The Doomed Courtesan and Her Moral Reformers

The Doomed Courtesan and Her Moral Reformers Rachel Rusch One of the eminent myths in nineteenth-century Western literature has been the story of the doomed courtesan, destined to love truly but damned by a social imperative to perish. The accompanying myth ingrained in the study of this ¤gure is that she is somehow monolithic, as if the heavy role of fate in her story leaves no room for other de¤ning characteristics. In truth the doomed courtesan takes on many forms over the course of the century, as the character is constantly adapted according to the social demands of her era. Authors shaped the role to ¤t the prevailing morality of their time, using it either as proof or reproof of the society’s fears. In this essay I will show the mutual transformations of the doomed courtesan and her moral reformers by tracking the most paradigmatic of these ¤gures—Marguerite Gautier, the lady of the camellias—as she is represented in Alexandre Dumas ¤ls’s La dame aux camélias, Emile Augier’s Le mariage d’Olympe, and ¤nally Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real. The role of the doomed courtesan found its supreme expression in nineteenth-century France, where countless plays, operas, and novels portrayed women who rose from humble origins to become the mysterious women whose favors might be purchased only by a discriminating clientele with both the taste and the money to appreciate them. These women belonged to the demimonde, a term coined by Alexandre Dumas¤ls to describe a society “which sails like a ®oating island in the Parisian ocean and which hails, admits, and accepts all who fall, all who emigrate, all who escape from the mainland, not to mention haphazard wrecks of fortune whose original abode is unknown.1 Dumas ¤ls’s formulation placed these women in a half-world. The notion of a “half-world” gives the sense that the residents of this world have somehow been excised from the everyday world of the living and now reside in a liminal space where they are close to the real world but not quite in it—their ®oating island. This sort of indistinct existence disturbed many in the bourgeoisie , but there was also the worry that pulling the prostitute back into the de¤nite society in which they themselves dwelt might allow her sins to reenter their comfortable world and contaminate it. Unsure of how to contend with her, dramatists of the nineteenth century pushed the courtesan out of that liminal space and into the certainty of the grave. The essential example of the demimondaine comes, of course, from the author who coined the word. Dumas ¤ls’s Marguerite Gautier, heroine of La dame aux camélias, is the representation of the doomed courtesan from which all the rest spring. The theatrical version of La dame aux camélias was adapted in 1851 by Dumas ¤ls from his own successful novel. The play chronicles the failed love affair of Armand Duval and Marguerite Gautier, Paris’s most sought-after courtesan. Her renowned beauty is made all the keener by the promise that it will never fade into age, as Marguerite has the lethal diagnosis of a hereditary form of consumption . Fatality tinges her every breath, giving her splendor a frailty that appeals to the romantic taste for the bittersweet. Armand, smitten from afar, keeps vigil during one of Marguerite’s illnesses. The gesture’s devotion deeply affects Marguerite when she learns of it, leading her to abandon her practical sensibilities and take Armand as her lover and not her client. As Armand professes, to make a virgin fall in love with you is no great trick, but to win the heart of a woman who has so often sold it is a notable accomplishment indeed. Marguerite somehow believes that she still can possess a virgin heart despite her commercial worldliness and that she and Armand can behave as if they truly were innocent young lovers. The two spend a summer idyll away from Paris and Marguerite’s professional demands, but both Marguerite’s money and her health have begun to run out when Armand’s father arrives and begs Marguerite to give up...