Selfish Passions and Artificial Desire: Rereading

Clérambault's Study of "Silk Erotomania"

PETA ALLEN SHERA
Independent Scholar

IN ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN 1908 AND 1910 the French psychiatrist

Gaétan Gatian de Clérambault (1872-1934) presented four cases of women
who displayed an autoerotic passion for pieces of silk that they stole from
department stores.^ Amidst the periods of depression that shaped these
patients' lives, their sexual use of stolen fahric gave them feelings of plea-
sure more intense and intoxicating than the response they elicited from
alcohol, drugs, erotic fantasies, or sexual partners. This article examines
Cléramhault's study of what can be called "silk erotomania," which has been
highly influential in the history of the criticism of his life and work. The
literature on the psychiatrist is extensive and varied, yet a popular reading
of his medicolegal study is that it reveals his own fabric fetishism. Rather
than suggesting what his studies might reveal about the psychiatrist's life
and work, a line of enquiry that has become orthodox, the present work
seeks an alternative understanding of his text and the challenges women's
erotic passion for fabric poses to established categories of sexual expression
and deviant consumption.
Clérambault worked as a médecin certificateur (a medicolegal role in
which he recorded patients' symptoms and the reasons for their internment
and/or treatment) at Paris's Infirmerie spéciale (Special Clinic) from 1905
and then as the institution's head psychiatrist from 1921 to 1934. In this
role and as a psychiatric expert for the court of law he studied mental au-
tomatism (a theory of psychosis), delusions of love, and the hallucinations

I would like to thank Prudence Black, Peter Cryle, Elizabeth Ferrier, Ian Hacking, Jean and
Jean-Noël Joinié-Maurin, Stephen Muecke, Gerard Salmon, the Shera family, and Elizabeth
Ann Wilson for their support and contributions to this essay. I also thank Lisa Downing,
Matt Kuefler, and the anonymous reviewers for the Journal of the History of Sexuality for their
valued responses to this work.
' Gaétan Gatian de Clérambault, "Passion erotique des étoffes chez la femme" (1908)
and "Passion erotique des étoffes chez la femme (suite)" (1910), in Archives d'anthropologie
criminelle, June 1908 and August 1910, reprinted in Oeuvres psychiatriques (Paris: Frénésie,
1998), 683-720.
Journal of the History of Sexuality, Voi. 18,No. 1, January 2009
© 2009 by the University of Texas Press, P C Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819

158
 Selfish Passions and Artificial Desire 159

caused by various toxins.^ He also produced photographs of North African

drapery in 1915 and then between 1917 and 1920.' Like his predecessor
Jean-Martin Charcot, Clérambault observed and classified mental illness.
He did not attempt to treat his patients because he believed they were
incurable. Today psychiatric and judicial literature in English still employs
the term "de Clérambault's syndrome" for a particular type of stalking and
deluded love. At the end of the twentieth century Clérambault was ofi:en
mentioned as having been the teacher of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.
Clérambault's own work was not psychoanalytical, and although he was
Sigmund Freud's contemporary and fluent in German, he never expressed
an interest in Freud's work. Clérambault's project was principally to describe
his patients' behavior and document as much of their history as possible with
the aim of suggesting the possible interrelated chemical, neurological, and
social causes of their conditions. It was with this purpose that his studies
of fetishism included notes about his patients' fantasies and the symbolism
of the fetish, and they remind us that the study of "fetishism" has a diverse
history to which psychoanalytical accounts contribute but one part.*
Clérambault's photographs and their relationship with his life and
medicolegal work have inspired varied literature, ranging from excessively

^ Clérambault's other medicolegal works are also published in his Oeuvres psychiatriques.
•' Clérambault's photographs are held today at the image library at the Musée de l'homme
in Paris. A restored selection was exhibited at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1990,
and reproductions of these images are included in the following works: Jananne Al-Ani, "Acting
Out," in Veil: Veiling, Representation, and Contemporary Art, ed. David A. Bailey and Gilane
Tawadros (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 90-107; Danielle Arnoux, "Gaétan Gatian
de Clérambault: Une méthode, un schéma de construction," in "Dossier: L'architecture et
son lieu, revue annuelle," special issue. La part de l'oeil 13 (1997): 224-37; Joan Copjec,
"The Sartorial Superego," October 50 (1989): 57-96, and Read My Desire: Lacan against the
Hí5íon«'#í (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 65-116; Gen Doy, Drapery: Classicism and
Barbarism in Visual Culture (London: 1. B. Tauris, 2002); Mounira Khemir, "The Orient
in the Photographer's Mirror: From Constantinople to Mecca," in Orientalism: Delacroix
to Klee, ed. Roger Benjamin (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1997), 188-96; and
Serge Tisseron, La passion des étoffes chez un neuro-psychiatre: Gaétan Gatian de Clérambault
(Paris: Solin, 1981).
' In contemporary theoretical analyses of Clérambault's work, just as in contemporary
histories of sexuality, "fetishism" tends to be considered in Freudian or other psychoanalytic
terms rather than in Marxist or anthropological terms. See Matt Wray, "Fetishizing the Fe-
tish," in Bad Subjects (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), also available online
at http://eserver.org/bs/41/wray.html (accessed 24 June 2008). For Karl Marx's analysis
of "commodity fetishism" see Capital: A New Abridgement (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999), 42-49. For an interesting history of the different understandings of fetish in
the seventeenth century in European trade with Africa see William Pietz, "The Problem of
the Fetish, I," Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (1985): 5-17; "The Problem of the Fetish,
II," Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 13 (1987): 23-45; "The Problem of the Fetish, Ilia,"
Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 16 (1988): 105-23; and "The Spirit of Civilization: Blood
Sacrifice and Monetary Debt," Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 28 (1995): 23-38.
160 PETA ALLEN SHERA

complimentary interpretations to revisionist inquiries.^ A popular theory is

that his photographic works betray a fabric fetishism that he caught from
his fabric-obsessed patients or that he shared with them and recognized in
their condition.* While these theories are rich subjects for further investiga-
tion, this article focuses on Clérambault's study of women's erotic passion
for fabric and draws attention to the medicolegal and medical-commercial
traditions to which it speaks. This article makes no moral argument about
the textural relations Clérambault described. Instead, the present work
explores the view Clérambault offered of four women's extreme reaction
to the emerging domain of leisure consumerism.
Thefirstcase Clérambault presented in hisfirstpaper, entided "Passion
erotique des étoffes chez la femme" (Women's Erotic Passioh for Fabric),
is of a woman identified only as "V.B.," forty years of age and a former
dressmaker who arrived at the Infirmerie spéciale in July 1906 after break-
ing objects and menacing people with a pair of scissors. Her first theft of
silk occurred at the age of thirty-two, even though she had ready access to
fabric in her work as a seamstress. When V.B. stole fabric she had an orgasm

