"Ces Dames du Cirque": A Taxonomy of Male Desire in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Art

The career of Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938) encapsulates the multi-faceted thematics of desire, domination, display and creativity which nineteenth-century art and literature played out through the persona of the female circus performer. Suzanne is best known as the open-faced, golden-haired jolie môme in Renoir's Danse à la campagne, Danse à la ville (both from 1883) and Les Baigneuses (1887). Her unreliable memoirs have her as femme-serpent in a travelling circus and/or acrobate-écuyère at Paris's prestigious amateur circus, the Cirque Molier. More likely is that she was a figurante and apprentice acrobat at her local Cirque Fernando, in Montmartre. In the event, her career as circus artiste was ended by an accident, and she became a popular artists' model, posing for both impressionistes and pompiers. Responding to the needs and fantasies of her various "masters," she was a melancholy nymph for Herrer, a Muse for Puvis de Chavannes, Degas's dancing girl, a sullen absinthe-drinker, and the model for Toulouse-Lautrec's bareback rider in "Au Cirque Fernando: Ecuyère" (1888). ¹ Although it is the exaggerated massiveness of the horse's rump which is the primary focus, the seated rider (Suzanne) exhibits mastery over her steed, and has smiles for the crowd and enough bare flesh to please the gentlemen in the front row. In the third phase of her career, she became a painter herself, finally achieving that autonomous creativity which she might have gained in the ring as acrobat or écuyère and which she had only been able to mimic for Toulouse-Lautrec and others. In 1916 she returned to the circus, with a painting in her characteristic rich, earthy colors and bold black outlines, of "L'Acrobate": a woman all in red performing in the circus-ring, which could well be a portrait of her younger self from the Cirque Fernando days. ²

This article proffers the female circus performer in her various roles--femme-sauvage, figurante, acrobate, danseuse de corde, sylphide, dompteuse, écuyère--across a range of nineteenth-century texts from Balzac to Huysmans, and in artistic (as opposed to popular visual, e.g. poster-art) representations [the latter date almost entirely from the period 1879-99]. It is the traditional conjugation of male gaze and female "to-be-looked-at-ness" ³ which is the issue here (I have not come across the topos in female writers): how the spectacle of each category of circus performer was coded for erotic display and impact by male writers and artists, and how the categories of performance correlated with expressions of (male) desire and prerogative. Although often acknowledging her artistry and the discipline underlying her address, the female circus performer rarely emerged from these male texts (art works can be less specific and/or judgmental) as an autonomous creative being; most often she was situated within a patriarchal framework of male-female sociopolitical, as well as erotic, relations. Within such a reductive binary model as patriarchy, based on male fantasy as much as political imbalance, there can be only two potential co-existing categories for the female--Madonna or Whore: in the case of the female circus performer--victim or dominatrix, and both are, of course, only alternatively and differently negative. In addition, the various métiers of the circus had their own internal hierarchy, occasionally articulated by the women themselves or implicit in the author's perspective on the milieu he depicts--but nonetheless consistent across texts and the period. From this, a hierarchical model of male desire is tentatively posited.

Motives for the surge of interest in circuses in general, their performers and the spectacle they provide, by writers and artists in the latter half of the nineteenth-century, have been catalogued by (among others) Jean Starobinski, Frédérique Roche (closely following Starobinski), Louisa E...