BEYOND THE BLUESTOCKING
Images of Work-Life Balance in the Belle Epoque
“What people don’t say enough about George Sand is that she was a skilled housekeeper, often made little dishes for her guests, and was excellent with jams and cauliflower soup,” wrote Marie d’Ourlac in a 1901 Femina article devoted to the celebrated author, marking the launch of an annual literary fête in her honor.1 The article ends with a requisite nod to Sand’s artistic prowess as the reason for her assured immortality, but not before devoting the bulk of its text to her unparalleled skills as a homemaker, devoted mother (“she herself had cut and sewn her babies’ layettes”) and grandmother.
Femina’s tribute to George Sand as domestic and literary heroine was part of the magazine’s broader efforts to decouple the woman writer from her tainted past. Sand, far better known for her cross-dressing than for her mothering, was the most recognizable of the nineteenth-century bas-bleus or bluestockings.2 When she was writing during the 1830s and 40s, her audacious sartorial choices only added fuel to a long-brewing misogynist fire, at a time when women writers were denigrated as mannish and chided for their careless abandon of proper feminine roles. By 1900, the terrain had shifted only slightly for the woman writer. The term bas bleu remained in wide circulation, while the writer herself had become one among many possible manifestations of troublesome women in the public sphere, embodied most often as the New Woman, or femme nouvelle. The fear-inducing New Woman was thus a descendant of the bas bleu, and a sister/alter-ego of the equally scorned feminist, imagined to have abandoned all semblance of femininity in her bold fight for new rights and some sort of vaguely defined “emancipation.”3
In the article cited above, Femina references this association with Sand (“She was heavily criticized for her masculine clothing during the first years of her literary career”) before quickly moving on to the task at hand: proving that, in fact, George Sand was a profoundly feminine role model—kind, patient, caring and sensitive. In remembering Sand in this way in one of its first issues, Femina encapsulated the ambiguity at the heart of its ambitious efforts to remake the French woman writer. The magazine promoted the femme de lettres as a feminine role model in defiance of her tarnished nineteenth-century reputation at all costs—even if that meant a selective revision of history.4
Figure 2.2 Feature on George Sand, Femina (October 15, 1901).
We have already begun to see the privileged role given to women’s literary expression in both Femina and La Vie Heureuse, in part through fostering readers’ identification with women writers and their work. In what follows, I explore the elaborate ways in which both magazines directly confronted the troubling visual associations with female intellect by offering a carefully constructed image of the woman writer as a conventionally feminine ideal. The threat of the New Woman was tightly linked to the newly exploding mass media and its capacity to circulate images at an increasingly rapid pace.5 In place of these persistent caricatures of modern women’s roles, Femina and La Vie Heureuse presented a highly pleasing alternative: the woman writer was celebrated—in text and image—as the very definition of the femme moderne. The challenge for the magazines was to present the woman writer as modern and new while at the same time deeply familiar and thus non-threatening—someone who respected the past, while projecting the modern French woman into a more promising future. By expertly harnessing multiple mechanisms of journalistic innovation, including the joint forces of celebrity and mass culture, innovations in photography and contemporary artistic trends, Femina and La Vie Heureuse offered women readers iconographic evidence of a brand-new role model to emulate: a woman who could balance—with impeccable agility—tradition and innovation, femininity and feminism, work and family.
“At Home” Photography and the Woman Writer in Context
Photography was a key ally in the magazines’ efforts to reinvent the femme de lettres, ensuring the elevation of writer to celebrity, while also instantly normalizing her through reassuring visual cues.6 (The Sand article, all of two pages long, featured eight images [Fig. 2.1]). Both Femina and La Vie Heureuse relied heavily upon the relatively recent phenomenon of “At Home” photography, popularized in the 1890s by the photographer known as Dornac (pseudonym of Paul Cardon), who used portable cameras to capture famous figures in their own domestic spaces.7 Dornac’s images differed strikingly from previous portraits that focused entirely on the individual at close range, often with a few strategically placed symbolic objects.8 Like the celebrity interview, another newly popularized genre, his wide-angle lens offered the public a whole new level of access to the casual details of the famous person’s private world.9 Dornac’s series “Nos Contemporains chez eux,” which appeared in Le Monde Illustré in the 1880s, featured dozens of these photographs of famous writers, artists and public intellectuals. By the early 1900s, there were endless photographers specializing in this genre, featured in newspapers and illustrated magazines; these intimate images of the famous were also sold to the public through postcards and albums.10
The visual immediacy of the photograph offered a shortcut to the message being conveyed by Femina and La Vie Heureuse about the compatibility between feminine and intellectual pursuits that bypassed more complex gender strategies during roughly the same time period. Mary Louise Roberts, for example, has described the “subversive mimicry” used by women writing for Marguerite Durand’s La Fronde through their alternating between conservative and unconventional womanhood, reading that paper’s quick demise as proof of “the potential weakness of parody as a subversive strategy.”11 Both Femina and La Vie Heureuse, on the other hand, exploited the straightforward power of the image to show women as both progressive and conventional, immediately normalizing, through pictures themselves and the accompanying text, any potential conflict. Like the female mountain climbers or women literally reaching new heights described in the introduction to this volume, photographs of