JEAN LORRAIN’S WOMEN’S MAGAZINE
Emma Bovary Meets Celebrity Culture
As Jean Lorrain’s 1908 novel Maison pour dames opens, Madame Emma Farnier, a young newlywed from Avignon, thumbs through the pages of a women’s photographic magazine, Le Laurier d’Or, only to discover that Florise d’Ellebreuse has won the grand prize in the publication’s poetry contest. With this discovery, Emma’s life is transformed. Florise d’Ellebreuse, it turns out, is the pseudonym that Emma herself had chosen when she hopefully (and surreptitiously) submitted her flowery and somewhat audacious, sensual poems to a tournoi de poésie sponsored by the glossy publication. Emma/Florise is immediately sent to Paris to be repackaged for rapid celebrity, and the novel gleefully recounts the moral downfall that accompanies her rise to fame.
Le Laurier d’Or was intended as a direct send-up of Femina and La Vie Heureuse, “those illustrated magazines,” in Lorrain’s words, “devoted fully to women’s glory, that of the woman painter, the woman artist, the woman sculptor, the woman writer,” to which it is explicitly compared.1 Lorrain, a decadent writer better known for novels like Histoire des masques (1900) and Monsieur de Phocas (1901), as well as for his flamboyant homosexuality, rather improbably wrote for Femina in 1905 and 1906, contributing reports as well as the serialized novel Ellen. With the first installment the editors acknowledged that readers might be a little surprised to find this author “whose works thus far would not be welcome in just any hands” in the pages of Femina. But rest assured, they clarified, this would be the famous novelist’s first work appropriate for young women.2 Maison pour dames was published shortly after his death, and it is not clear whether he had intended it for a general public. In addition to naming Femina and La Vie Heureuse as the imaginary Le Laurier d’Or’s competitors and mocking the magazines’ “poetry tournaments,” Lorrain’s biting roman à clef mixes reality with fiction in its depiction of the magazine’s contents. The novel cites directly from articles that actually appeared in Femina and La Vie Heureuse and loosely disguises its favorite “authoresses” as well as numerous female Belle Epoque literary figures. Some, like Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Séverine, Daniel Lesueur, Jeanne Marni and Gabrielle Réval, are named explicitly, others in thinly veiled disguise: Madame Myriam Hegland (Myriam Harry); la comtesse Hamarande (Anna de Noailles).
Lorrain’s novel has been cited in recent studies of the women’s press as a window onto their workings—a caricature, or satire, but with more than a grain of truth—as witnessed in its ripped-from-the-headlines qualities.3 But Lorrain’s novel is a fantasy that caricatures female desire and the presse féminine’s power to manipulate it: it resolves the very real threat of female intellectual parity suggested by the magazines by masking it as errant female desire, more easily coded negatively than female brains. Indeed, despite his familiarity with the content of the magazines, Lorrain’s scathing satirical novel shows the difficulty an outsider might have in distinguishing between Belle Epoque literary feminism and other kinds of challenges to Belle Epoque gender norms. The novel presents a fundamental misreading of Femina and La Vie Heureuse, one which maps the new ambitions of the femme moderne onto an outmoded nineteenth-century narrative of ill-fated female desire—completely ignoring, then, the ways in which these publications deliberately set themselves apart.
Le Laurier d’Or
The name given to Lorrain’s heroine is no coincidence. It is not hard to imagine that Emma Bovary, a few generations later, would have been seduced by Femina and La Vie Heureuse, just as she fantasized about passionate romance she knew from best-selling novels. Like that of her namesake, Emma Farnier’s naïve ambition is guided by the hope of an escape route from her marriage. Hardworking Emile, fonctionnaire par excellence, is repeatedly referred to by the less-than-awe-inspiring epithet “Farnier the mortgage officer.” After a long four years, Emma is bored. Because she has no children, the narrator explains, “the idle, sentimental young woman had all the time to daydream” (2). These dreams are nourished by magazines like Le Laurier d’Or, whose seductive powers reach far beyond Emma Bovary’s fairy tales from the convent or the magazines Flaubert had her devour: La Corbeille and Le Sylphe des salons. Emma Bovary was already constructed as a kind of ideal reader of the women’s press, with all the time in the world to project her dreams into their tantalizing pages.4 In contrast to the early prototypes that Emma B. read, however, Le Laurier d’Or portends to speak directly to Emma F.; and, delightfully, the lines of communication go both ways, so that she can send in her poems and become one of the celebrated, by dint of her own talent. Indeed, for this generation, women do not need to force their husbands into path-breaking surgeries in order to squeeze out some ancillary glory for themselves. This Emma’s professional mistakes—and shame—will be all her own.
In her study of the postmodern city, Paula Geyh observes that if advertising is about “confrontations with mirror images that suspend one’s consciousness and unconscious, and hence one’s space of desire, between the fantasy of success and the reality of failure,” then the postmodern innovation is the place of one’s own potential celebrity in this space: “the desire for and illusion of the possible dissemination of this image of oneself.”5 As precursors to this phenomenon, Femina’s and La Vie Heureuse’s concours, enquêtes and tournois (see Fig. 6.1), influenced as they were by the advertising industry, exploited this new nexus of desire for female magazine readers by offering women a new kind of mirror through which to see themselves (and in the process coded both celebrity and writing as roles appropriate for women). Lorrain, on the other hand, ridicules his heroine’s seduction by these precise forces. Emma Farnier’s fantasy is much more specific than that of her predecessor, who dreamt vaguely of bliss, passion, ecstasy. She dreams instead of a particular brand of celebrity offered through “the top feminist journal of its day”: “her name proclaimed from all corners of Paris, what am I saying, France, Europe, or even further away! And her picture published in the Review and certainly reproduced in other newspapers; the party given in her honor; the travel funds at her disposal; her volume of poetry finally published, for publishers would run after the top female poet of the year, if not of the century!” (7). Note that in this fantasy, literary glory is described as a corollary of celebrity, and not the other way around.
Like Flaubert’s Emma, whose tragic disappointments can be anticipated through Flaubert’s incisive prose long before her wedding night, this Emma’s sparkling, naive dreams of a more glorious existence are quickly deflated—and with much less subtlety. In the process, Lorrain’s narrative gives voice to the same anxiety expressed by Flaubert and a legion of his nineteenth-century contemporaries about the effect of urbanism on the bourgeois woman, who loses control when the city’s sophisticated tastes unleash her desires. Hunger for celebrity maps onto those other feminine desires, and the consumerism of the newly accessible department store, or grand magasin—channeled for Madame Bovary through her broker Monsieur Lheureux (whose very name bespeaks her longed-for pleasures and the hedonistic indulgence of consumption)—is passed down through the magazine.6
Figure 6.1 Winners of a Femina poetry “tournament” (March 1, 1907).
Emma Farnier’s unfeminine ambition finds its first victim in the fragile marriage bond: she must tell her husband, who, while privy to some of her poetic efforts, had been ignorant not only of her delusions of grandeur but of the outlet through which she had channeled them. After three nights of sexual favors, he allows her to accept her prize, and they head off to the brave new world of the Parisian literati—encouraged by the coincidence that the magazine’s publisher Robert M. de Farenbourg is—behind his fancy pseudonym—none other than Emile’s long-lost schoolmate. This presumed stand-in for Pierre Lafitte is another example of the dissolution of French tradition that Emma’s achievement represents. Anyone, it seems, can climb to the highest social heights, if skilled in the new rules of the game.
Emma’s exchange—conjugal sex for glory—only forewarns of the prostitutional stance in which she will soon find herself trapped. Indeed, the beautiful world of Le Laurier d’Or is revealed to be an illusion—nothing more than the construction of greedy snake-oil purveyors who manipulate images and concoct seductive prose in order to tug at the heartstrings of those too simple to know any better. The women around Le Laurier d’Or are perverse lesbians, the men sleazy sex fiends; no one cares about truth and beauty. The magazine world is unveiled as a cesspool of greed and filth.
