THE “ORIENTAL” AUTHORESS
Myriam Harry and Lucie Delarue-Mardrus
For the first three years or so of their existence, Femina and La Vie Heureuse almost always pictured women writers through the domestic images I explored in the previous chapter. They stayed insistently on message, demonstrating how this modern figure could succeed, seemingly without having to alter anything else about her lifestyle. Around 1904, however, two new figures, Myriam Harry and Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, emerged as favored media darlings of the women’s press, and the iconography associated with the woman writer expanded in accordance with another visual trope tightly linked to female celebrity during this time: the exotic Orient.1
Born in Jerusalem to European parents, Harry grew up in Ottoman Palestine before moving to Vienna as an adolescent, finally ending up in Paris.2 Her 1903 autobiographical novel La conquête de Jérusalem (and its sequels) captured the attention of a French audience already captivated by the Orient and further seduced by the grain of authenticity Harry’s true-life experience promised.3 This novel was the partial impetus for the first Vie Heureuse literary prize, which she was awarded once it became clear that she would be excluded from the Prix Goncourt because of her sex.4 Delarue-Mardrus, on the other hand, was the young wife of the Egyptian doctor Joseph-Charles Mardrus, who was celebrated for his translation of the Arabian Nights into French.5 His savvy negotiations of Parisian literary circles ensured Delarue-Mardrus’s quick rise to fame, especially after the publication of her third collection of poetry, Horizons, in 1904, after which he circulated photographs of her visit to Tunisia. While she is remembered chiefly through her affiliation with “Sapho 1900” and the lesbian subculture of the Belle Epoque, remarkably (if not surprisingly), no sign of this facet of her identity is visible in the women’s press.6
Images of both Harry and Delarue-Mardrus mapped on to an orientalized and theatricalized aesthetic made popular through actresses like Sarah Bernhardt, herself a staple of both publications.7 Like Bernhardt and Cléo de Mérode, Harry and Delarue-Mardrus were women celebrated in part for their performance of otherness through photographic spectacle.8 These images ensured their success, demonstrating the potency of this early model of celebrity in a domain that has remained almost entirely out of the critical spotlight. But Harry’s and Delarue-Mardrus’s costume changes are even more interesting when considered in light of what the magazines energetically refrained from suggesting about these potentially controversial women. As Emily Apter has shown, oriental-ism functioned “as a theatrical conceit in turn-of-the-century feminist performance.”9 During this time, women were “empowered or accorded sexual license through association with the dominatrix characterologies attached to exemplary princesses, queens, seductresses, or women leaders of the East” (139). In the pages of Femina and La Vie Heureuse, on the other hand, the seductive powers and associations of the East were harnessed in ways that needed always to keep the threat of such unconventional femininity at bay, in keeping with efforts to present the woman writer as a figure to be admired and imitated. The magazines, I argue, sought to extract from orientalism its attention-grabbing visual appeal while denying the implicit sexual undertones of these acts of cultural transvestism through an insistence on the writers’ bourgeois familiarity. Harry’s and, to a lesser extent, Delarue-Mardrus’s, free-spirited, adventurous personalities and exotic origins were cautiously balanced by repeated reminders that the exotic Orient served as a costume that could be put on and taken off, one of many landscapes these writers inhabited. At the same time, the magazines exploited the pleasing trope of orientalized otherness to diffuse the potentially troubling aspects of these women writers’ challenges to gender norms, masking in this way the traditional threats associated with the woman writer.
