The Legs of The Countess-Solomongodeau1986

The Legs of the Countess
Author(s): Abigail Solomon-Godeau

Source: October, Vol. 39 (Winter, 1986), pp. 65-108
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778313 .
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The Legs of the Countess
ABIGAIL SOLOMON-GODEAU
deniedto woman: indisputably

Subjectivity
thisprovides
thefinancialbacking ir-
forevery
constitution
reducible [ofher]as an object:
of
ofdesire.
ofdiscourse,
representation,
- Luce Irigaray, "Any Theory of the
'Subject' Has Always Been
Appropriated by the 'Masculine'"
Historians ofphotographytend to divide the staggeringnumber ofimages

that constitutetheirobject of study into two separate but hardly equal realms:
thatof the typicaland that of the anomalous. The photographsof the Countess
de Castiglione fallwithinboth. On the one hand, the countess was merelyone
of thousands of well-to-doclientswho passed throughthe doors of the fashion-
able Second Empire photographic firmof Mayer & Pierson, officialphotog-
raphers to the emperor and his court.1 The majorityof photographsmade of
1. Louis Pierson, who began his professionalcareer as a daguerreotypist,joined the firmof

Mayer Freres sometime before 1854. The Mayers' commercial success was based on the inven-
tion, patent, and sale of various photographicsupplies, including fullyequipped darkrooms, and
the sale of already prepared paints and tints for handcoloring photographs, a speciality of the
firm.Their firstcommissioned portraitof Napoleon III in 1853, followed by a number of por-
traitsof Eugenie, established theircommercial success and social cachet. By 1855 the firmhad an
address on the Boulevard des Capucines and branches in London and Brussels.
In 1862, Ernest Mayer, the remaining brother in the firm,withdrewfromthe business,
leaving Pierson as sole owner, although the original name was retained. In that year the firm
could boast a collectionof 1,000 to 1,500 celebritycartes-de-visite.
The same year saw the precedent-
settinglawsuit (Mayer and Pierson were the plaintiffs)establishing the copyrightprotectionof
photographyunder the law ofJuly 19, 1793.
In 1873, Pierson's daughter married Gaston Braun, son of Adolph Braun, whose
photographicfirm,based in Dornach, specialized in industrial photography.The followingyear
Gaston Braun purchased the entire contentsof the Mayer & Pierson studio, which was then con-
solidated into the firmof Braun & Cie. Pierson continued to administer the affairsof the com-
pany until his retirementin 1909. Many of the photographs of the Countess de Castiglione have

Mayer& Pierson.Countessde Castiglione.ca. 1856-60.
photoChristianKempf.)
(Musie d'Unterlinden,
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The Legs oftheCountess 67
the countess by Louis Pierson are thus neither technically nor formally
dissimilar to those of any other aristocraticand elegant woman who engaged
his services. But the frequencywithwhich the countess preseited herselfto the
camera, and in a certainnumber of startlinginstancesthe waysin whichshe did
this,are exceptional. What are we to make of the countess'shaving herselfpho-
tographed in her chemise? Or exposing her legs? With some justice, one could
dispense with these anomalies as the whims of an eccentric,if not deranged,
woman. But when considered in the contextofher cultureand milieu, the very
nature of her eccentricityseems remarkable only in degree, and in relationto
the fact that she herselfwas the architectof her own representations.Indeed,
much of the significanceofthesephotographs,initiallyso unclassifiable,resides
in theirhomologywith otherkinds of photographs,theircontiguitywithother
images, both licensed and illicit.For, as I shall argue, the logic of these images
is not only thatof a unique expressionof the countess'sobsessions, but thatof a
talisman of the culture that produced her.
Accordingly, the photographs of the countess require a contextual ex-
amination as much as theydo a biographical one. However bizarre or idiosyn-
cratic the appearance of these images, the elementsof theirconstructionare to
be located in various representationalsites whose common denominatorcould
be termed the semioticsof the feminine.Their reading thus needs to be both
symptomaticand dialectical: symptomaticin that theyare the personal expres-
sion of an individual woman's investmentin her image - in herselfas image;
dialectical in that this individual act of expression is underwrittenby conven-
tions that make her less an author than a scribe. Such a reading raises the
photographs from the trivial status of historical curios to significant
testimonials of the power of patriarchy to register its desire within the
designated space of the feminine. This latter reading devolves on the con-
fluenceof threefetishisms,a confluencewhich can also be observed in otherso-
cial and cultural phenomena of the period: the psychicfetishismof patriarchy,
grounded in the specificityof the corporeal body; the commodityfetishismof
capitalism,shroudedin what Marx termedthe"veilofreification," and grounded
in the means of production and the social relations they engender; and the
fetishizingpropertiesof the photograph- a commemorativetrace of an absent
thus been erroneously attributedto Adolph Braun, and the ones taken in her old age to Gaston
Braun, because of the studio stamp they bear. I am convinced that all the photographs of the
countess that I have seen were taken by Pierson.
The number of extant plates fromthe firmof Mayer & Pierson now in the collection of the
Musie d'Unterlinden, but housed in the Archives du Haut Rhin in Colmar, number 10,000.
See Pierre Tyl, "Mayer et Pierson (1)," in Prestige
de la photographie,
no. 6, Paris, Editions e.p.a.,
1979, pp. 5-30; Pierre Tyl, "Mayer et Pierson (2)," in Prestigede la Photographie, no. 7, Paris,
Editions e.p.a., 1979, pp. 36-63; and the unsigned article, "Pierson's portrettenvan 'La
Castiglione,'" Foto, December 1974, pp. 36-39. For the implications of the Mayer & Pierson
lawsuit, see Giselle Freund, Photography and Society,Boston, David Godine, 1983.

68 OCTOBER
object, the stillpicture of a frozenlook, a screen forthe projectiveplay of the

spectator'sconsciousness. That Marx wrote"The Fetishismof Commodities"at
the verymomentwhen the countess photographicallydocumented her toilettes
and body parts, and also when the photographicindustryexperienced its own
massive commercialexpansion suggestsnot only the temporalproximityof the
three formsof fetishismbut the site on which theycome together.2
That site is, of course, woman, and the confluenceof these fetishismson
the body of woman is everywhereto be found in the Second Empire and Third
Republic. But it is above all found withinthe representationsof threetypesof
women: in the image (both textual and iconic) of the prostitute,who unites in
her person both seller and commodity;in the dancer or actress- the spectacle
withinthe is perceived as a typeof circulatinggoods; and in the
spectacle--who
notion of the beautiful, worldly woman, endlessly hypostatized, scrutinized,
and dissected. That these three fetishisms converge in and around the
representationof the feminineis surelynot fortuitous.Luce Irigaray contends
thatMarx's analysis of commoditiesas the elementaryformof capitalistwealth
may be applied to an understandingof women's status in patriarchy.Irigaray's
attemptto integrateMarxist and psychoanalyticapproaches illuminatesone of
the problems in much recentliterarycriticismconcerned withthe mechanisms
and consequences of sexual positioning. In focusing on only the firstof the
three fetishisms,such an approach tends to de-historicizethe phenomenon.
The structuresof fetishism,like the Oedipal scenario which is its source, are
presentedas transhistorical,transcultural,and immutable givens,hermetically
distinctfromchanging material determinations.Granted that the nineteenth
centuryculturallymanifestsa heightenedfetishizationof the woman's body, it
is equally importantto acknowledge that it is also the period that witnessesthe
penetration of the commodity into all spheres of life, experience, and con-
sciousness. Is it not possible to see in the emergingreign of the commoditya
correspondenceto new formsof the commodificationof the feminine?
Examined in this perspective, photography appears to function as a
crucial agent in the articulation and dissemination of both forms of com-
modification.Moreover, insofaras the camera fragmentsand abstractsits liv-
ing subject, its mechanisms opticallyparallel those of reification.In producing
and reproducingthe image-worldof capitalism, photographyis simultaneously
a commodity and an instrumentof commodification.3Such mid-nineteenth-
centurycultural developmentsas an expanded conception of celebrity,with its
2. The structuralhomologiesbetweenthecommodity fetishand thewomanin partriarchy

is
thesubjectofLuce Irigaray'sextraordinary
essay"Womenon theMarket."My ownessayis toa
greatextentindebtedto her analysis. See Luce Irigaray,This Sex WhichIs Not One,trans.
CatherinePorter,withCarolynBurke,Ithaca, CornellUniversity Press, 1985.
3. A thoroughdiscussionofthisdoubleroleofphotographymaybe foundinJudithWilliamson,
Decoding London,Marian Boyars,1985.
Advertisenments,

auxiliary discourses of fashion and publicity,are inseparable fromthe rise of

camera culture. Furthermore,photographyplays a criticallyimportantrole in
fosteringthat condition of modern life which the Situationists have dubbed
spectacle. Finally, photographybringsinto being new configurationsand artic-
ulations of the body, new images of masculinityand femininity -
especially the
latter whichintersectwitholder modes of representationto produce theirown
-
potent and transfiguringadmixtures of modernity. It is within this dense

matrix of sexual ideology, economic and social transformation,and the inex-
orable expansion of commodityculture that the historical significanceof the
countess's photographs may be glimpsed. To the extent that they also raise
questions about the nature of feminine self-representation,they are somber
remindersthat the psychicdeterminationsof patriarchyand the material ones
of capitalism are as inescapable forus as they were forthe countess.
1. The ImageofDesire
Writingin her journal near the age of sixty,the Countess de Castiglione
considered her youthfulbeauty: "The Eternal Father did not realize what He
had created the day he broughther into the world; He formedher so superbly
thatwhen it was done He lost His head at the contemplationof thismarvelous
work."4The extravagantnarcissismof the countess'sself-appraisalis somewhat
startling,but less so than the objectificationto which it attests,evidenced both
by the use of the third-personsingular and by her designation of herselfas a
work ("maravigliosa opera").
This hyperbolic praise was echoed by other commentators during the
period of the countess's prominence as a Second Empire court celebrityfrom
1'854 until the early 1860s. "There has never been another woman," wrote
Gaston Jollivet, "at least not in my lifetime,in whom immortal Venus, as
deifiedby the brushstrokesand chisels of the greatmasters,was more perfectly
incarnate."5Even Princess Pauline de Metternich,who thoroughlydisliked the
countess, admitted,"I have never in my life seen such beauty and I do not ex-
pect to see its like again."6
Virginia Verasis, nee Oldoini, Countess de Castiglione, has been the sub-
of
ject two kinds of posthumous acknowledgment,succeeding those contempo-
rary descriptionsof her that appeared in the memoirs and diaries produced
during the Second Empire and the Third Republic.7 In the standard political
4. Cited in Frederic Loli&e, Lesfemmesdu secondempire,Paris, Talladier, 1954, p. 48.

5. Cited in Alain Decaux, La Castiglione:
damedecoeurde l'Europe,Paris, Le Livre Contemporain,
1959, p. 151.
6. Cited in Robert de Montesquiou, La divinecomtesse: .itude d'apresMme de Castiglione,
Paris,
Goupil & Cie., 1913, p. 26.
7. These include the memoirs of Count Horace de Viel-Castel, Countess Stephanie Tascher
de la Pagerie's Mon sejouraux Tuileries,and the memoirs of the Count de Maugny.

