Intimate Exchanges: The Courtesan Narrative and Male Homosocial Desire in La Dame aux camélias

Before Violetta moved audiences with her soaring arias in La Traviata, there was a play called La Dame aux camélias. But before the curtain ever rose on this melodrama, there was a novel of the same name. What sets Alexandre Dumas, fils’s original 1848 novel apart from its better-known theatrical and operatic adaptations is its narrative structure. Borrowing a structural technique from Manon Lescaut (more on this reference to come) the story of the courtesan Marguerite Gautier and her doomed love affair with Armand Duval unfolds for the reader as the heartbroken lover recounts his tale of woe to a sympathetic male listener. At the start of the novel, when the narrator meets Armand, the courtesan is already dead. The reader comes to know Marguerite, la dame aux camélias herself, never through her actions, but through the words of her mourning lover and two letters she has left behind.

The anonymous narrator who shares this story with us meets the grieving Armand by chance, and the two quickly form a close friendship—close enough that Armand feels comfortable sharing this personal tale with him and no one else. All the reader learns about the narrator is that he is male, around the same age and class as Armand, and that he felt great pity towards prostitutes even before learning of Armand and Marguerite’s true love.¹ After establishing a strong friendship that involves helping Armand transfer Marguerite’s remains to a better grave site and nursing him back to physical and emotional health, the narrator becomes the recipient of Armand’s sad tale. The story Armand tells the narrator, and that the narrator tells us, is a tragic one. A beautiful courtesan suffering from tuberculosis genuinely falls in love with a young admirer, whom she ultimately abandons in a selfless act to save his family’s honor, before succumbing to her disease and her broken heart.

Even though this novel never achieved the fame and popularity of its subsequent adaptations, a closer look at Dumas’s original text can shed light on an important part of the narrative. Considering the frame story that encloses the more familiar narrative reveals new insights into the allure of fictional prostitutes for nineteenth-century French authors. Thus, my focus here will be on the frame narrative and its two main characters: the narrator and Armand. I want to explore the story of how this story got told. My aim is to highlight not the prostitute’s body, as other critics have done, but the importance of her narrative.² The common interpretation of La Dame aux camélias is, as Naomi Segal succinctly describes, “The text is all about her body.”³ I would argue that the text is about much more. The courtesan herself only appears once in the frame narrative: as a gruesome exhumed cadaver. But her story becomes the glue that binds these two men in a special way. From the first words of the text, “on ne peut créer des personnages que lorsque l’on a beaucoup étudié les hommes,”⁴ the focus is on men getting to know men. Despite its title, this is a story about two men, not about a courtesan.

For the purposes of this essay, I will use the terms prostitute and courtesan interchangeably, although a prostitute is any person who accepts monetary compensation for sexual acts, and in the nineteenth century a courtesan is a more fashionable female prostitute of a higher price. Also, the mercenary nature of that profession will not be relevant here, except to the extent that the need and desire for money usually bring the prostitute into contact with more men than a woman who is merely adulterous would meet. The men mentioned in the context of this novel are presumed to be heterosexual because they have had or plan to have sex with a woman, namely Marguerite, although there are few indications that the narrator is sexually attracted to women. Finally, I will be employing Eve Sedgwick’s use of the term “homosocial...