A BELLE EPOQUE MEDIA STORM
Marcelle Tinayre and the Legion of Honor
On January 19th, 1908, a Henriot cartoon in the “Semaine illustrée” section of the Parisian daily Le Petit Journal depicted an elegant woman in the distance, descending a well-appointed staircase.1 Throngs of people swarm the street below her; one fellow has climbed up a lamppost to catch a glimpse and another hovers from a treetop. In the caption, a couple looking on discusses the spectacle. Asks one: “So what is it? Everyone is looking!” Replies the other: “It’s the woman who did not want to be honored (décorée) in order to avoid being noticed.”
As Parisian readers at the time well knew, the woman in question was none other than Marcelle Tinayre; the decoration at stake was that of the Legion of Honor, the award established by Napoleon to honor French patriotism. Less than two weeks earlier, Tinayre’s name had been leaked as a presumptive nominee for the rank of chevalier.2 She would not have been the first woman to receive the honor, nor the first woman writer—fellow novelist Daniel Lesueur had been decorated in 1900; but the award was primarily given to men, and controversy still brewed around Sarah Bernhardt’s repeated exclusion from its ranks (she would not be decorated until 1914).3 On January 7, following the announcement, the daily newspapers La Liberté and La Patrie featured interviews with Tinayre and the following day Le Temps published a letter from the author reflecting on her nomination. In these articles, Tinayre expressed amusement and surprise over her sudden glory: “A knight! Me, a knight! No, it’s too funny,” she mused to La Patrie, adding that she would not be the kind of masculine hero Napoleon had in mind when creating the honor. She couldn’t possibly wear the red ribbon, she told the interviewers, referring to the medal that accompanies the honor—a cross-shaped badge suspended from a ribbon traditionally worn over the left breast—for doing so might lead people in the metro to notice her and misinterpret her identity. This decision, she reported, went against the advice of her seamstress, who thought it would look lovely against a black suit (Le Temps). The Legion of Honor, Tinayre insisted, was not something she would have ever solicited; indeed, when Aristide Briand—then minister of Public Instruction and Worship—had mentioned it to her at an earlier moment, she told him he could better please her with a strand of pearls (La Liberté). Further, the award might trouble her young son, “who doesn’t want his mommy to be ‘different from other ladies’” (Le Temps) or discourage her hard-working artist-husband, “whose boutonniere was still free of decoration” (La Liberté).
Over the next several days, nearly one hundred articles appeared in the Parisian press, far beyond the carefully circumscribed pages of Femina and La Vie Heureuse. In fact, Tinayre’s comments were analyzed by publications across a wide spectrum of political affiliations, from the extreme right to the left-leaning; major dailies and gossip rags participated in the media storm in nearly equal measure4: it was a veritable media frenzy surrounding a scandal that became known as the Affaire Tinayre. The vast majority of voices opposed Tinayre’s nomination, citing her mockery of French tradition and a hyperfeminized modesty that was deemed disingenuous, as the Henriot cartoon attests. Tinayre’s words were scrutinized relentlessly, and her feminism, maternal obligations and career choice became journalistic fodder for essays, satires, letters, cartoons and polemics over the course of nearly two weeks. When the official list of honorees was finally released one week later, Tinayre’s name was notably absent; her nomination had not been ratified.5
Tinayre’s well-documented unraveling at the hands of the mass press reveals a troubling disconnect between the image of modern femininity promoted in Femina and La Vie Heureuse and ones accepted by the mainstream media. It demonstrates, once again, the extent to which the femme moderne’s carefully choreographed balance of femininity and feminism was difficult to assimilate beyond its meticulously constructed domain. The self-effacing remarks of a woman being celebrated for her intelligence and creativity—comments perfectly natural within the pages of the women’s (semi-)glossies and consistent with their model of feminine achievement—were attacked as an absurd, disingenuous performance outside of them. Even more stunning in Tinayre’s public bashing was the fact that this writer had herself been so savvy, as we have seen, in manipulating the image of herself circulated to readers.
A key element of this disconnect can be traced to the magazines’ sophistication as a media outlet, reminding us that Femina and La Vie Heureuse were still innovative in developing their particular genre of the biographical feature story. The magazines’ frequent multipage exposés on any given woman writer (as well as their biographical articles on other female role models), with their visually dramatic combination of photography, intimate looks inside the home, and “candid” personal commentary, created a sense of intimacy between the public female figure and her readers. While stories about famous men (and women) were regular features of other illustrated magazines, these figures were generally admired from a critical distance. Femina and La Vie Heureuse were unique in their efforts to collapse the boundary between idol and lectrice, always trying to make it look as if the reader was genuinely a part of the conversation. Tinayre’s casual, personal comments were a product of this modern celebrity relationship, which Richard Schickel dubbed that of “intimate strangers” in his book on celebrity culture in twentieth-century America. But her offhand tone was strikingly dissonant with both the cultural practices of the daily press (where photos never appeared) and the sense of gravity surrounding the national honor. The Tinayre episode vividly demonstrates, then, how the complications of a nascent celebrity and media culture were intertwined with the fate of the femme moderne. What we have here is a perfect (media) storm, as anxiety and confusion about modern gender roles hit up against anxiety and confusion about modern celebrity.
Marcelle Tinayre’s Adventure
Tinayre’s initial controversial remarks appeared on January 7 and 8, after her nomination was announced, in the letter (supposedly solicited) that she wrote to Le Temps and in interviews she promptly offered to La Patrie and La Liberté.6 “It’s true, I’ve been decorated. It’s not my fault,” began the letter addressed to the editor of Le Temps, published on the front page of the paper. Tinayre insisted that she did nothing to solicit the honor, an admission repeated in the other two publications.7 She went on to reflect on what she described as an already uncomfortable relationship to celebrity, explaining that she had always been both “a little bit shy and a little bit prideful.” Fame, she asserted, did not conjugate well with femininity, noting that while the writer might have pretenses to vanity, “the woman scoffs at the writer, and she is the one who has the last word.” In the letter as well as in the two interviews, Tinayre explained that, despite her deep appreciation for and willingness to accept the honor, she had decided that she could not wear the “pretty ribbon and the pretty cross” in public.8 She gave a series of reasons for this decision, all of which seemed to point to a discomfort with being thrust into a traditionally masculine role: the decoration would attract uncomfortable attention to her in public; Napoleon had intended it for male heroes; so many others had merited it, including her husband, but remained unadorned; it would upset her young son, whose antifeminist inclinations she admitted being troubled by (and thus cleverly acknowledged both her feminism and her willingness to live with its opponents).
In the context of Femina and La Vie Heureuse, Tinayre’s conscientiously diffident comments to the Parisian dailies would likely have been received as a welcome feminization of the masculine role of authorship, a reminder that, though a writer, she was still womanly. But in the context of the mainstream press, destined towards a primarily male audience (or at least one where the male point of view served as the generic neutral) and unaccustomed to the register of discourse in which she was speaking, those same words appeared nothing short of preposterous. Not surprisingly, Tinayre’s apparent irreverence provided an opening for a backlash against women writers, whose success and rising numbers had been posing an increasing threat to their male counterparts in the early years of the century. The conservative commentator Jean Ernest-Charles, who had brooded over the proliferation of women writers in a regular Saturday column, was among the most forceful to take the bait.9 Following a strongly worded piece in the January 8 Gil Blas mocking Tinayre’s modesty, on January 18, he devoted an entire issue of his journal Le Censeur politique et littéraire to the affair. Entitled “Madame Marcelle Tinayre’s Adventure,” it was a collection of approximately forty articles that had appeared in the previous ten days, setting the tone through Ernest-Charles’s initial declaration: “There are too few occasions for laughter in the world.”10 Beyond a reason to laugh, Ernest-Charles promised the affair would offer insight into “contemporary mores,” literary and otherwise. Ernest-Charles was particularly irritated by what he perceived as Tinayre’s inappropriate garnering of publicity, which he saw as characteristic of women writers as a group (although he also admitted that they probably learned this from their male predecessors and peers). In an article entitled “Women of Letters” that appeared in the January 12 edition of the Gil Blas, he wrote: “Publicity! Publicity! Publicity! Women writers are publicity crazy!”11 Without mentioning Tinayre’s name explicitly, he mocked her supposed high manners throughout the piece, before launching into a tirade against women writers, who, he claimed, had overly benefited from attention granted them.12 For Ernest-Charles, then, Tinayre’s feminized persona and her carryings-on about her appearance were merely a ruse—part of a greater shared effort by women writers to hide their decidedly unconventional behavior (writing, making money) in conventionally feminine terms, for their own purely selfish motives. The contemporary woman writer, this argument suggested, was not the delicate woman she pretended to be, but rather, no better than the aggressive bluestockings of the nineteenth century, and thus hardly a true woman after all. Ernest-Charles’s response put the woman writer in the same camp as other subversive female figures of the Belle Epoque—including feminists, suffragettes, cyclists, and all variations of the New Woman—who were perceived as abandoning conventional sex roles and thus threatening basic social structures.
