Sweet dreams : sexual fantasies in J.K. Huysmans's Against the Grain and Leopoldo Alas's La Regenta

H. Al-Zubi

Stranded in a tradition that was only beginning to acknowledge their existence, writers in the nineteenth century had little but the established forms of heterosexual romance with which to build their works. Sexual practices (homosexuality, bisexuality, fetishism) were commonly understood by nineteenth-century novelists, yet since they were not addressed by the established cultural mechanisms, many European writers came to dramatize these sexual practices implicitly in their narratives. This article examines the ways in which two nineteenth-century novelists, J. K. Huysmans and Leopoldo Alas, employ narrative metaphors and descriptions of homoerotic, bisexual, and fetishistic behavior in order to afford their characters sexual identities opposed to the heteronormative cultural ideal. The article concludes that it is only through immersion in the worlds of artifice and other "deviant" sexual practices that the main characters in Huysmans's Against the Grain and Alas's La Regenta synthesize the material and philosophical dimensions of their environment and transcend the level of caricature imposed upon them by society.[Copies are available from: Haworth Document Delivery Center. The Haworth Press, Inc., 10 Alice Street, Binghamton, NY 13904-1580, USA]