Queer Idiosyncrasies: Description and Deviance in the Novels of Zola and Huysmans proposes to complicate literary-historical narratives about the relationship between French naturalism and decadence using analytical approaches informed by sex and gender studies and queer theory. In particular, it examines the ways in which these writers’ penchant for literary description and cultural moralism leads to new and surprising expressions of non-normative genders and sexualities that are at odds with their aesthetic projects. Their novels are revealed as intertexts—responding and adapting to one another—whose forms, styles, and themes are mutually shaped over the course of their authorial careers.

The first chapter consists of a comparative study of Zola’s La curée and Huysmans’s Marthe, histoire d’une fille. Here, I contend that La curée’s heterotopic style manifests early naturalism’s anxieties concerning the conjugal deviance and androgyny of modern France, and that Marthe’s poetics of placelessness prefigures decadent tropes even in Huysmans’s naturalist phase. In the following chapter, I argue that Zola’s anti-clerical novel La faute de l’abbé Mouret, in attempting to write a scientifically informed version of Genesis, unwittingly models a radical type of gender parity based on friendship. I then frame Huysmans’s En rade as a decadent parody of La faute in which sterility and auto-eroticism are inextricably bound up with decadent autoreferentiality. Chapter three turns to Huysmans and Zola’s late works—Là-bas and Paris respectively—to show how their individual polemics against modernity and modernism offer visions of liberated womanhood and subversive homosexuality. Finally, in the short coda that follows, I perform close readings of a third author’s work, La Marquise de Sade by Rachilde, to affirm both the possibilities and the limits of my own methodology, and to recast Rachilde’s relationship to naturalism and decadence.