Mayer& Pierson.Countess
de Castiglione.
ca. 1856-60.
MuseumofArt,giftofGeorge
(TheMetropolitan Davis.)
historiesof the period, she figuresonly as a footnotein the annals of the empire.
Brieflythe mistressof Napoleon III, she appears to have acted as an agent of
Camillo Cavour, to whom she was distantlyrelated, in order to help ensure the
emperor's cooperation in King Victor Emmanuel's designs forthe unification
under his crown of the kingdoms of Piedmont, Lombardy-Venetia, and the
two Sicilies. The countess's second discursive afterlifewas a functionof her
fabled beauty and her briefnotorietyas the emperor'smistress.In this guise,
thecountesswas the subjectofSecond Empirerepublicanpropaganda (Benjamin
Gastineau's Sottiseset scandalesdu tempsprisent),Third Republic potboilers
(Frederic Lolide's Le romand'unefavorite), modern historicalromances (Jacques
Chabannes's Le poisonsous le crinoline), and, perhaps most interestingly,a hys-
tericalpanegyricby the self-styled "sovereignof the transitory,"the epicure and
dandy Comte Robert de Montesquiou (La divinecomtesse).
One of the pretextsof de Montesquiou's curious book is the collection of
photographsof the countess, along with many of her personal effects,letters,
jewelry, and memorabilia, which he had purchased at auction afterher death
in 1899. It is this collection of over 400 photographsthat more than anything
else suggests the countess's singularity.8 For while many of the female
celebritiesof the Second Empire and Third Republic were frequentlyphoto-
graphed, their images reproduced, commerciallysold, and widely circulated,
the countess'sphotographs,thoughtakenby a professionalphotographer,could
with some justice be perceived as having been authored by her. Such an attribu-
tion would be predicated on the fact that the countess, far frompassively fol-
lowing the directivesof the photographer,substantiallydeterminedher own
presentation to the camera, dictating the pose, costume, props, and ac-
cessories, and occasionally decided upon the coloringand/orretouchingof the
photographs. Alternatively,we might consider the hundreds of photographs
taken of her by Louis Pierson as a workingcollaboration- one, moreover,that
extended over thirtyyears.
In whatever proportion we wish to mete out credit for these images,
however,what concernsme here are the problematicand contradictoryaspects
of the countess's attemptat photographicself-creation.Most suggestively,it is
the apparent imbricationof narcissism and fetishism,and the subject's collu-
sion in her own objectification,that transformthese idiosyncraticartifactsinto
disturbing emblems of the aporia of women and their representations.For
what is repetitivelyplayed out in the countess's choreographyof the self- a
choreographyshe attemptsto appropriateforher own ambiguous ends - is the
difficulty,ifnot the impossibility,of the attemptto representherself.Thus, in
venturingto raise the issue of authorshipin relation to these photographs,my
8. These photographs,assembled by Robert de Montesquiou, are now in the collectionof the

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

.
.
..........
A'k
xx
M
gg

72 OCTOBER
intentionis not to wrestthe honors fromPierson and give themto the countess,
or even to demonstrate the complex nature of the issues pertaining to
photographic authorship, but rather to emphasize that the singularityof the
countess's photographs intersects with the problem of feminine self-repre-
sentation.
There is littleneed to underscore the fact that, historically,women have
rarely been the authors of their own representations,either as makers or as
models. Prior to the twentiethcenturythere are a few exceptions in literature
and letters,fewerin the visual arts, and virtuallynone in photography.Indeed,
even the most cursory consideration of the photographic representationof
women reveals that they are typically constructed in photographs in ways
scarcelyless coded, hardlyless "already-written," than theyare in otherrepre-
sentationalsystems.Marx's descriptionof the politicallyand sociallydisenfran-
chised- "theydo not representthemselves;theymust be represented"- is surely
as applicable to women as to the proletariator the colonial subject. But the
countess did, in a quite literal sense, produce herselfforthe camera, and in a
manner she alone determined.When a nineteenth-century woman provides us
with an example of self-representation we do well to attend to the termsof its
articulation.
In addition to the 434 photographsassembled by the Count de Montes-
quiou, thereexist between 250 and 350 negatives of the countess fromthe pho-
tographic firmof Mayer & Pierson, incorporated into the collection of Mai-
son Adolph Braun in 1873, and now in the photographicarchives of the cityof
Colmar.9 The great majorityof the photographswere made between 1856 and
1865 at the height of their subject's fame and beauty. However, a few years
beforeher death in 1899, the countess commissioned Pierson to make another
series of photographs,one set of which is now in the collection of the Gilman
Paper Corporation, and another, larger group in Colmar.10
These photographs- running the gamut from entirely conventional
or cabinet format,to theatricalizedor nar-
studio portraits,eithercarte-de-visite
rativized tableaux, to stunningand formallyunusual full-figureportraitsand
odd, crudelyhand-colored images' - are exceptional fora number of reasons.
9. Many, but not all, of the printsin the Montesquiou collectionexist in the Colmar archives,
which in turn contains printsnot represented in the Montesquiou collection. The lack of preci-
sion in giving the number of photographs of the countess is due to the fact that there are often
several exposures on the same plate, with only slightvariations.
10. The photographs in the Gilman Paper Corporation are attributedto Gaston Braun; see
footnote1. Quite possibly there exist other photographs of the countess, but these are the collec-
tions I have worked from and are the only ones with which I am familiar.
11. Mayer & Pierson were well known forthe quality of theirhand-coloring. A number of the
countess's biographers claim that she particularlyvalued the hand-coloringof her photographsby
M. Gustave Schad, one of their employees. However, many of the colored photographs in the
collection of the Metropolitan Museum are crude almost to the point of defacement. Moreover,
the paint applied to them looks more like tempera, or occasionally india ink, rather than the

?:?
:
:"j:X
------
qN
i:ii:'.......................
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.........
Mayer& Pierson.Countessde Castiglione.

ca. 1856-60. AlbumpagefromtheCount
de Montesquiou's
collection.
(The Metropolitan
MuseumofArt,David HunterMcAlpinFund.)
First, thereis the sheer quantity. Surely no woman of the mid-nineteenthcen-

tury,irrespectiveof fameor notoriety,was photographedso extensively,within
so shorta time span, as was the countess. Moreover, where individual women
were much-photographed(forexample, Queen Victoria or the courtesan Cleo
de Merode), theirimages were intendedforcommercialconsumption,whereas
the bulk of the countess's photographsappear to have been commissioned for
herself.We must also bear in mind that in this period the photographicpor-
trait, made principallywithin a specialized photographic atelier, was by no
means cheap, involving as it did the skills of a number of professionalsand
technicians; it was, in short, anythingbut a casual and impromptuaffair.'2
The countess's photographs,in which she appears, variously, in extravagant
court dress, in masquerade, in narrative tableaux enacting such roles as
drunken soubrette,Breton peasant, or cloisterednun, were necessarilyelabo-
rate productions.
speciallymanufacturedtintsused forcoloringphotographs.
Sincea numberofthesephotographs
are annotatedin thecountess'shand (usuallyspecifying
thecolors,accessories,andjewelryshe
worewiththedepictedoutfit),it seemsreasonableto supposethatitwas shewhopaintedthem.
12. See in thisregardJean Sagne, L'atelier du photographe:
1840-1940, Paris, Pressesde la
Renaissance,1984.

......
.
...
IN
Mayer& Pierson.Countessde Castiglione.
ca. 1856-60. (Musded'Unterlinden,
photo
Christian
Kempf.)
No less remarkable are the photographs she commissioned of herselfen

dishabilli-in chemise or nightgown-or the closeups of her feetin the sandals
she wore for the costume of the Queen of Etruria, or the pictures of herself
feigningsleep and awakening, terrorand rage, or even a photographwhere she
weeps withinthe rectangleof an emptypictureframe,propped on a table. The
genre of stilllifewas also conscriptedto the ends of self-portraiture.
There are
two printsthat depict a profusionof her personal effects-photographsof her-
selfshown enabyme,along with shawls, keepsakes, and dried flowers,and half-
buried in theirmidst,one of her lapdogs togetherwithhis leashes, collars, and
dog clothes. That it was the countess, however,who directedthe camera is no-
where more evident than in the extraordinarygroup of photographsin which
she removed her shoes and stockings,raised her petticoatsand crinoline,and
had her naked legs photographedfromseveral viewpoints.
The shockingimproprietyofthisgesture,despitethe factthatthesephoto-
graphs were in no sense intended to circulate, becomes even clearer when we
note that in those contemporaryphotographsof dancers, actresses, and demi-
mondaines produced for public consumption, legs are always sheathed in
tights.Tights were virtuallythe prerequisiteforthe transformationof carnal
fleshinto the sublimated, sculpturalformof aesthetic,albeit eroticized,delec-
tation. For Baudelaire, the work of the tights was analogous to that of
cosmetics:
Anyone can see thatthe use ofrice-powder,so stupidlyanathemized
by our Arcadian philosophers, is successfullydesigned to rid the
complexion of those blemishes that Nature has outrageouslystrewn

there,and thus to create an abstractunityin color and textureof the

skin, a unity,which,like thatproduced by the legs ofthe dancer, im-
mediately approximates the human being to the statue, that is, to
somethingsuperior and divine.13
This conception was so prevalent that the naked leg appears only in the
contextof the nude or in the specificallyerotic gestureof removingor putting
on stockings.In the lattercase, it is, of course, the stockingthatconstitutesthe
supplementary sign that codes the woman's body erotically, whether in
eighteenth-century pornographicimagery or in the currentPlayboy.
That an aristocraticwoman, howevernotorious,would so display her legs
to the officialphotographerof the court breached one of the several boundaries
of what was normativelyrepresentablein Second Empire photography.This
fact alone establishes these photographs' oddity. But the images are neither
coded forthe erotic (as are the commerciallyproduced erotic or pornographic
images in which the fetishisticdisplay of the leg mandates particularmodes of
presentation)nor purely clinical and evidentiary,although they resemble the
lattergenre farmore than the former.Rather, the countess's desire was to im-
age parts of her body and to reserve those images forher own gaze, an enter-
prise that suggests the activitiesof the fetishist.
Freudian theory,however,insistson the impossibilityoffemalefetishism.14
The fetishis clinicallydefinedas a substituteobject, simultaneouslydisavow-
ing and commemorating the penis perceived as missing from the maternal
body. Accordingly,the significanceof the theorylies in its value as a model for
simultaneouslysustainingtwo mutuallycontradictorybeliefs. But insofaras it
hinges on the threatof castration, the definitioneffectively foreclosesa struc-
tural model of female fetishism.Indeed, clinical instances of fetishism(defined
as a libidinal investmentin an object indispensable forsexual gratification)ap-
pear not to exist. Thus, withinthe termsof psychoanalytictheory,it is not pos-
13. Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life," in The PainterofModernLife and Other
Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne, London, Phaidon, 1964, p. 33.
14. That Freud's theoryof fetishismis fundamentallypredicated on the male subject accounts
forat least some of the lacunae and inconsistenciesin the theory(for example, the differentcor-
relation between vision and significanceattributed to boys and girls); see Sarah Kofman, The
Enigmaof Woman: Womanin Freud'sWriting,trans. Catherine Porter, Ithaca, Cornell University
Press, 1985. Recently, attemptshave been made to theorize female fetishism.See, forexample,
Mary Kelly's artworkand book Port-Partum Document,London, Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1983. In
this work, Kelly formulatesa woman's fetishismin terms of the mother'srelation to her (male)
child. See also Naomi Schor, "Female Fetishism,"in Susan Rubin Sulieman, ed., TheFemaleBody
in WesternCulture.:Contemporary Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University
Perspectives,
Press, 1986. Theories of the fetish character of the photograph, on the other hand, do not
distinguish between male and female spectators, which tends to beg the issue of how women
could have a fetishisticrelation to them. See Christian Metz, "Photographyand Fetish," October,
no. 34 (Fall 1985), pp. 81-90; and Victor Burgin, "Photography,Phantasy, Function," in Victor
Burgin, ed., ThinkingPhotography, London, Macmillan, 1982, pp. 177-216.