women writers often created metonymic chains between the literary figure and conventional signs of femininity, visually fusing the natural relationship between woman and writer. A 1902 article on left-leaning journalist and devoted Dreyfusard Séverine—who might seem an unlikely candidate for celebration by these magazines given her outspoken socialist militancy—shows her seated beatifically, eyes closed, “in the hearth of the great fireplace” of her modest dining room, figured strikingly as part of the furniture, one with the home: la femme, quite literally, au foyer (Fig. 2.2), enacting the French expression for housewife.12 Another unlikely candidate because she almost always dressed in male attire (even if for “good” reason: devotion to her husband Marcel, which impelled her to follow him to the army during the Franco-Prussian war and participate alongside him), Jane Dieulafoy is pictured in August 1902 sporting “the man’s suit that she is never apart from.”13 This serves as a reminder that her pants were merely an expression of wifely duties. The caption below the image of Dieulafoy in her living room deliberately invites the reader to look away from her diminutive presence in the corner towards the rest of the stately, enormously high-ceilinged room in which “you’ll notice the monumental fireplace which is a true marvel” (Fig. 2.3). Indeed. Covered with fleur de lys and regal insignia, it is the image of tradition, wealth, clear social strata, and all that her garb might appear to threaten.14 And as with Séverine, Dieulafoy’s audaciousness is tempered by the diversion of the viewer’s gaze to the hearth, age-old metonym for feminine comfort and stability.
The images used by Femina and La Vie Heureuse insisted on the compatibility between femininity and authorship through the ease with which women’s professional role could be assimilated with their domestic one, thus diffusing the threat most closely associated with the bluestocking as public woman, in the worst sense of the term. As Femina was quick to remind readers, the woman writer did not need to leave her home to take on her professional role. Interviewed for an article on women’s literature, decadent author Catulle Mendès noted affirmingly: “Women, because of their sedentary nature, are in every way suited for fully sedentary professions and activities. Literature is a profession that requires no movement, that allows a woman to stay at home, and to oversee her household.”15 This comment is, of course, a reminder of the profound conservatism of the magazine in its support of conventional familial structures, a stance which made it willing sometimes to describe women in terms that seemed at odds with what we can now recognize as its more feminist objectives. But Femina’s particular twist on the At Home photography of the woman writer countered this conservatism in important ways: the magazine almost always depicted the woman writer at her desk, aligning her with a visual trope associated with the authority of the grand homme.16 Image after image picked up on this visual framework made familiar through Dornac’s and other photographers’ portraits of famous men that were a mainstay of the Belle Epoque press. Indeed, it is hard to find a picture of a male writer not at his desk between 1890 and 1910. In so many of these images, the esteemed writer or thinker is depicted deep in thought, surrounded by the trappings of an upper-bourgeois existence that serve to confirm his stature.17 Dornac did photograph a few women writers, but these images were often strikingly different from those of their male counterparts. Anna de Noailles and Marcelle Tinayre, for example, are featured in soft lighting, with no visual reference to their profession. A series on “modern women” in the 1896 issue of the Revue Encyclopédique included dozens of photographs of exemplary women, with only one at her desk (the venerable Juliette Adam).18 In their adoption of this familiar masculine trope, on the other hand, Femina’s images of women writers at their desks suggest intellectual parity and literary genius, while, as we will see, always, insistently, offsetting the associated threat to gender norms of such a suggestion through other kinds of visual and textual evidence of conventional femininity.
Figure 2.2 Séverine quite literally in her foyer, Femina (October 1, 1902).
Figure 2.3 Jane Dieulafoy in her salon, Femina (August 15, 1902).
An early example of the careful dance between text and image is from an article on Daniel Lesueur, the first woman writer awarded the Legion of Honor, in a feature billed as “Women of Yesterday and Today.” While the frontispiece to the issue had featured a hyperfeminized image of Lesueur in a richly ornamented dress, clutching a long necklace (not surprising, perhaps, for an author who had written on the relationship between feminism and beauty for La Fronde) (Fig. 2.4), the accompanying feature story showed her sitting at a rather austere desk, rows of neatly aligned books lining the shelves behind her (Fig. 2.5).19 The image can be compared to a well-known Nadar image of Zola, in which the vertical lines of his extensive library work against the swirling florals of his tiny desk (Fig. 2.6).20 Side by side, Lesueur seems every bit as grand homme as Zola—in fact, too much so. The curvy shape of the photograph slightly tempers Lesueur’s somewhat brutish look and less-than-elegant attire. But it’s the accompanying text that works most hard to compensate. The subheading to the article promises to “introduce readers to the charming and unique woman that is this writer they adore.” And then as if to literalize this promise, the first line of the article reads: “This decorated [with Legion of Honor] writer, former poet, is a woman,” before going on to describe her joyful graciousness and beauty: offering, explicitly, a definition of femininity itself. Despite her forceful writing, Lesueur is not the least bit adversarial in person, the article assures. She loves movement and color, nature and horses. While her desk might look severe in the image, in fact she cannot write unless all of her bibelots are in place. Indeed, the article insists, Lesueur’s femininity goes down to the very paper upon which she writes her books: “of the most tender and soothing blue color.”21
Figure 2.4 Daniel Lesueur, frontispiece to Femina (March 1, 1902).
