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The Crystal Spider

The most well known and important of Madame Rachilde's symbolist plays was a one-act drama called L'Araignée de Cristal (English: The Crystal Spider), which was written in 1892 and first performed in 1894. This play is a dialogue between a 45 year-old mother and her 20 year-old son (called Terror-Stricken in the text). The setting is a dark room with moonlight and a large mirror (a psyche or cheval glass) that appears to "reflect" a light inherent to itself. Within the dialogue, the mother refers to Terror-Stricken as Sylvius, a name with many possible reference points: Silivus, a Shakespearean character struggling in love; Silvius, a Roman mythological figure who hid in the darkness in fear; or, it has been suggested, sylvite, a mineral which might recall the mirror.

The conversation centers on sexuality and relationship between memory, dream, hallucination, and fear. Gender roles and power structures are explored as the mother encourages her son to pursue a relationship for financial gain or at least for sexual purposes, but then laments losing him to a "tramp." She then suggests that he has some kind of depraved vice that is keeping him from her, but also from the company of young women, e.g., masturbation or homosexuality. When he plays that off, she then plans a parade of women, including his former love-interest Cousin Syliva. She instructs her son that, "woman should be the sole preoccupation of man." It is no accident that the young woman's name is simply the feminine form of her son's own name. It forms a linguistic mirror and suggests that staring at her beauty would be essentially staring at a feminized Sylvius.

This leads toward the topic of mirrors. In colorful language Terror-Stricken describes the dread wonder of mirrors, and through his fear he expresses pity that his mother never sees more than herself in the mirror. He then describes a memory, distorted by hallucination, of an experience from his childhood which centered around a Narcissus-like moment of getting lost in his own reflection, but feeling trapped and suffocated as if he were the one behind the glass. Then came the vision of the crystal spider, trapping him in front of the mirror, feeding on him while he could do nothing until finally the mirror shattered. Even after he understood the empirical reality, what he remembers is the vision and the feeling of being trapped, doubled, and uncertain of reality.

As if that weren't enough, the son's fears and the mother's sexual curiosity collide as he relates two further incidents, one in which a mirror revealed his mother as seductive and another in which he saw his cause nude and in provocatively posed. He concludes that, "looking glasses are deep pits where women's virtue and men's peace of mind founder together."

Mirrors are all around for Sylvius. Everywhere there is a reflection becomes a mirror, surrounding him in terror and the trap of trapping him on the other side. He accuses his mother of filling the hours with them. He calls them "jailers." He calls the reflections "doubles." He suggest that she has been a pact with them. The implication is that the reflections, the doubles, with all their morbid and erotic qualities, are the ones with the real power.

In the end, after much back and forth and building fear on both their parts, they go to let the mother confront her reflection and thus her sexual power over him. Terror-Stricken declares, "I am afraid, the mirror, concealed in the dark, your huge psyché, mother." Then, in the darkness, with a man's dying screams and the shattering of glass, the play closes.