^ For laudatory interpretations of Clérambault's life and work see Joseph Kessel, "Un
soir, Rive gauche," Le Figaro, 4 December 1934; and Elizabeth Renard, Le docteur Gaétan
Gatian de Clérambault, sa vie et son oeuvre (1872-1934) (1942; Le Plessis-Robinson, France:
Laboratoires Delagrange/Synthélabo, 1992). For important revisionist studies see Al-Ani,
"Acting Out"; Danielle Arnoux, "La rupture entre Jacques Lacan et Gaétan Gatian de
Glérambault," Revue du littoral 37 (1993): 85-119; Danielle Arnoux, "Analytique du drapé,
les photographies de Clérambault," Revue du littoralAl (1994): 151-67; Arnoux, "Gaétan
Gatian de Clérambault"; Mounira Khemir, "The Orient in the Photographer's Mirror," in
Le maitre des insensés, Gaétan Gatian de Clérambault (1872-1934), ed. Alain Rubens (Le
Plessis-Robinson, France: Institut Synthélabo, 1999); and Serge Tisseron's introduction to
Renard, Le docteur.
* The following works suggest that Clérambault "caught" fabric fetishism from his silk
erotomaniac patients: "Le docteur Clérambault médecin chef de l'Infirmerie spéciale du
dépôt s'est donné à mort," Le Figaro, 20 November 1934; Carol Mavor, "Odor Di Femina;
Though You May Not See Her, You Can Certainly Smell Her," Cultural Studies 12, no.
1 (1998): 51-58; and Rubens, Le maitre des insensés. Some scholars suggest Clérambault
shared his patients' fabric fetishism or had an unusually personal perspective of their condi-
tion; see Emily Apter, "Splitting Hairs: Female Fetishism and Postpartum Sentimentality in
the Fin de Siècle," in Eroticism and the Body Politic, ed. Lynn Hunt (Baltimore, Md.: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1991), 164-90; Leslie Camhi, "Stealing Femininity: Department
Store Kleptomania as Sexual Disorder," differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
5, no. 1 (1993): 26-50; Doy, Drapery, Bernard de Fréminville, "Clérambault: Fruit de la
passion ou figure de cire?" in La passion des étoffes chez un neuro-psychiatre: Gaétan Gatian de
Clérambault (Paris: Solin, 1981), 7-10; Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, "Docteur Clérambault
in Zola's Paradise," in Good Novels, Better Management: Reading Organizational Realities,
ed. Barbara Czarniawska Joerges and Pierre Guillet de Monthoux (Chur, Switzerland: Har-
wood Academic Publications, 1994), 17-36; Norman Madarasz, "Le motif du tissu: Études
à partir de la philosophie française contemporaine d'unefigurephilosophique descriptive aux
confines des théories du nom, de la proposition et du texte," Ph.D. diss.. Université de Paris
VIII, 1998; Elisabeth Roudinesco, La bataille de cent ans: Histoire de la psyehanalyse en France,
vol. 2,1925-1985 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1986); Tisseron, La passion, 65-70,99-103; and
Claude This, "L'ultime pli," Figures de l'art 1 (1993-94): 161-68.
 Selfish Passions and Artificial Desire 161

that she could never have experienced if the cloth had been given to her.
During her examinadon she could not remember exacdy what she did with
the silk once she stole it. When Clérambault suggested to her that she put
the fabric between her legs and rubbed it against her genitals, she agreed
that such behavior was possible,''
The second case concerned the padent "F,," a woman forty-nine years
of age who had been arrested twenty-two times between 1885 and 1905,
mosdy for thefts resuldng from her desire for silk, Clérambault cited the
case notes his colleagues had made about F,, which referred to her thefts
of silk and passion for the fabric and described her as being electrified by
silk. When F, was a child, her sister, a dressmaker, gave her cutdngs of the
fabric. From age fifteen to twenty-two working with silk made her feel
"dred," "nervous," and "almost sick," She stopped experiencing this arousal
when she had her first sexual reladons. At the dme of her consultadon she
was still unable to wear silk because touching it made her too excited. The
fabric made her feel "wet," and she declared that no sexual pleasure could
match it for her. Stealing silk thrilled her, but buying it never gave her the
same pleasure. She felt giddily drawn to silk ribbons, skirts, and blouses.
The rusding of the fabric caused the skin under her fingernails to dngle,
and then she felt unable to resist it. When F, had finished with the cloth,
she threw it behind a door in an alley or gave it away to her children,'
The third case, "B,," a woman forty-five years of age, was brought to
the Infirmede spéciale in December 1902 after she stole a piece of sillc. Her
thefts commenced at the age of thirty-eight and occurred after she drank
ether (which was not an uncommon substance of addicdon in the era). In
her interview wilh Clérambault B, confessed: "I sdll love thick siUcs that swish
around. But I can't wear them:, , , even a small piece irritates me,, , , In the
act of stealing a piece of silk I'm gripped with anxiety, I won't let myself do
it, and then I'm overwhelmed with pleasure,"' She declared that silk gave
her "an amazing and voluptuous spasm," and Clérambault noted that she
finished her sentence with a shiver of delight,'"
The fourth case, published in 1910, concerned "Marie D,," a woman
forty-nine years of age whom Clérambault described as a drug addict and a
hysteric. At the dme of her examinadon Marie D, stated that she masturbated
every day and believed her belly to have become too large to allow her to
enjoy sexual reladons with another. At some time in 1904, after eight days
of intoxicadon, she stole a light blue child's dress and masturbated with it
while sdll inside the shop. Like F, and B,, Marie D, felt aroused by tlie "cry"
silk made when it was rubbed," In 1905 Marie D, had been diagnosed as

' Clérambault, "Passion erotique," 683-91,

' Ibid,, 693-94,
' Ibid,, 696,
"• Ibid,
" Ibid,, 716,
162 PETA ALLEN SHERA

suffering, among other things, from silk fetishism. Cléramhault, however,

suggested that this patient, like the others, did not simply display a feminine
form of fetishism hecause she did not use fabric as a substitute for a human
body, and it was not intended to evoke one.
Clérambault sought to establish women's erotic passion for fabric as a
distinct entity within the existent medical taxonomy of sexual expressions
not connected to biological reproduction. By 1908, the date of his first
paper, the medical study of autoeroticism and fetishism had taken precise
shape. Although these works were differently motivated, they were, like
Clérambault's study of silk obsession, primarily descriptive and classificatory
in ambition. In his 1880 publication, L'onanisme chez la femme (Female
Onanism), Thésée Pouillet had notably discussed the autoerotic pleasure
seamstresses derived from the mechanical vibrations of their sewing machines
and the movement of their legs on the machines' treadles.'^ In 1897 Henry
Havelock EUis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex drew on Pouillet's work and
examined the other ways women have sought autoerotic pleasure, including
riding bicycles and hobbyhorses and rubbing against fiirniture and knotted
chemises.^^ In their 1882 article, "Inversion du sens genital" (Inversion of
Genital Sensation), Jean-Martin Charcot and Valentin Magnan discussed
cases of male sexual obsession with quotidian objects: nails in women's
shoes, women's nightcaps, and white aprons.'* Their work informed
Richard von Krafft-Ebing's 1886 presentation in Psyehopathia Sexualis oí
other case studies of material and object fetishism.'' By the twelfth edition
of Krafft-Ebing's tome in 1903, the Western medicolegal community and
many educated general readers had learned of the diversity of uncommon
sexual interests that had attracted medicolegal attention during previous
decades. The range of classified pathological types by then included fetish-
ists of various materials and objects from daily life—handkerchiefs, starched
linen, shoes, gloves, fur, velvet, and silk—as well as coupeurs de nattes, who
derived sexual excitement by surreptitiously cutting women's hair, and
frotteurs, who rubbed themselves for sexual pleasure against female strang-
ers."" Against this background Clérambault would not have found the silk
obsession of the four women he studied to be extraordinary.
More intellectual background for Clérambault's article is provided by
Jean-Étienne-Dominique Esquirol's studies of "monomania" and "ero-
tomania." In his 1838 treatise. Des maladies mentales, considérées sous les

" Thésée Pouillet, L'onanisme chez la femme (Paris: Delahayc, 1880).