76 OCTOBER
sibleto describethecountess'srelationto herphotographs, at leastin a clinical

sense,as fetishistic. Symptomatically, one is on more solid groundin describ-
ing the countess's captivation with herphotographic image a classicinstance
as
ofnarcissism or, as itwouldhave been understoodin herowntime,a familiar,
ifexcessive,expressionof femininevanity.But thinking back to her charac-
terizationofherselfas a "work,"it is moresuggestive to considerthecountess's
narcissismwithinthe problematicsof femininesubjectivity. For withwhose
eyesdoes thecountessgaze at imagesofherface?herlegs?herbody?Having
no culturally privileged organofnarcissistic identification and beingpositioned
outsidethe symbolicorderof patriarchy, definedonlyas otherin relationto
themasculineone, thefeminineposition,it is argued,precludesan achieved
subjectivity - subjectivity hereunderstoodas a positively, ratherthandifferen-
tially,defined identity. Consequently,thewoman,whoseself-worth and social
value is contingent on herstatusas objectofdesire,has so internalized themale
gaze as to produce a near-total identification with it. In this sense, the com-
monplace desire to see oneself as one is seen - from outside the confines of sub-
- is
jectivity complicated the
by concept of sexual difference. Because for woman,
to see oneselfas one is seenis nota supplement to subjectivity, butitsverycon-
dition.But theconditionsthatinform thesubjectivity ofwomen,includingthe
internalization of the male gaze, are hardlythe symmetrical complementof
thoseinforming thesubjectivity ofmen. In thislight,thecountess'sobsessive
self-representations are less an index of narcissism- althoughtheyare that
too- thana demonstration ofa radicalalienationthatcollapsesthedistinction
betweensubjecthoodand objecthood.
Despitethecountess'sauthorshipofherown presentation, then,we con-
frontin thesephotographsa fundamentalcontradiction. In the veryact of
authoringherimage- a positionthatimpliesindividuality and a unique sub-
jectivity - thecountesscan onlyreproduceherself as a workofelaborately coded
femininity, a femininity which,as always,derivesfromelsewhere."The lifeof
thiswoman,"wroteRobertde Montesquiou,"wasnothingbuta lengthy tableau
vivant, a perpetualtableauvivant."'5
Contemporarydescriptionsof the countessemphasize the sculptural,
marmorealaspectofherbeauty,a qualitydoubtlessheightened byherhabitual
hauteur. Princess de Metternich,forexample, describingthe countess's scan-
dalousball costumeas Salammb6,witharmsand legsbare and no corset,con-
cludes,"Despiteour indignation,I mustswearthatthesculpturalbeautyshe
revealedwas so completethattherewas nothingindecentabout it. One could
call hera statuecometo life."'6And theMarshalCanrobertagrees,"Mme de
Castiglionewas ofan incomparable beauty.She resembledat one and thesame
15. Montesquiou,p. 81.

16. Cited in PierreLabracherie,NapoldonIII et son temps,Paris,Julliard,1976,p. 49.

time a Virgin of Perugino and an antique Venus; but she remained always in a
state akin to marble or painting, withoutanimation and withoutlife.
..."17
This totemic and reifiedconception of femininebeauty is a leitmotifin
French nineteenth-century culture, changing very little between Balzac and
Zola. The highly conventionalized language in the descriptions of feminine
beauty may be more specificand detailed in the later period, but what remains
the same is theirstatus as already-writtentexts.18Consequently, the discursive
formulaeemployed in conveyingthe beautifulwoman are not only quite gener-
alized, but usually have littleto do with the specificattributesof the individual
on whom they are inscribed. This accounts for the frequentdissonance be-
tween the writtenaccounts and the visual record of famous nineteenth-century
courtesansand beauties. For the most part, the faces and bodies ofwomen such
as Cora Pearl, La Paiva, Liane de Pougy, Anna Deslions (the firsttwo were the
composite models forZola's Nana) seem whollyordinary.Similarly,looking at
the plump and ratherflaccid legs of the countess, it is difficultto understand
what the fusswas about. To be sure, standards of femininebeauty change con-
stantly;Second Empire canons encompassed both the plump and the slender.
Moreover, the importance of various body parts waxes and wanes. In her
youthfulglory,even the countess's elbows were eulogized, were compared to
ripe peaches. According to de Montesquiou and several other biographers,
molds were made of her feetand arms.
Of course, the termsaccording to which the countess was perceived, and
those throughwhich she came to perceive herself,were so mediated as to make
any referenceto her corporeal realityalmost beside the point. A historicaland
feministexamination ofher photographsmust thereforeshiftto a consideration
of the stereotypicalaspect of their construction.In this respect, one of their
most strikingqualities is theirtheatricality.In substitutingperformanceforany
attemptat presence, the countess may be said to provide a series of representa-
tions of the feminineas a formof theater,of masquerade. The impassive face
she offersto the camera, the utterformalityand iconicityof her self-presenta-
tion, refuses the viewer any psychological access, whether real or imagined.
We are here far fromany conventional notion of bourgeois portraiture,and
furtherstillfromthe interestin physiognomy.By her own estimationand that
of others, the countess is equivalent to her beauty, and her beauty is itselfa
formof mask, of disguise. The extravagance of her toilette- extravaganteven
17. Labracherie, p. 48.

18. "Beauty (unlike ugliness) cannot really be explained: in each part of the body it stands out,
repeats itself,but it does not describe itself.Like a god (and as empty), it can only say: Iam whatI
am. The discourse, then, can do no more than assert the perfectionof each detail and refer"the
remainder" to the code underlying all beauty: Art. In other words, beauty cannot assert itself
save in the formof a citation . trans. Richard Miller, New York, Hill
and Wang, 1974, p. 33). .." (Roland Barthes, S/Z,

78 OCTOBER
by the bloated and parvenu standards of the Second Empire court- is the in-
carnation of a femininitythat has become whollytheatricaland impersonal, a
tribal mask of idealized display. If the photographsof the countess oftensug-
gest the stylizedexaggerationsof a female impersonator,it is because the spec-
tacle of this elaborated femininityis so overweeningas to abolish any impulse
in the spectatorto imagine a character,a personality,a psychology,behind the
mask.
In this regard it is importantto recall that femininityhas been theorized
as an operationofmasquerade. Initiallyformulatedby the Frenchpsychoanalyst
Joan Riviere, this concept has been revivedby contemporaryfeministpsycho-
analytic theorists(Luce Irigaray) and feministfilmtheorists(Claire Johnston,
Mary Ann Doane) forits relevance to the project of definingthe conditionsof
femininesubjectivity(or its lack).19 "Masquerade," as Doane writes,"is not as
recuperable as transvestismprecisely because it constitutesan acknowledg-
ment that it is femininityitselfwhich is constructedas a mask- the decorative
layerthenconceals a non-identity. . . The masquerade, in flauntingfemininity,
holds it at a distance."20Doane's formulationdeparts somewhat fromRiviere's,
who had argued that femininity,in a fundamental way, was masquerade.
Doane inflectsthe concept differently, enabling her to argue forthe de-stabi-
lizing and de-familiarizingaspects of the feminineas masquerade and thereby
imputing to its operations a subversive, or at least disruptive,charge. But tak-
ing the case of the countess as a (once) living instance of the mechanisms of
femininemasquerade, one perceives less a refusal of patriarchal positioning
than a total capitulation to its terms.
Nevertheless, in this psychoanalyticsense of masquerade, the fact that
many of the photographsof the countess depict her in actual fancy-dresscos-
tumes- the Queen of Etruria, the Lady of Hearts, the Hermit of Passy, the
Breton peasant, the geisha- is less significantthan the more profoundsense in
which the feminineitselfis constitutedas an elaborate constructionof pose,
gesture,dress, or undress. Femininityis not a costume thata woman mightre-
move at will, but a role that she lives. Still, there was somethingabout the
19. "Masquerade (la mascarade): An alienated or false version of femininityarising fromthe

woman's awareness of the man's desire forher to be his other, the masquerade permitswoman to
experience desire not in her own rightbut as the man situates her"(Luce Irigaray, ThisSex Which
Is Not One, p. 220). The problem with such a formulationlies in its presumption of an at least
hypothetically"authentic"femininity.For a differentinterpretationof the concept see, Mary Ann
Doane, "Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator," Screen,vol. 23, nos. 3-4
(September-October 1982), pp. 74-87.
20. Doane, p. 81. Doane's consideration of masquerade within the problematics of feminine
self-representationdraws on the work of the French psychoanalyst Michele Montrelay, who
argues that, since women lack the means to representlack and can never wholly lose or repress
the maternal body, they manifest an excessive proximity to their own bodies that precludes
representation. "Woman," writes Montrelay, "is the ruin of representation." See Michele
Montrelay, "Inquiry into Femininity,"m/f,no. 1 (1978), pp, 83-101.

or
..........
Emma
'"E
."U"M
?.
W.W.,iM
.
yl."Q?Mm=
...........
...........
..
.....
......
............
Mayer& Pierson.Georges ca. 1862.

de Castiglione.
d'Unterlinden,
(Musde photoChristian
Kempf.)
rituals of masquerade to which the countess was profoundlyresponsive. This

fascinationwith willfultransformationwas extended to, imposed upon, her
only child, her son Georges. In a number of photographsthe littleboy is some-
timesdressed as a girl,sometimesas an eighteenth-century cavalier out ofRey-
nolds or Gainsborough, or, in one startlingsuite of images, as a little-girlver-
sion of his mother: hair identicallycoiffedand ornamentedwith flowers,neck
and shoulders bare. There are also photographs in which he is cast as his
mother'spage, facingthecamera while the countessposes in imperiousprofile.21
21. Not surprisingly, relationsbetweenthecountessand her son weredeeplytroubledfrom

and
Georges'sadolescenceon. The countesswas perceived,evenbyheradmirers,as a negligent
mother.This was, in fact,one ofthechargesmadebytheCountVerasiswhen,at one
indifferent
point,he contemplateddivorceproceedings.Georgesdied at theage oftwenty-four
fromscarlet
fever.

80 OCTOBER
The countess's enthusiasm for acting out roles, even to the extent of
casting her child as supernumeraryin her photographicmise-en-scenes,can
perhaps be read as a synecdocheforthe role of court beauty, a role fullydeter-
mined beforeshe ever came to occupy it. In otherwords, the termsof thispart,
like the standardized and formulaicdescriptionsof her beauty, were in every
sense given in advance. The babble of the popular press, the gushingofher ad-
mirers,the ritualistictributesto femininebeauty are not only overdetermined,
but serve, crucially,to mask the nonidentityof the feminineposition,its nullity
in relationto an acknowledged subjectivity.Many of the anecdotes attached to
the countess (that she immured herselfbehind closed doors and shutters,mir-
rors veiled, to avoid seeing the fadingof her beauty; that as she aged she went
out only at night)bear witnessabove all to her textual construction,just as the
photographsreveal a persona ratherthan a person. But the awe, admiration,
even panegyricsthat La Castiglione inspired in her briefcelebrityin the glitter
of the Tuileries should not distractus fromthe material factsthat determined
her lifeas a woman. Her relativefreedomwas a functionless of her stationand
her income than her widowhood, the Count Verasis having died at the age of
twenty-eight,five years aftertheir marriage. Moreover, the countess, whose
face was trulyher fortune,came froma noble but not especially solventfamily.
The count was wealthy,and she was given in marriage- the terminologyis sig-
nificant- at the age of fifteen.Neither rank nor beauty exempted the countess
fromher woman's fate as object of exchange.
In her old age, the countess returnedto the studio of Louis Pierson. She
had known him by thenformore than threedecades, and fora number ofyears
theyhad been neighbors. Given the differencein class and circumstance,it is
unlikelythattheywere friends,but theremust have existed thekind ofpeculiar
intimacy that artistocraticwomen would sustain with their servants, physi-
cians, or corsetieres. She had, afterall, exposed her legs to him. By the time
these photographswere taken in the 1890s, the countess had become stoutand
possibly toothless.She seems, as well, to have lost much of her hair. Nonethe-
less, her face appears unlined (it was probably retouchedon the negative), her
eyebrowsare penciled, her eyelids shadowed. She had Pierson photographher
in a number of ensembles: in a ballgown she had worn in her youth; in street
costume, in what looks like mourning attire. Again, she had her legs photo-
graphed, thistime froman odd angle. Her legs extended on a chair or hassock,
the camera must have been directed down towards her lap from over her
shoulder. The dead whitenessof these limbs, along with.theshape and black-
ness of the hassock that supportsthem, suggestnothingso much as a corpse in
a coffin.In one photograph she opened the bodice of her dress, revealing not
the lace underwear of an artistocrat,but a poor-lookingundershirt,an under-
garmentthat mightbe worn by a beggar woman. Her expression here is hard
to pin down, hovering as it does between grimace and smile. Her hands are
strangelyposed; consciously placed or not, they point to her sex.

. .. " i~ .....~ii~
......
... I I
"i!
Louis Pierson.Countessde Castiglione.ca. 1895-98.
(The GilmanPaper Company.)
? F'i
i~i'iiii!iiiiii~iiiii~iA
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6"ii
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Louis Pierson.Countessde Castiglione.ca. 1895-98.

photoChristianKempf)
(Mus'e d'Unterlinden,
.
............

i4
j4'
.......
LouisPierson.Countess
de Castiglione.
ca. 1895-98. (Left:TheGilmanPaperCompany;
right:
Musde
photoChristian
d'Unterlinden, Kempf.)
From this photographic session the countess selected a group of prints

and sewed the images togetherwith a few stitches.On a slip of paper, in her
large sweepinghand, under the heading "Sirie des Roses," she listed the places
she had worn the ballgown between 1856 and 1895 (Tuileries, Compiegne,
etc.). With straightpins, she attached sliversof paper to the surfaceof several
of the photographs,as thoughto whittledown her girth.But in certainof these
the pieces of paper are applied with seeming randomness, precludingthe pos-
sibilitythat in every instance this was a crude attemptto mask the image for
rephotographing.
These last photographsare a somber coda to the several hundred images
of the countess. For an old woman to restage the postures, costumes, and at-
titudesofher youthis a staple ofthe gothic,the grotesque,or thecomedic. This
too is a textthat is already written.Old and fat,forgottenby almost everyone,
annotatingreferencesto herselfin the memoirs of the Second Empire as they
appeared in print, the countess looked to the photographernot only to stop
time,but to undo it. That she went so faras to tamperwiththe images suggests

the depth of her identificationwiththem. Theywere herselfas much as she was

herself,perhaps more so. Having lived her lifeeffectively as a representation,it
is not so surprisingthat identitycame to be located in the image perhaps even
more than in the flesh.
If we are willingto see the countess'sinvestmentin her image as patholog-
ical only in degree, then her photographiclegacy can be read as a melancholy
excursis on the conundrum of feminineself-representation.The lack of any
clear boundary between selfand image, the collapse of distinctionsbetween in-
teriorityand specularity,are familiar,ifextrememanifestationsof the cultural
constructionof femininity.In this sense, it is temptingto see her relation to
photographyas a bleak parable of femininityattemptingits own representa-
tion. Mirrorof male desire, a role, an image, a value, the fetishizedwoman at-
temptsto locate herself,to affirmher subjectivitywithinthe rectangularspace
of another fetish- ironicallyenough, the "mirrorof nature."
2. The Bazaar ofLegs

The commodity, like thesign, suffers from
metaphysical dichotomies. Its value, likeits
truth,liesin thesocialelement. But thesocial
element is addedontoitsnature,toitsmatter,
and thesocialsubordinates itas a lesservalue,
indeedas a nonvalue.Participation in society
requires thatthebodysubmititselftoa specu-
larization,a speculation,thattransforms it
into a value-bearing object,a standardized
sign, an exchangeable signifier,a "likeness"
withreference to an authoritative model.A
- a woman - is divided into
commodity
two irreconcilable"bodies": her"natural"
bodyand hersociallyvalued,exchangeable
body,whichis a particularly mimetic expres-
sion ofmasculinevalues.
- Luce Irigaray,
"Women on the Market"
The photographsof the countess suggestthatshe is less the incarnationof

a reifiedfemininitythan a particularlyadept medium of it. In this interpreta-
tion, the grotesquerieof the countess's narcissismmoves beyond the individual
case history to find its constituent terms in the cultural construction of
femininity.Accordingly,ifthe countess can be understoodas activelyinvolved

84 OCTOBER
in fetishizingparts of her own this instance, her makes sense

to examine this impulse in itsbody--in
historicalspecificity.Insofarlegs--it
as femininity(the
cultural) is never simplya given, as is femaleness(the natural), the countess's
stagingof herselfmay be seen as an extremeand immenselystylizedrecapitu-
lation of fetishisticmechanismsdispersed throughoutthe culturethatproduced
her.22
It is with respectto the specificfetishismof legs and the more generalized
fetishisminformingthe constructionof femininitythat I want to consider as-
pects of the social historyof ballet fromthe romanticperiod throughthe Second
Empire. My purpose is twofold. On the one hand, the development of the
ballet permitsus to see sexual ideology in the making: the cult of the ballerina
and the correspondingeclipse of the danseurnobleare indices of new concepts of
masculinityand femininity.On the otherhand, the historyof ballet provides a
particularlyclear case of the imbricationof fetishismand commodificationon
the bodies of women. It is one thingto acknowledge the metastasizingproper-
ties of capital as it transformseverythinginto its own image, quite another to
demonstrate its concrete ramifications,particularlyin the inchoate realm of
cultural production. The ballet is significantin this regard; it provides the
elementsof a case studyof social, sexual, and economic transformations,inso-
far as it illustratesthe relations between the fetishizingof the feminine,the
prostitutionalizationof the women workerswho representthatfemininity,and
the imperativesof the marketwhich underpin both developments.
My informationon the social historyofnineteenth-century ballet is drawn
almost entirelyfromthe works of Ivor Guest - the standard referencesin the
field. But the informationI have culled fromhis book and essays, and the em-
phases I have given it, is in every sense partial. In producing his detailed and
indispensable accounts of the French and English ballet, Guest himselfap-
pears to be oblivious to the sexual politics enacted not only on the level of
ideologybut also on the materialcircumstancesofthe dancers who literallyem-
body that ideology. Feminist dance historians such as Lynn Garafola, how-
ever, have been able to reread Guest's historieswitha clear grasp of the hitherto
unacknowledged factorsof sexual ideology that operated reciprocallyboth in-
side and outside the institutionalparametersof dance. The importanceof both
22. In the nineteenth century the opposition female-nature/feminine-culture is heavily in-

flectedin termsof class. Femininityor womanliness is the purview of the lady, in contrastto the
animal femaleness of working-classor peasant women. "Woman," state the Goncourt brothers,
"is an evil, stupid animal unless she is educated and civilized to a high degree. . . . Poetry in a
woman is never natural but always the product of education. Only the woman of the world is a
woman; the rest are females [femelles]" (Entry dated 13 October, 1855, PagesfromtheGoncourt
Journal,ed. and trans. Robert Baldick, London, Oxford University Press, 1963, p. 18). This
discursive opposition is reflectedin the Goncourts' literaryproduction as well; on the one hand,
the historical studies of eighteenth-centuryaristocratic women, and on the other, the realist
novels featuringworking-classheroines.

sources forthisessay lies in theirexaminations of a culturalphenomenon from

which the countess assimilated the generalized fetishismof legs, as well as the
more dispersed mythologyof the feminine.
All considerationsof the nineteenth-century ballet stressthat it produced
the most highlyarticulatedand aestheticizedexpressionof idealized femininity.
With the development of pointein the second decade of the century, the
ballerina became an etherealized vision of sublimity.Her airy weightlessness,
embodied in the darting, floating movement of her body en pointe,is the
emblem of a femininitypurged of earthlydross and carnality. Like the fairy
spirits,ghosts,and apparitions thatpopulate the librettiof romanticballet, the
ballerina is a figureof another,more rarefiedworld. At the same time,thisnew
primacy of the ballerina signals, in Lynn Garafola's description,the historical
moment in which "femininityitselfbecomes the ideology of the ballet, indeed
the very definitionof the art."23
This spiritualizedrepresentationof the ballerina as the incarnationof an
idealized femininityis, of course, ballet's own representationto itselfand of
itself;this is the language and perception of choreographers,librettists,and
dancers, of dance critics, afficionados,belletrists,and those for whom the
beauty and pleasure of the ballet lay firstand foremostin its status as an ex-
pressive and rigorous art. But while the internaldevelopment of the ballet in
London and Paris fromthe 1820s throughthe Second Empire hinges on the
new primacyof the ballerina, on a range of technicalrefinementsand elabora-
tions in the dance vocabulary, on the abolition ofgenres,24and on the assimila-
tion of romanticisminto dance libretti,music, and narrative, what mattered
forthe new enlarged dance public was legs.
Here, forexample, is a wholly unexceptional excerpt froman unsigned
articleof 1843, a momentconsideredby dance historiansas a benchmarkin the
artisticand technical evolution of ballet:
When ever we hear that a danseuseis coming out we white-waistcoat,
pantaloon, and double-opera ourselves up to the hilt . . . so that
nothingmay interruptour studyand deep contemplationof the"new
gal's legs." The stage, particularlythe stage of Her Majesty's Theatre,
is a kind of galleryof sculpture,a studio in whichPhidias mighthave
revelled, and the conceptions of Canova have been enslaved. The
23. Lynn Garafola, "The TravestyDancer in Nineteenth-CenturyBallet,"Dance Research Journal,

vol. 17, no. 2/vol. 18, no. 1 (Fall 1985/Spring1986) pp. 35-40. The ideological structuringof the
femininemystique of the ballerina was furtherimplementedby the division of ballerinas into two
categories, an ethereal (Taglioni's legendary quality), and an earthly(Elssler's speciality). This
binary opposition was codified by Theophile Gautier in his distinction between ballerinas as
"Christians" and "Pagans." See Ivor Guest, The RomanticBallet in Paris, London, Sir Isaac Pit-
man & Sons, 1966.
24. The threetraditionalgenres were the noble(in which the male dancer was of special impor-
and comique.See Ivor Guest, ibid.
tance), demi-caractkre,

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ii~i~ii~Wit
A. A. E. Disdiri. Les jambes de l'Op ra (carte-de-visite).

1856. (International
MuseumofPhotography
at GeorgeEastmanHouse.)

legs at the opera are reflectionsfromthe best masters-we beg par-

don-we mean mistresses, is precisely what we mean.
yes mistresses
We have seen gentlemen, even old gentlemen, deeply affectedby
this gloriousdisplay . . . Oh! the legs of Fanny [Elssler] displayed a
vast deal of proprietyand frightenedsober men fromtheirprescribed
complacency. Taglioni's legs encompassed a great deal of attention;
Cerrito'sleg magnifiedexcitement;Duvernay possessed a magic leg,
but to dilate is Opera is a bazaar of legs, and a stall
useless--the
costs ten and sixpence.25
That a significantproportionof the audiences that throngedthe ballet in
London and Paris were there to ogle the dancers' bodies - and particularly
theirlegs - was a factof ballet lifethat varied only in the outrageousness of its
expression. By the 1830s the pit of the Covent Garden Opera House, the part
of the house that was popularly referredto as "Fop's Alley," became an unruly
debauch in which the dandies fromWhite's and Crockford'sloudly commented
upon the physicalmeritsand deficienciesof the dancer's bodies, regularlyinter-
ruptingthe ballet withcatcalls, obscenities,or the equal furorof theirapproba-
tion. The salaciousness of the aristocraticmale spectators was often baldly
repeated in the writtenaccounts and commentarieson various performances.
Thus, fromtheprivilegedvantage oftheomnibus box, one writerdescribed
the ballet in termsof an erotic locus, "drawing innumerable glasses to a com-
mon centre,decked in flowersand a confusionof foldsof gauze scarcelysecret-
ing thatparticularpart of the leg whereon the fasteningofthe stockingis gener-
ally clasped and smilingand making otherssmile to see herpirouette as the star
of the ballet."26
That the legs of the dancers are the focus of the fetishizinggaze of the
male spectator is only the reflectionof a far more generalized phenomenon
which superimposes a map of (erotic) significanceon the woman's body. In
Western culture, women's legs had been covered by robes, skirts,or dresses
until afterthe First World War. Althoughhemlines historicallymigratedfrom
the arch of the footto several inches above the ankle, no expanse ofleg was ever
normallyexposed, a protocolas applicable to women agriculturallaborers as to
aristocratsand bourgeoises. Still, thatwomen's legs were not normallyseen is a
necessarybut not sufficient argumentforthe eroticsignificanceaccorded them
at least from the eighteenthcentury on. Certainly, the fact that European
women did not routinelywear drawers until well afterthe mid-nineteenthcen-
turyis relevant. Above the stocking,the leg was bare; under the skirts,under-
25. IllustratedLondon Life, April 16, 1843. Cited in Ivor Guest, "Dandies and Dancers," in
no. 37 (Spring 1969), p. 4. The leering quality of this quotation is particularly
Dance Perspectives,
strikingin that Taglioni was popularly perceived as the incarnation of virginal spirituality.
26. Cited in Guest, ibid., p. 12.