Upon Emma’s arrival in Paris, she is ushered to a photo shoot, where, perhaps not surprisingly, the most extensive window onto the magazine’s work is offered by the dashing photographer Robert Evimore. Compared to Christ himself, with a strong “Nazarene resemblance” that is said to have determined his artistic career, Evimore’s miracles are limited to the dazzling technology of photo alteration: he will superimpose the photograph he takes of Emma in Paris onto the more exotic landscapes of her Avignon hometown—with its medieval Palais des Papes and scenic promontories. This unfamiliar technological feat in itself gets the provincial couple’s hearts beating faster. To give the wide-eyed couple an idea of what he’s going for, Evimore then lays before them back issues of Femina and La Vie Heureuse, offering incisive commentary as he flips through their pages. He stops, for example, on the “Ménages de poètes” article we examined in Chapter 5, showing Emma and her bewildered husband the glorious celebrity couples modeling modern marriage. As he points to the Rostands, he urges, “read the caption, it’s admirable” and proceeds to quote it directly: “Madame Edmond Rostand, exquisitely poetic, has made herself, now, the exquisite Muse of her husband.” (Emma is delighted thinking she and Emile can pose as a couple before Evimore reminds her that those are artist couples, and “it’s not the wife but the husband who makes the ménage d’artistes.”) Evimore’s lesson in the careful genius of combining text and image makes up the better part of Lorrain’s chapter: frequently quoting directly from the magazines, he points out Daniel Lesueur surrounded by pigeons in Venice’s Saint Mark’s Plaza (Femina, March 1902), Gabrielle Réval with her adorable son (an image that both “charms and intrigues”), and the Poet Queen Carmen Sylva herself (“you’d think it was Catherine the Great”), before arriving at “the nec plus ultra of the genre”: Lucie Delarue-Mardrus.
“Not only did Madame Lucie Mardrus have genius,” Evimore explains breathlessly, showing Emma the pictures of the poetess in Tunisia, “but she was lucky enough to have for a husband an intellectual and a traveler doubling as the even rarer writer.” He continues: “Not only did Madame Lucie Mardrus have the opportunity to travel around and visit the most beautiful country in the world, but her husband had the terrific idea of kodaking (kodachquer) her in the most unexpected sites and most captivating costumes” (55). He goes on to narrate those costumes, marveling at the accompanying captions as “masterpieces,” which he reads aloud word for word, enraptured. If Lorrain, who devotes four entire pages of his novel to describing Delarue-Mardrus’s appearances in the magazines, seems particularly irritated by the glorified presence of this particular muse, perhaps it was because his own novella, Ellen, was first introduced on a page of Femina that faced one featuring the poetess in oriental garb.7
By the end of this encounter, Emma and Emile—for he is simply a male version of her, this mediocre mortgage officer, the provincial husband gamely following his wife’s bidding—are demoralized, their dreams quickly deflating. How could they compete with such figures? “Madame Farnier had never wandered through Kroumirie and the sands of the desert; Madame Farnier had never mounted a horse, in men’s clothing, on the roads of North Africa” (59). Her energies sapped, Emma hardly protests when Evimore cuts off her sleeves and opens her collar to expose her neckline.
After this long discourse on the actual articles that appeared in Femina and La Vie Heureuse, Lorrain retreats deep into fictional territory, abandoning the provocative Belle Epoque narrative of new kinds of female visibility in favor of the older but persistent storyline. To her husband’s alarm and incomprehension, Emma quickly drains her prize money in an effort to accommodate the sartorial demands of her new role, in the familiar trope of Bovaresque feminine desire channeled into shopping. Soon she is being courted by the seedy old Monsieur Agrado, and seduced by the painter Madame de Mauves, who covers her with baffling kisses that her innocent mind struggles (and fails!) to interpret. The newest “it-girl” of the publishing world, she cannot move without being ogled and is inundated with fan mail teeming with sexual innuendo. Gossip rags detail her unrealized sexual exploits as faits accomplis, while the poor young wife from Avignon is transformed into a full-fledged Sapphic demimondaine on the verge of that disease of the (nineteenth) century, hysteria.8 Alarmed at her own naiveté, Emma laments, “I came to Paris, not to do prostitution, but rather, literature” (255); the parallel construction of the sentence betrays the public aspect of both activities that made them equivalent, at least for women. At the novel’s end, Emma and Emile have fled home (although the family has already written to sever ties with these shame-ridden relatives)—bonded together now through their mutual shame. Hardly “poetess of the year” material, Emma is fully humbled when she returns to her existence as the chastened wife of the lowly mortgage broker. In the final scene, the journalist who has written an article for Le Scandale describing Emma’s lesbian seductions is attacked by a posse of women artists and writers, his face bleeding from their violent scratches. The editor of Le Laurier watches smugly, having orchestrated this revenge on the rival journalist who had prevented him from expanding his lucrative enterprise on the back of this new celebrity.