" Henry Havelock EUis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 1, The Evolution of Modesty;
The Phenomena of Sexual Periodicity; Auto-Erotism (1897), available online at http://www
.gutenberg.org/dirs/l/3/6/l/13610/13610-h/13610-h.htm#l_FNanchor_208 (accessed
24 June 2008).
'•* Jean-Martín Charcot and Valentin Magnan, "Inversion du sens genital," Archives de
neurologie i, no. 12 (1882): 296-322.
" Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psyehopathia Sexualis {1886; New York: Arcade, 1998).
" Ibid., 166-67,170,176,181,158-60.
 Selfish Passions and Artificial Desire 163

rapports médicaux, hygiéniques, et médico-légaux (translated in 1845 as

Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity), Esquirol explored monomania
and its suhcategory of erotomania, which he identified as pathologies of
isolated and fixed ideas."^ For Esquirol erotomania was an "essentially
cerebral" affliction of "excessive sexual" and unrequited passion, a male
or female fixation on a person who is barely known in reality.'* Although
it could affect anyone at any age, those individuals "of nervous tempera-
ment" who had "received a voluptuous and effeminate education" were
at an increased risk of developing the condition." Erotomania differed
from the general category of "mania" because the erotomaniac subject's
delusions were "partial and limited" rather than being characteristically
violent, perverting the whole being and causing the subject to believe
everything to be exciting, oppositional, and irritating.^" The erotomaniac's
passion was also typically veiled in secrecy and never passed "the limits of
[social] propriety."^'
In both his 1908 and 1910 studies Clérambault also explored pathologi-
cal singular fixations, which were, in these cases, focused on an inanimate
object. He suggested that the obsession with silk experienced by V.B., B., E.,
and Marie D. was not a form of female fetishism, but he did not label their
condition a subset of erotomania either. Although Clérambault did not use
the term himself, in this article I use the term "silk erotomania" to refer to
his patients' passion for fabric. I take this liberty because the term can be
popularly understood as "erotic mania for silk" and stands for the various
terms, including "touching delirium," "passion for silk," "aptophilia," and
"hyphéphilia," that Clérambault employed.^^ The condidon as he described it
did not neady fit into the structure of the pathology that Esquirol presented,
specifically because Clérambault's padents' behavior was socially unacceptable,
and they did not consider their object of desire to be direcdy or symbolically
related to another person.^^ Women's erotic passion for fabric can neverthe-
less be understood as linked to the category of erotomania through the
" Jean-Etienne-Dominique Esquirol, Des maladies mentales, considérées sous les rapports
médicaux, hygiéniques, et médico-légaux (Paris: J. B. Baillière, 1838), translated as Mental
Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity: A Facsimile of the English Edition of 1845 ( 1845; New York:
Hafner, 1965).
" Esquirol, Mental Maladies, 342, 335, 341.
" Ibid., 342.
'"Ibid., 321,380, 388.
' ' Ibid., 336.
" Clérambault, "Passion erotique," 683, 700-701. Clérambault describes the women's
"délire du toucher" (delirium of touching) and "passion de la soie" (passion for silk) and
also uses the Greek-derived terms hyphéphilie, meaning a love for fabric, as well as the more
general aptophilie, meaning a love of touch.
" Esquirol, Mental Maladies, 336. In Mental Maladies Esquirol suggested that the
erotomaniac's love object might sometimes be inanimate and cited two historical instances of
"erotic delirium" for the Greek statue "the Cupid of Praxiteles." He did not, however, discuss
any cases of deluded love for objects that were seemingly as independent of interpersonal
romance as were the pieces of fabric desired by Clérambault's silk erotomaniacs.
164 PETA ALLEN SHERA

singularity of the women's focus and the sexualized energy with which they
pursued their object. The popular understanding of the term is also fitting in
the context of this article because it speaks to the different ways in which the
passion was apparently delusional in its social unsustainability. The women's
delight in fabric did not incorporate a sexual partner, yet they did not com-
pensate for this absence with fantasized interpersonal narratives or consider
silk in symbolic terms. Supporting a long tradition in the history of sexuality,
Clérambault also implied that the "silk erotomaniacs" were unusual in their
delight in clitoral rather than vaginal pleasure and stated that their apparent
lack or only slight feeling of pleasurable vaginal sensations "might be the
cause, or one of the causes, oftheir aversion to normal sexual relations."^*
The term "silk erotomania," however, could be problematic in historical and
diagnostic terms were it to be confused with the focus of Clérambault's later
studies of mixed and pure erotomania as deluded love, which appeared in
papers dated 1913, 1920, 1921, and 1923.^^ In these case studies the psy-
chiatrist suggested that his subjects had not only a pathological fixation on a
living romantic object but also the unfounded belief that their feelings were
reciprocated. His most famous case of this kind was of the Frenchwoman
Lea-Anna, who believed she was loved by the king of England.^*
Clérambault's study of V.B.'s, B.'s, F.'s, and Marie D.'s passion for silk
explored the condition's sexual aspects and also continued the work on klep-
tomania laid out by his supervisor at the Sainte-Anne clinical asylum, Paul
Dubuisson. Dubuisson's 1902 publication. Les voleuses de grands magasins
([Female] Department Store Thieves), examined cases of both male and
female shoplifiing in Paris.^^ The most interesting aspect of the work, as
Clérambault's biographer Alain Rubens indicates, is the suggestion that the
department store's enticing presentation of goods and lack of overt surveil-
lance were pardy to blame for his patients giving in to temptation.^* "The
woman steals," Dubuisson declared, "but it is the store that encourages
thefi:, that lays out the snare to which they succumb."^' It is a sentiment
expressed by a more famous voice in Emile Zola's 1883 elaborate fabric
and shopping mise-en-scène. Au bonheur des dames (Ladies' Delight). In
this novel, which so exquisitely describes the emerging department store,
the character Vallagnosc suggests that displaying so much merchandise only
tempts women to steal.^' Dubuisson wrote that his patients rarely used

^* Clérambault, "Passion erotique," 691.

^^ Clérambault, Oeuvres psychiatriques, 3 1 1 ^ 5 1 .
" Ibid., 323-37.
" Paul Dubuisson, Les voleuses de grands magasins (Paris: A. Storck, 1902), 223, 164.
^' Rubens, Le maître des insensés, 70.
" Dubuisson, Les voleuses, 223.
'" Emile Zola, Ladies'Delight {1883, London: Calder, 1957).
" Ibid., 276. Serge Tisseron also makes the link between Clérambault's study and Zola's
novel in his Gaétan Gatian de Clérambault, psychiatre et photographe (Paris: Collection les
empêcheurs de penser en rond, 1990), 31.
 Selfish Passions and Artificial Desire 165