Figure 2.5 Daniel Lesueur feature story, “Women of Yesterday and Today.” Femina (March 1, 1902).
Figure 2.6 Émile Zola studio portrait by Félix Nadar.
Just a few months earlier, in October 1901, the playwright Jeanne Marni was pictured at her desk, pen in hand, facing outward (Fig. 2.7). The numerous knickknacks on every surface of the desk convey a healthy excess (compared with, for example, a barren desk in an image of the working-class Marguerite Audoux from Femina, July 1, 1910). With practically the same language as the Lesueur feature, the caption declared Femina’s delight in introducing “the woman that is this enormously talented writer” (la femme qu’est cet écrivain de grand talent) to its lectrices; the somewhat awkward syntax of this formulation is an attempt to reconcile the femme with the always masculine écrivain. In this case, the photograph can avoid awkwardness entirely. Indeed, this seems to be the main objective of presenting Marni in this way: the image of woman writer at her desk represents the fusing of the very identities of woman and writer, the demonstration, that is, through the matter-of-fact evidence of the journalistic photograph, that she is both of these things without contradiction. The abundant lace billowing around her sleeves and collar matches the casual disorder on her desk, and these images somehow affirm her femininity.
Figure 2.7 Playwright Jeanne Marni at her desk. Femina (October 1, 1901).
Sometimes the desk seems to overtake, if not displace, the woman, as in the image of Madame Henry Gréville’s cabinet de travail from the June 1902 issue of Femina (Fig. 2.8). Madame Gréville sits at her desk in the center of the photograph, pen engaged in one hand, cheek resting thoughtfully on the other. Her pensive gesture is a familiar trope (see, for example, the Dornac photo of Alphonse Daudet from 1891, Fig. 2.9).22 But rather than the harsh lines of bookshelves behind her, a floral paper decorates the wall. Her oval face and patterned dress blend into the background of the cavernous room; every surface is adorned, from the overlapping Persian rugs covering the floor to the floral wallpaper, upon which a series of mirrors and paintings appear to be affixed. The recently deceased Madame Gréville becomes a decorative object herself, aligned with the blooming flowers to her right, and similar to the roses she passionately described in her writing, quoted in the article below. The room itself offers far more visual interest than the diminutive writer, especially the desk, a weighty confection with swirling flowers carved into a dark wood in the same style as Nadar’s Zola, but covered by a richly embroidered throw. As light streams onto her face, flowers, writer and desk thus form a metonymic chain of beauty, femininity and domesticity that steadily elide the potentially threatening intellectual gravitas of her professional role.
Figure 2.8 Madame Henry Gréville, Femina (June 15, 1902).
Figure 2.9 Alphonse Daudet, from a Dornac photograph. From the series “Nos contemporains chez eux.” Le Monde Illustré (1891).
Images of women at their desk slowly evolve in Femina, with more visible feminine indices that visually reconcile the writer’s femininity with the harsh angles of the furniture. Sometimes the potential dissonance of the upper bourgeois woman at her desk is diffused by reference to other more familiar domestic scenes. An article on Madame Alphonse Daudet, wife of the famous decadent novelist, shows her sitting at a small writing table, more befitting of a “femme du monde than would be a writer’s desk” (Fig. 2.10). And yet it was there that she wrote her latest collection of poetry. Again, the desk itself works to assimilate the identities, to demonstrate the reconciliation of opposing forces: with her exquisite ostrich feather collar and heavy gold chains, Madame Daudet is no less a femme du monde than a brilliant writer, her genius having been “to have known how to describe the outside world with intensity, all the while maintaining her charm and feminine qualities.”23 The delicateness of her appearance and of the table itself, the fact that she is actually reading rather than writing, her gaze modestly averted from the camera, links her visually not to the trope of grands hommes chez eux, but rather to impressionist paintings like Berthe Morisot’s 1877 Girl Reading. The curving border of the photograph further situates her in a feminized frame.
The shifting emphasis on décor allowed the viewer to see the desk as a decorative object, detached from its more audacious function as a link between these upper bourgeois women and the outside world of work and profession. In a rare and early appearance in the women’s press, Colette, named Madame Gauthier-Villars, sits at a long table with her dog by her side (Fig. 2.11). The article followed the publication of her Dialogue des bêtes, and thus appeared just before her bitter divorce from the notorious Willy captured the French imagination, and three years shy of her scandalous lesbian kiss with Missy, her lover, on the stage of the Moulin Rouge, which nearly caused a riot. Nonetheless, as if hesitant to subject this compelling female talent to too much scrutiny, the caption seemed to deliberately divert the reader’s gaze away from Colette herself and towards the furniture, offering a view of what the camera does not capture in this case. “Within this Dutch austerity one finds a fleeting disorder of books strewn about, leafed-through magazines littering the thick red carpet. And the contrast is charming: that of the somber furniture with the bright Parisianism of the copperware that catches the light, and the cheerful flowers in their crystal vases and pots.”24 A charming contrast, indeed, and a gendered one as well: that of the severity of intellect (books, reading materials) with the lightness of the feminine ornaments and flowers. The contrast is in fact the crux of it all: a perfect display of the magazines’ effort to show that all of these juxtapositions were not threatening at all, but rather nothing short of charming, and that femininity is never fully lost, even when momentarily displaced.
