Finding the Woman Who Didn't Exist: The Curious Life of Gisèle d'Estoc

Afterword

159 Afterword Final Lesson: There is no real beginning or end. Once upon a time there was a woman who pretended to be Gisèle d’Estoc. For a while, some people doubted that this woman really existed, and then for a while after that, people thought that Gisèle d’Estoc was Marie Elise Courbe, born in 1863. But she wasn’t, and now we know that, too. Gisèle d’Estoc was really Marie Paule Alice Courbe Parent Desbarres (1845–94), and now with this knowledge we can say that in a sense Marie Paule has finally become the woman she pretended to be all along; the connection between the two identities has been established. We have come full circle: there once was a woman who pretended to be someone else. The other identity took over, and people thought she no longer was who she was, but now we can see the connection again. The Sanskrit scholar Wendy Doniger has written extensively about stories from around the world in which a woman pretends to be someone else and people fail to recognize her, even though her outward appearance has not changed significantly. It is such a common narrative pattern that the examples Doniger discusses range from ancient Sanskrit mythological texts to popular Hollywood films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). In this film, hero Scottie falls in love with Madeleine (supposedly an old friend’s wife), who is really Judy acting the part of Madeleine. “Madeleine” dies (though not really) and when Scottie later meets Judy being herself, he does not recognize her, though she seems familiar (Freud would say “un- 160 Afterword canny”). It takes a while for Scottie (James Stewart) to realize that Madeleine and Judy (both played by Kim Novak) are really the same person. Doniger calls this pattern “the woman who pretends to be herself .” The women she describes make little or no effort to disguise themselves, so although they seem to be impersonating someone else, they can hardly be said to be misrepresenting themselves. Indeed, as someone else, they are arguably even more really their true selves, Doniger suggests. The story of Gisèle d’Estoc is, I would contend, another variation on the same narrative: once upon a time, a woman pretended to be someone called Gisèle d’Estoc, and even though she never attempted to disguise herself in any other way, people found it hard, somehow, to see who she really was. The vast range of examples Doniger analyzes combine to suggest that we are strangely blind when we see the same person in a different context. What we see is largely a function of what we expect to see. But even stranger than this poor ability to recognize those we already know is what makes the scales of blindness eventually fall from our eyes. For what enables Jimmy Stewart to see that it was really Kim Novak all along is love. Or as Doniger puts it, “Love is what endures and survives when either consciousness or appearance is destroyed” (204). As a thousand clichéd films, sensational novels, and popular stories testify , we cling to the belief that true soul mates recognize one another even when their external appearance has changed—or seems to have changed, or even indeed because it has changed—because the bond between souls that are meant to be together is deeper than anything as superficial as their mere appearance. The paradox of masquerade, suggests Doniger, is that it really tells a deeper truth, but someone must love the person enough to notice that the traits they had overlooked as those of a stranger are in fact familiar. For Doniger, this way of understanding identity as requiring the recognition of the other in order to truly be ourselves has an additional , postmodern, lesson. Rather than positing an inner core of self that puts on masks (different masks for different people at different times), a model of identity she ascribes to sociologist Erving Afterword 161 Goffmann, Doniger posits that there is only the surface.1 There is no true inner self that can take off the mask: “We are never ourselves merely to ourselves but always in relation to others, even if only imagined others” (204). Being one’s true self requires putting on the mask (pretending), not taking it off. This model of identity might be construed to mean that in order...