88 OCTOBER
skirts,and petticoats,the woman's body- her sex - was exposed. Yet the per-
sistenceof the fetishismof legs as, in Kleinian terms,a part object is such as to
trivializeattemptsat an empirical understanding.The legs of BettyGrable or
Marlene Dietrich, or the prominence of legs in modern advertising,are evi-
dence of the enduring potencyof this particularmapping of the erotic. Within
the historicalperiod under discussion here, however, the salient factis thatun-
til the twentiethcenturyit was only the legs of dancers or entertainersthatwere
publicly on display.
We confronthere the firstof the culturalcontradictionsof the mystiqueof
the feminineinscribed in the dance. Discursively constructedto representa
purifiedessence of femininity,enacting the body's transformationinto art, the
dancers themselvesare simultaneouslyeroticspectacle, bazaar of legs, panoply
of potential mistresses.
In this regard, there are two crucial and interrelatedphenomena which
accompany the ballet's evolution froma courtlyart, whollysupportedby royal
patronage, to a public, increasinglybourgeois spectacle, dependent on sales
and subscriptions.Firstand foremost,therewas the prostitutionalizationof the
dancer; second, there was the eclipse, if not banishment, of the male dancer
and his replacement by the female travestydancer. That these developments
are the direct outcome of the ballet's new economic exigencies and its conse-
quent reliance on a free market economy is furthersubstantiated by com-
parison with conditionsof the Royal Ballet in Copenhagen and the Mariinsky
Theater in St. Petersburg. Licensed and subsidized by crown and czar,
patronized by the court, the ballet in both countries retained its aristocratic
status. Consequently, the danseurnoble, although certainly rivaled by the
ballerina, never lost his position. And the female corps de ballet, underpaid
and overworkedas were theirsistersin France and England, were employeesof
the court and thus legally protectedby it. But in both England and France the
privatizationof the ballet led inexorablyto the debasement of the femalecorps
and eventually to the trivializationof the ballet itself.
One of the immediate results of privatizationwas the need for advance
subscriptionsand private subsidies. This meant that the financesof the ballet
were contingentupon the largesse of wealthymen. One of the firstacts ofJohn
Ebers, appointed directorof the Covent Garden Opera Ballet afterits bank-
ruptcyin 1820, was to open the passages to the stage to gentlemenand to con-
structa Green Room where theycould mix withthe dancers. Almost as soon as
it was completed, it became a cruising ground forthe members of the private
clubs, whose patronage was so crucial to the economics of the ballet. Contem-
porary accounts make very clear the extent of sexual trafficking within the
dancers' world, including the presence of procuresses as go-betweensand erst-
while managers. This is not to say thatdancers had not sold themselvespriorto
the adaptation of the ballet to a market economy. Rather, the new arrange-
mentstended to encourage and institutionalizea situationin whichwealthyand

powerfulmen could regard the corps de ballet as a sanctioned fleshmarket.27

The sexual commodificationof the dancer was furtherfacilitatedby the
disintegrationand eventual disappearance of a guild and clan systemthat had
traditionallyprovided both training, social identity,and protection. While
many of the greatestballerinas of the romanticera were the offspring
oftheatri-
cal clans, in increasingnumbers the girlsenteringthe professionwere products
of urban slums.28
In Paris, the sexual economy of the ballet, which was privatized in the
wake of the 1830 revolution,mirroredthatof London. In the same way thatthe
Green Room was made into a site of sexual commerce, so was the Foyer de la
Danse under the directorshipof Dr. Venon. Alberic Second's descriptionof
this development is worthquoting at length:
Before the Revolution of 1830, when few strangerswere admitted
backstage and guards and lacqueys in royal liverywere stationed to
warn offintruders,the Foyer de la Danse served merelyas a room
forthe dancers to gatherand limber up beforegoing on to the stage.
But all that was changed by Dr. Vernon, who transformedthe bare
working room into a glitteringcentre of social life. This was an
adroit move, which made the Opera fashionable overnight. The
dancers were then joined by a select band, consisting of the corps
diplomatique,the more important abonnes,and other distinguished
men, who found in thishour an added source of pleasure in the eve-
ning's entertainment.Many of these men, young men-about-town
who were forthe most part members of theJockey Club, acquired
the habit of looking on the coulissesof the Opera as their private
seraglio. The most fashionable of them watched the performances
from the proscenium boxes which abutted on the stage itselfand
were known as the logesinfernales. "The Opera," it was explained,
"providesthemwiththeiramorous pleasures, just as the Pompadour
27. "Poverty, naturally, invites sexual exploitation, especially in a profession of flexible

morals.... In the 1830s, however, the backstage of the Paris Opera became a privilegedvenue of
sexual assignation, officiallycountenanced and abetted. Eliminating older formsof 'caste' separa-
tion, the theater'senterprisingmanagement dangled before the select of its paying public a com-
modityof indisputable raretyand cachet- its female corps of dancers" (Garafola, p. 36). To this
recipe for exploitation must be added the straitened economic circumstances of most dancers
afterthe loss of royal subsidy. New budgetaryrestrictionsin the wake of privatizationdiminished
pensions (when they were not altogethereliminated) and curtailed other benefits.In 1848, with
the Paris Opera confrontingenormous deficits,the corps's salaries were reduced. With the excep-
tion of the immense salaries drawn by the ballet stars, salaries were extremely low. Opera
dancers had to pay out of pocket for extra classes and classesde perfectionnement.That so many
dancers sold themselves has to do as much with poverty as with the freersexual mores among
professional entertainers.
28. See Garafola, p. 36.

90 OCTOBER
stud-farmprovides them with theirequestrian pleasures; they con-

sider it as a storehouseforremounts,no more."The real natureof the
coulisses,in the words of an intelligentdancer, was "bourgeois,which
is theworstof natures. No one is too virtuous,because thatwould be
stupid, but no one is too sinful,because thatbecomes fatiguing.The
coulissesof the Opera have, above all, an air of boredom. They have
the spleen, like a fatEnglish millionaire,and it would be difficult
for
it to be otherwise.A large proportionof the abonnishave frequented
the Opera for years. For them, the coulissesno longer have any
mystery,savour, noveltyor poetry. The others,the newcomers, do
nothingbut look on, being not rich enough to touch."29
But if the bourgeois spectator could only affordto look, he was given
more to look at. In the 1840s the ballet skirtwas shortenedfrommid-calfto
knee length, although the longer skirtwas retained forcertain roles. Of much
greatersignificance,however,was the disappearance of the danseurnobleand the
rise of the travestydancer as partner to the ballerina.
In large part, thisdisappearance is a consequence of altered definitionsof
masculinity engendered by bourgeois culture. An aristocratic,courtly ideal
of masculine grace and elegance was incommensuratewith a new ideology of
gender in which concepts of beauty and grace were coming increasinglyto be
identifiedexclusivelywiththe feminine.The statelyadagios of the danseurnoble,
the gravityand poise ofhis partnering,were farless appea ing to an increasingly
bourgeois audience than the athleticismofthe leaps and spins performedby the
danseurde demi-caractere.Associated with the ancien regime, the art of the danseur
noblewas politicallysuspect as well.30
By 1840, these attitudeshad solidifiedto such an extentthat even a critic
as knowledgeable and sophisticatedabout dance as JulesJanin professedto find
male dancers ridiculous:
You know perhaps thatwe are hardlya supporterof what are called
grandsdanseurs.The granddanseurappears to us so sad and heavy! He
is so unhappy and self-satisfied!He responds to nothing,he repre-
sents nothing,he is nothing. Speak to us of a prettydancing girlwho
displays the grace of her featuresand the elegance of her figure,who
reveals so fleetinglyall the treasures of her beauty. Thank God, I
understandthatperfectly But a man, a frightful
man, as ugly as
....
you and I, a wretchedfellowwho leaps about withoutknowingwhy,
a creaturespecially made to carrya musketand a sword and to wear
a uniform. That this fellow should dance as a woman does -
29. Alberic Second, Les petitsmystkres

de l'Opera,Paris, 1844; cited in Guest, The RomanticBallet
in Paris, p. 28.
30. See Garafola,pp. 35-36.

impossible! That this bewhiskered individual who is a. pillar of the

community,an elector, a municipal councillor, a man whose busi-
ness is to make and unmake laws, should come beforeus in a tunicof
sky-blue satin, his head covered with a hat with a waving plume
amorously caressing his cheek, a frightful danseuseof the male sex,
come to pirouettein the best place while the prettyballet girlsstand
respectfully at a distance- this is surelyimpossibleand intolerable.31
The rise of the travestydancer, fromthe 1820s on, representedmore than
a technicalsolution to the problem posed by the shiftin the ideologyof gender.
The thinlyveiled pruriencein the descriptionsof the ballerinas who specialized
in travestyroles indicates the extent to which her popularitywas inseparable
fromthe spectacle of her body. Her corseted midriffemphasized bosom and
hips, the skintightbreeches displayed buttocks, hips, and legs. Thus, every-
thing in the costume of the travestydancer proclaimed her womanliness even
as the choreographypositioned her as the lover/partnerof the ballerina. Ac-
cordingly,a pas de deux between ballerina and travestydancer produced its
own, distinctiveeroticism, subtly evoking a lesbian pairing that the libretto
disavowed.32
During the Second Empire, as the ballet became diminished as art, it
became ever more elaborate as spectacle, with great attentionpaid to lighting,
decor, special effects,and an accompanying increase in corps dancers. The
number of venues for dance, both popular and balletic, increased; for the
period 1847 and 1870, Guest lists seventeen theaters, vaudevilles, and bals
where dance could regularlybe viewed. This proliferationproduced an expan-
sion in the number of dancers who obtained, however precariously, a living
fromthe dance. The introductionof new popular forms(the cancan, forexam-
ple, which, although invented in 1832, swept throughParis as a craze in the
1860s) produced a new crop of celebritydancers, such as the notorious Mlle
Rigolboche.33 The proletarian background of the majority of these women,
combined with the now fullysexualized associations of the dance, guaranteed
31. JulesJanin,JournaldesDibats, March 2, 1840; cited in Guest, TheBalletoftheSecondEmpire,

Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 1974, p. 21.
32. "In the formalized mating game of the travestypas de deux,two women touching and mov-
ing in harmony conveyed an eroticism perhaps even more compelling than their individual
physical charms. The fantasyof females at play forthe male eye is a staple of erotic literature,a
kind of travestyperformance enacted in the privacy of the imagination. Ballet's travestypas de
deux gave public form to this private fantasy, whetting audience desire, while keeping safely
within the bounds of decorum" (Garafola, p. 39).
33. Ephemeral celebrities at the intersection between popular dance and the demimonde,
women such as Rigolboche at the height of her fame, inspired books (e.g., Rigolbochemanie,
Mimnoirsde Rigolboche),numerous caricatures in the popular press, and, of course, photographs.
See Ivor Guest, "Queens of the Cancan," Dance and Dancers,December 1952, pp. 14-16; and
Francis Gribble, "The Origin of the Cancan," The Dancing Times,April 1933, pp. 19-21.