Becoming Parisian: Myriam Harry
Harry appears on a remarkable cover of La Vie Heureuse from April 1904, sporting an elaborate Chinese costume: every part of her is adorned, from the three-corner hat on her head, replete with hanging tassels, to the strands of beads that hang over her silk flowered robe, to the sinuous faux finger nails she displays on her right hand, and the figurine of a similarly clad Chinese woman she holds in her left hand (Fig. 3.1). The photograph is brought into stark relief by the dramatic orange background on which it sits—the color in itself both a signal of the exotic culture represented within and a preview of color photography, still in its early phases. Inside the magazine, four contrasting images dominate a one-page article on the author: in the photograph stretched above the title (“Madame Myriam Harry”), Harry is shown in Saigon, clad in white European clothes (although white is described as the “the universal costume of the country”), driving an English carriage for a morning promenade; a Malaysian peasant, also dressed in white, sits behind, holding a parasol over her (Fig. 3.2). Their parallel luminous figures are linked by the white of the parasol and draw the eye to the power structure embedded in their perfectly colonial relationship of French traveler to indigène. Then, on the bottom left of the page, the full image from the cover appears, the caption offering additional details that were obscured by the black-and-white photography: we learn that the tunic is light blue and that Harry’s “theatrical hair style” is made of red satin incrusted with fragments of mirrors. Just to the upper right of that image, Harry is shown as a baby in her mother’s arms, a photograph taken, we are told, in an Armenian convent in Jerusalem, the city where Harry was born. And finally, on the bottom right, perfectly symmetrical with the image of Harry in Chinese garb, the final photograph depicts Harry “having become Parisian” (devenue parisienne). This is the “real” Harry, we are meant to believe, Harry the writer. Dressed in the conservative apparel of the upper bourgeoisie, she is described as contributing to the Journal, publishing with Calmann-Lévy, and working on a new novel about the island of Ceylon.
Figure 3.1 Myriam Harry in oriental garb on the cover of La Vie Heureuse (April 1904). © Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand/Roger-Viollet.
What are we to make of this dizzying array of images, each one offering another captivating but alternative version of the exoticized author? On the one hand, photographs of Myriam Harry as a bonne bourgeoise in the women’s press seemed to secure her ability to don the other looks with impunity. An article announcing Harry’s receipt of the Prix Vie Heureuse in 1905, for example, juxtaposed an image of her in a veil with one in bourgeois attire (Fig. 3.3). The first photograph offers an alluring image “in oriental costume”; the second, her “true” domestic self.10 The irony, of course, is that Harry was born and raised in Jerusalem. Her identity as Parisian bonne bourgeoise was just as artificial as her exoticized Asian performance—if not more so. The careful balance between fantasy and reality suggested by these alternating images was of course fundamental to these magazines’ success: readers must at once admire women like Harry, one of the “brilliant destinies” depicted, and identify with them, in order to believe on some level that if they were to buy the expensive creams and corsets advertised by the magazines, they themselves could achieve some version of such good fortune.
But the depiction of Harry draws on several other narratives as well, her attraction connected somehow to the natural fluidity of her identity—her ability to perform multiple iterations of Belle Epoque femininity. As the “coiffure de théâtre” suggests, the layout of the 1904 piece mimics the popular photo spreads of actresses frequently featured in the magazine, often clad in costumes from their various productions. Harry, the article seems to propose, is just another sort of actress, a European playing with more exotic identities. The article acknowledges her complex and fascinating identity, that of “a daughter of the Rhine baptized in the Jordan River,” who has traveled through several languages before conquering French; a woman at last both “wild and Parisian.”11 Her actual Middle Eastern ties are offered as a fascinating but distant detail that makes her better able to perform exotic otherness as she gallivants in Far-Eastern lands. In addition to the references to China and Vietnam within the article, the facing article is entitled “Coréens et Coréennes.” The East functions here as a generic pole of otherness—China, Vietnam, Korea—their geographic multiplicity elides the specificity of each individual location, and signals nothing more than a shared landscape for uninhibited exploration and orientalizing mimicry that always inevitably reinforces existing power structures.12 We see this trope of playful European mimicry throughout the magazines: in an article on Pierre Loti’s elaborate “Chinese party,” where actual Chinese emissaries found themselves appearing “less Chinese” than the French guests;13 in images of Miss Alice Roosevelt visiting Japan, her gaze off in the distance as Japanese royalty look up to her;14 in the endless features on the famous artist Sada Yacca of Japan (and the fashion trends she inspired); and in rapturous descriptions of Moroccan beauty (Fig. 3.4).