Figure 2.10 Madame Alphonse Daudet at her writing table. Femina (January 15, 1903).
Figure 2.11 Colette, known as Madame Gauthier-Villars, at her writing table. La Vie Heureuse (May 1904).
The clutter of papers and books, knickknacks and flowers only just past their prime that appears in so many images of cabinets de travail connotes a cheerful and natural feminine hominess, while nodding to the High Victorian decorative tradition.25 Sometimes this ultrafeminine décor served to compensate for either the particular woman writer’s lack of feminine traits or her audacious behavior. See, for example, the feature on Gyp in the November 1902 Femina. Born Sibylle Aimée Marie Antoinette Gabrielle de Riquetti de Mirabeau, in 1869, Gyp married the count Martel de Janville, with whom she had three children in rapid succession before becoming financially ruined and eventually estranged from him.26 This controversial and prolific author was best known for her outspoken anti-Dreyfusard writings, famously declaring, at one point in 1899, her official profession to be “anti-Semite.” Gyp, then, was hardly a role model for upper bourgeois young ladies, described in the article itself as having “the spirit of La Fronde and its writers, and a sharp sense of opposition.”27 And yet, iconographically, she is the image of bourgeois bliss. In the brief autobiographical sketch she herself offers in the article, she mentions her marriage without further commentary on its tumultuous history. An excess of ultra-feminized bourgeois interiors continue her own work of reframing, distracting the reader from prevailing gossip with their visual evidence of domestic stability. The very multiplicity of images—there are six on the first page alone, nine total—serves to efface this biographical context, offering a concrete visual alternative. She too is figured “at her writing table,” but both books and flowers are overflowing around her, her flowing robe mimicking the floral lines of the furniture, making her appear to be almost a giant flower herself in the center of the photograph (Fig. 2.12). And while the caption indicates a desk, the image illustrates the perfect conflation of At Home photography with the impressionist woman at her toilette trope. Writing table and dressing table are indistinguishable, a mirror peeking out behind Gyp’s piles of papers. In a portrait by Louise Abbéma featured in the same article, the very presence of which reminds of Gyp’s noble origins and the importance of her image to posterity, she is also seated at a writing table, framed by two large plants that mimic the floral scarf tied round her neck.28 Once again, then, she is a picture of feminine beauty, propriety and upper class modern style. The composition of both images recalls Morisot’s paintings of women in their private interior moments—whether at their toilette, easel or piano.
Figure 2.12 Gyp at her writing table, Femina (November 15, 1902).
The 1903 cover image of the “Poet Queen” Her Majesty Elisabeth of Romania (Fig. 2.13) completes, in a sense, Femina’s metonymic work of adopting At Home photography to fuse the identity of woman and writer in a perfectly feminine balance. The queen is seated at her desk, her luminous satin gown flowing to the floor; with one hand, she holds her pen to a manuscript in progress, while with the other she consults an open book. Her sidelong pose mirrors Mary Cassatt’s “Mrs. Duffee, Reading” (1876): in both painting and photograph, the elegant woman is engrossed in thought, her billowing skirts softly draped against the opposing geometry of the furniture (Fig. 2.14). As an updated version of Cassatt’s image, the Poet Queen’s seamless flow from domestic leisure activities of the upper class to the At Home work of authorship is vividly displayed in the visual arc from seat to table, book to manuscript, reading to writing. And yet, as striking as this image seems to be, by the time it had appeared in February 1903, the juxtaposition of the ornaments of aristocracy with the work of writing had become familiar in Femina: that the queen was a writer was clearly meant to elevate her capital among readers rather than diminish it, assimilating the unfamiliar royal with the numerous famous women writers already depicted in a similar stance.
Figure 2.13 “A Poet Queen: Carmen Sylva, her majesty Queen Elisabeth of Romania.” Cover of Femina (February 1, 1903).
