Decadent Heroines or Modernist Lovers: Natalie Clifford Barney's Unpublished Feminine Lovers or the Third Woman

American émigrée Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972) was a prolific writer and a key figure in the Parisian literary scene at the turn of the century. One of her most compelling works, Amants féminins ou la troisième (Feminine Lovers or the Third Woman, 1926), has received almost no scholarly attention due to its unpublished status. Based on a tumultuous three-way love affair between Barney, Mimi Franchetti, and Liane de Pougy, the novel is an important autobiographical document that demonstrates a kind of continuity between decadence and modernism.

Just as Barney's pensées can be seen as an explicit response to Blaise Pascal's Pensées—by virtue of their form and content—we see certain resonances between Barney's Feminine Lovers or the Third Woman and the depiction of erotic domination and gender ambiguity in Baudelaire's "Condemned Women: Delphine and Hippolyta" in The Flowers of Evil. In her feminist response to Baudelaire, Barney draws on his depiction of gender ambiguity that, at least on the surface, demonizes a woman's sexual desire (especially the desire for another woman) and uses it for another purpose: to reaffirm the erotic in lesbian relationships and to illustrate the emotional complexities of such relationships. In this experimental modern novel, Barney draws on decadent discourse to create a new language of desire, one that more fully represents her own vision of the gender dynamics within a lesbian relationship.