their ill-gained goods. Instead, they hoarded them in neat arrangements

under beds or in cupboards. One patient at the time of his arrest had even
planned to move to a larger apartment to accommodate his loot. Only one
of his two male shoplifters had ever stolen a piece of silk. In Dubuisson's
thesis the type of pilfered object is irrelevant in the scheme of the patients'
pathology. Six years after this exploration of the shoplifters' "strange pas-
sion," Clérambault returned to the field to study women who stole silk to
satisfy their erotic yearnings.^^ Unlike the men and women of thé earlier
study, his four subjects stole only silk and had no interest in keeping it once
they had satisfied their erotic needs.
Clérambault's critics acknowledge the debt his work owed to Dubuisson,
yet they do not identify his work as a continuation of Roger Dupouy's 1905
study of kleptomania, published as "De la kleptomanie" (On Kleptomania)
in the Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique (Journal of Normal and
Pathological Psychology).^^ The journal produced its first issue in 1904, and
its directors, Pierre Janet and Georges Dumas, enjoyed a high standing in
the medicolegal community. While Clérambault did not reference Dupouy's
article, the closing pages of his 1908 paper appear to be pitched against
Dupouy's arguments about the existence of a form of female silk fetishism.
Clérambault stated that the publications that did mention cases similar to his
own generally regarded them as a type of fetishism or as a fairly unimportant
form of kleptomania. He also suggested that the pathology common to his-
case studies did "not seem to have been described by classical authors," even
though it could not have been unknown in medicolegal practice.'*
Dupouy's study discussed three different types of compulsive thefts
and two patients who derived an erotic pleasure from stealing silk. The
work's principal subject, "Hélène M.," "felt irresistibly attracted" to
black silk blouses and pieces of black silk but was never enticed to steal
any other goods.'' As a young woman she was rich enough to buy what-
ever she wanted and enjoyed department store shopping. She developed
an "obsessional desire to buy and pay" and felt excited when using cash
instead of checks."* Later in life she Iost her fortune and, unable to satisfy
her expensive tastes legally, began to steal silk from various department
stores in Paris. Stealing silk made her genitals feel "wet," but it did not
bring her the same "voluptuous sensations" she had enjoyed when pur-
chasing goods or paying bills.'^ She was always careful not to crumple or
to damage the silk items that she held under one arm to steal, and "she
had no remorse, absolutely no sense of having behaved badly; then she
'^ Dubuisson, Les voleuses, 164.
" Roger Dupouy, "De la kleptomanie," Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique 2
(1905): 404-26.
" Clérambault, "Passion erotique," 714.
'^ Dupouy, "De la kleptomanie," 416.
'* Ibid., 425, 423.
"Ibid., 423, 421.
166 PETA ALLEN SHERA

realized that she was all wet,"^* Six months after her fourth conviction
she was arrested for stealing pieces of silk from the department store at
the Louvre, A police inspector had seen her throw the silk away in the
Palais-Royal, Hélène described herself at the point of being arrested as
being "so overexcited" that she "was not aware of her situation,"'' Later
in police custody she felt nothing but apathy. During her medicolegal
examinadon, however, she was aquiver with emotion as she revealed the
details of her thefts, Dupouy wrote that "her eyes lit up and shone with
a brighter sparkle; her face lost its color, [and] her breathing [became]
more rapid,"'"' She felt, "albeit to a lesser degree, the same sensations she
experienced by accomplishing her thefts; she was anxious and her privates
felt wet"—"a fact," Dupouy pointed out, that "we did not verify,"*'
Dupouy's árdele contained an admission from another padent that was
remarkably similar to those found in Clérambault's study of silk erotomania,
Dupouy's kleptomaniac confessed: "When I am able to hold silk, then I am
just as if I were drunk, I tremble, although not from fear because the sordid-
ness of what I have just done does not occur to me at all; I only think of one
thing: to go into a corner where I can rusde it at my ease, which gives me
voluptuous sensations even stronger than those I feel with the father of my
children,"'*^ Clérambault's articles were similarly concerned with his padents'
intoxication by silk and with the intensity of their desire overtaking their
self-awareness and of the erode pleasure silk gave them, which surpassed any
they had experienced with sexual partners. Both Dupouy's and Clérambault's
studies ardculated the physical qualides of fabdc that were the most prized.
As noted above, for example, Hélène was always careful not to crumple or to
damage the silk items when stealing them, Clérambault's silk erotomaniacs
similarly preferred silk when it was ftesh and new and considered it to be
reduced in value if it showed any crease marks,
Clérambault's observations did not simply mirror Dupouy's, but the
vivid parallels between their studies prompt the quesdon as to whether
he "tailor-made" or exaggerated aspects of his patients' conditions in his
desire to document cases of pure pathology,*^ "Passion érodque des étof-
fes chez la femme" referred to other medicolegal pracdtioners, including
Dubuisson, Garnier, and Magnan, as having examined V,B,, B,, F,, and

' ' Ibid,, 424,

''Ibid,, 417,
*" Ibid,, 416,
" Ibid,
" Ibid,, 412-13, Michael Miller includes a translation of this passage in The Bon Marché:
Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store (Princeton, N,J,: Princeton University Press,
1981), 204,
" Tisseron suggests that "the principal signs" of silk erotomania in Clérambault's text
"sometimes seem a little too made to measure for the women that he describes" ("les signes
principaux y paraissent même parfois un peu trop taillés à la mesure des femmes qu'il y décrit"
[ La passion, 65 ] ),
 Selfish Passions and Artificial Desire 167

Marie D., suggesting that the women were not invented characters. Like
Dupouy, Clérambault acknowledged enough of the women's histories that
their unusual practices did not completely mask the pathos of their lives. To
various extents they were damaged by alcoholism, drug addiction, physical
abuse, and poverty, and some were exhausted by their many pregnancies.**
Clérambault's subjects did not, however, display the same acute fascination
with money that Dupouy's Hélène exhibited. V.B. possibly preferred silk
to all other fabrics because it was expensive, but she could not say if that
was the only reason. Clérambault's text included a note by Dubuisson
that F. wrote to her children from prison, instructing them to see certain
individuals in order to reclaim money that they owed her, even though the
people indebted to her apparently did not exist. Clérambault's description
of his patient B.'s "shiver of delight" when discussing her passion for silk
pales against the range of symptoms Dupouy attributed to Hélène. The
latter's comment that he did not verify whether her genitals were actually
wet reads today as a smutty joke about the power that was literally at his
fingertips. As curious as he was about kleptomania, Dupouy did not bear
witness to all his patients' symptoms. Clérambault humored his reader less
than his contemporary. He considered silk erotomania to be entangled not
only with the well-documented circumstances of kleptomania but also with
a range of other conditions.
The novel aspect of Clérambault's work is its exposé of the sexual resolu-
tion that Dupouy's kleptomaniacs had not established. Hélène declared that
she found the tlieft of silk to be intensely joyful but that she also experienced
palpitations, a tight throat, difficulty breathing, and a genital response that
did not involve volupté, or sensual delight.*^ Clérambault's patients followed
her path yet went farther to an erotic conclusion by using their pieces of
silk to obtain the volupté that the theft and the rustling of silk alone could
not produce. Their textural mania was not linked to one single, preexisting,
obsessional condition, although Clérambault's principal diagnosis was that
it had developed from their disenchantment with heterosexual, penetrative
coitus. Their interlaced circumstances of menopause, substance abuse, and,
for some, hysteria were seen to have informed their psychiatric state, whereas
Hélène's fascination for silk was understood as having developed from or
as a substitution for her obsession with spending and paying. Along with
these differences, it is significant that the silk erotomaniacs, like Dupouy's
kleptomaniacs, were unaware of their actions as they indulged them. Their
sole rationale for their actions was the fiilfillment of their erotic pleasure.