Figure 2.14 Mary Cassatt, “Mrs. Duffee Seated on a Striped Sofa, Reading” (1876). Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
New Frameworks
The image of Colette at her desk is encased by vines of flowers, whose swirling lines call up the art nouveau patterns of Belle Epoque poster art. In fact, the repeated art nouveau motifs throughout Femina and La Vie Heureuse point to a connection that goes beyond the purely aesthetic.29 The magazines not only reflect some of art nouveau’s key aesthetics but also offer an overlooked expression of its core ideological tenets; the pen-and-ink frames reflect a shared means of framing ongoing social shifts through visual culture. As part of the democratization of luxury so crucial to the rise of consumer culture at the fin de siècle, art nouveau meant “the diffusion of taste and tradition from above, from an official institution of the cultural elite.”30 Femina and La Vie Heureuse, linked to the same highbrow monde artistique et littéraire, represented one such kind of institution and as such demonstrate the ways in which this refined taste was specifically deployed for women. Like the art nouveau movement, the magazines sought a way of updating, not French decorative objects but rather French women, while maintaining—and reviving—French artistic tradition. And like the magazines, art nouveau was preoccupied with domestic interiors, which, as Debora Silverman has argued, emphasized conventionally feminine forms so as to allay the New Woman’s audacious forays into the public sphere, seen as a threat to the fundamental social structures of French society.31 If art nouveau sought to restore woman as “queen of the interior,” the women writers of Femina and La Vie Heureuse were depicted as new iterations of traditional French values, and this was done, more often than not, within elite domestic interiors themselves.
The very first issue of La Vie Heureuse showcased the beloved Countess Anna de Noailles in a magnificent five-page spread entitled “A Woman Poet Appraised by a Woman of Letters,” written by the Baronne A. de Rothschild. Noailles herself was a felicitous choice, beloved for her social status as well as for her talents. Born Princess Anna Elisabeth Bibesco-Bassaraba de Brancovan, she married Mathieu Fernand Frédéric Pascal de Noailles.32 Well-connected to the literary and artistic elite, at the time of the article she had published two volumes of poetry, Le coeur innombrable and L’ombre des jours, both of which had received widespread critical acclaim.
In the image that introduces the article, Noailles is pictured in her sitting room, just off center in the photograph, her young son gingerly upon her lap (Fig. I.1). The extensive caption tells the reader exactly what she is supposed to see, narrating Noailles’ decorative choices, from the furniture to the flower arrangements:
A nearly white rug, the walls draped with a pale blue silk; no clutter, just precious objects; a veil of a beautiful point de Milan lace drapes the chaise longue; only carefully chosen and arranged antiques, which in this brightness take on a new light. The furniture was modern style at first. But Madame de Noailles could not live in the uncomfortable mixing of such sharp forms. She came back to the wing chairs and the medallion armchairs. In a vase, one finds branches of delphinium, flower of Old France (la vieille France).
This inscription, just beneath the visual evidence, provides almost more detail than the image itself, and its overdetermined narration underlines the significance of the countess’s decorative choices to the story that is being told. Noailles is described here as having rejected “modern style” furniture in favor of carefully chosen antiques.33 Yet old cannot fully win out over new: the antiques are rejuvenated by their context, just as Noailles herself, a member of the aristocracy, is part of a new poetic movement. Her poetry, details the article, exihibits “that something new that pervades contemporary women’s writing.”34
The image of Noailles is framed by a simple pen-and-ink series of rectangles, around which is laced a most delicate wreath of flowers—a subtle visual index of the still-nascent modern style of art nouveau, with its emphasis on nature, feminine floral lines and those intricate swirls that weave throughout the magazine itself. In the photograph, the decorative signs of French tradition anchor the femme de lettres in a familiar past while the stately furniture situates her in the confines of a museumlike interior. At the same time, the fluid, dynamic floral lines of the frame augur a change that is at once radical and natural. Situated in the sight line of the delphinium branches, Noailles seems meant to be read in parallel to them as a “flower of Old France,” she herself, seen, literally, in a transformative new light as it streams through the window.
With these kinds of glimpses into the beautifully furnished homes of their stars, the magazines functioned both like the pavilions of the recent Exposition Universelle, displaying France’s finest new home accessories, and like the more permanent collection of antique furniture gathered in the Louvre’s Department of Art Objects in the late 1890s. Named the Museum of French Furniture in 1901 (thus coinciding with the birth of Femina), this installation also represented a key moment for art nouveau.35 Influenced by the renewed interest in interior design that the exhibits at the 1900 Exposition Universelle had provoked, these popular collections were meant to bring visitors from all classes into close contact with the intimacies of aristocratic life, and thus shape their sensibilities. Visiting these interiors, stated Gaston Migeon, would be an uplifting experience for the masses.36 Like the museum, on the other hand, the magazines, through their extensive photo spreads, invited readers into the homes of their women writers while presenting them as role models for a broader, not exclusively upper bourgeois or aristocratic audience. Echoing Migeon, the editors of La Vie Heureuse had asked in their first issue, in which the feature on Noailles appeared: “Isn’t it good that those women who are burdened by hard labor catch a glimpse, as in a dream, of the lives of queens, princesses and Women who are the most refined specimen of the aristocracy of all races?”37 One might think about the feature stories in these magazines and their use of At Home photography, then, as a visual experience that mixes the highbrow appeal of the Louvre’s furniture museum, which reproduced homes without their inhabitants, with the mass marketing of the Musée Grévin, which featured celebrities in recreations of their interiors.38 Like the museum’s thick red ropes employed to maintain that fragile border between viewer and object, the delicate, highly feminized art nouveau pen-and-ink framing helped preserve and elevate the figures within, even as they were offered up for mass consumption.
