Abstract
This chapter examines de Pougy’s Idylle saphique (1901) and Les Sensations de Mlle de la Bringue (1904) as intertexts that dialogue with Nana. In both works, de Pougy vividly depicts the dangers, harassment, humiliation, and psychological damage endured by sex workers, an important but harsh reality never described by Zola and his coterie. In addition to the counter-discourse in Idylle, de Pougy’s writing also serves as a form of therapy for working through trauma. In Sensations, de Pougy recounts her alter ego demi-mondaine’s rise to the top and subsequent retirement in Brittany, which is an optimistic ending on her part because it allows the courtesan heroine to not only avoid death but also escape the drudgery of prostitution.
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Notes
- 1.
In her choice of her protagonist’s name, De Pougy continues the tradition of intertexuality in the courtesan novel sub-genre because Annhine chose her nom de guerre from Dumas fils’s Diane de Lys (21).
- 2.
For more on de Pougy capitalizing on her notoriety to sell her novel, see pages 47–48 in Dade.
- 3.
See Mesch on de Pougy’s difficulties publishing Idylle saphique (45). For a discussion of representations of lesbianism in the novel, see Hawthorne and Dade.
- 4.
Pougy’s description of her mentor, de la Bigne in Idylle, reflects the strong-willed fictional character portrayed in Isola as well as the real woman described in her biography. In Idylle, de Pougy describes her as surrounded by incredible luxury and as rationally leading the life of a true courtesan: “Sa devise était: Ego, et cela la résumait toute” [Her motto: Ego, summed up everything about her] (22–23).
- 5.
Welldon’s “Not Human Beings but Things” appears as one of the “short personal responses by women to a man-made myth” in Violetta and Her Sisters. In her article, she applies her observations concerning the motivations of the prostitutes she has analyzed in her practice to what she imagines the psychological impulses that drive Marguerite are in La Dame aux Camélias. By extension, I apply in this chapter Welldon’s observations about the psychology of a courtesan to Annhine’s actions.
- 6.
For more on the patriarchal stance against female homosexuality, see Michael Finn’s “Female Sterilization.” According to Finn, the “voice of patriarchy” in Idylle saphique claims that lesbianism makes women sterile and mad (38).
- 7.
De Pougy’s reference curiously anticipates Colette’s La Vagabonde (1910). Interestingly enough, the story, “Humanités” in Ecce homo features a dancer named Colette who runs into a theater man with whom she had worked while she is on holiday and he has briefly fled Annhine (of Idylle fame). When the two dine together in a hotel restaurant, some of the bourgeois guests assume the worst about the duo (even though they both go back to their rooms separately) and demand they be asked to leave the next day. Through servants’ gossip, the reader discovers that Colette and her friend are the honest ones since the hypocritical bourgeois guests are cheating on their spouses.
- 8.
Hawthorne explores what must be lacking in the novel to “account for the fact that at the end of Idylle saphique, Annhine dies, whereas the relationship with Barney proved far from fatal for Liane de Pougy” (137).
- 9.
De Pougy modeled Lebreton after Jean Lorrain, a journalist whom Robert Ziegler calls a “toxicomaniac” with an “affinity for the toad” (29).
- 10.
According to Wiktionnaire, faire la bringue means “faire la fête” [to party]. Teppe associates it with other French expressions associated with debauchery (163–164).
- 11.
Ziegler calls Lorrain “a jeering social critic who wrote acidulous Pall Malls” (29).
- 12.
See Mesch (56).
- 13.
Although she does not write about de Pougy, what Jennifer Willging writes about narration in Telling Anxiety applies to courtesan novelists. She sums up her work: “My premise in this book is that narrating is an activity that the narrators considered here take up because they believe it will both fulfill a desire and alleviate an anxiety” (4).
- 14.
See Chap. 4 in Rodriguez for more on Barney’s plans to “rescue” her and de Pougy’s refusal to cooperate.
- 15.
“Mon bourbier” in the French edition (33).
- 16.
Mesch writes that in Annhine’s dream, she envisions Flossie covering her in flowers and thus saving her from her debasement: “The lesbian relationship is thus the vehicle to Nhine’s empowerment through intellect and writing, enabling her to reject her bodily degradation and announce her literary rebirth” (57).
- 17.
Mesch also refers to de Pougy’s embrace of writing cathartic and liberating (59).
- 18.
It should be noted that Henke, in Shattered Subjects (1998), addresses the trauma depicted in the autobiographical writings of Colette, H.D., Anaïs Nin, Janet Frame, Audre Lorde, and Sylvia Fraser, not de Pougy.
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Sullivan, C. (2016). De Pougy’s Innovative Courtesan Fiction. In: The Evolution of the French Courtesan Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59709-0_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59709-0_3
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