Matching Ernest-Charles in vitriol for the femme de lettres was a piece by the writer Clément Vautel in the January 10 edition of La Liberté. Vautel picked up on the comments of Tinayre’s young son that he wanted her to be like other mothers. Calling attention to the fact that, even without the red ribbon, the woman writer was already not a conventional mother, Vautel’s piece showcased a notion that Tinayre and the women’s press were working particularly hard to fight: that motherhood was incompatible with writing, and implied a lapse in maternal and wifely performance. Vautel thus imagined young Noël Tinayre describing what exactly those other mothers were doing that his was not:
I mean that they take care of their little boy and their husband, that they survey the kitchen, that they never go out alone, that they don’t read old books, that they never have ink-stained fingers, that they don’t lock themselves in their room all afternoon to do work, work always more work . . . These moms don’t talk about complicated things, they don’t have wrinkled brows; they are simple, patient, very sweet.
This imagined dialogue was followed by the admonition: “If Madame Tinayre is reasonable, she will stop writing immediately.”13
Vautel’s and Ernest-Charles’s tirades are examples of a common consequence of public scandals in the media age, which can produce a rush of previously censored sentiment momentarily made acceptable by dint of the public figure’s blunder. Just as the intense preoccupation with the New Woman that had dominated print culture of the previous decade was beginning to fade, Tinayre’s comments clearly irritated nerves still sensitive about shifting gender roles; they tapped into fears that the women making their way into the public sphere were acting disingenuously, arriving at success through manipulation rather than merit, and thus subverting the very gender norms they often feigned to preserve.
Writers like Ernest-Charles and Vautel exploited the affair in an attempt to reignite these debates, hoping to prove, it seems, not unlike Jean Lorrain, that women were not meant to be writers after all. Their comments seem almost predictable in that context. But these were in fact the minority voices during those two weeks in January 1908. Indeed, despite the harsh criticism of Tinayre’s behavior apparent in these examples, the majority of her critics took pains to demonstrate their appreciation of Tinayre’s talent, and many went out of their way to defend women’s right to hold the honor. Franc-Nohain spoke of her “incontestable talent”; La Presse described her as “a woman of talent” and L’Autorité recognized her “very lovely talent.”14 Reacting to Tinayre’s statements that she did not think Napoleon would have approved of her nomination, numerous critics insisted that her award was fully consistent with Napoleon’s wishes to honor accomplishments beyond the military.15 Demonstrating proof of their belief in honoring women, if not this particular woman, many critics offered suggestions of female honorees to replace Tinayre; they included Sarah Bernhardt and the women writers Mademoiselle Dufau and Georges de Peyrebrune.16 L’Éclair invited previously decorated female honorees to comment on the scandal. Among them was the first femme de lettres to be decorated, Daniel Lesueur, who insisted that the only appropriate response to the honor was her “silent gratitude.”17 Lesueur’s astutely circumspect comment suggests that the controversy around Tinayre did not so much regard honoring a woman for her writing as it was concerned with the way in which she received it—the image of accomplished woman that she projected. Thus, while it is tempting to read the media outrage and the sheer quantity of responses to Tinayre’s comments as affirmation of wider French discomfort with women’s advances in the public sphere, and as proof of the public’s continued denigration of the woman writer, this interpretation misses the import of the Tinayre affair.18 While certainly the negative associations of the woman writer and the New Woman persisted and were stirred up by these events, what the media frenzy reveals most pointedly about Belle Epoque society is that most of the public was attempting to move away from the rigid gender roles of the past, and yet not quite able to imagine what a professional woman writer should look like or what her public role should be. It was a moment of ambivalence, if not confusion—one that, ironically, so many women novelists themselves were engaged in working through, as we have seen. Most crucially, the question that rose dramatically to the surface was no longer whether a woman should hold the honor, but rather how she should go about doing so.