Figure 3.2 “Madame Myriam Harry,” La Vie Heureuse (April 1904). © Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand/Roger-Viollet.
Figure 3.3 An article announcing Myriam Harry’s award of the first Prix Vie Heureuse, later to become the Prix Femina. La Vie Heureuse (March 1905).
There is, however, another layer to these representations of the woman writer in oriental costume, in which the Orient serves as a filter that at once masks gender subversion and makes it more powerful. Within the pages of Femina and La Vie Heureuse, part of the pleasure of these images of white women in costume, I would suggest, lay in the apparent removal of Western gender hierarchies from the orientalizing performance. The “European” woman in costume suffers none of the humiliations of the non-Western world (she is never dressed, for example, as part of the harem). Rather, her oriental adornments indirectly applaud women’s more powerful roles in Western civilization. In a 1907 La Vie Heureuse article describing Harry’s travels to Tunisia, Harry is pictured in a striking pose behind a billowing veil, her eyes peering out above a dark cloth, her eyebrows joined in a dark double arch that is repeated in the graphic frame of the photo (Fig. 3.5). Despite the dramatic pose and the reference to the strictures of Islamic law in the caption, Harry’s gesture is one of liberty rather than submission; her naked arm gently rests on the grate behind her, and her exposed flesh lies in stark contrast to the reams of fabric that shield the rest of her from view. We see this same casualness with respect to Muslim headgear throughout the magazines, in multiple images of Arab women wearing alluring, gauzy coverings over their faces.15 The 1904 image of veiled Harry “in oriental costume” is in fact nearly identical to a picture that accompanied a 1903 short story by G. Dorys in La Vie Heureuse. That image, in turn, matches those featured in a four-page article on Turkish women in the same issue (Fig. 3.6). Entitled “Princesses, Grandes Dames, Bourgeoises,” it described one such veil “of a light silk that beautifies more than it hides.” The very fact of these photographs’ existence becomes in itself a subversion of the subjugation the veil should signify, proof of the different valence it was meant to have in this altered context. Under a smaller image of a Turkish woman covered by another sheer silk facial wrap, the caption reads: “With the passing of time, the strictest proscriptions are alleviated, and, despite the laws of the Koran, this Turkish grand dame poses in a veil for the photographer, which only adds to the mystery of her dark eyes.”16 In other words, the veil is but an accessory, a sign of femininity and mystery being actively harnessed and deployed. It is thus also, by definition, a metonym for the Orient itself.17
Figure 3.4 “A Type of Moroccan Beauty.” Femina (October 15, 1907). The caption describes her as “of such admirable purity and delicacy that she could take part in the International Beauty Contest with a reasonable chance of success.”
Figure 3.5 Myriam Harry “veiled as Islamic law requires.” La Vie Heureuse (September 1907). © Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand/Roger-Viollet.
Figure 3.6 A story on Turkish women, La Vie Heureuse (April 1903).
As if to prove a point, underneath the image of her, fully cloaked, Myriam Harry is pictured with her dark-skinned servants in two photos that confirm the joint fact of her freedom and European power in startling explicitness. In one of them, “Zorrah” serves her tea, and in the other, a nameless “little Negress, pretty and bright” is described as playing with her “like a domestic animal.”18 In addition to reinforcing Harry’s powerful position, these images deter the reader from focusing on the sexual suggestiveness of Harry slipping out of her full body covering while confined haremlike behind the grated wall. The domestic images and their captions frame Harry in a “safe” and familiar environment: one of female domesticity.
In these photo spreads, West dramatically confronts East, in service, I would propose, of the woman writer’s power and authority.19 As the accompanying article makes clear, the Orient serves as Harry’s muse—as it did for so many of her European peers—feeding her reveries, inspiring her next novel. If she is at home here, it is not as a native but rather as a colonizer and thus a figure associated with power and dominance. Through this very different set of “charming juxtapositions” than the ones in the domestic iconography of the woman writer, the magazine demonstrates the power of the French woman through the unambiguous fact of her opposition to the colonial woman. Indeed, the thinking French woman depicted in these pages, a powerful and potentially subversive figure of modernity, is removed from her traditional opposition to the French man whose role she always implicitly threatens to usurp, thus drawing attention away from her subversion of traditional gender roles. The importance of this displacement becomes clear in the text of the magazine, as Myriam Harry, devenue parisienne, is described as “violently antifeminist,” despite the fact that she is also portrayed as courageous, independent, free-spirited and a prolific and talented writer—a partner to her husband, rather than a helpmeet.20 The fact of her unconventionally feminine power can be masked, just as she herself is, through its exotic dislocation. Cultural subversion, it seems, is more easily accepted than gender subversion—and unlike the latter, in itself a desirable enterprise.
The European woman visiting the East, then, is undeniably and joyfully free, and her visual representation here adds another dimension to the conservative feminism of the women’s press. In Myriam Harry, the complex stance of the woman writer reflects not only ambivalence surrounding French gender roles, but also that surrounding its complex relationship with the Orient. Rather than a source of anxiety, the relationship between France and the Orient is—at least on its surface—a pleasurable, desiring one that upholds the magazines’ objectives of downplaying the threat of shifting gender roles. In describing French women’s donning of the veil in the nineteenth century, Marni Kessler writes that “the veiled Parisian woman’s face became a site for several levels of imperial mastery, for not only was her appearance a reminder of the inhibitions imposed on colonial women, but it also represented her own status as a ‘colonized’ being within France” (102). Decades later, and in a different visual context, Harry’s veil signifies something more ambivalent: in addition to demonstrating European superiority over the colonial woman, it reminds both of Harry’s femininity and of her freedom to choose that role—to choose, in a sense, her ‘colonized’ status. Compared to the women of Vietnam and Tunisia, Turkey and Korea, the bonne bourgeoise is a figure of power and authority; at the same time, through her association with the Orient, itself highly feminized, she emphasizes her own femininity. The powerful nature of the woman writer is normalized through her opposition to the passive Orient, while at the same time, her willingness to veil herself reminds that she has not entirely rejected femininity either, even in some of its most troubling dimensions. Indeed, as in the graphic surrounding “Daniel Lesueur, woman of yesterday and today,” a certain dissonance comes through in these images and their accompanying text, one that likely only fueled Harry’s popularity.
Stranger in a Strange Land: Lucie Delarue-Mardrus
Harry’s dear friend Lucie Delarue-Mardrus offers a slightly more complex case, the contradictions of which were also likely factors in her popularity. She was a favorite of both magazines, initially depicted as a mysterious and bold adventurer, accompanying her husband on his travels and producing exceptional poetry. In her memoirs, she writes of how the pictures her husband took of her made her into a literary sensation even as she remained thousands of miles from the Parisian literary epicenter: “I can say that, well before my novels, I owe the beginning of my fame to that collection of pictures on horseback and on camels, of silhouettes under cork trees and in the Sahara, and of portraits juxtaposed against white cityscapes or surrounded by Arab faces.”21 These unfamiliar images “of a Parisian woman off so far away,” notes Delarue-Mardrus, were in high demand, and both Femina and La Vie Heureuse seemed eager to capitalize on the visual intrigue of this exotic and talented new figure on the literary scene.
But their efforts to impose the same feminized narrative on Delarue-Mardrus, or to offer any sort of consistent narrative at all, seem forced; the striking differences among images only call attention to the young writer’s performance, making it difficult to identify the “real” Delarue-Mardrus. Adding to the confusion is the question of Delarue-Mardrus’s own role in the manipulation and circulation of her image: in the photographs, she appears by turns complacent, ill at ease, smug or purposefully vacant in expression: almost inviting the viewer to interpret her very inscrutability. The fact that her domineering husband, a man sometimes referred to as “Oeil” (Eye), took them, further complicates our understanding of these images meant to launch a woman’s lucrative literary career.