•" Clérambault, "Passion erotique des étoffes," 689. V.B., for example, "had seventeen
pregnancies, four of which ended in miscarriage. Always very anemic, [she] could only breast-
feed once. Eight of her children are dead, leaving five alive" (ibid.).
•" Dupouy, "De la kleptomanie," 423. In addition to noting her other physical symptoms,
Dupouy described Hélène as having experienced "an ejaculation without first feeling sensual
pleasure" ("Elle ressentit. . . une sensation d'éjaculadon sans toutefois éprouver de volupté"
[ibid.]).
168 PETA ALLEN SHERA

UNSPOKEN DESIRES

When V.B., F., B., and Marie D. did not confess to fantasized interpersonal
narratives upon which their desires were built, Clérambault initially assumed
that they were withholding information about their condition. He began
his study with the assumption that women's erotic passion for fabric would
be similar to forms of male material fetishism that his medicolegal readers
would have recognized, such as the silk fetishists described by Krafft-Ebing.
Yet when his questions and observations failed to extract the evidence to
align the women's eroticism with established pathological types, he came
to believe that there were no clear fetishist-like associations to uncover in
these women's passion for silk.
Clérambault diagnosed the silk erotomaniacs as being "passive" in their
pleasure with fabric and as closing themselves off to the outside world. He
argued that they lacked the fetishist's characteristic imaginative associations
or fantasies with their pieces of silk. The fetishist invests his fetish object with
erotic powers so that it becomes the substitute for a sexual organ and/or
for the presence of another living being. According to Clérambault, the
silk erotomaniacs, however, had none of the "sensorial, aesthetic, [and]
moral evocations" that the fetishist reads in his fetish.'*'' Their imaginadon
played a "very retiring role" in their pathology, even though they had an
otherwise rich capacity for fantasy.''^ In the throes of their pleasure with silk
their responsiveness to touch and the feel of the fabric effaced their capac-
ity for other mental processes to the extent that their pleasure involved no
intellectual participation.*' As they enjoyed their scraps of stolen silk they
became "devoid of vision, devoid of desire, [and] the opposite sex ceases
to exist. "^'' The silk erotomaniacs did not use fabric as a substitute for a
human body, and it was not intended to evoke one.^^ Their passion was for
the cloth itself, not for what it represented. According to Clérambault, the
silk erotomaniacs' passion was not a clear form of fetishism because for the
women their pieces of fabric lacked symbolism. The condition therefore
existed beside fetishism, indeed, in its "shadow.""
While Clérambault argued that his cases of women's erotic passion for
fabric constituted a new contribution to the study of sexual pathology,
a critically informed reading today might argue that his language sup-
ported the conventional, gendered, and cultural dualisms that are written
throughout the history of the medicolegal discourse to which his study
contributed. His comparison of silk erotomania and fetishism was a study

"" Clérambault, "Passion erotique," 704.

" Ibid., 699.
"" Ibid., 714.
' ' Ibid., 703.
"•" Ibid., 704.
" Ibid., 698.
"Ibid., 715.
 Selfish Passions and Artificial Desire 169

of pathological rather than normative sexualities. The analysis neverthe-

less supports the typical cultural alignment of women with their bodies,
with emotion, touch, silence, consumption, and being spoken for as the
object rather than the agent of discourse. The male fetishists Clérambault
described enjoy the opposite: cultural alignments of masculinity with the
mind, reason, sight, being heard and speaking for themselves as the creators
of artistic and intellectual production.
As working-class women with police records for theft and nonprocreative
sexual exhibition, the silk erotomaniacs were disenfranchised by the socio-
cultural, linguistic, and analytic structures in which they were examined.
Although Clérambault was confident in his analytic skills, modern readers
have understandably speculated as to whether the women held back from
complete disclosure of their desires. They may have chosen not to speak
because they felt too ill at ease with the discourse and structure oftheir con-
sultation to adequately express all the details oftheir passion. Jann Madock
suggests Clérambault's study of silk erotomania reveals the psychiatrist's
misogynist dismissal and disdain for nongenital female sexuality. Madock
also comments, with humor, that "to read Clérambault's contemptuous
portrait of female cloth obsessionals, one might think that being a male
fetishist was a feat to attain."^^ For Matiock, Clérambault's work reveals
more about his inability to interpret his patients' desire than it does about
the absence of die women's erotic fantasies. She suggests that the silk ero-
tomaniacs' stolen pieces of silk had nothing to do with their yearnings. It is
therefore left to the collectionneuse (the female collector or, in the context
of Madock's essay, the feminine and/or nontraditional archivist/collator
who has traditionally been marginal to the world of medicolegal privilege)
to uncover the reality of the women's desires.^*
As compelling as Madock's argument is, this article does not take up
the call to discover what the silk erotomaniacs' true desires may have
been or whether any misunderstanding of their sexuality might be read
as the artifacts of Clérambault's own rhetoric.^^ In this article I instead
prefer to work with what is known about the silk erotomaniacs from the
existing medicolegal texts. I suggest how the women's passion for silk, as
Clérambault described it, can be understood as speaking to and challeng-
ing the typical understandings of autoeroticism, desirable consumption,
and kleptomania.

^' Jann Matiock, "Masquerading Women, Pathologized Men: Cross-Dressing, Fetishism,

and the Theory of Perversion, 1882-1935," in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily
Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 31-61, 59.
" I b i d . , 61.
'* See Janet Malcolm's suggestion that any sympathy or other feelings readers of Freud's case
studies of hysteria may have for the patient Dora are the "artefacts of Freud's rhetoric" {The
Purloined Clinic: Selected Writings [London: Papermac, 1996], 26). For a similar argument
see Lizbeth Goodman's introduction to Kim Morrisey, Dora: A Case of Hysteria (London:
Nick Hern Books, 1994).
170 PETA ALLEN SHERA

CONTAGIOUS PLEASURE

In both of his articles Clérambault described his patients as being "degener-

ate." While the term would not have required further explanation for his
medicolegal colleagues, it is noteworthy that the word spoke to numerous
social concerns and medical-moral assumptions. In his 1892 study. Degen-
eration, Max Nordau argued that degeneracy was in part the result of the
constant nervous excitement caused by life in cities, where subjects were
surrounded by the greatest luxury (of which department stores provided a
particularly vivid example).^* According to Nordau, degeneracy had always
existed, but it had only become a danger to civilization as the conditions of
modernity made ever greater numbers of people exhausted and therefore
liable to fall victim to its "nervous diseases."^^ He believed that degeneracy
was written throughout society and affected fin-de-siècle artistic and lit-
erary figures, including the writer of ^M bonheur des dames, Emile Zola.
While Nordau devoted much of his book to showing how degeneracy had
corrupted creative movements of his era and hadflourishedwith Europe's
increasing urbanization, he also believed that it did not benefit society to
attempt to classify all of its symptoms into distinct "'phobias' and 'manias,'"
such as Valentin Magnan had proposed.^' For Nordau, the naming of condi-
tions such as "rupophobia (fear of dirt)," "aichmophobia (fear of pointed
objects)," "oniomania (madness for buying)," as well as the terms that have
continued into twenty-first-century common language, "claustrophobia
(fear of enclosed spaces)," "pyromania (incendiary madness)," and "klep-
tomania (madness for theft)," were evidence of mere "philologico-medical
trifling."^' Such nomenclature drew attendon away from the most significant
fact that they were all symptoms of the "great emodonalism" through which
degeneracy spoke.*'" While Nordau described degeneracy as an epidemic, he
also believed that it was incapable of adaptadon and unable to propagate
itself.*' Some degenerates were too afflicted to be curable, but the greater
number of "the culdvated classes" who followed degenerate fashions could
be educated about its vices and could change the conditions that allowed it
to emerge.*^ Degeneracy, then, could ultimately become extinct.**^
Nordau suggested that France had experienced an "epidemic of mental
diseases" following its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.**
This conflict had exacerbated the French population's nervous strain and
'•' Max Nordau, Degeneration (1892; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993).
Ibid., 537, 41-43.
Ibid. 243.
Ibid. 242^3.
60
Ibid. 243.
Ibid. 537, 540, 555.
' Ibid. 550,550-54.
' Ibid. 555.
64
Ibid. 43.
 Selfish Passions and Artificial Desire 171

