Ritual Violence: Courbet and George Sand

Title and Interpretation

What is at stake in the naming of the work of art, the title of a poem, the few words that will add to, and be substituted for, the creation they designate? What is a title? More so than the title of a literary work, the title of a painting is irrevocably separated from its object. The title is changeable; it has a life of its own, reflecting the critic’s view as well as the artist’s words. ¹ The word title has several familiar meanings: an inscription placed over an object, the name of a work of art, a conferred distinction, that which justifies a claim, a legal right to possession of property, and, in a more archaic sense, an inscription over a tombstone. In all cases, a title has a synecdochal function, with representative, legal, and economic consequences. Because the title makes a selection, privileges a meaning, and carries a legal status, the title is above all an attempt at fixing sense and worth, at securing, once and for all, the otherwise floating value and meaning of the object it designates, but from which it is also separated. It is thus an interpretative gesture that preempts and determines all subsequent interpretations. To quote Jacques Derrida: “In quite a singular manner, the title remains foreign to language and discourse. It introduces in them an abnormal referential function, as well as a violence and an illegitimacy that founds legitimacy and the law.” ²

Figure 1.

Gustave Courbet, The Preparation of the Dead Girl (formerly called The Preparation of the Bride), ca. 1850–55. Oil on canvas, 74 x 99 in. Smith College Museum of Art. Reproduced by permission.

In recent years, a dramatic change of title has radically transformed the interpretation of a large Courbet canvas belonging to the Smith College Museum of Art. I would like to examine the arguments that allowed a painting, known for more than fifty years as Toilette de la mariée (Toilet of the bride) to be renamed Toilette de la morte (Toilet of a dead woman). ³

Courbet’s Bride

In 1929, the Bulletin of Smith College Museum of Art described the recently purchased Courbet painting as follows:

The bride, newly bathed and clothed in chemise, corselet and petticoat, is the reigning figure of the group. A girl kneeling in the foreground before her has put on one of her slippers, and the second is held in readiness by a woman who stoops forward with the wedding dress on her arm. A radiant creature in her teens contemplates the bridal wreath of orange blossoms which she has just arranged, while a mass of flowers on a low table before her is ready for the bouquet which the bride will carry in her hands. Two girls have drawn from a curtained alcove a low four poster. They are making the marriage bed. A trio of maidens, young things with missals in their hands rehearse sotto voce the music for part of the church ceremony. On the big table the cloth is already laid for the wedding breakfast, and a maid with lovely action plants in its center a tureen. . . . The local flavor of rural France is here. ⁴

But in an article written for the catalogue of the 1977 Courbet retrospective in Paris, Hélène Toussaint argued that La Toilette de la mariée was none other than La Toilette de la morte, a canvas mentioned in two early lists of Courbet’s paintings. What had been seen for decades as a preparation for a wedding, came to be reviewed as a death ritual.

Toussaint wrote: “Courbet undoubtedly painted, at an uncertain date, a picture entitled Toilet of a dead woman. This title figures, firstly, in the list of large paintings not at La Tour de Peilz that were delivered to Juliette Courbet in 1878 (Bibliothèque Nationale, Box VI) and, secondly, in Dr Blondon’s inventory of works still in Juliette’s possession after the public sales of 1881 and 1882 (Blondon papers, Bibliothèque de...