ABSTRACT
The violent wars and revolutions that characterize nineteenth-century history, coupled with late nineteenth-century France's interest in the more macabre aspects of Catholicism's cult of suffering, along with decadent literature's interest in death and decay, are some of the inspirations for the gruesome fascination with scenes of torture, cruelty, and pain which can be detected throughout the latter part of the century. There remains in the most troubling depictions of corporeal brutality, scenes that are all concerned with ways in which the taboo excesses of bodily experience can be represented in language. Through an analysis of some of these most troubling depictions of corporeal brutality in nineteenth-century French fiction, this chapter explores the troubled and troubling relationship between text, author, and reader that is foregrounded in both Elaine Scarry's theories and the texts themselves. The chapter discusses Hugo's monsters, demonstrating how this gap between language and visualisation goes to the heart of the problem of representing the taboo.