its predisposition to "morbid derangement" that followed upon the French

Revoludon and Napoleonic wars,''^ Although Nordeau did not elaborate on
the specific relationship between degeneracy and its effect on populadon
numbers, medical and moral discourses of the nineteenth and twendeth
centuries generally considered degeneracy to be a significant threat to socially
desirable biological reproduction, Daniel Pick suggests that the concept of
, degeneracy in nineteenth-century French "medical-psychiatry,,, seemed to
crystalise a problem of reproduction," an issue that had become important
with France's "slow birth rate" and its decline in populadon and general
morale following the Franco-Prussian War,** At the same dme, concern
about the corrupdon of reproducdve sexuality was but one element in
what Pick describes as degeneracy's "fantasdc kaleidoscope of concerns
and objects,"*'^ The rhetoric of degeneracy served "contradictory polidcs"
about modern corruptions and followed "two different trajectories": de-
generacy was an isolated social threat, and yet, as Nordau had suggested,
it also lurked everywhere,**
Of pardcular relevance to Clérambault's study of women's erode passion
for fabdc was llie specifically gendered threat of degeneracy that was writ-
ten through concerns about women's responses to the opportunides of the
modern city. The first Parisian department store. Le Bon Marché, flourished
from the mid-nineteenth century as women in pardcular responded eagerly
to the capitalist incitement to enjoy the process of shopping and spending as
acdvides that did not need to be ded to specifically utilitarian needs. At the
edges of this "ladies' delight," however, lurked the threat that the oppor-
tunides of the modern world and all its alluring commodides could render
women nervously exhausted. In his study of the first medical diagnosis of
fiague syndrome in France in 1887 Ian Hacking suggests that one of the
meanings of the term "degeneracy" was the threat of "women falling prey to
uncontrollable voluptuousness,"** At the start of the twendeth century, when
Clérambault documented silk erotomania, matedal consumpdon and sexual
expression were both suscepdble to the perils of this gendered corrupdon,
Clérambault's descripdon of his padents as degenerate drew on their
consumpdon of alcohol and ether, episodes of depression, kleptomania, and,
most significandy, autoerodcism. By 1908, the date of Clérambault's first
paper on women's erode passion for fabric, European medical and moral
communides had theodzed masturbadon as the most significant contribudng
factor in the etiology of degeneradon, Autoerodcism was considered not

" Ibid, 42--13,

"Daniel Pick, Paees of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848-c. i 9 i S (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), 72, 15, 50,
" Ibid,, 15,
'"Ibid,, 56, 106,
" Ian Hacking, Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness (Ch^r-
lottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 8, 87,
172 PETA ALLEN SHERA

only to have a detrimental effect on the health of the individual but also to
pose a problem to society in general.
Deluded love itself came to be associated with the medicolegal and
moral discourses that had shaped masturbation as a corrupting vice. In
his work on erotomania Esquirol suggested that masturbation increased
"the susceptibility of the nervous system," which left one "predispose[d]
to erotic delirium."'''' In his 1891 study, L'amour morbide: Étude de psy-
chologie pathologique (Morbid Love: A Study in Psychopathology), Emile
Laurent suggested that erotomania, one expression of erotic delirium,
was the most obsessive pathology of its kind and "the perfect example
of degeneracy."''' Both Esquirol and Laurent believed that masturbation
could lead to deluded love, which proved the subject to be degenerate.
If women's erotic passion for silk could be considered as "silk erotoma-
nia," as a subset of the established category of erotomania, then it could
be shown to have grown from the almost "vicious circle" of corrupted
sexuality, erotic delirium, and degeneracy that caused the patient's vice
and then proved the diagnosis.
In Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation Thomas Laqueur
explores the intersection of other social, medical, moral, and commercial
motivations that shaped the negative medicolegal interpretation of auto-
eroticism in Clérambault's era.'^^ Laqueur suggests that autoeroticism only
became a significant moral and medical concern in the Western world with
the publication in England around 1712 of a book designed to sell reme-
dial products for the newly exposed condition.''^ John Marten, the author
of Onania; or, The Heinous Sin of Self Pollution, was a "quack doctor and
medical pornographer," and his book was explicidy designed to promote
a range of medicines to combat the practice and the supposed effects of its
"self abuse."'^* Masturbation as a significant moral and medical problem was
thus a commercial invention. Laqueur explains that before Marten's tract
and its subsequent transladon into French and German, masturbadon was
of "no great interest to anyone and thus also not to doctors." Before this
dme it was neither widely celebrated nor condemned, and, because it was
not an ethical issue, "it was also peripheral as a medical one."^^ Laqueur
traces the popular concepdons of autoeroticism from Marten's markedng
campaign to the late twendeth century and explains the rhetoric by which
it emerged as a threat to both the individual and society. He suggests that
undl the First World War—^just after Clérambault published his studies of

™ Esquirol, Mental Maladies, 342.

" Emile Laurent, L'amour morbide: Etude de psychologie pathologique (Paris: Société
d'éditions scientifiques, 1891; facsimile replica edition by Elibron Classics, 2005), 131.
" Thomas Walter Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York:
Zone Books, 2003).
" Ibid., 15-16.
'"Ibid., 81.
" Ibid., 95.
 Selfish Passions and Artificial Desire 173

silk erotomania—"an extensive commercial medical network profited from

the disease and guilt born" of Marten's writing.^*
According to Laqueur, the "three features of masturbation" are "its claim
on the imagination and fancy, its secrecy and solitude," and "its tendency to
excess and addiction." These characteristics were "regarded as threatening
in the eighteenth century and have remained exigent ever after. "^' By the
start of the twentieth century autoerodcism was commonly regarded as
unnatural because "it was motivated not by a real object of desire but by
a phantasm" and "threatened to overwhelm . . . the imagination." It was
private or "social in all the wrong ways" when practiced in the presence
of others, and it created an "insatiable" desire that could too easily be in-
dulged.'^* Laqueur argues that by the late nineteenth century masturbation
attracted moral disapproval not because it "created sexual pleasure outside
of reproduction" or because it was "lumped with transgression involving
inappropriate partners or inappropriate ways of engaging with appropriate
ones." Instead, the "problem was that it íacked any partner at all except
those in the mind's eye."^' Significandy for my analysis, Laqueur also reads
masturbadon as being similar to kleptomania in that both have been re-
garded as diseases of "artificial desire." For the subject living in "modern
[commercial] society," surrendering to an "overwhelming impulse to find
pleasure in one's own body" was akin to "the overwhelming desire to have
what was on display, or simply to have."'**
Reading "Passion érodque des étoffes" with Laqueur's history high-
lights the different authorial modvadons of Marten's and Clérambault's
work and suggests that the characterisdcs of silk erotomania do not neady
conform to the dominant Western perspecdve of the sexual pracdce that
makes it unique. First, it is notable that, unlike Marten, Clérambault had
no enterprising aims for his analysis of autoeroticism other than advancing
his career through the publicadon of his observadons. His case histories
were unaccompanied by any publicly available remedy, and he believed
that all his padents were untreatable. Clérambault's work established his
padents' desires as uncommon rather than as illustradons of the hitherto
secret behavior of a large group in society. Thesefindingswent against the
grain of the discourse of degeneradon, which typically spoke of it as being
epidemic in the "civilized" world. Silk erotomania certainly pardcipated
in the rhetoric of autoerodcism as a social, moral, and medical problem,
yet its documentation as an expression of degeneracy was not intended to
create commercial opportunides. Second, it is important to remember that
although the desire exhibited by V.B., F., B., and Made D. conformed to the

' ' Ibid., 46.

" Ibid., 248.
" Ibid., 210.
"Ibid., 215.
'" Ibid., 298.
174 PETA ALLEN SHERA

perspective of autoeroticism as excessive and addictive, the women's sexual

use of silk often took place in public and was not kept secret. According to
Laqueur, autoeroticism typically also relies on the individual's fantasy and
imagination. Yet Clérambault's thesis is that semiotic and narrative processes
were not apparent in the silk erotomaniacs' erotic pleasure.
Reading silk erotomania with Laqueur's work also invites the question
as to how much the women were able to speak about their condition if
autoeroticism was a socially unspeakable practice. Laqueur writes that for
"those charged with the process of civilization, solitary sex held out the
disturbing possibility of the impossible: a private language of the body
in which only the masturbator knows what the signs mean, a totally self-
contained system of fetish and arousal that nowhere touches down in social
reality."^' Clérambault might have diagnosed the condition displayed by
V.B., F., B., and Marie D. as being peculiarly devoid of imagination, yet
through Laqueur's work this same absence could be read as an illegibility
characteristic of masturbation. If silk erotomania was nonsemiotic in that
the pieces of stolen silk were not meant to mean anything to anyone but
themselves, then it was a "totally self-contained system of fetish and arousal"
such that the patient had no need to describe her passion and no language to
do so. The further implication of Laqueur's hypothesis is that Clérambault
did not understand the silk erotomaniacs' language and symptoms because
he did not share their condition.*^ It would also suggest, contrary to the
scholarly consensus on Clérambault's relationship with his work, that the
psychiatrist did not share the silk erotomaniacs' private language of auto-
erotic fabric delight.
Despite being a departure from the rule, women's erotic passion for fabric
contained enough masturbatory activity and erotic delirium for Clérambault
and for his contemporaries who apprehended the four women or witnessed
theirfitsof passion to regard their behavior with moral disapproval. Laqueur
suggests that the concept of masturbation as "the dangerous, resistant 'first
darling' of selfish desire" is one that emerged in the early eighteenth cen-
tury and that lingered even when its supposed "horrors" "stopped being
acutely threatening."*' This theme of selfishness, which borrows from the
Christian tradition, was not significant in the overall secular, medicolegal,
and moral rhetoric of degeneration. Joan Copjec nevertheless suggests that
Clérambault deemed his patients' desires to be selfish because they lacked
both a physical and an imagined male partner.** Whether their desire was
described as selfish or degenerate, though, the moral judgment woven
into such an implied diagnosis is that the sexual pleasure exhibited by the

" Ibid., 231.

*^ The suggestion that Clérambault "caught" fabric fetishism can also be read as supporting
what Laqueur's work suggests is the rhetoric of masturbation's contagious potential.
«' Ibid., 306-7.
'•* Copjec, "The Sartorial Superego," 87.
 Selfish Passions and Artificial Desire 175

women was doubly narcissistic because it was masturbatory and it lacked

even a fantasized role for another person. In light of Laqueur's thesis, it
appears that women's erotic passion for fabric was not a variation of either
autoeroticism, fetishism, or kleptomania, although it was enlaced with
aspects of each practice.

A LUXURIANT NICHE

Ian Hacking's study of "pathological tourism" or fugue syndrome in late-

nineteenth-century France provides another important analysis according
to which silk ei-otomania can today be understood. Hacking describes the
fiague epidemic of compulsive traveling, in which individuals felt compelled
to journey and either forgot their identity or created a new one elsewhere,
as a transient mental illness, not in the sense that people were afflicted by it
to different degrees at different times in their lives but because the syndrome
was culturally and histotically specific. The condition displayed by V.B., F.,
B., and Marie D. can, for the same reason, be described as transient. Hacking
develops the metaphor of an ecological niche to suggest diat fugue grew at
the convergence of several streams of influence and was "situated between
two elements of contemporary culture, one romantic and virtuous, the other
vicious and tending to crime."'^ Of the major vectors in fugue syndrome that
he identifies, those of visibility, medicine, and cultural polarity are pertinent
to Clérambault's study of women's erotic passion for fabric.
Hacking proposes that "in order for a form of behavior to be deemed
a mental disorder, it must be strange, disturbing, and noticed."** Silk ero-
tomania met these conditions. It was clearly unusual and disconcerting.
It disQbeyed the social-economic contract that obliged citizens to pay for
goods offered for sale and to respect the codes of sexual expression that
excluded masturbation in public. The silk erotomaniacs were also, and just
as importandy, often visible. As they indulged their passions they were no-
ticed by fellow shoppers, department store staff, and police. The theft of
silk was an integral part of these women's pleasure, and they found stealing
to be so arousing that once they had stolen, they could not delay indulging
their sexual cravings. Some stepped outside the store to use their pieces of
stolen silk in the doorways of nearby buildings, at the entries to houses, or
in public toilets. Others used silk as soon they had it in their hands and so
dramatically increased the likelihood that they would be apprehended.
Whue Hacking's analysis of fiigue syndrome suggests one way of inter-
preting silk erotomania, it is significant that the latter condition was never
an epidemic. Only five silk erotomaniacs were ever described in this period.
Clérambault described four, and the fifth appeared in Dupouy's article, as
detailed above. It is possible that the pathology did not spread because it

"' Hacking, Mad Travelers, 2.

'" Ibid., 82.
176 PETA ALLEN SHERA

was a perversion based on touch that existed in a culture that encouraged a

degree of tactile enjoyment and yet privileged visual knowledge and pleasure.
It is also significant that, unlikefi.iguesyndrome, silk erotomania manifested
itself in the clearly demarcated and policed space of the department store.
Pathological tourism, by contrast, revealed itself in the crossing of far greater
spaces that were without the same intensity of surveillance as the shop floor.
The compulsive traveler, it could be said, got away with more for longer, and
the details of those exploits, which were nonsexual and thus not as subject
to social censure, could more easily circulate and influence others.
Silk erotomania was also unlike pathological tourism in that it belonged
only in part to what Hacking describes as "a larger framework of diagnosis,
a taxonomy of illness,""^ It is true that it grew from the diagnosdc structure
of kleptomania, although Clérambault made it clear that he considered
the condidon to be distinct from it and also from fedshism. Unlike the
ñigue epidemic, silk erotomania did not fit neatly into "existing systems
of classificadon,"** As a result, scholars have wondered whether or not
it even existed, Reading Clérambault's text alongside Dupouy's study of
kleptomania suggests that it was not a complete fabrication. Although silk
erotomania challenged existing classifications of pathology, it still reads
as a plausible mental illness that emerged at a specific place and for a cer-
tain time and then faded away. It did not disappear because Clérambault
ceased to refer to it but, rather, to borrow again from Hacking's eloquent
analysis, because it was created "from the concatenation of an extraor-
dinary large number of diverse types of elements which for a moment
provideFd] a stable home" for it to manifest itself at the turn of the
89
twentieth century.
Silk erotomania drew its energy from kleptomania and thus frojn the
criminal side of the society in which it existed. Today it can be understood
as but one of many disorders produced alongside the desires created by the
department store,'" It was no coincidence that the condition should have
occurred in and near the world that best illustrated consumerism in action. In
contrast to the traditional commercial shop, which offered limited varieties
of a few categories of products, the department store displayed a plethora
of goods in many categories. The variety of items for sale increased the
channels that customers' desires might take and multiplied their interests,"
Most customers were attracted to new and fresh objects. As they chose an
item for sale and bought it, they ignored the fact that it was unlikely to
*' Ibid,, 1-2,
""Ibid,, 81,
"' Ibid,, 13,
'° See Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993), 42,
" See Rosalind H, Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century
France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 66-67,
 Selfish Passions and Artificial Desire \77

