Decadent Perfume: Under the Skin and Through the Page

At the fin de siècle, there is tendency in learned discourse to discredit the salubrious properties of fragrance, and more radically, to deem perfume use potentially toxic and aberrant. It is as if suspicion of perfume supplanted the fear of miasma (smell-borne contagion) as an olfactive indicator of hygienic and social danger. But unlike the involuntary absorption of disease-ridden smells, fin-de-siècle perfume abuse (be it heightened sensitivity to odor or overzealous spritzing, huffing, injecting, or imbibing) was a deviant behavior, not an environmental hazard, and one—accurately or not—often ascribed to women and linked to mental and emotional instability.I posit that the more obtainable and feminized perfume became, the more toxic and symptomatic its portrayal. A growing suspicion of perfume, and vigilance to its implementation and proximity to the body, coincided with an increased likelihood that women of all classes might leave their scent trail in spaces beyond the privacy of the boudoir.The essay focuses on two remarkable yet nearly forgotten fin-de-siècle manifestations of decadent perfuming, in texts ad images whose discourse intersects with that of hygiene and medical reports of their time. The first is Edmond de Goncourt’s 1884 novel Chérie, the fictional study of a young hysteric with a decadent, erotic connection to perfume. The second, a real-life swooning perfume-lover, involves the nameless consumer to whom an unusual gadget called the Lance-parfum Rodo (1896) was marketed. Like Goncourt’s Chérie, Alphonse Mucha’s ad poster for the Rodo, and the surprisingly hazardous product itself, contribute to reciprocal discourses on the social and literary implications of permeating the body and the page with perfume.