Concocting La Dame aux camelias: blood, tears, and other fluids.(Alexandre Dumas fils)

In June 1847, the 23-year old Dumas fils set out to write a novel loosely based on his brief love affair with Marie Duplessis, the most sought after courtesan of the day who had died of consumption four months earlier. Meant to garner him fame and a place among his literary peers and forefathers, the novel, La Dame aux camelias, claimed to be a truthful representation of the plight of a courtesan who fell in love with a young bourgeois, attempted to leave behind her life of prostitution, and ended up sacrificing her love and her life to conform to bourgeois social, economic, and moral imperatives. The textual strategy employed by Dumas ills to craft the story of this doomed love and life and its intended effect on the implied reader are a rather complex affair, involving the use of intertextual narrative, rhetorical, and semiotic models as well as elements of cultural discourses that had particular currency at the time. (1) The thread that ties together the various strands of this intricate textual web appears to be a medical discourse centered on notions of disease, contagion, and bodily fluids of various kinds. Fluids permeate the text and become important carriers of meaning. From the abundant flow of tears that inundates the introductory flame chapters of this confessional novel to the tear-soaked pages of the recently deceased courtesan's letter and diary recording in clinical detail her fatal bouts of bloody coughing, fluids carry the narrative logic and fuel the logistics of a text whose success--its capacity to generate mass consumption--is predicated on the notion of influence. I propose to trace these medical notions and investigate the ways in which they are made to serve the social, moral, and literary goals of Dumas fils' project. (2)

In the first part of the essay I examine the complex textual strategy deployed in the introductory flame chapters of the novel where a gendered medical narrative that constructs sexually transgressive females as diseased and contagious is plotted and framed by two male narrators, an unnamed flame narrator who explains the circumstances in which he became the recipient of the story he is writing, and Armand Duval, the former lover of the dead courtesan Marguerite Gautier. These chapters are meant to provide interpretive paradigms for the reader as he is faced with the task of making sense, both of Armand's subsequent recit and of Marguerite's written accounts of her agony and impending death. The second part of the essay provides a critical reading of the remainder of the novel in light of the discourse of disease and contagion set up in the frame. (3)

TEARS AND SYMPATHY

In the beginning, there is a dead courtesan, buried in Montmartre cemetery, whose apartment, personal belongings now up for sale at auction, and the life of prostitution they represent become the object of curiosity and investigation as readers, led by the frame narrator, are invited to penetrate into the text via her private space. (4) In the course of this visit, readers are presented with a number of hermeneutic challenges put forth by the narrator as he ponders over the possessions and various details of the life of this courtesan whom he claims to have known only by her face and habits, as well as reassuring pronouncements, meant to allay the fears of the most morally reticent or squeamish. The physical journey through her apartment is placed under the narrator's reassuring, sanitizing authority as he establishes, at the outset, an equivalence between death and purification. Of the "cabinet de toilette" we are thus told that "la mort avait purifie l'air de ce cloaque splendide" (52), making it both morally safe and socially acceptable for "les femmes les plus vertueuses" (52) to enter the courtesan's most private space. The use of the term "cloaque," evoking as it does a sewer, a space where stored refuse and the release of miasma constitute a breeding ground for infection and disease, suggests an interpretation of the "cabinet de toilette," and more generally of the courtesan's quarters, as a space of infection and contagion--more specifically of "contagion miasmatique"-and invites a reading of the story along medical lines, with a focus on motifs of contamination and contagious disease. (5)

Moving from considerations of space to questions about its former occupant, the narrator ponders puzzling aspects of Marguerite's physical appearance such as her lovely face presented as the site of an unexplainable paradox: "Comment sa vie ardente laissait-elle au visage de Marguerite l'expression virginale, enfantine meme qui le caracterisait, c'est ce que nous sommes forces de constater sans le comprendre" (58). Then, there is the color of her camellias: "Pendant vingt-cinq jours du mois, les camelias etaient blancs, et pendant cinq ils etaient rouges; on n'a jamais su la raison de cette variete de couleurs, que je signale sans pouvoir l'expliquer et que les habitues des theatres off elle allait le plus frequemment et ses amis avaient remarquee comme moi" (59). There is a mystery about Marguerite that calls for elucidation and, when the narrator pronounces, in response to the curiosity exhibited by the virtuous ladies who have come to her apartment looking for "les traces de cette vie de courtisane dont on leur avait fait, sans doute, de si etranges recits" that "les mysteres etaient morts avec la deesse" (52), he does not deny mystery, he merely displaces the enigma and reorients hermeneutic interest away from the supernatural plane onto the natural one, the lady's flowers, face, and other body parts, particularly her "poitrine" (58), or rather lack thereof: "Grande et mince jusqu'a l'exageration, elle possedait au supreme degre l'art de faire disparaitre cet oubli de la nature par le simple arrangement des choses qu'elle revetait" (58).

Marguerite's skillful concealing of her flat chest testifies both to her artistic abilities and to her artfulness, and underscores her power to attract to her body, despite what the narrator presents as a physical deficiency, the absence of a culturally-constructed attribute of femininity. While her chest is characterized by lack, her sporting of the red camellias, signaling, one must assume, those days of the month when she is menstruating, marks her exterior, usually dressed in white, with the scarlet sign of her menstruating sex. Flashing the sign of her reproductive sexuality to communicate sexual unavailability and flaunting her sexual difference as a courtesan, Marguerite presents herself as radically other. Not only does she defy gender norms governing women's modesty, she also breaks the taboo placed on women's menstrual blood by making a public spectacle of it--witness the narrator's feigned interpretive incompetence and reluctance to spell the sign's meaning. (6) But more than just committing gender and social improprieties, what the text suggests about Marguerite's behavior is that it symbolically denaturalizes and desacralizes the most valued female biological function, that of reproduction, by tying it to commercial considerations and subordinating it to economic interests such as the use of sex to make a living rather than to produce life. At stake here in the semiotics of Marguerite's appearance displayed for the reader early in the text are the courtesan's problematization of maternity as woman's biological, social, and ethical destiny, and intimations of defiant and dangerous otherness. Framed by the narrator's comments, the "cabinet de toilette" is thus the space where a master illusionist practices her art of self-fashioning and self-commodifying, accomplishing the visual magic that will ensnare many an admirer and potential consumer.

At the same time as he muses over the dead lady's physical attributes and mysteries, the narrator lays out the various literary, religious, and medical plots along whose lines the story he has been entrusted to tell will be crafted. The master narrative that channels these plots and that is meant to throw light on the courtesan's death as well as establish the ethical nature of his undertaking appears to be a rehabilitation narrative branching out into two different scenarios. The first one, of a punitive, retributive nature, involves the suffering and shedding of blood of the woman whose sexual conduct has branded a sinner and a moral outcast. It is expressed through the extended metaphor of a journey along "deux sentiers," "la douleur et l'amour. Ils sont difficiles; celles qui s'y engagent s'y ensanglantent les pieds, s'y dechirent les mains, mais elles laissent en meme temps aux ronces de la route les parures du vice et arrivent au but avec cette nudite dont on ne rougit pas devant le Seigneur" (66). The second, based on the Christian model of mercy and forgiveness put forth in the stories of Mary Magdalen and of the prodigal son, calls for indulgence and forbearance, and advocates the lending of a friendly hand to "panse[r]" [...] ces ames blessees par les passions des hommes": "Pourquoi rejetterions-nous [...] des ...