Delarue-Mardrus is first introduced in Femina in 1905 as “the young wife of Dr. Mardrus” in a demure photograph, her chin resting gently on fingers, above a selection of her verse (Fig. 3.7).22 The youthful poet, coiffed in what would be her distinctive hairstyle, offers an expression that appears both neutral and guarded. Seven months later, in October, the same demure guise—and hairstyle—appear in the exact same layout, only this time she is cloaked in a tunic, perched on what seem to be Roman ruins, bearing a slightly less complacent expression in her eyes; she looks, in fact, ill at ease, uncomfortable, like a child forced to pose for the camera, waiting for the moment to pass (Fig. 3.8). Her new volume of poetry, the caption suggests, “evoked new emotions in Madame Delarue-Mardrus’s passionate soul”; she is depicted as Dr. Mardrus’s ingénue, naïve, “her eyes dazzled” by the exotic world around her, even if her assured poetry suggests a more mature voice. Several excerpts of her poems are included, without further commentary.23 Indeed, there is a startling disjunction between the photograph, the poems, and the caption. Delarue-Mardrus’s next appearance in the magazine is on the cover of the April 15, 1907 issue, in an elegant profile, in honor of her playing Sappho in her own play, Phâon Victorieux (Fig. 3.9). The magazine neglects to mention, of course, that the original title was “Sapho désespérée,” changed for reasons of propriety.24
Figure 3.7 Women’s poetry, featuring Lucie Delarue-Mardrus. Femina (March 1, 1905).
Figure 3.8 Lucie Delarue-Mardrus and her poems, Femina (October 1, 1905).
La Vie Heureuse, by contrast, proposed a rather different image of the writer during those same years. A feature story from September 1905 entitled “Madame Delarue-Mardrus aux Pays Arabes” offered the requisite juxtaposition of Delarue-Mardrus in “costume” with the real Delarue-Mardrus, but to an entirely different effect than the Harry images. At the top of the piece, two images of Delarue-Mardrus in Kroumirie, Tunisia, are balanced around the same delicate profile of her that would later appear on the Femina cover (Fig. 3.10a). But rather than appear in feminized oriental garb in the Kroumirie pictures, Delarue-Mardrus wears riding clothes that suggest a subversive autonomy; indeed, the feminine European Delarue-Mardrus of the center image contrasts with the mannish Delarue-Mardrus of the East. Instead of recalling the beautiful costume changes of Harry or Bernhardt, these images of the poet in pants call to mind another common feature of the women’s press: eye-popping human interest stories on eccentric feminine identities, like “Les Cowgirls” from Femina, October 1906.25 Taken out of context, the image on the right of the triptych, in which a cigarette hangs from a confident, almost smirking Delarue-Mardrus’s mouth, signals as much New Woman as adventurous traveler. On the following page, Delarue-Mardrus is pictured in a traditional European dress, surrounded by dignitaries, but the central image shows her in pants once again, staring directly at the camera with a decidedly neutral expression (Fig. 3.10b).26 Delarue-Mardrus’s exotic costume changes, then, take her consistently into masculine and not typical orientalized attire, while her husband, notably, sports the loose skirts of Egyptian men in an accompanying photo.27 In Delarue-Mardrus’s case, the geographic displacement seems to allow a level of audacity that would be anathema to La Vie Heureuse in any other context. Within the text of the article, one senses the elusiveness of Delarue-Mardrus’s identity: “she hates and scorns socializing (le monde),” notes the journalist; and her poetry is singular, difficult to classify, exhibiting “a strange energy.”28 Like the country she visits, Delarue-Mardrus is fundamentally other; her bourgeois clothing appears to be as much a costume as any of her other sartorial changes.
Figure 3.9 Lucie Delarue-Mardrus on the cover of Femina (April 15, 1907).