One of the issues that the public responded to most vociferously was Tinayre’s initial declaration that she would not wear the red ribbon, so as not to be noticed by the corner grocer—despite her seamstress’s urging to put it on her tailleur noir.19 Among dozens of others parsing these comments, Franc-Nohain, a frequent contributor to Femina and La Vie Heureuse, mocked Tinayre’s seeming preoccupation with the challenge of wearing the “the star of the brave” on a chest that, “fortunately!” in her words, didn’t resemble that of a soldier, as a frivolous concern that betrayed a lack of respect for Napoleonic tradition (“and with what a tone, what a smile,” he insisted). But while the press relentlessly mocked Tinayre’s emphasis on fashion and appearance, her sartorial challenge was the stage on which a much larger debate was playing out over the place of conventional femininity in the public sphere (one not unlike recent scrutiny of both Hillary Clinton’s and Sarah Palin’s wardrobes, or those of Rachida Dati and Cécile Duflot on the other side of the Atlantic).
In Tinayre’s case, the challenge was actually rooted in the basic, practical problem that Franc-Nohain was so quick to dismiss: how does a decorated woman writer wear the medal? Citing her comment that she would have preferred a chain of pearls, Emile Faguet remarked in the January 9 issue of Le Gaulois that she deserved the jewelry and the medal. “The necklace is for the charming woman; the ribbon is for the artist. When one is both one and the other, one must accept the two decorations. [. . .] Why else do you have shoulders and also genius?” This was one real aspect of Tinayre’s dilemma: how to bear her shoulders and wear the ribbon. If decorated men regularly wore theirs upon their lapel, was a woman expected to do the same even when inhabiting more traditional roles? One possible solution was concocted by none other than Femina in 1904, when Julia Bartet became the first actress to receive the honor. In celebration, Femina raised 1800 francs from subscribers in order to present her with a diamond-encrusted version of the cross that traditionally accompanied the medal, and honored Bartet with a gala affair. Tinayre herself seemed to refer to this indirectly when she told Delaunay in a published interview, “I think I’ve found a way out of the problem. Here it is: it’s to have a tasteful jeweler make a tiny diamond cross that I will put on as a brooch.”20 Such an object, one imagines, could be worn in multiple circumstances, while remaining subtle enough (and assimilable to other kinds of female ornamentation) not to attract undue attention. Despite its clear relevance to the Tinayre scandal, no other reference to Femina’s honoring of Bartet appeared in the general press, a fact which serves as another striking proof of the disconnect between the women’s magazines and their peer publications during this time.
Rather than a red herring or a way to distract from the “real” gender equality question at hand, the preoccupation with clothing was quite fundamental, as it signaled the challenge of imagining this public figure and thus allowing her into the collective social imaginary. This was precisely the work in which Femina and La Vie Heureuse were engaged: their pages were an explicit effort to offer a model of what a successful modern woman should look like. But Tinayre’s comments suddenly made visible for a broader reading public the jumble of contradictions upon which that image of female success was based; we can thus recognize, in the reaction, the extent to which this model was tightly circumscribed by the controlled framework of the women’s press and the rigid parameters that Belle Epoque literary feminism had set for itself. Much of the ink spilled in response to Tinayre’s remarks was devoted simply to repeating what she had said and quoting other papers quoting her. While Tinayre’s charming tone was entirely familiar to her chères lectrices, the very act of reframing her words outside of their original context (her own letter and interviews) served as commentary in itself; the only editorializing needed in some cases was an added italics or exclamation point (“a string of pearls!”).21 Tinayre’s well-established public image amongst her readership was thus revealed to be just that: a construction intended for, and embraced by, a very limited audience.
Modesty, a Feminine Virtue?