92 OCTOBER
that the dancer was perceived a priorias a sexual commodity.Her lower-class

originspresumed, her legs exposed, her favorsforsale, the equivalency of the
dancer withprostitutionhad by mid-centurybecome fullyacknowledged. The
virtuous exceptions, such as the tragic Emma Livry, functiondialecticallyas
the necessaryvirginsin a discourse of whores. In a figuresuch as Lola Montes
(who in the 1840s and '50s was the subject of a number of scandalous or
moralizing books, much space in the popular press, and innumerable litho-
graphs and wood engravings), the mythologyof the dancer and that of the
courtesan are fullyunited.
To an already substantialmarketforlithographsand wood engravingsof
ballet dancers, the advent of the photographic carte-de-visite, by virtue of its
relativecheapness, quasi-industrialmeans of production,and indexical status,
guaranteed a second lifeand even greaterdissemination. In her book on carte-
de-visiteportraitphotography,Elizabeth Ann McCauley stressesthe technical
determinationsgoverningsubject and pose (e.g., exposure time, studio loca-
tion, etc.) which effectively precluded conveyingany real impressionof dance
choreography or movement.34 If we accept the formulation,however, that the
dancer had become, virtuallyby definition,an icon of the erotic, the massive
productionof photographsof dancers need not attestto any particularinterest
in ballet per se. Additionally,the factthat so many of the dance photographsof
the Second Empire are of travestydancers would tend furtherto substantiate
the perception that these were, in some sense, fetishobjects.
The trafficin (dance) photographs,like the trafficin (dance) women, is
charged in this period with another discursive current:namely, an intensified
and expanded notion of celebrity,a phenomenon reciprocallyfueled and in
part constructedprecisely by that trafficin images, particularlycarte-de-visite
and stereopticonphotographs. McCauley indicates that by 1860, the first,sec-
ond, third, and ninth arrondissements(the center of the photographic in-
dustry) included 207 photographic establishmentsof which sixteen employed
more than ten workers.Althoughthe commissionedportraitwas the staple ser-
vice of all such businesses, celebritycartesrepresenteda significantpart of the
sales of the larger firms.35Similarly,celebritystereoswere marketedeitherin-
34. Elizabeth Ann McCauley, A. A. E. Disd"ri and the Carte-de- Visite,New Haven, Yale
University Press, 1985.
35. The vogue for assembling celebritycartes-de-visite
into bound albums was widespread, in-
dulged in as much by the aristocracyas by the bourgeoisie. What is particularlystrikingabout
these albums is the promiscuous mix of images of the powerful, the royal, the fashionable, the
notorious, and the ephemeral. For example, an album in the collection of the Museum of
Modern Art (Accession #42.135), assembled 1865-75, brings togetherin its pages the following:
victims of the Commune, the British Royal Family, generals of the Second Empire, various
crowned heads of Europe, artists (Edwin Landseer, Adolph Menzel, Horace Vernet, Ary
Scheffer,Courbet, Corot, Meissonier), actresses (Rachel, Ristori), and, finally,freaks(General
Mite, Tom Thumb's wedding). Such an ensemble is by no means exceptional.

Vaury& Cie. Celebrity carte-de-visite
stereoscopic
ca. 1860-65. (Collection
ofLouiseDilossert.
WilliamL. Schaeffer.)
.............
............................. ....... ........... .....
............ ............
...........
................
...............
............
...............
...............
J
...................
NJi N
dividuallyor in thematicensembles. McCauley indicatesthatthirty-seven per-

cent of Disderi's published Galeriedescontemporainswas devoted to theatricalper-
sonalities and entertainers;fifty-three percentof the celebritycartesadvertised
in an 1861 issue of theJournalAmusantwere likewiseof entertainers.While the
top of the photographicpyramidwas occupied by esteemed tragediennessuch
as the Rachels, Ristoris,or, forballet, the Muravievas and Merantes, the bot-
tom was made up ofthefigurantes, dance-hall girls,caf6-concertsingers,and the
of
troupes the popular theaters and bals. Somewhere between the two were the
cartesof the famous courtesans La Paiva, Cora Pearl, Anna Deslions, and so
forth.
Accompanying the circulationof these images were hastilyrun-offbooks
produced by journalists, books with such titlesas Ces dames,Lesjolies actricesde
Paris,Les cocottes, These
Rigolbochemanie. were themselves supplements to the ex-
tensive coverage of entertainersand demimondaines churned out by the illus-
trated press, publications such as Le Boulevard(established 1862), La Lune
(1866), JournalAmusant(1856), La VieParisienne(1863).
While it is indisputable that the developmentof the illustratedpress and
the celebritygossip/scandal/fashion ephemera it purveyedwere among the re-
sultsof the draconian press laws imposed afterNapoleon III's 1851 coup d'etat,
this new constructionof celebrityin the Second Empire has broader ramifica-
tions. For, insofar as this expanded notion of celebrityis predicated on an
economy ofthe spectacle (an image of Ada Isaacs Mencken in tightsis not to be

94 OCTOBER
understood in the same termsas one of the Duc de Morny with accompanying
biography), we are witnessing a shiftfrom an older conception of celebrity
defined through power or exemplarityto one of consumable - constantlyre-
plenished- evanescence. And insofaras a major part of this spectacular realm
is populated by more or less eroticized images of women, the attractionof this
new image world is underwritten by fantasies of imaginary possession.
Although the image of the woman is not yet conscriptedto the marketingof
commodities (this would be the accomplishmentof the Third Republic), the
eroticallure of the commodityand the woman herselfas eroticcommodityare
inexorablymoving into a shared orbit. For the bourgeois men at the opera who
could not affordto touch, but only to look, the diminutiveimage of the living
woman - sexualized, compliant, immobilized- is the token of theirpower.
3. The Legs oftheProstitute

The economyof exchange
- - is
of desire
man'sbusiness.
- Luce Irigaray,
"Women on the Market"
The nude, the prostitute,pornography- what kinds of relations on the

registerofrepresentationobtain between thesethreeavatars of femininity?The
first,legacy of classical antiquity, had by the nineteenthcenturyall but ex-
cluded the male, whose idealized body had originallyprovided the conceptual
model forits expression. The second, the prostitute,whetherin the glamorized
incarnation of the grandecourtisane or the debased and sordid image of thefille
publique,is one of the most pervasive and allusive motifsof the Second Empire
and Third Republic. The thirdterm of this set, pornography,intersectswith
and upsets the firstcategory,particularlyto the extentthat it incorporatescer-
tain elements of it within its own conventions.36And insofaras it is assumed
that the women depicted in pornographic and erotic photographyare pros-
titutes,the artistocratichotel,the bourgeois interior,can be said to have been in
36. The distinction I am implicitlydrawing between erotic and pornographic photographic

imagery is neithersystematicnor theoretical. I would categorize as erotic a frontalphotographof
a female nude, more or less artfullyposed. If, however, she were masturbating,or exposing her
genitals, I would consider it to be (within the terms of this discussion) pornographic. From the
coup d'etat of 1851 throughthe 1860s, censorship of photographywas fairlystringent.Acadimies
were legal, but could be sold only withinthe walls of the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Soft-coreerotica,
which was openly sold, was subject to the vagaries of the governmentcensors; one man's art was
oftenanother's indecency.

some sense penetratedby that which the entire reglementarysystemwas de-

signed to sequester and contain.
In placing these three terms in relation, what I hope to suggest is the
failure of a discursive cordonsanitaire:an attemptat segregatingthe licit from
the illicitthat constantlyfounders,not simplybecause the various boundaries
prove permeable, but because the mechanisms (psychic, social, economic) that
underwritethem are ultimatelythe same. The evidence of this failureof con-
tainment shows itselfin various guises in the Second Empire. The anxiety
cathectedonto the image and body ofthe prostituteis one symptom.The "crisis
of the nude"- so termedby T. J. Clark- is its manifestationin the framework
of aestheticdiscourse. And, finally,the apparentlyenormous productionof por-
nographic imagery attests to the impulse to master and possess the object of
desire, while simultaneouslydebasing it and neutralizingits power and threat.
Of the three terms I am treating,photographicpornographyis the most
empiricallyelusive.37 Then, as now, it representedan underground aspect of
photographicproduction, and as such it figuresnot at all in the standard pho-
tography histories. Collectors of pornographic photography tend not to
publicize their holdings, a reticence paralleled by libraries, museums, and
otherpublic institutions.Nonetheless, a few generalizationscan be made with
certainty.
First,almost as soon as therewere viable daguerreotypes,therewere por-
nographic ones. Until the early 1850s, that is to say, until the industrialization
of photography, photographic pornography appears to have been a luxury
item. Daguerreotypes are, of course, unique images; calotype technologies
were not employed much in France until after1850, and the collodion process,
whichi-lso produces unlimitedprints,was not inventeduntil 1851. Daguerreo-
type pornographyis oftenexquisitely hand-colored, the models are carefully
posed and lighted, and the trappings are often luxurious. Grant Romer of
Eastman House describespornographicdaguerreotypesconcealed inside watch
covers opened by hidden springs,or liningthe interiorcovers of snuffboxes, or
made intojewelry. By the early years of the Second Empire, much daguerreo-
typepornographywas stereoscopic.38Possessing a compellingillusion of three-
dimensionalityand preternaturaldetail, painstakinglytinted,entirelygrainless,
the visual effectof the hand-colored daguerreotypestereo is the acme of verisi-
militude.Moreover, viewingan image througha stereopticonmasks out every-
thingbut the image; the illusion of being in the picture is extremelypowerful.
The finesse of detail is often striking;in a number of daguerreotypesin the
Cromer Collection at Eastman House the necklace and earrings of the model
37. For most of my informationon Second Empire pornography, I am indebted to Grant

Romer, of Eastman House, who has generously shared his substantial, and unfortunatelyun-
published, research with me.
38. See Uwe Scheid, Das erotische
Imago, Dortmund, Die bibliophilen Taschenbiicher, 1984.

96 OCTOBER
r7.E*%V
.Ag
m
0:0010
ORM
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ii
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WIRRA ..
.......
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5- 4-1?011 .....
Mo
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......
...........
M,
W.51
are picked out with a needle on the surfaceof the plate. Viewed througha ste-
reopticon, they glitterand shine.
Romer suggeststhat the productionof these deluxe examples of the por-
nographer'sart crestedat the time of the 1855 and 1867 universal exhibitions,
when Paris was packed with wealthyforeigners.By the mid-50's, though, the
productionof pornographyforthe discriminatingconnoisseurwas joined by a
mass-produced form,with an accompanyingdecline in quality and craftsman-
ship.39
What did these images depict? Here is an instance of the ways in which
photographyeitherdraws on existingrepresentationalconventionsand alters
themor inventsits own. Of the former,images ofcoitus, oral sex, lesbians, and
masturbation all have graphic-artsprecedents- in many cases, immediate
ones, such as in the pornographiclithographyof theJuly Monarchy. These,
however, undergo modification.On the level of technique, the intractabilityof
the tripod-mountedcamera, the relative slowness of exposure, and the resis-
tance of real bodies to positionspossible forthe graphicartistall tend to enforce
a repertoryof pose and display in one sense more limited,in anothermore ex-
pansive, than existed previously. For example, traditionallypornographyhad
39. Some notionofthescale ofthephotographic pornography industry ofthenineteenthcen-

turymaybe obtainedfromthefollowing: "The Timesof20 April1874reportsa policeraidon a
Londonshopin which130,248obscenephotographs wereseized,plus 5,000 stereoscopic
slides"
(StephenHeath, TheSexualFix, New York, SchockenBooks, 1984, p. 110).