Jean Lorrain inserts his women’s magazine, then, into the narrative trajectory of so much French realist and naturalist fiction, taking Emma F. to her logical and inevitable conclusion, the errant bourgeois woman at the center of the late nineteenth-century narrative of decline. In the process, he invokes a litany of similarly unfortunate female heroines. Emma is explicitly compared to Dinah de la Baudraye of Balzac’s 1837 La muse du département, also “diverted from a peaceful life by the mirage of fame.”9 Balzac’s provincial bluestocking (herself a playful send-up of George Sand) tries to live up to the passion she evokes in her own poetry, written, of course, under a pseudonym, only to be chastened by the realities of Paris. Emma’s much-anticipated arrival onto the Parisian social scene, with the uttering of her name passing in the crowd from “mouth to mouth,” is also evocative of the entrance of Zola’s notorious courtesan Nana in his novel of the same name. Along the way, of course, Lorrain has furthered that persistent nineteenth-century slippage between woman writer and prostitute.
Finally, as in Maupassant’s 1884 short story “The Necklace” (“La parure”), whose antiheroine Mathilde Loisel is a close spiritual cousin of Madame Bovary, Maison pour dames invites readers to take pleasure in a cautionary tale about unbridled female ambition, bred of consumerist lust and the desire to imitate those more fortunate. In Maupassant’s text, Mathilde (who is introduced as a charming young woman born “as if by an error of fate, into a family of workers”) loses the necklace she had borrowed from a rich girlfriend in order to attend a ball; she spends the next ten years working to pay back debts incurred in replacing it, only to discover that the original had been fake.10 It’s too late, of course, for Mathilde, haggard and worn, to learn the lesson that modern life means a lack of distinction between real and fake riches—a lesson for which she herself served as an example in her glorious appearance at the ball. Just as the invitation that the earnest husband Monsieur Loisel brings home is not enough—his wife then needs a dress and jewelry to attend the ball—Emma F.’s prize earnings are quickly poured into the clothes and accessories she must purchase in order to take part in the world to which her poem has served as an invitation (and Maupassant’s tale is perhaps evoked in Lorrain’s penultimate chapter, “The Queen’s Necklace,” where Monsieur Agrado tempts Emma with dazzling jewels). As Mathilde and Emma Bovary before her, the provincial Madame Farnier is punished for attempting to climb beyond her God- and marriage-given lot, ruined but chastened by this unfortunate encounter with Paris and its temptations. Indeed, all three texts are Cinderella-stories gone awry: women longing to be lifted out of their mundane existences in order to become princesses, but denied happy endings. Lorrain’s cruel yet lighthearted narrator, like Flaubert’s and Maupassant’s playfully sadistic ones, seems to take pleasure in bringing Emma down along with the women’s press to which she had hinged her dreams of a better life.
The discomfort with women’s upward social mobility reflected in Balzac, Flaubert and Maupassant’s works maps onto a distinct unease in Jean Lorrain’s writing with the expansion of women’s intellectual opportunities. His novel reads the magazines via enduring nineteenth-century stereotypes through which women were either courtisanes or ménagères—harlots or housewives; the story follows Emma’s attempted (and failed) conversion from the latter to the former, without destabilizing either side of the dichotomy. Interestingly, Lorrain associates Le Laurier d’Or with feminism, a term both Femina and La Vie Heureuse consciously avoided precisely because of its association with the rejection of conventional gender norms. If Le Laurier might be considered feminist, it was in the sense of that particular Belle Epoque brand of gender resistance so eloquently described in Mary Louise Roberts’s Disruptive Acts: the bold, audacious behavior of certain Belle Epoque women meant to upend gender orthodoxy and allow women into brave new realms. Lorrain’s novels remind us that the women he portrayed would likely have been considered feminists by many because of this behavior, but would have been just as likely to eschew the term, which was associated with a specific political stance. While many famous Belle Epoque women writers did in fact exploit the associations of modern femininity with sexual audacity in their novels, those women were not the darlings of Femina and La Vie Heureuse. Lorrain’s depiction thus conflates two very different modes of challenging gender norms during the Belle Epoque, demonstrating how the audacious “New Woman” stereotype, then and now, occulted other forms of resistance and feminist expression. While Femina and La Vie Heureuse were consumed with celebrity, they steered carefully away from gossip or scandal. Indeed, they worked vigilantly to be the very image of propriety. And despite Lucie Delarue-Mardrus’s frequent presence (which we know to have been somewhat anomalous), the rest of “Sapho 1900” was absent from these pages. The word lesbian would never be printed; illicit sexuality or (heaven forbid!) adultery never even suggested. Some of the most famous women writers of this generation (Rachilde, Colette, Renée Vivien) and some of the most prolific popular writers (Jane de la Vaudère) would never be found, let alone mentioned, in their pages because of the very audacity of their prose.11
Lorrain’s novel brings into relief the extent to which the nuanced feminist stance of these magazines and the particular ideology they seemed to represent for thousands of French women was invisible to those not seeking it. Even someone who wrote for Femina, and who had read enough articles from both Femina and La Vie Heureuse to cite several of them directly in his novel, was unable (or unwilling) to recognize the other kinds of discussions taking place within these publications, or to distinguish between their straightlaced bourgeois feminism and the overtly “disruptive act” challenges to gender norms enacted in other venues, print and elsewhere. The conversation orchestrated by Femina and La Vie Heureuse was taking place between and among a substantial group of women and a select number of men; but those not part of the conversation seem to have been largely oblivious to it.
