This image of Nana, taken from one of many cinematic versions, shows her as "wealthy", as "domestic", as "bourgeois". In a world where "appearances matter", appearances can dissemble and deceive. Nana tells the story of Nana Coupeau's rise from streetwalker to high-class prostitute during the last three years of the French Second Empire. Nana first appears near in an earlier novel, L'Assommoir (1877), as the daughter of an abusive drunk. At the conclusion of that novel, she escapes and, on the streets, just beginning a life of prostitution.
Les Enfants du Paradis
The film's title translates into English as Children of Paradise, referring to the section of the audience, always completely engaged with the performance, often in raptures of laughter, but consigned to the cheapest entry and "standing room only" second balcony of the Théâtre des Funambules ("Theater of Tightrope Walkers"). The audience in the "Gods", the "peanut gallery", working, or not working, people.
Les Enfants du Paradis is set in the theatrical world of Paris during the July Monarchy (1830–48), centred on the area around the Funambules theatre, situated on the "Boulevard du Crime".
The film revolves around a beautiful and charismatic courtesan, Garance. Four men – the mime Baptiste Debureau, the actor Frédérick Lemaître, the thief Pierre François Lacenaire , and the aristocrat Édouard de Montray – are in love with Garance, and their intrigues drive the story forward. Garance is briefly intrigued with them all, but leaves them when they attempt to force her to love on their terms, rather than her own.
The four men courting Garance are all based on real French personalities of the 1820s and 1830s. Baptiste Debureau was a famous mime and Frédérick Lemaître was an acclaimed actor on the 'Boulevard of Crime' depicted in the film. Pierre Lacenaire was an infamous French criminal, and the fictional character of the Comte Édouard de Montray was inspired by the Duc de Morny.
The idea for making a movie based on these characters came from a chance meeting between the film's director Marcel Carné and Jean-Louis Barrault, in Nice, during which Barrault pitched the idea of making a movie based on Debureau and Lemaître. Carné, who at the time was hesitant about which movie to direct next, proposed this idea to his friend Jacques Prévert. Prévert was initially reluctant to write a movie about a mime, "Jacques hated pantomime" his brother once said, but Barrault assured Prévert, that he and his teacher Étienne Decroux, who plays Baptiste's father in the film, would take responsibility for developing the mime sequences. According to Trauner Prévert then saw an opportunity to include the character of Lacenaire, the "dandy du crime", who fascinated him. The Germans were then occupying the whole of France, and Prévert is rumoured to have said "They will not let me do a movie about Lacenaire, but I can put Lacenaire in a film about Debureau".
"clickbait" alert!
This 1878 painting by Henri Gervex and titled Rolla, was based on a poem by Alfred de Musset, a well-known figure in brothels and who was widely accepted to be the anonymous author-client who beat and humiliated, on her own account, the author and courtesan Céleste de Chabrillan, also known as La Mogador.
ROLLA OU LE SUICIDE POUR UNE COURTESAN
The painting was rejected by the jury of the Salon de Paris for immorality, since it depicted a scene from the poem of a naked prostitute after having sex with her client. See More recently the image of this painting has been used to adorn the cover of the book Grandes Horizontales
Grandes Horizontales
Gervex had a long and deep relationship with the famous courtesan Valtesse de La Bigne's. Gervex included the golden haired beauty in his painting called the Civil Marriage of 1881. Valtesse De la Bigne is dressed from head to toe in blue, her favourite colour as it symbolised royalty.
Édouard Manet also painted a portrait of Valtesse de La Bigne, in 1879, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
It seems that Manet was comfortable moving in those same social circles where courtesans and other inhabitants of the demi-monde, including the so-called "Bohemian", or déclassé individuals (as pretending to having been "de-classed"), society. These individuals sought a lifestyle that was pleasure-seeking, and, in contrast to the "respectable bourgeois", embraced all that modernity could offer, according to their spending power.
For the women, called demimondaine, externally, the defining aspects of the demimonde were an extravagant lifestyle of fine food and clothes, often surpassing that of other wealthy women of their day with a steady income of cash and gifts from their various lovers. Internally, their lifestyle was an eclectic mixture of sharp business acumen, social skills, and hedonism. Intelligent demimondaines would invest their wealth for the day when their beauty faded.
Queen or courtesan?
A famous beauty
Portrait of the Countess di Castiglione painted in Paris in 1862 by Michele Gordigiani.