Despite their ideological resonances with the mission of the magazines, however, the signature lines of art nouveau were visually associated with a model of femininity that did not always match Femina and La Vie Heureuse’s ideal. The early feature on Daniel Lesueur that appeared in the Femina series “Women of Yesterday and Today” (Fig. 2.5) betrays some of the initial difficulty in harmonizing a visually modern frame with a very traditional looking woman.39 As an idealized example of the modern femme de lettres, Lesueur is presented in this feature as a woman of both the past and present, perfectly balancing the tradition of elegance with contemporary new roles. But there is also something rather jarring in this image: the “whiplash” lines surrounding the photograph of Lesueur had gained their familiarity largely through popular Belle Epoque poster art. In images by Alphonse Mucha and Paul Berthon, similar lines flow from the cascading tresses of women’s hair, and were used most often to surround a hypersexualized feminine image, often of an actress. See, for example, the Berthon poster of the famous courtesan Liane de Pougy at the Folies Bergères (Fig. 2.15). Similarly, in this heading, two mermaidlike, mythical-looking creatures frame Lesueur’s face.40 Figured in black undulating, snakelike contours, their hair, while mimicking the curves of Lesueur’s tightly knotted coiffure, suggest an unbridled sexuality that the accompanying photograph and article seem to flatly deny. The giraffe motif behind Lesueur’s portrait demonstrates the entanglement of African imagery with art nouveau graphics. Along with the disembodied birds’ feet clawing at the title, these images suggest a wild energy that the writer’s image seems deliberately poised to work against.41 The magazine both evokes and displaces in this way the threat of the New Woman and her seemingly dangerous sexuality, deliberately replacing such an image with a far more respectable alternative that feels, at the same time, strangely superimposed.42 And yet, the image inscribes itself in a highly modern aesthetic. It thus presents its own idealized version of the professional woman—the femme de lettres—as both thoroughly modern and thoroughly traditional, split, like the mythical creatures, in two. This was, indeed, the challenge of the Belle Epoque woman writer attempting to have it all: within the context of the women’s press, she must somehow be both “a woman of yesterday and today.”
Figure 2.15 Poster of Liane de Pougy by Paul Berthon, 1895.
Books and Babies
As Anna de Noailles sits with her baby delicately balanced upon her lap, the poet-countess balances feminism and femininity through the precise equilibrium of books and babies—offering, then, compelling visual evidence that writing need not be perceived as a threat to women’s traditional roles. In the multipage feature story, Noailles’ darling son is deliberately juxtaposed with passages of her verse. The image described above of the countess in her living room is matched with a slightly larger photograph on the facing page of Noailles in profile, a book open across her lap (I.1). In the first picture, the white of her son’s clothing matches a blanket draped across the Louis XV chair, ready to receive the child. The loosely folded fabric of this makeshift baby bed corresponds to the folds of the countess’s billowing skirt in the facing picture, which cradles not her child but her book.
In this, La Vie Heureuse’s visual emphasis differed from that of Femina. Unlike its rival, La Vie Heureuse rarely showed the work of writing. The editors’ favored image was that of the writer on a well-appointed sofa, with her children in reach—a trope that, working in iconographic opposition to the pants and bicycles that conjured the New Woman, demonstrated to readers that authorship was in tension neither with motherhood nor an upper-class lifestyle. Moreover, we have here the beginnings of the visual mystification of modern motherhood as a female ideal. Aristocrats and upper-bourgeois women still rarely actually took care of their own children in Belle Epoque France; but the desire to recognize their contributions as mothers meant that they were increasingly photographed in this role. The images of women writers with their children, alongside those of queens and their babies, offer a pleasing image of maternity as yet another aspect of female achievement to be admired and emulated.
The juxtaposition of the Noailles images, while so carefully aiming to convey the harmony of maternity and intellect in parallel pursuit, also ironically captures their inevitable tensions: the baby in the first image looks to his left, through the open window but, if you follow his gaze, also to his mother in the facing picture. Noailles, on the other hand, faces left as well, leaving her gazing outward, to the extra-maternal realms suggested by the open volume on her knees. The next two images, however, bring mother and child back together in unity. In a dramatic portrait, the parallel gazes of mother and son aim directly at the reader, while below the last paragraphs of the article we see the countess in profile again, this time playfully holding her young son beneath her (2.16). As if growing out of this last image, itself circled in an egg-like oval, are hand-sketched branches of a flowering tree—those of a pied d’alouette, flower of Old France, perhaps?
The images in Femina and La Vie Heureuse are hardly ever left to speak for themselves, and this article makes no exception. The accompanying text, both in the captions and in the articles, reminds of the important critical work being done to create harmony where there was once dissonance. The Baronne de Rothschild describes holding Noailles’ “beautiful book” upon her knees, enchanted by “the beating of this Vast Heart [Coeur innombrable, the title of her poetry collection].” She devotes the bulk of the article to extensive analysis of the countess’s poetry, having charged herself to “demonstrate the ways in which this book was very new for us.” Then, in her final paragraphs, she finds herself face to face with Noailles, interrupted by the entrance of un petit poème vivant—a little living poem—her son. She notes, “in her delicious maternal expression that fruitiness that came so strongly for me out of her work,” thus confirming, once and for all, that initial link between literary and procreative products.43 The erudite literary criticism that preceded (Rothschild inscribes Noailles in literary history between the “genius” of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’s melancholic poems and those of the eighteenth-century romantic poet André Chénier) evaporates in the baby’s presence. At the end of the day, it all boils down to this, really: the countess is a profoundly feminine talent. Books and babies are just two different forms of her poetry, two ways to infuse the world with maternal beauty.