Images of Delarue-Mardrus again dominate an issue of La Vie Heureuse from July 1906. The cover shows Delarue-Mardrus perched on the hump of a camel (Fig. 3.11). As in the images of Harry, the Bedouin in the background and Delarue-Mardrus’s veil-like cloak remind of where she is, as well as of the inherent power structures that put her in a position of authority, despite her femininity. The image also accentuates the gender-neutral aspect of certain colonial garb through the pleats of the Bedouin’s tunic, his pants cut off by the frame of the photo. On the one hand, the reams of fabric meant to cover Delarue-Mardrus from head to foot parallel the Muslim headdress worn by Myriam Harry in 1907; like Harry’s, only part of Delarue-Mardrus’s body is covered. On the other hand, however, in contrast to Harry’s unclothed and decidedly feminine arm reaching out, Delarue-Mardrus’s masculine pants and boots disrupt the cloak’s full coverage; her wardrobe, like that of the Bedouin, is startlingly androgynous. A few pages later, the frontispiece of the same issue shows her at the helm of a ship’s wheel in an enigmatic scene that disrupts the colonial visual discourse seemingly at play, while reminding us of her femininity (Fig. 3.12). Although her dress is described in the caption as Asian, its simple toga-like drapery, lacking the embroidered adornment seen in Fig. 3.8, also conjures ancient Greece. Indeed, she might be one of the Fates, as the enormous structure at which she stands suggests that she steers a wheel of fortune rather than a ship. Such a mythological subtext is alluded to in the caption’s description of her round bracelets as “prophetic” (fatidiques) as well as in her comparison to “one of Ariel’s sisters.” These vague allusions to an unsettling feminine power contradict the status of the photograph as amusing travelogue that was suggested by the cover shot of Delarue-Mardrus on a camel. The caption, with its ambiguous language, fails to guide the viewer, who is left entirely unsure of what to make of Delarue-Mardrus peering forward with her mysterious gaze: she is clearly in costume, yet it is unclear what role she is supposed to be playing, or where she is traveling to and from.
Figure 3.10a (above) and b (below) “Madame Delarue-Mardrus in Arab Lands.” La Vie Heureuse (September 1905).
Figure 3.11 Lucie Delarue-Mardrus on the cover of La Vie Heureuse (July 1906). © Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand/Roger-Viollet.
Figure 3.12 Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, frontispiece to La Vie Heureuse (July 1906). © Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand/Roger-Viollet.
Finally, in December 1907, Delarue-Mardrus is pictured in her French writerly persona, her profiled face in hand; engrossed in a book, she is turned away from the camera now, refusing in this sense its frame (Fig. 3.13). A cut out triangular image takes up more than half the page—behind her elbow, the sketches of oriental turrets beckon under a distant sun—a reminder of the enhanced appeal of this otherwise visually mundane figure. Unlike Harry, Delarue-Mardrus’s costumes throughout the pages of Femina and La Vie Heureuse ultimately seem more suggestive than imitative—less a sign of the times or an ode to the Orient than a sign of a free spirit unable to be circumscribed by convention. The repeated disjunction between her expression and the role her costumes suggest that she is playing add to Delarue-Mardrus’s allure as an inscrutable and therefore compelling figure. The images of the demure, conventionally feminine, “true” writerly Delarue-Mardrus fail to convince in comparison: we have already seen too much.
Figure 3.13 Lucie Delarue-Mardrus announcing her new poetry collection, La Figure de Proue, La Vie Heureuse (December 1907). © Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand/Roger-Viollet.
There was, of course, much more to both Delarue-Mardrus and Harry than these captivating images. In both cases, their enthralling personae were matched by widely acknowledged literary acumen. Harry’s novel La conquête de Jérusalem was so compelling and widely acclaimed that it helped launch the Prix Vie Heureuse, later to become the Prix Femina. The talented Delarue-Mardrus, poet, novelist, sculptor, was only in the beginning of what would make her one of the most prolific and successful women writers of her generation.29 Their important iconographic presence in Femina and La Vie Heureuse demonstrates how the magazines were able to participate in and even exploit one of the most visually powerful tropes of their generation, to the extent that it authorized (even as it masked) their own feminist agenda. In the next chapter, we will examine the emergence of Delarue-Mardrus’s own authorial voice—equally staged—in the pages of Femina, and how the magazine enabled this woman writer to harness her own celebrity in service of Belle Epoque literary feminism.
