Solitary Confinement in Rachilde’s La Tour d’amour: Dehumanization and Madness of the Buried Alive

In La Tour d’amour (1899), Rachilde imagines the secluded life of Mathurin Barnabas and Jean Maleux, two lighthouse keepers trapped in the Ar-Men lighthouse off the coast of Brittany, France. Rachilde’s male characters are doubly marginal: geographically (they are in a tower lost at sea) and socially (they are single). In this novel, Rachilde condemns the pervasive decadent patriarchal discourse that demonizes women and leads some men to find alternatives to experiencing love with living, breathing women (Barnabas relieves his sexual urges with dead female bodies while Jean eventually decides to reject women altogether). She shows that this masculine desire to erase, bypass, or avoid the Feminine ultimately leads to perversion (necrophilia) and death, a journey the isolating and maddening lighthouse hastens. In this huis-clos, this father-and-son duo struggles to keep their humanity as the Ar-Men lighthouse, a bachelor pad, becomes a padded cell.