In Memory of Sarah Bernhardt (1844 - 1923)

Sarah Bernhardt (aged 21) 

Photo by Félix Nadar (1865)

 

"Mon vrai pays est le plein air et ma vocation est l'art sans contraintes."

 

 

I. 

 

It's strange, but there are some figures who, in theory, should hold a special interest to me, but about whom I know embarrassingly very little. And the French actress Sarah Bernhardt, who died on this day 100 years ago, is one such figure ...

Famously described by Oscar Wilde as divine, a 63-year-old Bernhardt even managed to capture the heart of a young D. H. Lawrence in 1908, when appearing on the English stage as part of a twenty day, sixteen city tour of Great Britain and Ireland:

 

"Sarah Bernhardt was wonderful and terrible. [...] Oh, to see her, and to hear her, a wild creature, a gazelle with a beautiful panther's fascination and fury, laughing in musical French, screaming with true panther cry, sobbing and sighing like a deer sobs, wounded to death, and all the time with the sheen of silk, the glitter of diamonds, the moving of men's handsomely groomed figures about her! She is not pretty - her voice is not sweet - but there she is, the incarnation of wild emotion which we share with all live things, but which is gathered in us in all complexity and inscrutable fury. She represents the primeval passions of woman, and she is fascinating to an extraordinary degree. I could love such a woman myself, love her to madness; all for the pure, wild passion of it." [1]

 

 

II. 

 

Clearly, then, Bernhardt - the illegitimate daughter of a Jewish courtesan who had numerous lovers amongst the wealthy Parisian elite - was one of those wonder-women who seem to seduce, bewitch, or scandalise everyone they encounter. 

 

And, the more I read about her - or the more I look at beautiful old photos of Miss Bernhardt, particularly those taken when she was still very young and with a mass of curly black hair  - the more I start to understand and appreciate why that would be. 

 

I love the fact, for example, that as a child being educated at a convent, she outraged the nuns by performing a Christian burial, with full procession and ceremony, for her pet lizard. And I love the fact also that a century before the world had ever heard of Toyah Willcox, Miss Bernhardt chose to sometimes sleep in a satin-lined coffin.   

 

Arguably, Bernhardt even has something free spirited about her that Nietzsche (who was born in the same month and year) would admire, as this quotation demonstrates:

 

'I passionately love this life of adventures. I detest knowing in advance what they are going to serve at dinner, and I detest a hundred thousand times more knowing what will happen to me, for better or worse. I adore the unexpected.' [2]

 

That's pretty much the philosophy of amor fati and living dangerously in a nutshell, is it not? 

 

She also had that most Nietzschean of virtues: endurance ... For here was an actress who didn't just break a leg, she actually lost a leg due to gangrene in 1915 (when aged 70), but still returned to the stage at the first opportunity and performed for French soldiers fighting on the Western Front.

 

Right until the very end, she also continued to entertain guests at home, - including Colette, who described being served coffee by a living legend:

 

"'The delicate and withered hand offering the brimming cup, the flowery azure of the eyes, so young still in their network of fine lines, the questioning and mocking coquetry of the tilted head, and that indescribable desire to charm, to charm still, to charm right up to the gates of death itself.'" [3]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Blanche Jennings (25 June 1908), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 59. 

      It is interesting to note that Lawrence was forty-years younger than Sarah Bernhardt when he wrote this letter. Later, he issues a warning to his new friend Miss Jennings: 

      "Take care about going to see Bernhardt. Unless you are very sound, do not go. When I think of her now I can still feel the weight hanging in my chest as it hung there for days after I saw her. Her winsome, sweet, playful ways; her sad, plaintive little murmurs; her terrible panther cries; and then the awful, inarticulate sounds, the little sobs that fairly sear one, and the despair of death; it is too much in one evening." 

      It is also interesting to note that a 28-year-old Sigmund Freud was also smitten by Sarah. After seeing her perform the title role in Victorien Sardou's melodrama Théodora (1884), he sent his long-suffering fiancée, Martha Bernays, a scene-by-scene account of Bernhardt's performance, concluding that she was a remarkable creature: "Her caressing and pleading, the postures she assumes, the way she wraps herself around a man, the way she acts with every limb, every joint - it's incredible!" 

      See the Letters of Sigmund Freud 1873-1939, ed. Ernst L. Freud, trans. Tania and James Stern, (Hogarth Press, 1961), pp. 178-82.  

      But of course, Bernhardt also had her critics, including Shaw, Turgenev, and Chekov - but I'm writing here to praise Sarah, not to bury her. 

[2] Quoted in Hélène Tierchant, Sarah Bernhardt: Madame 'quand même', (Éditions Télémaque, 2009), pp. 210-211. Unknown translator.

