His pale courtesan in beauty and decay
Main de Botton
VIOLETTA AND HER SISTERS: THE LADY OF THE CAMELLIAS, RESPONSES TO THE MYTH edited by Nicholas John Faber, £8.99, pp. 305 Ever since Alexandre Dumas fits penned his novel The Lady of the Camellias in 1848, the fate of his heroine Marguerite has been to outgrow her humble story and develop into a quasi-mythical figure. In 1852, she became the star of Dumas's hugely successful theatrical adaptation, and in 1853, assumed the name of Violetta in Verdi's La Traviata. Since then, all the great divas from Christine Nilsson to Kiri to Kanawa have taken the role, the novel has been translated into every language, there have been ballet versions and count- less film remakes, most notably starring Greta Garbo in George Cukor's Camille of 1937.
The story is a melodramatic account of how a courtesan breaks the rules of 19th- century prostitution by falling in love with a kind and sincere young man. Armand res- cues Marguerite from the corruption of Paris and takes her to a country idyll, soon shattered by his father, who begs Marguerite to leave his son in order to save his virginal daughter's honour. Sacrificing herself for the sake of her lover's family, Marguerite does as she is told and, in the grand tradition of paranoid lovers, is rewarded by Armand accusing her of duplicity in leaving him, only for him to realise as she dies of consumption that she had acted from pure motives. In death, the whore regains her purity, and true love avoids the banality of old age.
In editing this brilliantly eclectic collec- tion of essays and extracts, Nicholas John, the dramaturge at the English National Opera, illuminates the story and its myth in a way that will interest not simply opera fans or admirers of Dumas fi/s (if such creatures still exist), but also readers in 19th-century social history and issues of gender and sexuality. The voices he has gathered are breathtakingly varied; Balzac, Flaubert, Baudelaire and George Sand jostle alongside contemporary historians, opera stars, literary critics, even prostitutes and sex therapists. The mix makes for what John calls, 'a kaleidoscopic picture of the society from which the myth emerged'.
The background of mid-19th-century France was one of a society convulsed by rapid economic and political change which threatened to upset the established sexual hierarchy, blurring the line between prosti- tutes and respectable women, the blur incarnated in the new figure of the demi- mondaine. She was a woman who con- trolled both sexual and economic power, could be accepted in the highest circles and thus challenged a family structure based upon the financial submission of the female. She epitomised Paris as a city of vice. For Elizabeth Wilson,
one of the most disturbing aspects of the metropolis to many of the men who wrote about it was the way in which female sexuali- ty flooded it, uncontrolled, disordered, engulfing.
It was a society where Ernest Pinard, the prosecutor at the trial of Madame Boveny, could attack Flaubert's work of shocking realism by saying that, 'Art without rules ceases to be art; it is like a woman taking off all her clothes.' When women did take off all their clothes in the salon pictures of the age, Philip Hook explains how porno- graphy had to be disguised by setting matters in dreamlike scenes from Antiquity or the Middle East.
The psychological aspect of the Camel- lias myth was no less unsavoury. The ortho- dox interpretation of Marguerite's fate has been that taken by Barbara Cartland, who offers us the wisdom that in real love, 'the person one loves is more important than one's self and no sacrifice too great'. Sever- al contributors skilfully challenge the patri- archal repression at the heart of this morsel of Romantic nonsense, pointing out that Dumas had to kill his heroine only because she controlled both sex and money. As Wil- son writes, 'a sexual woman living outside marriage constituted a threat that had to be defeated'. In the words of John, only as a martyr could Marguerite, 'be placed among the works of art in a respectable Second Empire drawing-room'. Lucy Hughes-Hallett suggests that the problem of Marguerite is more fundamentally the problem of the woman who surrenders to male desire:
In offering to gratify male desire, she thwarts it. She translates erotic fantasies, which are essentially imaginative, into flesh. In so doing she destroys them and she must, in turn, be destroyed.
Violetta and Her Sisters most successfully decodes the repressive myth (now thankful- ly dated) at the heart of The Lady of the Camellias. In the words of one of the collection's more spirited contributors, a one-time Parisian prostitute by the name of Phyllis Luman Metal,
Lady of the Camellias . . . if only you lived now, you would have strong sisters to help you. . . You could claim your soul. You could use your mind.
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