SOURCE: Stivale, Charles J. “Horny Dudes: Guy de Maupassant and the Masculine Feuille de rose.” L'Esprit Créateur 43, no. 3 (fall 2003): 57-67.

In the following essay, Stivale discusses Maupassant's role in the construction of nineteenth-century masculine identity through an examination of his pornographic play, À la feuille de rose.

In 1875 and 1877, Guy de Maupassant participated in two private performances of the play that he composed, À la feuille de rose: maison turque, and in which he performed the role of a bisexual female prostitute.¹ Following the performance that Flaubert attended (the second one), he is reported by Edmond de Goncourt to have said, appreciatively it would seem, “Oui, c'est très frais!”² This nexus of performance, texts, and commentaries, all between men, recalls the homosocial bonds that typify the complexity of Maupassant's sexuality.³ On the one hand, this sexuality is problematized by a concept of the superperformative and mythified phallus, to...