 

[3] Quoted by Cornelia Otis Skinner in Madame Sarah, (Houghton, 1967), p. 330. 

 

 

Special (from beyond the grave) bonus - Sarah Bernhardt reciting a poem by Victor Hugo (Paris, 1903): click here. 

 

For a follow up post to this one on the art and necessity of coffin sleeping, click here.

 

Merci à Sophie pour la suggestion de cet article.

Pédophilie (with Reference to the Cases of Michel Foucault and Gabriel Matzneff)

 Suffer the little children to come unto us ...

 

Whatever some people choose to believe, children are not angels and even pre-pubescent youngsters possess an immature form of sexuality that they will often seek to playfully explore as a natural part of their development. That, we might say, is simply an established (biological and psychological) fact.  

 

The problem, however, is that this fact of child sexuality is subject to an ever-shifting socio-cultural interpretation by adults, some of whom wish to safeguard the innocence of those deemed to be incapable of giving consent and some of whom wish to share in or exploit the affections of children whom they argue are perfectly capable of expressing their feelings and know very well what they do and do not want to do.         

 

This latter position was pretty much that of everyone who located themselves on the radical wing of French politics in the 1960s and '70s, including, for example, Michel Foucault ... 

 

In 1977, having previously added his name to an open letter published by Le Monde [1] defending three individuals who had been charged over sexual activity with minors (or what is known outside of France as statutory rape), Foucault signed a petition addressed to the French parliament calling for the decriminalisation of all consensual relations between adults and minors under the age of fifteen [2]. He also later took part in a radio discussion of this topic with Guy Hocquenghem and Jean Danet [3].

 

Amongst other things, they expressed their shared concern that the penal system was not merely punishing acts deemed criminal, but in the process of constructing a new type of bogeyman - the paedophile - who was being held up as a danger to society in much the same way that the figure of the homosexual had previously been used.         

 

For Foucault, the suggestion that children - particularly over the age of twelve - were unable to consent to sexual relations (either with one another or with adults) was itself an unacceptable form of abuse, restricting their right to freedom and decision making via the use of contractual law introduced into the amorous realm. Children, he said, should be fully empowered to find pleasure in any way they liked.

 

What this argument ultimately hinges upon is whether one considers child sexuality as fundamentally different from adult sexual behavior and, as such, something that should be preserved as a form of virgin territory "with its own geography that the adult must not enter" [4] under any circumstances or for any reason. 

 

Clearly, Foucault isn't prepared to buy into this idea of children's sexuality as a specific sexuality "with its own forms, its own periods of maturation, its own highpoints, its specific drives, and its own latency periods" [5]. Nor does he think that children are a particularly vulnerable population who need protecting from adults or, indeed, from their own desires.

 

It's precisely this kind of thinking that, over forty years later, has finally landed Gabriel Matzneff in hot water ... [6]

 

Notes

 

[1] Foucault was not the only well-known French intellectual to sign this; his name was just one of over sixty attached to the letter - written by Gabriel Matzneff (see footnote 6 below) - that appeared in Le Monde on 26 January, 1977. For an English translation of the letter and a list of the signatories, click here.

 

[2] Again, it should be noted that the petition was also signed by many other prominent intellectuals, including Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, and even dear old Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. As I say in the post, pretty much everyone on the radical left at this time was pro-sexual freedom, the extension of civil rights, and the breaking of all taboos (if only to outrage the bourgeoisie). For an interesting article by John Henley writing in The Guardian (24 Feb 2001) on how the call to legalise sex with children rebounded on some of the luminaries of May '68, click here.    

 

[3] The radio discussion was produced by Roger Pillaudin and broadcast by France Culture on 4 April, 1978. A transcript was later published as La Loi de la pudeur in Recherches 37, April 1979. The first full translation in English, by Alan Sheridan, appeared under the title 'Sexual Morality and the Law' in Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, (Routledge, 1988). This was republished as 'The Danger of Child Sexuality', in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, (Semiotext(e), 1996).   

 

[4] and [5] Michel Foucault, 'The Danger of Child Sexuality', in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston, (Semiotext(e), 1996), p. 267.

 

[6] Gabriel Matzneff is a French writer who had long boasted of his penchant for sex with children and openly detailed his activities in his books. Despite this, he escaped criminal prosecution for many decades and enjoyed the support of the French literary establishment. However, at the end of 2019 Vanessa Springora published Le Consentement, describing her illicit relationship with Matzneff in the mid-1980s when she was fourteen and he was fifty. The book ignited a controversy in France and led to prosecutors opening a rape inquiry. Matzneff is also due to appear in court in September of this year charged with being an apologiste for paedophilia in a case brought by the Blue Angel Association.