Tinayre later clarified her original refusal to wear the ribbon in L’Écho de Paris, saying: “I will wear the ribbon with pride in circumstances that seem to me appropriate and suitable, but not on the street,” and elaborated to L’Intransigeant her horror of being hounded by curious onlookers.22 But this clarification hardly satisfied readers. Like the Henriot cartoon, which called attention to the contradiction between Tinayre’s willingness to speak to the press and her avowed refusal of public recognition, a January 9 article in L’Aurore entitled “Modesty, a Feminine Virtue,” read: “Madame Tinayre, who is discreet, thus confides to thirty-eight million French people and all the citizens of the world that she will not wear her decoration at all.”23 Discretion, or modesty, was indeed key to Tinayre’s self-presentation, as she offered herself up as a talented and hardworking writer blind to her own success. But this insistence on feminine modesty, of all traits, seemed fundamentally incompatible with the obligations of celebrity: how could one appear in widely circulating publications, exposing one’s private life for general consumption, and claim this quality—while also claiming a desire to avoid unwanted attention? On top of this inherent contradiction, French tradition added another level of pressure, as it had always privileged a firm line between public and private life. The seemingly disproportionate response to Tinayre’s remarks, then, stemmed at least in part from deep discomfort with this new and largely unfamiliar aspect of celebrity culture, further exacerbated by Tinayre being a woman and thus meant to be an exemplar of discretion herself. Even as she insisted on her traditional feminine values, Tinayre’s comments horrified readers who saw this insistence—by virtue of its public framework—as both unfeminine and anathema to the rules of French propriety.24
Femina and La Vie Heureuse, on the other hand, attempted to resolve the internal contradiction of the discreet female public figure through a systematic conflation of those traditionally separate public and private spheres. As we saw in the feature stories discussed in Chapter 2, Tinayre and her colleagues’ public personae—the images of them circulated to the thousands of readers of Femina and La Vie Heureuse—often relied on the assimilation of the woman writer with her domestic domain. Reading the features on Tinayre, one has the impression that she never left the house and would never want to do so.25 After all, the modest woman writer does not parade around flaunting her talents; rather, she can only be admired if one catches a glimpse of her within her own home. Her very public image within the magazines thus served to reinforce the idea that she had never left the private sphere, collapsing in that sense their opposition. The extensive photographic documentation of women writers in their domestic interiors helped tremendously to maintain this illusion: readers became familiar with Tinayre in her own home, and could picture her next to her husband, playing with her children (Fig. 7.1). Tinayre’s comments to Le Temps, La Patrie and La Liberté following news of her nomination must also be considered, therefore, in the context of this familiar, familial image she had developed in the women’s press. When, in the mainstream publications, she ever-so-charmingly offered a glimpse into the colorful domestic world she shared with a precocious son, doting husband and opinionated seamstress, she was referencing well-documented biographical details that would have been deemed highly relevant in the pages of Femina and La Vie Heureuse.26
Moreover, Tinayre’s remarks about not wanting to be noticed are actually not as inconsistent as they might first appear: there is a difference between the public nature of appearing in a magazine and the public nature of appearing on the street. While she had no problem revealing her intimate details to the press, she did not want that intimacy with strangers on a personal level (a challenge celebrities and their fans have been wrestling with ever since). But this distinction was still quite new in 1908. Tinayre herself had not yet quite worked out the precise balance between her public and private roles, perhaps because Femina and La Vie Heureuse actually only offered a media solution; they had not yet offered a way for women to assimilate public and private roles outside of their pages—in other words, in the real world, on the street, in ordinary life.
Tinayre gave voice to one aspect of this lingering tension explicitly, if playfully, in her letter to Le Temps, when she spoke of the battle between the woman and writer: “The writer might perhaps be tempted towards vanity, but the woman could care less about the writer, and she’s the one who has the last word. It’s the writer who is decorated, but it’s the woman who has to wear the decoration!27 In this context, the term writer, or écrivain (and thus the public aspect of her identity) was not at all neutral, but rather remained very much a masculine identity, placed in tense opposition to the woman whose identity he shared. Tinayre’s comments in effect underline the dearth (or absence) of public space that Femina and La Vie Heureuse had ultimately allotted for their version of the femme écrivain, as she was revealed to be nothing more than a journalistic construction, a contradiction in terms. The public persona crafted in the women’s press could, paradoxically, only be imagined in the private sphere, or in a perfectly circumscribed public forum—such as a reception honoring her. To appear in the metro or on the street—that is, in daily life—as a celebrated écrivain would somehow be an affront to her carefully maintained femininity.
Figure 7.1 Marcelle Tinayre pictured at home with her family in a Femina feature story (October 1, 1904).
Picking up on this conflict in the January 9 edition of the Gil Blas, Michel Psichari parsed Tinayre’s comment, writing of the “heroic combat” in Tinayre’s mind between the écrivain and the femme in a dialogue that astutely staged the competing interests over the way the woman writer might want to be seen:
THE WRITER: Decorated! . . . Thus, the star of the brave will shine on my chest!
