The Meaning Beyond the Dress
Alterity and Economy of Desire in Mallarmé's Berthe Morisot
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9840347 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jill E Anderson (0000-0003-1706-5452, The University of Melbourne, corresponding author), Jill Anderson (0000-0002-3253-8142, The University of Melbourne) |
| Year | 2006 |
| Volume | 60 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 33-48 |
| Publication date | 2006-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | French Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0016-1128 • E-ISSN: 1468-2931 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/fs/kni286 |
| OpenAlex | W2082005749 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 2 |
This essay explores Mallarmé's late prose text Berthe Morisot , 1 the preface to the catalogue of the 1896 posthumous exhibition. Morisot was one of Mallarmé's privileged others. Their relationship sheds light on the economy of desire and evolving cultural practice in two major figures of late nineteenth-century France. I aim to show how poet and painter came to speak the same language via a remarkable intercultural and gender exchange. The narrator's relational self hides behind the dispassionate art historian's mask, yet emerges in unexpected ways. This elegiac text stages an eroticized encounter with a feminine alter ego that takes on broader significance, a ‘symptom’ of the foreign that disrupts and enriches French culture. Speaking as an outsider, yet clearly implicated, Mallarmé's narrator moves from the intimate to public sphere and from the foreign to the national. The poet recovers a marginalized, private form of discourse, previously eschewed, to forge une poésie à côté de la loi such as Kahn had wished, revealing the passionate attachment to the other generally erased for ideological reasons. Ostensibly evacuated from Mallarmé's poetic practice as fitting only for autobiography, le sentiment , purified according to Morisot's definition, is conveyed in a language of restrained sensuality
Aesthetics · Alterity · Art · Biography · Elegiac · Id, ego and super-ego · Ideology · Literature · Meaning (existential · Poetry · Politics · Psychoanalysis · French Literature and Critical Theory · French Literature and Criticism · French Literature and Poetry · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |