Notes
1. Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, The Divine Sarah: A Life of Sarah Bernhardt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 3–4, 33, 276.
2. Guy Gaucher, Histoire d’une vie: Thérèse Martin (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1988), 227–228.
3. The most cogent discussion of narrative as a representational strategy is Hayden White’s The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), esp. 1–25. See also chap. 3, below.
4. This choice is somewhat narrow, and certainly open to criticism. These and other literary works are discussed in relation to tuberculosis in Guillaume, Du désespoir au salut, 81–105 (“Phtisie et sensibilité romantique”); in René and Jean Dubos, The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man, and Society, 2d ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 44–66 (“Consumption and the Romantic Age”); and in Grellet and Kruse, Histoires de la tuberculose. This selection is not meant to convey a judgment of canonical status or of literary quality. Rather, I have tried to cover (chronologically) most of the nineteenth century and to call on familiar literary and artistic works that exemplify certain broad trends and themes in French culture and also address social issues (such as prostitution, class and gender relations, labor, and poverty). In addition, all of these works refer specifically to tuberculosis (rather than vaguely to some unspecified chronic illness, as do some of the works discussed by Grellet and Kruse), and two of them provided Sarah Bernhardt with some of her most famous stage moments; for reasons discussed below, I see Bernhardt as personifying in certain ways the nineteenth-century consumptive ideal.
5. See chap. 1, above.
6. See, for example, Guillaume, Du désespoir au salut, 81–105, and Grellet and Kruse, Histoires de la tuberculose, 133–142.
7. Alexandre Dumas fils, La Dame aux camélias [1848] (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1967).
8. Ibid., 86.
9. Ibid., 93, 101.
10. Ibid., 244.
11. Carlos M. Noël, Les Idées sociales dans le théâtre de A. Dumas fils (Paris: Albert Messein, 1912), 42–43, 47.
12. Roger J. B. Clark, introduction to Dumas fils, La Dame aux camélias (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 44–45.
13. Henry Murger, Scènes de la vie de bohème [1851] (Paris: Gallimard, 1988).
14. In the opera version, La Bohème (1896), the character of Francine is folded into that of Mimi, and Mimi’s death from tuberculosis is dramatized to such an extent that it plays a much more prominent part in the opera than does Francine’s in the novel; as a result, later opera audiences perceive the death originally intended for Francine as more central to the drama than it is in Murger’s text.
15. Murger, Scènes de la vie de bohème, 216–217.
16. See chap. 1, above.
17. Murger, Scènes de la vie de bohème, 281–282.
18. Ibid., 283–284, 287–289, 291.
19. Victor Hugo, Les Misérables [1862], trans. Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee (New York: New American Library, 1987), 187.
20. Ibid., 182, 200–201, 257, 283–284, 294.
21. Jane P. Tompkins, “Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Literary History,” in Elaine Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 81–104; quotation at 85.
22. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Germinie Lacerteux [1864] (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1982).
23. Ibid., 101–102.
24. Ibid., 142, 164.
25. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Madame Gervaisais [1869] (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 93, 241.
26. Ibid., 209–210, 228.
27. Ibid., 241.
28. Elaine Aston, Sarah Bernhardt: A French Actress on the English Stage (Oxford: Berg, 1989), 122.
29. Edmond Rostand, L’Aiglon [1900] (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 226.
30. Ibid., 90, 139.
31. Ibid., 231–236.
32. Ibid., 360–361.
33. Ibid., 360–361, 429 n. 109.
34. Among the best biographies of Thérèse are Gaucher, Histoire d’une vie: Thérèse Martin; Monica Furlong, Thérèse of Lisieux (New York: Pantheon, 1987); Jean-François Six, Thérèse de Lisieux au Carmel (Paris: Seuil, 1973); and René Laurentin, Thérèse de Lisieux: Mythes et réalité (Paris: Beauchesne, 1972).
35. Gérard Cholvy and Yves-Marie Hilaire, Histoire religieuse de la France contemporaine, 1880–1930 (Toulouse: Privat, 1986), 142, 325–329; Furlong, Thérèse of Lisieux, 124–128; Gaucher, Histoire d’une vie, 231–234.
36. See, for example, Story of a Soul, 157–159, 211; Furlong, Thérèse of Lisieux, 85–86.
37. Story of a Soul, 210–211.
38. Ibid., 210, 215, 265.
39. Furlong, Thérèse of Lisieux, 114–115.
40. John Clarke, ed., St. Thérèse of Lisieux: Her Last Conversations(Washington, D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1977), 80, 98, 108.
41. Ibid., 217, 224. (Emphasis in original.)
42. Ibid., 224. This scene is rendered brilliantly in the film Thérèse, directed by Alain Cavalier (UGC Films, 1986).
43. Clarke, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, 229–230. (Ellipses in original.)
44. Ibid., 205, 230. (Ellipses in original.)
45. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 41–47.
46. Ibid., 61–100.
47. Ibid., 100.
48. Aston, Sarah Bernhardt, 48.
49. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 34–35; see also her AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989).
50. Claudine Herzlich and Janine Pierret, Malades d’hier, malades d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Payot, 1984), chap. 2, “De la phtisie à la tuberculose,” 48–64.
51. Nicole Priollaud, “Avertissement,” in Priollaud, ed., La Femme au 19e siècle (Paris: Levi/Messinger, 1983), 9. To a great extent, this was an international cultural phenomenon; in Anglo-Saxon cultures, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have noted, society told women “that if they d[id] not behave like angels they must be monsters.” In fact, they argue, the understanding of womanhood as inherently pathological so thoroughly penetrated society that, in addition to training girls in “docility, submissiveness, self-lessness…[and] renunciation…nineteenth-century culture seems to have actually admonished women to be ill.” Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 53–54. (Emphasis in original.)
52. White, The Content of the Form, 1–25.