THE WOMAN: You’re joking? Never, never will I consent to wear the red ribbon: I’ll be taken for a bluestocking!
THE WRITER: Is that possible?
THE WOMAN: In the metro, when people see me, they’ll think: it’s a woman who must be a nun who took care of victims of the plague.
THE WRITER: Not at all! They’ll think: it’s the famous author of La maison du péché, the most admirable of novels, the most poignant, the most marvelous, the most sublime . . .
THE WOMAN: Be quiet! It’s not proper to say everything out loud, even things that are true, especially what you’re saying.
THE WRITER: So you’re forbidding me to put the medal of honor on my corsage?
THE WOMAN: Yes!
THE WRITER: Will you at least let me make that decision public?
THE WOMAN: Of course. And could you at the same time reconcile my legitimate pride as a woman of letters with my simple feminine modesty—without looking like you’re doing so!
Psichari’s satire cleverly explains the paradox at the heart of Tinayre’s struggle. If a celebrity has often been defined as “someone who is famous for being famous,” Tinayre became famous for ostensibly not wanting to be famous—or rather, for trying very hard to look like she did not want to be famous.28 Psichari unpacks the multiple conflicting impulses of the Belle Epoque woman and writer that effectively render a respectable public image impossible. The femme was trapped now in her beautifully appointed home, unable to maintain her established persona as écrivain beyond the private sphere without somehow tainting it or being mocked for wanting to protect it. Femina and La Vie Heureuse had found a way to envision a modern female ideal balancing femininity and feminism; what they failed to imagine was how the female celebrity—the actual human being who existed beyond their pages—could step out of their pages and onto the boulevard.
Tinayre’s excessive professions of modesty, I would suggest, were the result of a feminist double-bind crucial to understanding the gendered nature of celebrity in Belle Epoque France. Unlike her male peers, who routinely lobbied for nominations to the Legion of Honor and then wore their ribbons with pride, thereby acknowledging their acceptance of well-earned public attention, Tinayre believed in her right as a woman to hold the honor but knew that admitting so would be considered unfeminine.
Pride, as the Psichari dialogue so vividly demonstrates, was a masculine characteristic in the Belle Epoque, whose only feminine corollary was modesty. By so publicly acting out her modesty, however, Tinayre revealed her desire for the very attention she declared neither to want nor deserve. Men had the right to celebrity in the Belle Epoque, and their process of claiming it went unquestioned; women’s fame, on the other hand, was only acceptable to the extent to which they appeared not to have orchestrated or desired it. By taking such public pains to appear unconcerned about her fame, Tinayre revealed to the French public just how acutely preoccupied with it she truly was, thus serving herself up to be devoured by the very print culture she sought to control.
One of the great ironies of the Tinayre affair is that the person most aware of this double standard may have been Tinayre herself, and that her awareness was likely what motivated her remarks.29 Tinayre was a sometime journalist herself (a fact she reminds readers of in both her letter to Le Temps and her interviews with La Patrie and La Liberté, explaining her willingness to speak as an act of compassion for her fellow writers). She left several clues of the extent to which she was keenly aware of the power of the women’s press and the roles it required its female subjects to assume. She appears to have been an active player in constructing her public identity in the pages of Femina and La Vie Heureuse as a talented yet modest ultrafeminine figure. In a Femina feature story, she is quoted as telling the interviewer: “Tell them that I love my children, that I’m a good mother—even if I don’t know how to wash up a child or teach them to read.” This comment put Tinayre in the same paradoxical position as did her comments about her nomination—she insisted on her modesty, but that very insistence calls the modesty itself into question. On the one hand, Tinayre is all the more admirable in her childrearing for her modesty in describing her lack of skill. On the other, she is revealed to be aggressively trying to control the way in which she is depicted.
