are also more introspective than the others published up to this point, invoking sexual guilt and raising questions about the relationship between sex and abusive violence. Rachilde's final novel was Duvet-D'Ange (1943), an autobiographical roman à clef dealing with mother-daughter relationship, inherited sin, and the Catholic church's turning sin into something evil. In this story she makes use of the werewolf origin myth she has adopted for herself, especially in terms of family curses. Drama Rachilde was the only woman at the time to play a prominent role in avant garde theater of any sort. Through her support, involvement, and reviews at Mercure de France, she helped bring Theatre de I'Ouvre and Theatre d'Art to prominence. She herself wrote and directed symbolist plays, stretching the ability of the theater and of audiences to accommodate rich and complex supernatural symbols. Rachilde's first prominent experiment was with Madame la Mort (1891), in which the entire second act takes place as a subjective and dream-like experience inside the protagonist's mind. In that act she incarnates both death and life as women competing for the same suicidal man, as he sorts through whether he should embrace death or allow himself to be charmed by life. Life is a tempting young woman named Lucie, and ultimately Lady Death scolds her as a "slut," on grounds of Lucie's thoughts of procreation, i.e., sex as a reproductive act sanctioned by the Catholic church. The next year, Rachilde's 1892 one-act drama L'Araignée de Cristal (English: The Crystal Spider) refined the symbolist drama, exploring gender roles, power structures, simmering sexuality, self-identify, and the nature of reality through a dialogue of fear and confusion. The central image is that of a mirror. A mirror is a double-trap. It shows you other realities, where your desires are more powerful than you are, and it also calls into question which side of the mirror is real and which is illusion, which of you is the free person and which is the trapped reflection. Poetry and short fiction Rachilde wrote short stories that were published in Mercure de France and other literary reviews. She released collections of the stories along with other material, including Le Démon de l'Absurde (1894), Contes et Nouvelles (1900), and The Theater of Animals (1926). One such story, originally written for Mercure de France in 1892 is, "La Dent," a dark and disturbing tale about the two sides of