give them any sustained pleasure.'^ Clérambault's padents mirrored this

aspect of the normal consumer's actions. They craved a new piece of silk,
but it ceased to sadsfy them soon after they possessed it.'' Later, after for-
getting their previous disillusionment with the item, they returned to the
stores and stole anew. Gen Doy describes the silk erotomaniacs' behavior
as having been "totally at odds with bourgeois ideology of property and
female sexuality."'* The women's attracdon to silk and their later rejection
of the same fabric did, however, follow a common cycle of consumerism,
moving from the desire for a material good to its procurement, to a feel-
ing of dissatisfaction, and eventually to its replacement with another newly
desired item. At the same dme, the singularity of the women's choice of
object was unusual in an arena that provided consumers with greater op-
portunides for the appreciadon of the textural across a range of products.
Department stores specifically indulged the feminine market's supposedly
natural tactile sensitivities while encouraging an appetite for novelty. V.B.,
F., B., and Marie D. did not pardcipate in this general desire to consume
because they focused on a single commodity and textural experience.
Clérambault suggests that these women's adult obsession with silk rather
than the fedshist staples of fiar or velvet can be explained by the gendered
nature of the textile and fur industries in early-twentieth-century France.
The women's work as seamstresses brought them into contact with silk,
whereas pelt raising and production and the manufacture of fiir garments
were essentially male industries.'^ It is also the case that silk has long been
a symbol of opulence and refinement and, for those without substandal
disposable incomes, a fiscal extravagance. A silk merchant trading today
describes the fabric as "one of the world's most enduring symbols of beauty,
fialfiUing a human love of luxury that no other fabric seems to sadsfy so
completely and in so many forms."'* Despite appearing fragile and lustrous,
silk is one of the strongest natural fibers in the world. It is unlikely that
Clérambault's padents would have had the resources to dress exclusively in
silk, despite having access to the fabric in their work as seamstresses. If they
were aware of its monetary status as well as its aesthedc value, they may
have chosen the fabric to assert their sense of self-worth and dissimilarity
from the economically depressed populace of which they were a part.

'^ Patricia O'Brien suggests that "acquisition became a form of fulfillment in itself, regardless
of the utility of the object" ("The Kleptomania Diagnosis: Bourgeois Women and Theft in Late
Nineteenth Century France," Journal of Social History 17, no. 1 [1983]: 65-77, at 72).
'^ Lewis Hyde offers an analogous observation of consumerism. He suggests that "the
desire to consume is a kind of lust. . . . But consumer goods merely bait this lust, they do not
satisfy it" {The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property [New York: Vintage Books,
1983], 10).
'* Doy, Drapery, 109.
'* Clérambault, "Passion erotique," 713.
" "History of Silk," SilkDirect, available online at http://www.silkdirect.com.au/
silktrader/history_of_silk.cfm (accessed 24 June 2008).
178 PETA ALLEN SHERA

CONCLUSION

Clérambault's and Dupouy's patients felt intoxicated by silk when they

were surrounded by it in a store, and they were ftirther aroused by stealing
it. Unlike Dupouy's patients, however, Clérambault's silk erotomaniacs
did not simply "rustle" the silk they stole but went further and used it in
an autoerotic way to obtain the "exquisite pleasure" that the theft itself
did not produce. Clérambault did not repeat Dupouy's diagnosis that
Hélène's desire for silk was a direct parallel to an earlier pathology: her
obsession with buying and spending. He instead saw his patient's condi-
tion as displaying a range of a priori "degeneradve signs."''' Patient B.
confessed that her silk erotomania generally reemerged every November
at the time of year when she felt the most depressed. In the cold and
progressively shorter hours of sunlight of a November Paris her feelings
of desolation were momentarily replaced with surges of overexcitement
as she moved about the colorful, artificially lit and heated fabric section
of a department store.
According to Clérambault, silk erotomania involved depression and
kleptomania. It was also related to menopause and a rejection of or disen-
chantment with heterosexual coitus, and it was constructed on the pleasure
these women derived from masturbation in general. Before the publicadon
of hisfirstárdele on silk erotomania in 1908 Dupouy and Krafft-Ebing had
notably discussed the phenomenon of silk obsession and the illegal paths it
could take. Where Clérambault's work differs from that of his predecessors
is not in his invendon of the condidon, then, but rather in his diagnosis
that it was distinct from kleptomania and fedshism.
Clérambault's exploradon of silk erotomania not only addressed the pe-
culiarity of the condidon but implied that it resulted from the subject being
uncommonly self-absorbed. The issue of the individual's visibility is one basis
for such an interpretation. As the women indulged their desires they were
oblivious to the fact that they afftonted other people who viewed them. They
maintained that their erodcism did not require a spectator, but there were
invariably witnesses to their passions because the urge that followed their thefi:
of silk was too intense to postpone to a private setdng. As they relieved their
sexual yearnings they ignored the boundaries between private and public.
In economic terms their thefts, like those of the kleptomaniac, affected the
public who bought goods in the stores, for the latter inevitably paid a price
that incorporated a levy for shop surveillance. The silk erotomaniacs' sexuality
necessitated that they put their own desires ahead of the common good.
The interpretation of silk erotomania as stemming from self-absorpdon
also built on the fact that the women's use of silk was quite obviously not
sexually procreadve. When Clérambault described their condition as linked
" Clérambault, "Passion erotique," 706.
 Selfish Passions and Artificial Desire 179

to degeneracy he referred not only to the patients' substance abuse and

depression but also to the fact that they were so uninterested in heterosexual
relations. If we draw on Laqueur's study of autoeroticism, we can read
Clérambault's depiction of the pathology as contributing to the medical-
commercial tradition in which autoeroticism is depicted as a problematically
self-centered vice.
Borrowing from Hacking's model of transient mental illnesses, this read-
ing of silk erotomania suggests it to be a challenge to the medical taxonomy
of its era as well as a testament to the essential visibility of some mental
disorders. Like fugue, silk erotomania grew between cultural extremities.
Like kleptomania in general and yet more disturbing at the same time, it
was a licentious mirror to virtuous consumerism, played out in the relatively
new world of amassed displays of seductive and often frivolous commodi-
ties. The condition's existence coincided with a newly emergent form of
consumerism performed in the public spaces of the department stores.
These shopping spaces encouraged intimacy with a commodity through
visual and tactile immersion, creating hitherto unrealized possibilities for
browsing goods in person. Shopping had become a leisure activity. Silk
erotomania was also a commercially unexpected and unwelcome response
to the department store's invitations for subjects to consume and to become
passionate about items for sale. The condition exhibited by V. B., F., B., and
Marie D. was genitally sexual, exhibitionist in a socially undesirable sense,
and illegal in its use of stolen goods. Their condition was also a distortion
of desirable consumer behavior and an exaggeration of what Clérambault
suggested was the normal woman's natural tactile sensitivity.'*
The women whom Clérambault studied were individuals whose personal,
mental, and physical circumstances were often discordant with the expec-
tations of the culture in which they lived. They vividly revealed a form of
eroticism that did not belong at all to the ideal model of female sexuality in
France at the start of the twentieth century. Their condition was at once an
extreme haptic intelligence and a deviant sexualized consumerism. More-
over, their eroticism was uncontained by semiotic meaning because they
did not consider their pieces of silk to be a substitute for another person,
object, or experience. Today their desire might be termed "artificial," not
because Clérambault created it ex nihilo but because his diagnosis of the
condition participated in the rhetoric of the artificiality of both masturba-
tion and kleptomania.

' Ibid., 704.