TheLegs oftheCountess 97
Anonymous.Hand coloredstereoscopic
daguerreotype.
ca. 1855.
?:
lg?..-._
MWAW
-- i:::
:!:!
.iiI
........... .:::!iii
...
.... i:
Albumenprint.ca. 1865.
Anonymous.
privileged sexual activity; with photography,the emphasis came more and

more to be on the presentationof the woman or of parts of her body, a spec-
tacular display for scopic consumption. With the leg as a locus of erotic in-
terest,poses were invented to provide new arrangementsfor its delectation.
Dancers and demimondaines were frequentlyshown with theirlegs straddling
the backs of chairs. And photographycan be creditedwiththe inventionof the
beaver shot, an image so constructedthatits sole purpose is the exposure of the
female genitalia.40Within this genre neithera surrogatefor the male viewer
nor a simulation of the woman's pleasure- indeed verylittleof the woman at
all- is necessary for the image to do its work. In fact, one of the suggestive
tropes of this kind of representationis the disappearance of the woman's face,
covered by her thrown-backpetticoatsor shrouded in veils.
But if one representationalpole concerns the elimination of everything
but the woman's sex, another privilegesthe specificityof her gaze. It is these
photographsin which the woman model looks directlyinto the lens of the
40. A conspicuousexceptionto thisis GustaveCourbet'snotoriouspainting"L'originedu

monde,"recently discussedin Linda Nochlin,"The Originwithoutan Original,"October, no. 37
(Summer1986), pp. 76-86; Neil Hertz,"Medusa'sHead: Male HysteriaunderPoliticalPres-
no. 4 (Fall 1983), pp. 27-54; and Denis Hollier, "How to Not Take
sure,"Representations,
vol. VIII, nos. 1-2 (Spring-Fall1984), pp. 84-93.
Pleasurein Talkingabout Sex,"Enclitic,

98 OCTOBER
camera, thus meeting the gaze of the spectator-that depart so emphatically

fromtraditionalmodes of pornography.Inasmuch as it is a real woman so de-
ployed, a real woman who receives and returns the look, pornographic
photographydetaches itselffroman image-worldof fantasyand comes to oc-
cupy an ambiguous realm between the real and the imagined.
It was around this problem of the indexical propertyof the photograph
that the debate on the acceptabilityof the photographic nude unfolded. For
members of the prestigiousSociete Frangaise de la Photographie,who actively
debated the issue in the 1850s, the photographicnude, almost by definition,
could not accede to the aesthetic. Photographicnudes were thereforeformally
banned from the Societe's competitionsand exhibitions. This exclusion had
two components,one explicitlyarticulated,the otherimplicitwithinthe larger
frameworkof the debate. The formerhinged on the purportedlack of media-
tion between living model and photographicimage; the generalizing, idealiz-
ing, and abstractingoperations of the artistwere voided by the very nature of
mechanical reproduction.The absence of these mediations- so the argument
went- precluded the metamorphosisfromnaked to nude. The second, implicit
aspect of the debate turned on what could not be said about either category.
Primarily,this devolved on the nature of the conventionsthatconfirmthe
attributesof the nude as, on the one hand, a sublimationof the erotic, and as,
on the otherhand, a fetish.In its sublimatorycapacity, the nude functionsboth
formallyand discursivelyas an aestheticgrid on which is figuredthe represen-
tation of a woman's body. A fieldforpleasurable looking, forthe freeplay of
desire and imaginarypossession, it must nonethelessdistinguishitselffromthe
real world of individualized, corporeal bodies. As fetish,the nude must deny or
allay the fear that the real female body always risks producing- hence such
conventionsas the suppression of the vagina and the eliminationof body hair,
as well as a prescribed repertoryof acceptable poses.
The photographic nude inevitably disrupts these structuresof contain-
ment and idealization, disrupts,in short,the proprietyof the nude. What the
painter elided, the photographershowed: not just pubic hair, but dirtyfeet,
and, perhaps most disturbingly,the face ofthe real woman, oftenincludingher
directand charmlessgaze. The look of thesewomen is rarelythe inviting,com-
pliant expression that signals complicitybetween the desiring subject and the
object of desire. On the contrary,the look is often utterlystraightforward,
unflinching,devoid of seduction. Occasionally it is challenging.This is, in fact,
the look of Manet's Olympia,and part of the scandal the paintingprovoked un-
doubtedly lay in the widespread recognition,albeit unacknowledged, of the
covert and illicitimagery that paralleled her representation.41
41. Gerald Needham'sessay "Manet, Olympia,

and PornographicPhotography"made this
claimin 1972. Needhamreproduceda numberofphotographs
in supportoftheargumentthat

In this context, T. J. Clark's discussion of Olympia'sreception in 1865,

which in most respects is so inclusive, entirelyneglects the ways in which the
crisis of the nude, the scandal of Olympia,and the intensifyingfetishismof
women's bodies, were integrallyrelated to the proliferationand dissemination
of pornographicand erotic photography.Clark's discussion hinges on the no-
tion that the courtesan- the mythologized,expensive, and publically acknowl-
edged manifestation of commercial sexuality- constituted the horizon of
iconographic representabilityfor the Second Empire.42 To the extent that
Olympiaviolated thatboundary, to the extentthat she was anxiouslyrecognized
as a denizen of the lower ranks of prostitution- "woman ofthe nightfromPaul
Niquet's" as she is designated in one of Clark's criticalcitations-she wrought
havoc on the discursivelimitswithinwhich prostitutioncould be imaged. The
problem with this formulationis that it ignores the extentto which images of
prostitutes(or women imagined to be prostitutes)of all ranksand levels actually
circulated. While the courtesan may have been the only prostitutionalrepre-
sentative appropriate for salon walls, an iconographic traditiondepicting the
less privileged members of the professionhad produced its own mythologies,
conventions, modes of representation.Moreover, the women who posed for
the pornographic images (whether the deluxe or mass-marketversions), the
women who spread their legs, feigned masturbation, engaged in lesbian or
heterosexual sex, were surely assumed to be prostitutes-fillespubliques-not
artist'smodels. In fact,a broad spectrumof sexualized and more or less venal
feminineidentities- the grisette,lorette,
lionne,biche,cocotte,grandecocotte,
grande
horizontale-were imaged initiallyin the lithographicproduction of the 1830s
and '40s and later in photographs.43
Manet had been stronglyinfluencedby what Needham terms"pornographic" photographs (I

wouldconsiderthemto fallwithinthecategoryoferoticimagery).Needham'sessayis reprinted
in Thomas B. Hess and Linda Nochlin,eds., Woman as SexObject:StudiesinErotic
Art1730-1970,
New York,NewsweekBooks,1972,pp. 80-89. The essayappearsto have had littleinfluence in
thefield;T. J. Clark,forexample,neithercitesitnorlistsitin thebibliography of ThePaintingof
Modern Life.
42. "The categorycourtisane was whatcould be represented of prostitution,
and forthisto take
place at all, she had to be extractedfromtheswarmof meresexualcommodities thatcould be
seen makinguse of the streets" (T. J. Clark, ThePainting ofModern Life,New York,AlfredA.
KnopfInc., 1984, p. 109). On thispoint,I disagreewithClark,althoughI wouldwishto add
thathischapteron Olympia is brilliant
and illuminating. In arguingforthecourtesanas represen-
tationallimit,Clarkneedstocollapseall sortsofcategoriesofthesexualizedand/orvenalwoman
underthesignof thecourtesan,whomhe characterized as floatingeitherabove or belowfixed
classdeterminations. However,thegrisette oftheromanticperiodand thelorette oftheSecondEm-
pire(so namedby NestorRoqueplan, directoroftheParis Opera), to citetwoexamples,were
associatedwithbohemia,not withthe flashyworldof courtesansand financiers.Further,in
numeroustexts,includingNana, the courtesanis very explicitlylinked to commerceand
commodification; herglamorand costliness in no waydetachedherfromherpositionas goodson
themarket.
43. See in thisregardBeatriceFarwell,TheCultofImages:Baudelaire andthe19th-Century
Media
Explosion,Santa Barbara,University of Californiaat Santa BarbaraArtMuseum, 1977.

....... ....
....
..............
~SOW.
Braquehais.RecliningNude. ca. 1856.
!ii.21
i!i!iiiiiiii~i
iiiiiiii~iiii'Nowii
ii!!iiiiiii~iliii4 1
Anonymous. Stereographic ca. 1860.

pornography.
(CollectionWilliamL. Schaefer.)

These various lexical distinctionsin the vocabulary of gallantrywarrant

discussion, particularlyinsofaras theirvarietyand ambiguityhave some bear-
ing on the iconographic sphere. To begin with the obvious, such a rich and
nuanced lexicon for sexually active and/or venal women, like the Eskimo's
reputed twenty-sevenwords for snow, attests to the central importance of
women definedby theirsexual activity.How that importancewas articulated,
and what kind of significancewas attributedto it, could, however, be inflected
in differentways. Within the frameworkof the juridical, legislative, medical,
or sociological coordinates of prostitution,the crucial issues were surveillance,
control,and confinement.The termsof this discours laid down in
prostitutionelle,
encyclopedic detail by the "Newton of A.
Harlotry," J. B. Parent-DuchAtelet,
were largely instrumental.44If the public prostitute could be identified,
registered,and confinedto certain areas; her activitylimited to certain hours,
her person segregated in a licensed brothel; if she could be monitoredby the
madame, the police, the gynecologist,then prostitution,considered by Parent-
Duchitelet and his heirs as a necessary evil (which, like the sewer system,was
indispensable for public health), could be managed and contained.45 The
threatto thisrationalized systemlay in the growingranks of clandestine,thatis
to say, nonregisteredprostitutes.
But the alarm produced by the increase in clandestine prostitution
(reflectedin the correspondingdecrease in the number of licensed houses both
in Paris and London) as well as what was widely perceived as its increasingly
"public" manifestations,masked a more fundamental anxiety. For what is
ultimately at stake in the effortto define the prostitute- whether through
demographicand sociological analysis, as in the workof Parent-Duchitelet and
the BritishBlue Books of the 1840s, or in the numerous works in the popular
press on the subject of the demimonde- is the uncertaintyof differentiation.
How does one distinguishbetween the honest woman and the prostitute?Or,
as Alain Corbin asks: "But is it not preciselythe goal of thisdiscourse to create
a differenceand thus finally to marginalize the registered prostitute as a
counter-idealin order to permitthe honest woman to be betterdefined?"46The
44. AlexandreParent-Duchatelet's De la prostitution

dansla villedeParis,a demographicstudyof
whohad been registered
12,000prostitutes duringtheperiod1816-31,was publishedin 1836. Its
influencecannotbe overemphasized.It providedthe modelnot onlyforfifty yearsof French
reglementarysystems,but also forBritishlaws and investigations.See Alain Corbin'sseminal
work Les flles de noce.:misb're
sexuelleet prostitution
aux 19ibmeet 20ibmesiecles,Paris, 1978. In his
chapteron Olympia,T. J. Clarkprovidesan excellentaccountofthelegacyofParent-Duchatelet.
45. Parent-Duchatelet was additionallya specialistin sewers,drains,and cesspools.For a
discussionofthelinkagebetweenprostitution, and death,see Alain Cor-
sewage,putrification,
bin,"CommercialSexualityin Nineteenth no. 14 (Spring1986),
CenturyFrance,"Representations,
pp. 209-219.
46. This was takento itslogicalconclusionin thesubstanceoftheContagiousDiseases Acts,
passedin GreatBritainin 1864,1866,and 1869(theactswerenotrepealeduntil1886). In thein-
terestofcontrolling
venerealdiseasein garrisoncitiesand ports,anywomancouldbe accostedby