Femininity and Feminism
Tinayre’s blunder in so unrelentingly insisting on her modesty forced the tacit acknowledgment that femininity could be used as a strategy; it gave way to a larger conversation about the relationship between feminism and femininity that demonstrated just how alien Femina and La Vie Heureuse’s femme moderne was to some mainstream readers. In his tongue-in-cheek address to her, Emile Faguet, who had written a highly favorable review of La rebelle in 1905, urged Tinayre to wear the ribbon, while accusing her of confusing femininity with feminism.30 “You think you’re a feminist,” he declared in a strikingly perceptive conclusion. “You’re not a feminist: you are a woman, and very much a woman. In this regard, you don’t want to resemble men, and a red ribbon seems to be an anomaly.” Faguet’s comments point to why Tinayre’s behavior seemed so inscrutable: as with the écrivain, the identity of feminist, according to his logic, was in tension with that of woman. The public associated a woman winning the Legion of Honor—and therefore assuming the stature of the écrivain—with feminism, and expected femininity to recede to the background. Belle Epoque literary feminism, however, allowed these seemingly opposing values to be reconciled; yet it did so in ways not always transparent to those unfamiliar with its workings.
The editors of Femina and La Vie Heureuse energetically provided a narrative—both textual and visual—to make the unfamiliar assimilable, explaining to readers again and again with the help of visually seductive evidence that it was possible to be both feminine and feminist. The 1904 photo spread of Tinayre herself in La Vie Heureuse (Fig. 2.18) serves as one of the most compelling examples: Tinayre sits at her desk, poised between daughter and manuscript, while the caption describes her ability to have it all: “Between the started manuscript and the child to whom she gives her hand, 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.” To modern readers, the caption seems almost redundant, narrating a picture that appears to speak for itself. The Tinayre affair makes clear, however, that every drop of evidence and guidance was crucial to making this new model of femininity believable. All this discursive work was in fact necessary to show that public achievements did not disallow traditional family structures, and that feminism could also be feminine.
Notably, a few female critics understood precisely what Tinayre was doing. Berthe Delaunay applauded Tinayre for making feminism more palatable, explicitly articulating the doxa of the women’s press and challenging the opposition of “feminist” and “feminine” that informed Faguet’s comments: “If Madame Marcelle Tinayre is a writer with great talent and striking intelligence who loudly claims the title feminist, she also knows how to remain womanly and motherly, and how to make feminism—which some inconsiderate viragos have alienated reasonable folks from—lovely.”
The actress Régine Martial was similarly perceptive: “Women writers don’t want to look like fossils. In order to affirm their femininity, one of them has exaggerated this gesture to such an extreme that it became puerile.” Reminding readers of Tinayre’s reference to Blaise Pascal in remarks to Le Matin well before the controversy, Martial added: “After her nomination, Madame Tinayre must have said to herself: if I say serious things I am going to annoy everyone.”31 She saw Tinayre’s behavior as a consequence of modern life, noting that George Sand (by then widely recognized as a great writer)—had she lived fifty years later—might have felt the need to do some “modern pirouettes” and ended up in a similar predicament. “She started playing hula hoops with the cross of the Legion of Honor,” wrote Martial, and with this playful image seemed to anticipate the contemporary references to “jumping through hoops” and “juggling acts” as a way of signaling the complex negotiations of the working mother. Martial ultimately blamed the moment, saying it was the fault of her “era” rather than her intelligence. In other words, Martial recognized that in this brave new media world, all sorts of dangers lurked for the famous woman.
On January 13, the Conseil de l’Ordre failed to ratify Tinayre’s nomination in a highly unusual rejection of the minister’s recommendations. A few commentaries followed in the coming days, after which the scandal largely went the way of media frenzies—into silent oblivion. There was little outcry from the women’s press—no mention in the Journal des femmes after its initial acclaim for Tinayre, and a decidedly measured piece in La Française. Femina, on the other hand, rose to the occasion. In her first cover appearance, Tinayre appears sitting inside her home; she leans gently into the book that she is reading, her arm resting on a table modestly decorated with a flower-filled vase (Fig. 7.2). The caption reads: “Madame Marcelle Tinayre, whom we believed for a week to be a chevalier of the Legion of Honor.” The paragraph beneath summarizes the affair: “Our eminent collaborator, the much-lauded author of La rançon, La maison du péché and La rebelle and so many other witty and pleasing sketches, was on the list of nominees for the most recent Legion of Honor. Everyone was thrilled for an honor so well earned, when we learned that the news had been premature. It should only be a postponement.” There is no mention of the scandal beyond these words. Inside, a caption beneath another demure photo describes its subject: “The eminent writer, who prides herself on being as much a woman as an artist, loves flowers, which she enjoys arranging in vases herself.”
Figure 7.2 Marcelle Tinayre, “whom we believed for a week to be a chevalier of the Legion of Honor.” Frontispiece to Femina (February 1, 1908).
