Marguerite Gautier: An Ideal Femininity

Jenna Tamisiea Elser

Sex and Rep

March 30, 2014

Final Paper- 1/3 DRAFT

Marguerite Gautier was chaste of heart. She was also a courtesan. She was diseased yet desirable. As Alexandre Dumas, fils’ consumptive heroine in his 1852 play, La Dame aux caméllias, Marguerite Gautier comes to represent “Everywoman, required to be both virtuous and alluring, and compelled to find identity in worldly suffering and the promise of otherworldly redemption”. Romanticized visions of ideal femininity like those found in Dumas, fils’ female protagonist swept through the literature and performing arts of the nineteenth century. Identification of this ideal femininity rested on the double myth of the sinner/saint, as well as feminine disease being inexorably

Instead of the real camellias surrounding the bourgeois Marguerite in Camille, Mimi speaks of having to embroider artificial flowers “a tela o a seta recamo in casa e fuori”(on canvas or silk, at home and outside) for her livelihood . Mimi’s description as a working woman in manufacturing is one example of how Puccini nods to the difference in social context of the disease during 1896. The reoccurrence of coldness is another. Mimi’s “gelida manina” (icy little hand) is mentioned throughout the libretto, and is significant as exposure to the cold was known to be a cause of

As she lay dying, her aria, “Sono andati?” is romantic and eloquent in contrast to her rather clumsy speech throughout the opera. Since Puccini portrayed Mimi as a victim of circumstance, she had no sin to purge. Nevertheless, her disease still rendered her desirable. In fact, by focusing on Mimi as the saintly part of Marguerite instead of the sinful, Puccini creates the epitome of anesthetized sickness: the femme fragile. The femme fragile of the nineteenth century is characterized by youth, fragility, and “budding sexuality” . The femme fragile is not a woman of superiority, but a woman in need of patriarchal care. Whether she receives this care or not, her fate as a diseased woman is sealed . Marguerite’s death can at least purge her of her regressions. With nothing to purge, Mimi simply embodies a femme fragile: a woman to be desired for her disease and adored for her death. In Mimi’s pre-Koch consumptive predecessors, including Marguerite, “the essentialist perspective on disease assumes a literary, nonmedical form” , focusing on aesthetic representations rather than medical. Even in the post-Koch reign of tuberculosis, Puccini does not let up on his persistence of Mimi as “conventionally consumptive” despite the new medical knowledge of his