Subversive Satanic Women in Decadent Literature and Art

Chapter 7 discusses Decadence as a highly visible counter-discourse, which popularized tactics of counter-reading. Félicen Rops’s enthusiastically debauched engravings and paintings of Satanic women are examined. Next, J.-K. Huysmans’s novel Là-bas (1891) is considered, especially the female Satanist Mme Chantelouve who is portrayed in it. She is a self-governing woman with modern ideas about free love and described as hysterical. Hysteria carried connotations of feminism, and the independent Chantelouve can be seen as a caustic caricature of an emancipated New Woman. Certain bohemian females were undaunted and approached her as an object of identification. Finally, Stanislaw Przybyszewski’s highly ambivalent attitude towards the demonic feminine is read in view of his œuvre at large, which makes it difficult to understand his at times quite ghastly descriptions of female Satanists as a simple condemnation. At times unwittingly, Decadents contributed to a destabilization of gendered categories and ideals.