entier … par l'énigme de sa comédie perpétuelle" (La Jongleuse). In addition, Eliante's performances are narcissistic ones, not designed to entertain admirers, but to please and flatter her with her power to attract, her ability to magnetize the love, the look and the attention of her audience. Everything becomes a knife, a point, a blade: the whetting of the appetite, the hunger of the men transfixed by watching Eliante, their pointed gaze, and the cold inflexibility of "la jongleuse," "lame d'acier trempée aux feux des passions" (La Jongleuse), who is tempered against the emergence of emotions that might weaken her. Eliante loves no one, nothing but her philosophy of love. So to protect herself against the awakening of undesired feelings, she redirects her energy away from people who might touch her into an assessment of her reaction to them, excluding them as causes in favor of effects. Earlier the aggressiveness of Mary Barbe had made her look outside for victims. Only with a realization that the object of her hate might be an aspect of herself could her anger be internalized and the path to suicide from self-involvement be eventually described. This is the course that Eliante will follow, one based on denying any hold that others have on her, on withdrawing affect from those who make her feel, and investing it instead in an awareness of those feelings. Steel blade, "dédaigneuse de sang et de chair, n'usant plus que son propre fourreau noir" (La Jongleuse), she does not assume the male penetrating role, but over time destroys herself through a simple lack of contact with another but herself.

Through the accentuation of her ornamental beauty, her virtue and devotion to her niece, Eliante in many ways resembles "les créatures relatives" of whom Françoise Basch has written. Yet she does not couple her attractiveness with docility, or obedience to men. Rather she manipulates them for amusement, juggles them like knives. She lives to feel their glances that are sharpened by desire. She exposes herself to them but is never in real danger. Yet she does fear growing older and not feeling others' looks, fears relinquishing the status of "prêtresse d'Eros" and being forced to take the role of "mendiante d'amour" (La Jongleuse). As much as she would like to see herself as an independent woman, not a creation or composite of men's opinions of her, it is only by attracting their admiration that she feels herself alive. At the same time she must detach herself from others, owe them nothing lest the autonomy she covets be all but forfeited. "On n'est libre qu'en tuant tout le monde *#x2026;," she says (La Jongleuse). Freed from obligation, from the need to interact, she must also forego love as the means to be complete. First she is the dagger and its sheath, then the wound it opens up and finally the knife and her own dead body in which her weapon is embedded.

All the characters in Rachilde try to overcome the ascendancy of men: Raoule through an esthetic neutering of her boyfriend Jacques Silvert; Mary Barbe through attacks with hairpins, poison gases; and Eliante through a sleight of hand dissociation of sexuality and love. Still, concealed beneath their declaration of "la haine de la force mâle" (Barrès), is less a belief in women's self-acceptance than a flight from the spontaneous, the unpredictable and free. They are drawn to what is mechanical, highly structured, and recoil from emotions that make them give up self-control. Their ambition is to follow Raoule de Vénérande in making men wax robots that cannot challenge them to grow. What they deny is that women are reactors, their range of choices limited by their need to answer men, so they insist on leading, taking the initiative themselves. As the man is made an object, becomes "un être insexué," the threat he posed is neutralized. Thus Rachilde's women characters define their strategies, their goals in terms of an absence of constraint. They destroy what repels or frightens them, but do not know, cannot attain, what it is they truly want. Once Raoule makes Jacques Silvert her property or "thing," once Mary Barbe does away with the men that she despises, the objectives that were negative are effectively achieved. The tyrants are thrown down; the masters are destroyed and the woman's self as object is liquidated, too. Disconnected from the men who impose on her a role, Eliante is relieved of her old "en-soi" existence and can say to Léon Reille: "Je suis déjàmorte" (La Jongleuse). But if there is no future to create free of their lovers' domination, their lives will not be purposeful, nor their identities self-defined. They flee the image-prisons they were sent to by their men, kill off the factitious selves they felt had stifled them. Yet they run the risk of finding underneath an empty center where no real self is hidden. Léon Reille wonders whether the "comédienne"'s many masks may in fact be covering the absence of a face. And so when he believes she has finally acquiesced, he learns the woman he has conquered was never really there. Through a last trick, Eliante makes use of Missie as a stand-in in her bed, so when Léon awakes in the arms of the wrong woman, he sees Eliante juggling for the last time with her "cinq glaives de douleur" (La Jongleuse), sees her about to become a victim of her most beloved performance. In death, for Eliante, there is no revelation, no disclosure of who she really is. "La femme glissa en arrière. Un flot pourpre noya le masque pâle … son dernier fard …" (La Jongleuse).

At the end these "Belles dames sans merci" show less mercy toward themselves. They begin by captivating men with their mystery and looks, bewitching and ensnaring them so they can make them into slaves. Their purpose in attracting them is, in fact, to give them nothing. The seduction is an unkept promise whose object is frustration. Yet the greater their self-loathing, the more violent their revenge. Mary Barbe will make men bleed to eradicate self-doubt, will commit sadistic acts from a lack of self-esteem. These characters are committed to eliminating men as well as that part of their own psyche that was willing to submit. But with the removal of the self that once had taken part, that had collaborated in their initial degradation, they find there is still no buried truth, no sense of authenticity. They don their attitudes like the masks of Eliante, masks directed at an audience that is meant to be misled. Yet without the onlookers to be duped, they die to their old roles. They have no knowledge of themselves or who they really want to be, so the obsolescence of their anger, their resentment and their shame leaves them directionless and empty, with lives that have no point. With no hate to motivate them, they have nothing more to do, except mourn a useless past which had left them so embittered, had turned them into monsters, half-crazed recluses, and which in time would lead to suicide, make them victims of themselves.