Le personnage queer du dandy décadent dans Les Hors nature de Rachilde et Le Portrait de Dorian Gray d’Oscar Wilde
With the advent of sexology at the end of the 19th century, the medico-legal discourse on sexual deviance and psychiatry impose itself in European societies, thus becoming the reference in matters of not only sexual normality and identity, but also, in parallel, in cultural and moral discourse. Investigating the literary field in search of sexual perversions, the forensic discipline seizes the characters and their authors, now all analyzed and criticized by this “pathologizing” gaze. From this angle, the decadent dandies Paul-Eric de Fertzen in Les Hors nature (1897) by Rachilde and Dorian Gray in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde are two exemplary medical “cases” of androgynous, “homosexual” and degenerate deviance, because they do not perform (or poorly) the heteronormative and virile norm in force at the time. Using queer theory seen as a process of “‘deterritorialization’ of heterosexuality” (Preciado, 2003), this thesis questions the historiographical presuppositions of the implicit “social contract” (Wittig, 1992) and decompartmentalizes the characters (and the authors) of their multiple diagnosis. By noting in the narrative trajectories of the protagonists the initiation failures that prevent their aggregation into society, from an ethnocritical perspective, we will be interested in what built an identity at the end of the 19th century. A main question guides this work:  how these dandies, by being monstrous, abnormal, marginal, poorly initiated, do they pose as queer and “liminary” figures (Scarpa, 2009) within the narrative?
Oscar Wilde Rachilde queer theory decadent dandy luminary character 19th century performativity ethnocritic and anthropology of literature