Michele Gordigiani (1835 – 1909) was an Italian painter, known best for his portraits, and was invited to Paris in 1860 by his friend, Virginia Oldoini, the Countess of Castiglione. He was in much demand as a portrait painter, and among his subjects were King Vittorio Emanuele II, his daughter-in-law Queen Margherita, and the Count of Cavour. In 1867 in London, he painted portraits of Queen Victoria, and her consort, Prince Albert.
Queen Margherita of Savoy Portrait of a Queen
Portrait of a famous demimondaine
This famous beauty was Virginia Oldoini, Countess di Castiglione, who came to Paris in the 1850s with very little money of her own and soon became mistress of Napoleon III; after that relationship ended she moved on to other wealthy men in government, finance and European royalty. She was one of the most aristocratic and exclusive of the demimondaines—reputed to have charged a member of the British aristocracy one million francs for 12 hours in her company.
In 1856 she began sitting for Mayer and Pierson, photographers favored by the imperial court. Over the next four decades she directed Pierre-Louis Pierson to help her create 700 different photographs in which she re-created the signature moments of her life for the camera. She spent a large part of her personal fortune and even went into debt to execute this project. Most of the photographs depict the Countess in her theatrical outfits, such as the Queen of Hearts dress. A number of photographs depict her in poses risqué for the era — notably, images that expose her bare legs and feet. In these photos, her head is cropped out.
Robert de Montesquiou, a Symbolist poet, dandy, and avid art collector, was fascinated by the Countess di Castiglione. He spent thirteen years writing a biography, La Divine Comtesse, which appeared in 1913. After her death, he collected 433 of her photographs, all of which entered the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Domestic woman - the first modern individual?
When it come to modernity, there is a case to argue that the individual women discussed in this article so far, and further on too, are in a significant sense examples of truly modern individual presences. Perhaps in the history of art and literature we see this phenomenon begin to take shape, acquire new form alongside, and in dynamic relationship to, this new reality.
Isabelle Huppert as Madame Bovary in the film Madame Bovary directed by Claude Chabrol.
Enter: Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary is the debut novel of French writer Gustave Flaubert, published in 1856. The eponymous character lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life.
When the novel was first serialized in La Revue de Paris between 1 October 1856 and 15 December 1856, public prosecutors attacked the novel for obscenity. The resulting trial in January 1857 made the story notorious. After Flaubert's acquittal on 7 February 1857, Madame Bovary became a bestseller in April 1857 when it was published in two volumes.
"clickbait" alert!
Scene from Madame Bovary (1934), directed by Jean Renoir and starring Max Dearly and Valentine Tessier.
A seminal work of literary realism, the novel is now considered Flaubert's masterpiece, and one of the most influential literary works in history. The British critic James Wood writes:
"Flaubert established, for good or ill, what most readers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible."
Plot Synopsis
When Héloïse unexpectedly dies, Charles waits a decent interval before courting Emma in earnest. Her father gives his consent, and Emma and Charles marry.
The novel's focus shifts to Emma. Charles means well but is plodding and clumsy. After he and Emma attend an elegant ball given by the Marquis d'Andervilliers, Emma finds her married life dull and becomes listless. Charles decides his wife needs a change of scenery and moves his practice to the larger market town of Yonville (traditionally identified with the town of Ry). There, Emma gives birth to a daughter, Berthe, but motherhood proves a disappointment to Emma. She becomes infatuated with an intelligent young man she meets in Yonville, a young law student, Léon Dupuis, who shares her appreciation for literature and music and returns her esteem. Concerned with maintaining her self-image as a devoted wife and mother, Emma does not acknowledge her passion for Léon and conceals her contempt for Charles, drawing comfort from the thought of her virtue. Léon despairs of gaining Emma's affection and departs to study in Paris.
One day, a rich and rakish landowner, Rodolphe Boulanger, brings a servant to the doctor's office to be bled. He casts his eye over Emma and imagines she will be easily seduced. He invites her to go riding with him for the sake of her health. Charles, solicitous for his wife's health and not at all suspicious, embraces the plan. Emma and Rodolphe begin an affair. She, consumed by her romantic fantasy, risks compromising herself with indiscreet letters and visits to her lover. After four years, she insists they run away together. Rodolphe does not share her enthusiasm for this plan and on the eve of their planned departure, he ends the relationship with an apologetic, self-effacing letter placed at the bottom of a basket of apricots he has delivered to Emma. The shock is so great that Emma falls deathly ill and briefly turns to religion.
When Emma is nearly fully recovered, she and Charles attend the opera, at Charles' insistence, in nearby Rouen. The opera reawakens Emma's passions, and she re-encounters Léon who, now educated and working in Rouen, is also attending the opera. They begin an affair. While Charles believes that she is taking piano lessons, Emma travels to the city each week to meet Léon, always in the same room of the same hotel, which the two come to view as their home. The love affair is ecstatic at first, but Léon grows bored with Emma's emotional excesses, and Emma grows ambivalent about Léon. Emma indulges her fancy for luxury goods with purchases made on credit from the crafty merchant Lheureux, who arranges for her to obtain power of attorney over Charles' estate. Emma's debt steadily mounts.
When Lheureux calls in Bovary's debt, Emma pleads for money from several people, including Léon and Rodolphe, only to be turned down. In despair, she swallows arsenic and dies an agonizing death. Charles, heartbroken, abandons himself to grief, preserves Emma's room as a shrine, and adopts her attitudes and tastes to keep her memory alive. In his last months, he stops working and lives by selling off his possessions. His remaining possessions are seized to pay off Lheureux. When he finds Rodolphe and Léon's love letters, he breaks down for good. He dies, and his young daughter Berthe is placed with her grandmother, who soon dies. Berthe then lives with an impoverished aunt, who sends her to work in a cotton mill. The book concludes with the local pharmacist Homais, who had competed with Charles's medical practice, gaining prominence among Yonville people and being rewarded for his medical achievements.
Dissatisfaction? The desire to be desired? Boredom, credit and debt? A life rounded out by death? Sounds familiar! Modern life?
A key plot element in this story of boredom, aspiration, romantic escapism, looking "the part", being desirable, retail therapy, credit and debt, is the availability, and the desirability of textiles.
It is Monsieur Lheureux, the manipulative and sly merchant who continually convinces people in Yonville to buy goods on credit, including luxury textiles, and to borrow the money from him.
Lheureux lends money to Charles and plays Emma masterfully, leading the Bovarys becoming so far into debt as to cause their financial ruin and Emma's suicide.
Many of the images of Emma Bovary, in graphic art and in cinema, foreground Emma's love of elegant clothes and sumptuous textiles. Marie Claire on-line ran a story in 2015 on An Exclusive Look at the Costumes and Behind-the-Scenes Secrets of 'Madame Bovary'.
Samantha Leal in conversation with the Director of the latest Madame Bovary film, Sophie Barthes, discusses her approach to the costumes and costume design:
MC: How significant were the costumes in helping you develop that tone and in developing the characters?
SB: The costumes were essential to develop the tone and characters. Since Madame Bovary's self destruction is mainly connected to her spending on dresses, the dresses had to be very special and unforgettable. They are literally popping out of the screen.
The Costume Designers Valerie Ranchoux and Christian Gasc chose an extraordinary array of colors which either contrast or echoes with the tones of the production design and nature. Emma first dresses are different shades of greens (green is the color of hope and youth) and as her character develop stronger colors are introduced (red, orange, and almost poisonous purple) and the end her dress completely blends with the nature in the fall (yellows and greens).
Every dress tells a story about Emma:
the orange dress in the hunt scene has an asymmetrical pattern on the chest signaling the beginning of her bipolarity, the purple dress she wears to meet her lover in Rouen feels it has the texture of a poisonous flower, the red dress seems inspired by Baudelaire "Les Fleurs du Mal", there is so much symbolic meaning in every dress. It was incredible for me to have the chance to work with Valerie and Christian and their team.
Madame Bovary's Daughter
Since Madame Bovary's self destruction is mainly connected to her spending on dresses, there is a cruel irony in Flaubert's narrative where Emma's daughter end up as a worker in a cotton mill, a factory geared up for mass production. Cheap cotton resulted in domestic servants wearing clothes that were not so different from the mistress of the household. That's when uniforms for domestic servants were necessary in order to confirm, visually, the actually existing hierarchy.
Linda Urbach's historical novel picks up the story from Flaubert's ending, and provides a trajectory in the narrative for the young Berthe Bovary that includes unlikely encounters in the countryside and bright prospects in Paris. Eileen Charbonneau' s review for the Historical Novel Society writes:
Picking up in 1852, a year after the shattering end of Flaubert’s famous novel, young Berthe is burying her father. She learns she is penniless, due to her notorious mother who “always wanted what she couldn’t have.” Her paternal grandmother takes her in, demanding that she earn her keep as a farm worker in the French countryside. Here Berthe meets the Impressionist Millet, who delights in using her as a model in his rural scenes.
But when her grandmother dies, Berthe is left again without resources. She begins her life as a cotton mill worker, under conditions that try her resilient spirit. When plucked from the line to work in Paris as a lady’s maid to the mill owner’s wife, a new life begins, fraught with sexual intrigue and debasement. But also a career in the silk fashion trade begins once Berthe meets and becomes indispensable to Charles Worth. She finds love too, with a painter, Armand, who also struggles with a childhood marred and loveless.