Figure 2.16 Anna de Noailles playing with her son, La Vie Heureuse (October 1902).
The women writers celebrated in the pages of Femina and La Vie Heureuse had more or less impeccable bourgeois reputations. Their novels, on the other hand, often treated complex, controversial subjects. Reviews in both magazines regularly indicated if a novel was “not for everyone,” or not for young women.44 Often part of the work of the photograph was to disassociate the writer from her characters or subject matter. Children were extremely effective towards this end. In October 1903, Gabrielle Réval, best known for her treatment of female education in the 1900 Les Sévriennes, was pictured picnicking with her son: “In the paths of the Bois de Boulogne where she writes her novels Madame Gabrielle Réval spends her moments of relaxation teaching her son Jacques to read.”45 Again the magazine creates the perfect symmetry, demonstrating the harmonious relationship of books and children. When Réval is not writing about education, rest assured that she is busy educating her own child.
An article in La Vie Heureuse from May 1903 pictures Gérard d’Houville, wife of novelist Henri de Régnier and author of the best-selling novel L’inconstante, with her son, nicknamed Tiger (Fig. 2.17). Although not a member of the actual nobility, d’Houville, christened “the youngest of the femmes de lettres” in the article’s title, has the advantage—like many of the elite writers featured in the women’s press—of being a member of the literary aristocracy. In addition to being the wife of a famous writer, she is the daughter of one as well: J.-M. de Heredia, adding even more interest to her celebrated role. And yet the article worked hard to depict her in a nonthreatening light. d’Houville and her son are seated in another lush domestic interior, lined with adornments like the fans and candlesticks arranged atop the mantle. The wide-angle shots pioneered by Dornac to give a sense of “milieu” are exploited here to normalize the writer and visually inscribe her in typical upper-bourgeois existence. Light bounces in seemingly from a window beyond the photo’s frame, drawing the eye between a flower-filled vase, d’Houville herself in the center, and her contrite-looking son seated on the sofa, chastened by his mother’s supposedly wagging finger. The caption reads: “Madame de Régnier, sitting by the edge of the fireplace in her small sitting room, threatens the son that she has nicknamed Tiger with a slight and charming wag of the finger.” It seems that d’Houville’s novel contained something of a suggestion of parental impropriety. The photographic evidence, combined with the textual explication, thus works to negate any hint of parental neglect or resentment suggested by d’Houville’s literary work that might conjure Daumier’s woman writer as negligent mother. Each comment is offered in a delicate and careful effort to maintain a precarious equilibrium: d’Houville’s disciplining finger is “slight” and constitutes a charming gesture. In the article itself, she is described through this hybridity: “Strange woman, a bit enigmatic, she speaks loudly, a good buddy, real good kid who loves perfumes, books and knickknacks.”46 We see here competing journalistic urges: the impulse to show d’Houville’s eccentricity, as was often the case in feature stories about male writers, and the desire to affirm her conventional femininity. Again, the charm of juxtaposition is invoked. Any sense of anxiety surrounding the troubling personality is alleviated if not effaced by the accompanying images of a familiar bourgeois existence. In one, “the young woman who wrote such pretty verse” is figured dusting those same adored bibelots.
Figure 2.17 Gérard d’Houville with her son, Tiger. La Vie Heureuse (May 1903).
While it might seem patronizing to modern eyes, the insistent distinction between writer and subject matter, I would argue, worked to women’s advantage in the literary sphere. It proved, through example after example, that women could explore controversial topics in their writing without implicating themselves in the process. In this sense, the magazines performed a crucial gesture that helped foster the women’s writing they supported in the same pages. Even as women’s domestic roles seem immensely circumscribed in these photomontages, then, their imaginations were liberated.
