Medical Humanism or Scientia Sexualis?: Building a Sexological Concept in Fécondité

This article argues that Zola’s Fécondité, superficially a didactic roman à thèse articulating populationist concerns, is in fact a roman de mœurs implicated genealogically in contemporary sexological concerns. Exploiting the flexibility of contemporary notions of impotence, frigidity and sterility, Fécondité participates in the production of a key sexological concept through the malleable motif of female sexual coldness – signifier of pathological conditions named as ‘frigidité’, ‘froideur’, etc. – and its polyvalent application to distinct pathologies manifesting in its female characters: inabilities to desire, to conceive, to climax. Fécondité appears at a moment where absence of (now normalised) women’s sexual pleasure counts as a pathological disorder; it deploys tropes of coldness –consequential upon anti-reproductive practices – to suggest that attempted disruption of the natural reproductive order ensures such disordered absence. Readable as didactic expression of ‘humanistic’ natalist ethics, Fécondité articulates a coalescence of sexological and populationist concerns, thus straddling two major fin-de-siècle discursive economies.