Elena Farrante's essay in the THE NEW YORKER What an ugly child she is has another take on Madame Bovary's daughter.
I Am Not Madame Bovary
A bourgeois sex revolutionary?
Charlotte Jones writes (Fri 30 Sep 2016) on The Guardian Books Blog:
Q: What does Carmela Soprano, materialistic cuckquean from The Sopranos have in common with Rory Gilmore, the precocious teenager in Gilmore Girls, and the core cast of Desperate Housewives?
A: All have been shown on screen reading Madame Bovary.
This might seem unlikely, not least because the story of a bored French housewife seduced into conspicuous consumption and extramarital affairs by unrealistic expectations of love, romance and purchasing power promulgated by popular culture would seem an ironic choice for women who epitomise precisely this ethos.
But the paradox is appropriate, for Emma Bovary is herself nothing if not paradoxical. To borrow a refrain from Sex and the City, Emma’s raison d’être is the pursuit of “labels and love”. Yet Flaubert’s early disapproval of his heroine’s self-absorption, “icy charm” and vanity is curiously transformed, in the last 100 pages or so, by a softening towards, even forgiveness of, her tawdry and narcissistic escapism. She becomes a flawed, tragic figure. Does this make Emma a pitiable prototype for the passive female gull of mass culture, operating mindlessly under “false consciousness”, or a feminist avant la lettre who subverts bourgeois morality and suffers the consequences?
I Am Not Pan Jinlian
The Chinese name of the film I Am Not Madame Bovary is literally I Am Not Pan Jinlian. Pan Jinlian is a fictional character in the 17th-century Chinese novel Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase), and a minor character in Water Margin, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. She is an archetypal femme fatale and one of the most notorious villainesses of classical Chinese culture.
Pan Jinlian has also become the patron goddess of brothels and prostitutes.
Dressed for leisure . . . or pleasure . . .
. . . or dressed for work?
This painting, a portrait of Julia Tahl known as Mademoiselle Alice de Lancey, 1876 (from the art collection of the Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris), was included in the 2015 exhibitions Easy Virtue. Prostitution in French Art, 1850-1910, a collaboration between the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and Musée d’Orsay in Paris, while Paris, the exhibition was presented under the title Splendeurs et misères.
When it comes to appearances, clothing, fashion and textiles, the possibility of some confusion in distinguishing between courtesans and respectable women goes back to the origins of capitalism in Renaissance Venice and the renting out of clothes to all and sundry. Someone wearing an extremely expensive costume didn't necessarily own their own clothes, they could be renting them for appearances sake. The previous certainties when it came to body image, social status and so on, was compromised, disrupted.
Venetian women were renowned throughout Europe for their beauty. They dressed extravagantly thus displaying their families' wealth.
But even artisans' wives were well dressed as a result of the fact that even though when fabric was handmade and could be incredibly expensive clothes were constantly reused so that women could keep up with new styles. There was also a trade in renting clothes dominated by women as dealers and clients. Contemporary accounts suggest that this trade was used to lure women into prostitution. They were tempted by beautiful garments and then, finding no way to pay off their debts, were forced to prostitute themselves.
Garance - Les Enfants du Paradis
The model for Nana in Manet's painting, like the character "Garance" in Marcel Carné's film Children of Paradise, Henriette Hauser, was an actress and courtesan, a well-known grande cocotte, one of many notorious Les Grandes Horizontales. Somewhere between the low-brow world of brothels and the respectable world of the haute monde, were the pampered ladies of the demimonde. These courtesans became a mainstay of high society, always in the public eye despite their notoriety and questionable morals. The era's best-known demimondaines were Marie Duplessis, la Présidente, la Païva and Cora Pearl, veritable celebrities who were wooed publicly by men such as Charles Baudelaire and Prince Napoléon.
Neither prostitutes nor mistresses, they lived extravagantly on the favours of their rich lovers and enjoyed a level of freedom from the strict social codes that upper class women were expected to follow. Henriette Hauser was kept as a mistress by the Prince of Orange, Crown Prince William of the Netherlands, who had fallen out with his family and left the Hague for a life in Paris. This disagreement and departure earned the prince the nickname ‘Citron’.