Novels and Children
Looking at these magazines with twenty-first century hindsight, some obvious cultural critiques beckon. Indeed, Roland Barthes famously deconstructed a similar phenomenon in his Mythologies: “If we are to believe Elle magazine,” he wrote, “which some time ago mustered seventy women in one photograph, the woman of letters is a remarkable zoological species; she brings forth, pell-mell, novels and children.”47 Barthes was referring to a double-page image in the November 22, 1954 issue of the magazine, under which a headline declared “Women Writers Make Their Presence Known!” Accompanying the photograph to which he refers, a caption identifies the featured writers according to their credentials. Number 15, for example, reads “Marguerite Yourcenar (5 novels).” Witness, however, number 31: “Hélène Parmelin (2 children, 2 novels)” or number 34: “Nicole Dutreuil (2 sons, 4 novels).”48 Playfully but incisively deconstructing these captions, Barthes reads the 1950s woman writer as circumscribed by her procreative function, only permitted to write to the extent that she performs her feminine duties:
Women, be therefore courageous, free; play at being men, write like them; but never get far from them; live under their gaze, compensate for your books by your children; enjoy a free rein for a while, but quickly come back to your condition. One novel, one child, a little feminism, a little connubiality. (50)
It is hard to argue with Barthes’ cynical reading, certainly as far as Elle 1954 is concerned, and impossible not to see the parallel with the message that La Vie Heureuse was sending. But when we historicize Barthes’ critique, we see that this conscientious construction of a new model of feminine achievement in the Belle Epoque—limited as it might have been—was not meant as a retrenchment of women’s roles but rather as an expansion of the ways in which women could be equal. In 1903, in other words, novels and children was a response to a denigration of the woman writer, and part of a wider effort to broaden the scope of a feminism that was associated with (even if unfairly) a necessary rejection of all things conventionally feminine. The message conveyed in these photo spreads is repeatedly formulated throughout Femina and La Vie Heureuse: women’s achievement does not mean abandonment of conventional feminine roles—and thus widespread denigration as some sort of unnatural being. Femininity can be conjugated with authorship, these photo spreads prove, and to glorious and exemplary ends. To be a woman writer, according to Femina and La Vie Heureuse, is no longer a contradiction in terms.
Indeed, the editors of both Femina and La Vie Heureuse seem strikingly conscious of the conflict between the beautiful image of achievement they are constructing and the image of reckless depravity that still clung to the femme de lettres. “Small, brown-haired, slim and pale, her expression always changing, Madame Marcelle Tinayre is certainly the absolute contrary of what men a bit disdainfully call a woman of letters,” reads a 1903 profile of Tinayre from La Vie Heureuse.49 Similarly, a Femina article on “Women’s Works” from 1905 explicitly describes the images included as a challenge to Barbey d’Aurevilly and his legacy: “Barbey d’Aurevilly, who hated those he called bluestockings and haughtily maligned them with the most venomous traits, would himself wave the flag of surrender before such diverse, effervescent talent.”50 In this sense, then, what looks like a naïve and exploitative affirmation of patriarchal norms in 1954 can be seen, in 1903, as a deliberate embrace of convention intended to push further open the feminist umbrella, and thus to expand the ways through which Belle Epoque women could challenge gender roles.
Staging Work-Life Balance
For the most part, La Vie Heureuse emphasized the perfect conjugation of woman and writer through visual emphasis on her domestic fealty, while Femina situated the woman writer in a visual space parallel to her male counterparts by depicting her at a desk or writing table. One particular image stands out, however, in displaying both desk and child and thus beginning to express a new kind of ideal. In their 1903 feature “En Visite chez Marcelle Tinayre” (directly evoking the visite au grand homme trope popularized throughout the nineteenth century), La Vie Heureuse showed the emerging novelist at her desk, one arm posed gingerly next to a closed manuscript, the opposite hand linked to her impeccably groomed young daughter, who gracefully met her mother’s gaze (Fig. 2.18).51 Everything about this image reveals an expertly staged, carefully crafted symmetry. The subtitles on either side of the image: “Her Home,” “Her Novels” balance each other perfectly. Their equivalence is paramount: the equal emphasis allotted to these potentially competing elements of her life, house and novels, ensured her celebrated place in the magazine. The image itself is circular, and its shape makes it look as if we had peered through a peephole to catch a glimpse of their life en medias res. A pen-and-ink floral pattern surrounds the circular photo—that art nouveau framework that sets the image apart and elevates it, like the museum’s red rope. In this case, the flowers appear to be blooming out of this domestic-professional arrangement, gorgeous proof of its proliferating fruitfulness, reconfirmed by the fact that Tinayre’s daughter clutches a baby doll herself, repeating, then, the maternal role modeled by her mother.
Figure 2.18 Marcelle Tinayre with her daughter. La Vie Heureuse (March 1903). © Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand/Roger-Viollet.
In combining the prevailing iconography of both magazines, this image brings the workspace vividly into dialogue with the domestic feminine life. As such it is suggestive of a much longer, more complex narrative than the simple equation described by the caption, which insistently continues the work of the photograph, as if still uncertain of its blatant power: “Between the started manuscript and the child to whom she gives her hand,” it reads, “Madame Tinayre—even while composing wonderful books—has maintained the very spirit of feminine life—a tender heart, love for little ones, the taste for decorating her home.”52 In its staged equilibrium, the photograph itself begins to announce the challenges that lie ahead for the femme moderne: the questions of work-life balance that are only vaguely hinted at through Tinayre’s somewhat awkward, and surely untenable, pose.53 Within La Vie Heureuse’s perfectly constructed page layout, on the other hand, there is no room for uncertainty. Instead, we can clearly see all the magazine’s mechanisms—celebrity At Home photograph, elegant art nouveau frame, explicit text—doing the imaginative work of Belle Epoque literary feminism, and launching a new fantasy of female success. This was the woman writer as femme moderne: novels and children, work and home in beautiful synchronicity, she was truly queen of the interior—her once-tainted reputation a distant memory—with her desk chair as her new throne.