102 OCTOBER
urgencyof the need to definethe nature of the prostitutewas furtherheightened

because the work of Parent-Duchitelet and the British researchers had in-
dicated that women frequentlymoved in and out of prostitutionwith some
fluidity;the loss of employment or other economic factors could propel a
woman temporarilyinto prostitution,but she could leave itjust as abruptly.47
Thus the encrustationof folklore,legend, and myththat functionedto fixthe
definitionof the prostitute(she was frigid,lazy, improvident,liked sweets, and
so forth)was undercutby a body of empirical documentationthat put in ques-
tion the very terms of the discourse itself.
All the more reason, no doubt, thatZola's Nana, the Golden Fly, the Gon-
courts' Elisa, Huysmans's Marthe, or Balzac's Esther should possess the hard
and brilliantclarityof archetypes,whetheras representativesof the heightsof
prostitutionor of its depths. Not only do theyall come to suitablybad ends, but
theirsexualityis described as deficientor deformed.In thisway, the etiologyof
venal sexualitycould be fullyexplained, eitherin termsof heredity,malign in-
fluence,or moral corruption.Such explanations, like the archetypalcast of the
descriptionsof theprostitute,providedreassurance; theyare apotropaic devices
against uncertainty.
This uncertaintyis fullybuilt into the language of femininesexualityand
identity.Even as the words proliferate,the slippery, protean realitythat the
words attempt to govern constantlythreatens to overcome them. The word
demimonde, which fromthe veryoutset referredto a specificallyfemininecondi-
tion, was inventedby Alexandre Dumasfils in the 1840s. In the play in which it
originallyappeared, it referredto those women "become free"(widows, wives
separated fromtheirhusbands, and foreigners),who, thoughrespectable,were
nonetheless "marginal" insofar as their marital status was perceived as am-
biguous.48
The suggestive vagueness of the term is characteristicof the shifting,
unsecured meaning of the sexualized woman driftingbetween the sturdy
fixitiesof femmehonneteand file publique. Consequently, gray areas in this
topographyof the sexualized feminine- the kept woman (of high or low sta-
tion), the lorette,
thegrisette,the occasional prostitute,the dancer, the actress-
a specialplainclothespolicemanand accused ofbeinga "commonprostitute." If she could not

proveotherwise, shecouldbe subjectedto an internalexamination,
and, iffoundtobe carryinga
venerealdisease,internedforup to ninemonthsin a certified
lockhospital.Needlesstosay,men
(who wereknownalso to be carriersofvenerealdiseases)wereexemptfrommedicalorjudicial
control and examination. See Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution
and Victorian
Society:Women,Class and
theState,Cambridge,CambridgeUniversity
Press, 1980.
47. Clark cites a forthcomingbook byJill Harsin entitled Crime,Poverty,
and Prostitution
in Paris
1815-1848,whichhe says refutesthe idea thatprostitution
was in manycases occasionaland
temporary.
48. See Novelene Sue Ross's excellentdiscussion in Manet'sBar at theFolies-Bergkres
and theMyths
Ann Arbor, UMI Press, 1982.
ofPopularIllustration,

all confound the social need to definethat is an inseparable component of the

power to name, regulate, survey,and control. But the real question underlying
the specificdebates between prostitutionalregulationistsand abolitionists,or
between the celebratorsof the demimonde and itsJeremiahs, is perhaps more
fundamentalthan the stated problem of prostitutionas such. Rather, the ques-
tion is the culturally- and temporally- overarching one of femininity,the
enigma of woman, the sphinxwithouta riddle, the mysterywithouta solution.
Who is she? What is she? How can she be known? What does she want?
Predictably,these are the rhetoricalquestions asked about the Countess
de Castiglione in the popular press. The tone is bantering, sly, insinuating-
the cheap sophistication of the journalist/boulevardier. "Paris at this moment
possesses a lion and a lionne,"wrote a journalist for L'IndipendanceBelge in
1856.49 The countess is a "mysteriousstranger" destined to sow heartbreakand
discord in the fashionablesalons. Who is she? What does she want? The lion is
the aged Prince Orloff,emissary of the czar, present in Paris for the peace
negotiationsfollowingthe conclusion of the Crimean War. The lioness is the
countess, not yet a widow, and in no way associated with the demimonde.
Nonetheless, the Count Orloffis described as a lion, that is to say, prominent
and powerful(the term is still current,both in English and French) and the
countess is described as a lioness, that is to say, a sexual predator- a courte-
san.50 That the countess was not protectedby her marital status, her title,her
reception at court, from being publicly labeled as a courtesan indicates the
extreme instabilityof the epistemological systemthat attemptedto secure the
meanings of femininevirtueand vice. The nefariouspower of the woman per-
ceived as sexually active was such as perpetually to subvert the taxonomies
constructedto label and contain her. The cultural hysteriaproduced by the
courtesanand the prostitute(Zola's notes forNana or Maxime du Camp's wildly
inflateddescriptionsof the numbers and influenceof prostitutesare prime ex-
amples) exceeds the conventional categories in which the sexual activityof
women is circumscribed.For the anxietythat attaches to the figureofwoman is
that of a differencethat escapes the discourses of containment.
To a certain extent,the nude, erotic and pornographicimagery,and the
discourse of prostitutionall propose various responses to this threat. In the
female nude of Western culture, patriarchyproduces a representationof its
desire; sexual difference,like the structureof fetishism,is both there and not
there. Nothing to see and nothingto hide. Pornographyemphaticallyexhibits
the physical sign of that difference,even to the extentof making the woman's
49. JulesLecompte,in the"Courrierde Paris"in L'Indipendance

Belge,quotedin Loli&e,p. 226.
50. EugeneGuerard,forexample,produceda suiteoftwelveplatesentitled
The lithographer
Les Lionnesbetween 1845-48. "This series of lithographs . . . depicts the activitiesof the grandes
associationwiththedandies,or lions,derivedtheirappellationlion-
who,fromfrequent
courtisanes
nes(Farwell,p. 123).

104 OCTOBER
genitalsthe subject of the image. But any potentialthreatis neutralized by the

debased situation of the woman thus portrayedand the miniaturizationand
immobilizationinherentin photographicrepresentation.The masteryand pos-
session accorded the spectator'slook, a masterydoubled in the structureof the
photograph itself, dispels whatever menace or unpleasure the sight of the
woman might provoke. Lastly, the discourse of prostitution,in its episte-
mological rigorand exhaustive typologies,attemptsto provide the reassuring
edifice of knowledge and power, which, despite its lacunae, is nonetheless, a
monument to the possibilityof total controland domination.
The failureof the cordonsanitaireto which I earlier referredhas implica-
tions more far-reachingthan the disruptionof academic painting conventions
or the perceived failureto contain and controlprostitution.Moreover, to the
degree thatthislatterculturalanxietyconfuseseffectwithcause and imputesto
the prostitutethose destructiveand corrosive powers that are everywhereat
work in society, it produces a symbolizationof social crisis in which woman
becomes the figureof guilt, corruption,and decomposition. The barriersbe-
tween what is deemed licit and illicit,acceptably seductive or wantonly sala-
cious, aestheticor prurient,are never solid because contingent,never steadfast
because theytraffic witheach other- are indeed dependentupon each another.
Hence, an entire system of distinctions,elaborations, signs, and codes- a
system that pretends to be founded on differences- is in realitya tendentious
elaboration of the same. To the patriarchalnorms thatgovernthiswonderland
of sexual economics, the courtbeauty, proletariandancer, courtesan,or street-
walker are equally subject, if not equally abject.
Anonymous.Handcolored
stereoscopic
daguerreotype.
ca. 1855.
..................
its
MIT;

..........
............
..
ANEW .....
.....
......
....
........
............
......................
........
.....
...
......
...
...
Kk
Mayer& Pierson.
Countess
de Castiglione.
ca. 1856-60.
MuseumofArt,giftofGeorge
(TheMetropolitan Davis.)
In otherwords, forthecommodity, thereis no

mirror thatcopiesit so thatit maybe at once
itselfand its "own"reflection.
- Luce Irigaray,
This Sex Whichis Not One
Considering the hundredsofphotographsthatthe countesscommissioned

of herself,particularlythose that featurethe use of mirrors,the hollowness of
the attempt to claim the countess as author is apparent. Like the conven-
tionalized femininityshe was believed to incarnate, the edges of the
photographicframe are a Procrustean bed to which body and soul must ac-
commodate themselves.The masks, the disguises, the postures,the poses, the
ballgowns, the display of the body-what is the countess but a tabula rasa on
whom is reflecteda predeterminedand delimited range of representations?
And of what does her subjectivityconsist if not her total absorption of them,
her obedience to a scopic regime which inevitablyundercuts her pretended
authorityas orchestratorof the look? It is in this sense that the photographsof
the Countess de Castiglione are finallyso troubling.

----------------
-
%e
V.,
?x
.........
.
........ 0 'oe
.. ..........
....
...........
jk
.................
...
.......
hm
Mayer& Pierson.Countessde Castiglione.ca. 1856-60.

...
?wwwwwwwww
*44
Ake....
so
..
l aw
Bothphotographs
collection
Musee d'Unterlinden,
photos
ChristianKempf

108 OCTOBER
In a number of photographsshe included withinthe stagelikespace of the

studio a similarphotographof herself,doubling her own image enabyme.Image
withinimage, it is as thoughthe countess were providinga commentaryon her
own specularization. In anotherseries of photographs- the best-knownones of
her- she framesher eye withinthe oval space of a black passe-partoutframe.
In another, she doubles her gaze in a small hand mirror,deflectingit outward
toward the spectatorin a manner thatpermitsher to be at once subject and ob-
ject of the gaze. For whom does the countess effectthis framingof the look?
Knowing thatthese images of her were only forher, to what purpose thisisola-
tion and emphasis of her gaze?
The profound ambiguity of this gesture, the confusion of subject- and
object-positionsit occasions, might be said to expose the very reificationit
enacts. The appeal of such an interpretationlies in its presumptionof a critical
space, however minimal or problematic,fromwhich the woman can speak her-
self. But the images of the countess in their entiretydo not suggest her oc-
cupancy of such a space, nor anythingbut a total embrace and identification
with the look of the other. Consequently, the look with which she fixesherself,
and the fixingof herselfforthe receptionof the look, cannot be understoodas a
disappropriation- a theft- of the masculine prerogative.Nor can it be under-
stood as an act of intentionalmimicry,an act which potentiallysubvertsthe
authorityit apes. Rather, a living artifact,the countess has so fullyassimilated
the desire of othersthatthereis no space, language, or means ofrepresentation
forany desire that mightbe termed her own. In its broadest implications,the
photographic legacy of the Countess de Castiglione- image and object of
desire- confrontsus withthe question whose urgencyis a functionofwhatever
empowermentwomen can thus far claim: whose desire?
This essay, a shortversion of which was presented at the College Art Association in Febru-
ary 1986, is part of a work in progress; a study of femininity,sexuality, and photography in
nineteenth-centuryFrance. I would like to acknowledge the assistance and advice of the following
people: Jean Sagne, who firsttold me about the photographs of the Countess de Castiglione;
Maria Morris Hambourg, who led me to the de Montesquiou text and facilitatedmy research in
everyway; Grant Romer and Lynn Garafola, who generouslyshared theirresearch withme; and
especially Joanne Seador, who helped me at every stage of the work.


The Legs of The Countess-Solomongodeau1986

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The Legs of the Countess

Author(s): Abigail Solomon-Godeau

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deniedto woman: indisputably

Historians ofphotographytend to divide the staggeringnumber ofimages

1. Louis Pierson, who began his professionalcareer as a daguerreotypist,joined the firmof

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object, the stillpicture of a frozenlook, a screen forthe projectiveplay of the

2. The structuralhomologiesbetweenthecommodity fetishand thewomanin partriarchy

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auxiliary discourses of fashion and publicity,are inseparable fromthe rise of

potent and transfiguringadmixtures of modernity. It is within this dense

4. Cited in Frederic Loli&e, Lesfemmesdu secondempire,Paris, Talladier, 1954, p. 48.

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8. These photographs,assembled by Robert de Montesquiou, are now in the collectionof the

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Mayer& Pierson.Countessde Castiglione.

First, thereis the sheer quantity. Surely no woman of the mid-nineteenthcen-

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No less remarkable are the photographs she commissioned of herselfen

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there,and thus to create an abstractunityin color and textureof the

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sibleto describethecountess'srelationto herphotographs, at leastin a clinical

15. Montesquiou,p. 81.

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17. Labracherie, p. 48.

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19. "Masquerade (la mascarade): An alienated or false version of femininityarising fromthe

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Mayer& Pierson.Georges ca. 1862.

rituals of masquerade to which the countess was profoundlyresponsive. This

21. Not surprisingly, relationsbetweenthecountessand her son weredeeplytroubledfrom

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Louis Pierson.Countessde Castiglione.ca. 1895-98.

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From this photographic session the countess selected a group of prints

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the depth of her identificationwiththem. Theywere herselfas much as she was

2. The Bazaar ofLegs

The photographsof the countess suggestthatshe is less the incarnationof

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in fetishizingparts of her own this instance, her makes sense

22. In the nineteenth century the opposition female-nature/feminine-culture is heavily in-

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sources forthisessay lies in theirexaminations of a culturalphenomenon from

23. Lynn Garafola, "The TravestyDancer in Nineteenth-CenturyBallet,"Dance Research Journal,

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A. A. E. Disdiri. Les jambes de l'Op ra (carte-de-visite).

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legs at the opera are reflectionsfromthe best masters-we beg par-

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powerfulmen could regard the corps de ballet as a sanctioned fleshmarket.27

27. "Poverty, naturally, invites sexual exploitation, especially in a profession of flexible

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stud-farmprovides them with theirequestrian pleasures; they con-

29. Alberic Second, Les petitsmystkres