Surya Tubach (Mar 16, 2018) on the ARTSY website explains:
Why Manet’s Empathetic Painting of a Parisian Prostitute Still Resonates Today
Nineteenth-century Paris was obsessed with prostitutes. Courtesans (as the expensive mistresses of politicians, businessmen, and princes were known) rose from poverty to enjoy the glitz and glamour of the city’s wealthiest elite using what can only be called sheer hustle. They commanded the era’s imagination, not only with their luxurious apartments and opulent jewels, but with the power they exerted over some of the most influential men of the time.
The artists of the era were similarly preoccupied: French painting, drawing, and sculpture from the time is replete with images of prostitutes. “Painters suddenly decided to paint what was around them, what they were actually seeing,” historian Anka Muhlstein told Artsy. “So instead of painting allegories or historical things, they would paint what they encountered in everyday life.”
While these artists may have focused on the same subject, they went about it in very different ways. Edgar Degas depicted the more socially palatable world of theater and dance, a sexually murky sphere where ballerinas and actresses operated as prostitutes on the side. His paintings weren’t monumental; the subjects rarely face the viewer, looking more like the unassuming and impoverished dancers they were. Édouard Manet, on the other hand, favored canvases too large to ignore. His renditions of prostitutes, portrayed with refinement and femininity, stare boldly out at the viewer. Case in point: his 1877 painting Nana.
This piece is a nearly life-size work of playful homage to the courtesans of the era. Nana, the prostitute, is the star of the scene: Her body, from blonde head to delicately pointed toe, fills the entire central third of the painting.
Her presence is bold, almost imposing; she overshadows her male customer, cut in half by the frame and blending into the background with his dark suit. With a little half-smile on her lips, she stares directly out at the viewer, implicating them in whatever illicit scene they have stumbled onto. Rather than the typical societal shame associated with prostitution, Nana appears both open and proud. She is a woman who is aware of her power and how to use it.
Although today it hangs proudly in Hamburg’s Kunsthalle, when the painting was first shown, the reception was far from friendly. At the time, the art world was more comfortable with painted nudes featuring a heavy dose of Orientalism. It certainly wasn’t used to seeing a modern-day courtesan portrayed as a “pretty girl, practically winking at you, practically making fun of the old man with his top hat,” notes Muhlstein, whose book The Pen and the Brush explores the relationship between 19th-century French painters and writers. “The fact that she looked sympathetic, she looked appealing.…She looks extremely pleased with herself, and I think that probably was shocking for people.” The French Academic Salon, the only real path to artistic success in 19th-century France, rejected the painting from its 1877 exhibition.
Manet nevertheless found a way to display the work. In lieu of the salon, he hung it in the window of a trinket shop on the Boulevard des Capucines, one of Paris’s main thoroughfares. The painting became a popular attraction, toying with the visual pun of a painted prostitute displayed on the same street real-life prostitutes would frequent at night.
Frank Horvat 1956, Paris, Rue Saint-Denis, prostitutes
Display! "clickbait alert!
Display! On stage - at the theatre!
Display for the actor, and display for the spectator - the codes for interpreting emotional expression are also codes for isolation from others.
"The spectator, an isolated figure, hoped to accomplish tasks of personality which he felt he could not accomplish when he actively exchanged with others. In his social interactions his feelings became confused and unstable; by making himself passive, he hoped he would be aroused to feel more. This hope was more than a desire for titillation, for sensory stimulation by keeping still. In public, people, especially males, hoped at least to witness what life was like outside the rigidities of the propriety they experienced in the family. In silence, watching life go by, a man was at last free. Thus, the survival of a public realm on the new terms set up a fundamental antithesis of modern life: the modes of free personal development as opposed to, at war with, the modes of social interaction, as embodied in the family." The Fall of Public Man by Richard Sennett (p.195)
"Restraint of emotion in the theater became a way for middle-class audiences to mark the line between themselves and the working class. A "respectable" audience by the 1850 was an audience that could control its feelings through silence; the old spontaneity was called "primitive."The Beau Brummell ideal of restraint in bodily appearance was being matched by a new idea of respectable noiselessness in public.' In the i75o's, when an actor turned to the audience to make a point, a sentence or even a word could bring immediate boos or applause. Similarly, in the 18th Century opera, a particular phrase or high note beautifully performed could rouse the audience to demand that the little phrase be immediately sung again; the text was interrupted and the high note hit once, twice, or more. By 1870, applause had acquired a new form. One did not interrupt actors in the middle of a scene but held back until the end to applaud. One did not applaud a singer until the end of the aria, nor at a concert between movements of a symphony. Thus, even as the Romantic performer transcended his text, the behavior of audiences was moving in an opposite direction. To cease to express oneself immediately when one was moved by a performer was allied to a new silence in the theater or concert hall itself. In the 1850, a Parisian or London theatergoer had no compunction about talking to a neighbor in the midst of the play, if he or she had just remembered something to say. By 1870, the audience was policing itself. Talking now seemed bad taste and rude. The house lights were dimmed too, to reinforce the silence and focus attention on the stage: Charles Kean began the practice in the 1850, Richard Wagner made it an absolute law at Bayreuth, and by the 1890's, in the capital cities, darkness was universal." The Fall of Public Man by Richard Sennett (p. 206)
A year before he started to write Nana, Zola knew nothing about the Théâtre des Variétés. Ludovic Halévy invited him to attend an operetta with him there on February 15, 1878, and took him backstage.