By misunderstanding the complexity (or internal contradictions) of Belle Epoque feminism in this way, Lorrain’s novel reads the world of the women’s press in much the same way that other misogynistic Belle Epoque critics read the surge of women’s writing from the period. The world he describes, albeit satirically, mirrors Charles Maurras’s 1905 commentary on the underworld of women writers as a secret city of lesbians: “where man only appears as an intruder or monster.”12 The democratization of female intellect was a source of deep anxiety for many male critics of the Belle Epoque, who feared not only that women were abandoning their wifely duties (women writers of this generation were often figured as lesbians or prostitutes), but that the influx of female-authored writing would soon eclipse their own share of the market.13 It’s worth noting in this context that of all the different kinds of women celebrated in Femina and La Vie Heureuse, Lorrain chose women writers as his object of ridicule. According to critic Octave Uzanne, by 1894, 1,211 women were members of the Société des gens de lettres; in an essay dated May 1903, the critic Jean Ernest-Charles sarcastically referred to “the five hundred and some odd women who published novels this month”—a figure intended to have shock value. The year 1908 in which Lorrain’s novel was published may in fact have been a tipping point for French women writers: the point at which the woman writer became fully visible in all her success.14 Following that year, numerous volumes were devoted to analyzing the phenomenon: literary critic Jean Bertaut wondered whether there was a crisis at hand or the first step of an evolution, whereas Jules Flat worried about distinguishing between the “crowded battalions” of women writers and those who had true talent.15
Lorrain’s novel diffused the threat of the thinking woman by resurrecting the link between female creativity and moral corruption and then exacting fictional revenge. As Emma Farnier narrowly escapes from the nefarious hyper-sexualized underworld of Parisian journalism, his satire leaves her in much the same position in which Emma Bovary started, fifty years earlier: destined for a life of frustration. But much had changed in those fifty years, including, importantly, the availability of new screens upon which women could project their fantasies of upward mobility. His literary revenge does nothing to address the very real question of the emergence of large numbers of women writers—the ones far from scandal or secret sexual rituals. In light of this, it’s particularly telling that Marbo’s 1907 response to Yver’s Princesses de science—“The Intellectual Housewife”—about whether educated, professional women could have successful marriages, closed with a meditation on none other than Emma Bovary herself. Women who were not cut out to be housewives should be able to become “useful minds,” claimed Marbo, echoing Femina’s own 1902 promise to guide women in that direction.16 “Had she been capable of it, Madame Bovary would have been better off studying medicine,” she wrote, imagining Emma as a doctor in her own right. In the narrative of the women’s press, then, Emma Bovary’s problem was not desire itself, but the absence of ways for women to direct ambitions that did not conform to their circumscribed domestic roles. Femina and La Vie Heureuse thus served as modes of ordering what might otherwise be disordered; sexual deviance was no longer a result of intellectual exertion or excesses of imagination, but rather, lack of available paths for women to direct those processes. Send Emma to medical school and her problems are averted. As for Emma Farnier? In another novelist’s hands, she might have read some Tinayre and Compain and found a way to work through her literary success in order to update her marriage so as not to die of boredom: then she could fit right into the magazines’ framework for the femme moderne, and perhaps even discover her own means of work-life balance.
Lorrain’s novel traces the rise and fall of a fictional fifteen minutes of female literary glory. In the next chapter, we will see the real-life version of this story: what happens when an actual woman writer made famous by Femina and La Vie Heureuse falls prey to the whims of a fickle public just beyond her devoted female readership.