Blanche d'Antigny (May 9, 1840 – June 30, 1874) was a French singer, actress and courtesan whose fame today rests chiefly on the fact that Émile Zola used her as the principal model for his novel Nana.
Halévy told him innumerable stories about the amorous life of the star, Anna Judic, whose ménage à trois served as the model for the relationships of Rose Mignon, her husband, and Steiner in Zola's novel. Halévy also provided Zola with stories about famous prostitutes such as Blanche d'Antigny, Anna Deslions, Delphine de Lizy, and Hortense Schneider, upon which Zola drew in developing the character of his title character.
Display - behind the scenes - "clickbait"?
You know him, reader, this exquisite monster, — Hypocrite reader, — my likeness, — my brother!
"J'Accuse…!"
Zola, a misogynist?
For Zola, Nana is a subject, and a character determined by her environment, and also as an experiment, in an "Experimental Novel", that contributes to Zola's idea of a naturalist form of art and literature, situated on a spectrum somewhere between the opposite extremes of Realism and Romanticism.
Catherine Bordeau considers how the power of the milieu represents a potent force directing and shaping beings, a manifestation of nature's reign, in her Journal article The Power of the Feminine Milieu in Zola's Nana. This reflects the prestige of the natural sciences that pervades nineteenth-century thought, particularly theories of evolution and degeneration that identify the environment as the source of transformations. The article argues that environmental influence was attributed specifically to women in nineteenth century France "raising the question of their ability to transform society."
In this fantasy/reality notion of nature, women are identified with nature, and to an extent, also separate from society, in a similar way to the capitalist and colonialist treatment of a black African as being essentially a part of nature rather than being seen as a human being, so very conveniently for the practice of the institution of slavery, or forced labour, as an economic basis for the development of capitalism.
Bordeau draws attention to Zola's novel Nana and how nature's "environmental influence extends to women most strikingly in the conception of their natural odors as a seductive "atmosphere" capable of dominating and transforming men, a view that develops in both scientific and literary works in nineteenth-century France."
In Nana, she says "the notion of Nana's powerful odor contributes to a general paradigm of women's environmental influence that extends to their shaping of social milieu in the novel."
It is in Nana that Zola addresses most directly the question of women's power. Nana, an actress and courtesan of working class origins, inspires an obsessive desire in her wealthy lovers, ruining them and promoting a collapse of the upper class. In the draft, or ébauche, for the novel, Zola describes Nana as:
"devenant one force de la nature, un ferment de destruction, mais cela sans le vouloir, par son sexe seul et par sa puissante odour de femme, detruisant tout ce qu'elle approche, faisant tourner la societe, comme les femmes qui ont leurs regles font tourner le lait""Becoming a force of nature, a ferment of destruction, but unwittingly, by her sex alone and by her powerful female odor, destroying everything she approaches, making society spin, like the women who have their way of making the milk turn."(Catherine Bordeau, Nineteenth-Century French Studies 27, Nos 1 & 2, Fall-Winter 1998-99, p. 96)
The synopsis of plot in the Wikipedia article on Zola's novel says:
In the course of the novel Nana destroys every man who pursues her: Philippe Hugon is imprisoned after stealing from the army to lend Nana money; the wealthy banker Steiner bankrupts himself trying to please her; Georges Hugon stabs himself with scissors in anguish over her; Vandeuvres incinerates himself after Nana ruins him financially; Fauchery, a journalist and publisher who falls for Nana early on, writes a scathing article about her later, and falls for her again and is ruined financially; and Count Muffat, whose faithfulness to Nana brings him back for humiliation after humiliation until he finds her in bed with his elderly father-in-law. In George Becker's words: "What emerges from [Nana] is the completeness of Nana's destructive force, brought to a culmination in the thirteenth chapter by a kind of roll call of the victims of her voracity".Zola has Nana die a horrible death in July 1870 from smallpox. She disappears, her belongings are auctioned and no one knows where she is. It comes out that she has been living with a Russian prince, leaving her infant son in the care of an aunt near Paris, but when a smallpox epidemic breaks out she returns to nurse him; he dies, and she catches the disease. Zola suggests that her true nature, concealed by her physical beauty, has come to the surface. "What lay on the pillow was a charnel house, a heap of pus and blood, a shovelful of putrid flesh. The pustules had invaded the whole face, so that one pock touched the next". Outside her window the crowd is madly cheering "To Berlin! To Berlin!" to greet the start of the Franco-Prussian War, which will end in defeat for France and the end of the Second Empire.
Nana is Dead!
"And over this loathsome and grotesque mask of death, the hair, the beautiful hair, still blazed like sunlight and flowed downwards in rippling gold. Venus was rotting. It seemed as though the poison she had assimilated in the gutters, and on the carrion tolerated by the roadside, the leaven with which she had poisoned a whole people, had but now remounted to her face and turned it to corruption."
"The room was empty. A great despairing came up from the boulevard, and swelled the curtain."
" To Berlin! To Berlin! To Berlin! "
Rupture, a stirring short film by animation director Katerina Athanasopoulou, explores how the lack of smallpox vaccination during the Franco-Prussian war led to a pandemic killing 500,000 people.
So Zola wreaks a terrible death upon Nana, his natural "experiment". Is it a projection, in narrative form, of a misogynist requirement to even the score in these gender power relation destruction stakes? And with "nature" as the chosen instrument somehow, smallpox, so that nature like woman, is again represented as the destructive force. The maternal Nana, and nurture, are obliterated by nature. The deathbed scene is not found amongst the many illustrations to the novel's narrative. To read this episode is to deal with the aestheticization of a natural violence meted out on a woman's body, her beauty stripped away. The horror!
What if Nana had written her own story?
Although lost for many years, Jana Verhoeven found them in France—and with the help of Alan Willey and Jeanne Allen, translated and annotated them.
Mogador also wrote a number of plays, including Les voleurs d'or, Les Crimes de la mer, Les Revers de l'Amour, L'Américaine and Pierre Pascal.[5] Her friend Dumas père helped her revise a stage version of her best-selling novel Les Voleurs d’or (1857). Her novel, La Sapho (1858), is her only fictional work to address the injustices from which demi-mondaines suffered. In the novel, Marie Laurent is seduced and then abandoned. After a failed suicide attempt, she resurfaces as La Sapho in the London demi-monde and pursues revenge. Carol Mossman calls the novel a "vengeance fantasy" that allows de Chabrillan to work through the indignities she suffered as a prostitute: "If the justice sought by Céleste de Chabrillan in the course of her lifetime with respect to the social conditions leading her to her own prostitution remains elusive, she can at least mete it out in fiction.
A woman NOT a man!
By the time Gérôme is exhibiting his works of the slave market, the inhabitants at the leading edge of modernity, in a city such as Paris, had long been a woman, NOT a man, the wife of the bourgeois, a "mistress", whose domain was the domestic sphere, and "kept" by "economic man". The maintenance of this domestic sphere, was the whole raison d'être of an industrial society and its wider economy in the nineteenth century, including the acquisition of colonial resources, and the subjection of peoples across the globe through European imperialism.
At another level, all this reflects a further divide, a bifurcation fundamental to the ideology of capitalism and how it shapes our relation to both "women" and "nature".
The social construction of ‘economic man’ is the product of a bifurcated knowledge system and a materially divided society. ‘Economic man’ reflects a society in which the embeddedness and embodiedness of humanity is hidden by the division of mind from body, and science/culture from the natural world. For this reason it is not possible to incorporate women and nature into the ‘economy’ through the commodity form by according them a value as price. It is argued that the economic system can only exist if women and nature remain externalised, as women form the bridge between an autonomous individualised ‘man’ and the biological/ecological underpinning of his existence.This is an excerpt from the "Abstract" of a paper by Mary Mellor titled: Women, nature and the social construction of ‘economic man’.
A good market
In 1869 a vast new edifice arose in the centre of Paris, Le Bon Marché, the "good market".
In this new phenomenon public (and economic) man as actor was to be supplanted by the new modern individual - the first of our modern ancestors - a bourgeois female, mistress of the domestic sphere and therefore mistress too of domestic consumption across the new industrial economy.
The Fall of Public Man by Richard Sennett
In 1869 he built a much larger building at 24 rue de Sèvres on the Left Bank, and enlarged the store again in 1872. The income rose from twenty million francs in 1870 to 72 million at the time of Boucicaut's death in 1877. The floor space had increased from three hundred square meters in 1838 to fifty thousand, and the number of employees had increased from twelve in 1838 to 1,788 in 1879.
There was a new marketing plan. Fixed prices and guarantees that allowed exchanges and refunds, advertising, and a much wider variety of merchandise.
Later there came extensive newspaper advertising; entertainment for children; and six million catalogs sent out to customers, and a reading room for husbands while their wives shopped. At the end of each year every female customer would receive an agenda, a diary and planner for the coming year. And, the promise of the impossible fulfillment of desire, through shopping, would revolve around a heightened intensity in the display of commodities framed in exotic juxtapositions. This became the basis of surrealist art and the department store.
Q. How did this "good market" work?
A. The department store is a response to the factory enticing the shopper into a world of "commodity fetishism"!
By stimulating the buyer to invest objects with personal meaning, above and beyond their utility, there arose a code of belief which made mass retail commerce profitable. the new code of belief in trade was a sign of a larger change in the sense of the public realm: the investment of personal feeling and passive observation were being joined; to be out in public was at once a personal and a passive experience.
Karl Marx had an apt phrase for the psychology of consumption itself: he called it "commodity fetishism." In Capital he wrote that every manufactured object under modern capitalism becomes a "social hieroglyphic"; by that he meant that inequities in the relations of owner and worker producing this object could be disguised. Attention could be diverted from the social conditions under which the objects were made to the objects themselves, if the goods could acquire a mystery, a meaning, a set of associations which had nothing to do with their use.
Boucicault and other store owners were creating that meaning. By mystifying the use of items in their stores, giving a dress "status" by showing a picture of the Duchesse de X wearing it, or making a pot "attractive" by placing it in a replica of a moorish harem in the store window, these retailers diverted buyers, first, from thinking about how or even how well the objects were made, and second, about their own role as buyers. The goods were all.
The Fall of Public Man by Richard Sennett
(p. 145)
A harem through the looking glass/store window?
When Ingres, the director of the French Académie de peinture, painted a highly coloured vision of a Turkish bath, he made his eroticized Orient publicly acceptable by his diffuse generalizing of the female forms (who might all have been the same model). More open sensuality was seen as acceptable in the exotic Orient, an idea that persists
Commodification?
Within a capitalist economic system, Commodification is the transformation of goods, services, ideas and people into commodities or objects of trade. This process of commodification is therefore historically connected to the history of capitalism. Art as a commodity itself, also represents people as commodities, as in the display of slaves in the slave market, but is also capable of representing people as people in a world where commodification has been imposed upon them.
The Medical Inspection at the Rue des Moulins Brothel, 1894, by Toulouse Lautrec.
This is one of many of Lautrec's works that depict the life and work of women working as prostitutes in the brothels of Paris. Naughty postcards do this as well but from a different position, the position of the "male gaze".
History painting is not the painting of history. History painting is a style of art relating to subject matter, the subject matter of stories and and how stories communicate ideas and represent attitudes.
Diana and Actaeon is a painting by the Italian Renaissance painter Titian, finished in 1556–1559, and is considered amongst Titian's greatest works. It portrays the moment in which the hunter Actaeon bursts in where the goddess Diana and her nymphs are bathing. Diana is furious, and will turn Actaeon into a stag, who is then pursued and killed by his own hounds.
A modern Actaeon?
Art produced during the stages of capitalism is not often about capitalism as a subject, but the realities or fantasies represented in the narratives depicted are pointers to the consequences of capitalism as it is portrayed and experienced in the sphere of culture. And culture is a word with a very complex history. We can use the word in three different ways and not even notice that we are doing this.
A modern Diana?
Or, everyday life? Here is the back of the postcard!
The Digital Encyclopedia of European History (Read More) has an article that contextualises the history of prostitution in Europe from the 19th century to the 21st century.
Prostitution (19th-21st centuries) From the White Slave Trade to Human Trafficking. This is the Abstract:
From 1800 prostitution (assumed only to be female) was regulated in Europe, but it was tolerated as it was deemed necessary for male sexuality. The system of regulationism, accused in the 1860s of iniquity by the abolitionist movement, was then called into question by the development of a White Slave Trade involving innocent victims. This “scourge” led states to search for a European or even international solution. Addressed by international organisations (the League of Nations and United Nations) the issue became topical again in the second half of the twentieth century owing to the influx of prostitutes from Eastern Europe. The European Union attempted to respond to the challenge posed by what was now described as human trafficking, but respected the diversity of national policies towards prostitutes and the potential normalisation of prostitutes as sex workers.
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