CHAPTER ONE
THE TALE OF THREE WOMEN
THE BIOGRAPHIES
A light here requires a shadow there.
—VIRGINIA WOOLF, To the Lighthouse
Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier’s striking 1851 bronze bust, Vénus africaine (fig. 3), exemplifies the visibility of black women in nineteenth-century French art. According to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, a young African woman served as the model for this “highly popular” sculpture, which powerfully expresses “nobility” and “human pride and dignity in the face of grave injustice.” Among those who acquired casts of the sculpture were the Museum of Natural History in Paris and Queen Victoria.1 Despite the popularity of this and other works depicting African women around the time that slavery ended in France, no one appears to have recorded the name of the “young African woman.”2 In fact, she was a formerly enslaved black woman living in France. Cordier, an abolitionist, claimed to believe in the beauty of peoples of other races, but by calling this sculpture Vénus africaine, he indicated that he saw no need to link it with an actual person, even though doing so might have resonated with the viewer.3
FIGURE 3.
Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier (1827—1905), Vénus africaine, 1851. Casts of the sculpture were done in 1851 and subsequently acquired by both the Museum of Natural History in Paris and Queen Victoria. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.
More is known about the three women on whom this book focuses. Although they were separated chronologically, they were and remain connected in other ways. Ourika, Sarah Baartmann, and Jeanne Duval are essential characters in the annals of black women in France, with their shifting narratives and cultural breadth. Though real women, they are also icons: as Sander Gilman writes,
Rather than presenting the world, icons represent it. . . . [T]he ideologically charged iconographic nature of the representation dominates. And it dominates in a very specific manner, for the representation of individuals implies the creation of some greater class or classes to which the individual is seen to belong. These classes in turn are characterized by the use of a model which synthesizes our perception of the uniformity of the groups into a convincingly homogeneous image.4
Although these women were iconic, they were also actual human beings, and the details of their lives are the necessary starting point for this study, providing a grounding for the chapters that follow, which examine the representations of these women and their importance to white Frenchmen and -women. This chapter explores what is known about them—often as a consequence of accounts by their own contemporaries. Introducing these women and their biographies centers their most authentic selves, establishing and emphasizing the importance of their lived realities based on the limited information available about them. Although details about their lives remain exasperatingly sparse, these women are united by the fact that, regardless of their time on French soil, they never achieved the elusive Frenchness that this book investigates.
CHARLOTTE CATHERINE BENEZET OURIKA
Documentation about the real Ourika, the young girl who inspired the protagonist of Claire de Duras’s eponymous novel, remains scant, but scholars have begun to fill in some details regarding her life. Literary scholar Roger Little believes that Ourika was from Fouta-Djallon, in what is now southeastern Senegal, and that she was likely of Peul origin.5 In early 1786, the governor of Senegal, Stanislas Jean, the Chevalier du Boufflers, purchased a two- or three-year-old Senegalese girl for the Duchesse d’Orleans.6 This little girl, Zoé, is often confused with Ourika but was raised as a servant in the home of another aristocratic family. Boufflers described the girl as follows: “She is pretty, not like the day, but like the night. . . . Her eyes are like little stars. . . . She does not speak yet, but she understands what we say to her in Wolof.” He felt “moved to tears thinking that this poor child was sold to me like a lamb,” and he had become so fond of her that he feared that he would have difficulty separating from her. He also told his future wife, Delphine de Sabran, “If you see her at the Palais-Royal, don’t forget to speak to her in her language and to kiss her while thinking that I have kissed her also, and that her face is the meeting point of our lips.”7 Despite his evident affection for the girl, he positions her solely as a conduit between himself and Delphine. Moreover, by using passive voice after claiming his purchase (“was sold to me”), he obscures his active role.
The following July, Boufflers wrote again to Sabran to detail some additional exotic treasures that he had acquired: “a parakeet for the queen, a horse for the maréchale de Castries, a little captive for M. de Beauvau, a sultan hen for the duke of Laon, an ostrich for M. de Nivernais and a husband for you.”8 The “little captive” was Ourika. Consciously or unconsciously, the chevalier classed Ourika alongside the other animals he brought from Senegal to be distributed as presents.9 Boufflers apparently was well known for gifting black children to his friends and family. Sabran wrote to him that one such young boy “delighted” Elzéar and Delphine (her children). “[Y]our little savage, whom my children call Friday . . . is our only source of pleasure and entertainment.”10 This “little savage” is made another consumable in the form of a toy for children to play with and then discard at their leisure.
Eighteenth-century French nobility delighted in keeping black children as the equivalent of house pets, and according to historian Shelby McCloy, “little Negro boys were often presented as gifts to persons of prominence in France by officials and planters abroad.”11 They wore elaborate costumes and accessories that had specific social functions. Historian Kate Lowe writes that in Renaissance images, “Africans (even though usually slaves and servants) are often depicted wearing beautiful and expensive jewellery. . . . One reason for the preponderance of other bejeweled Africans is that a large proportion of black African images come from courtly settings, where the Africans would have been clothed and adorned to show off the status of their masters.”12 Elaborately dressed, the slaves served as jesters, miniature companions, servants, and fodder for aristocratic amusements: “In France, it was the day of the exotic. Dress, furniture, decorations, foods and drinks, books, and plays smacked of the faraway—of the orient and America—and a sure way to prestige was to have a black in livery to open the door for madame’s friends and to drive her carriage.”13 In 1787, Boufflers sent at least one more Senegalese child back to France, a five- or six-year-old boy, Jean Almicar, who became the pet of Marie Antoinette.14
Most of the published information on Ourika, like that in the 1874 Revue historique, nobiliaire, et biographique, comes from items about Boufflers and other members of the white aristocracy. So we know that “Charlotte-Catherine-Benezet-Ourika” accompanied the chevalier when he returned to France in August 1786 aboard Le Rossignol, which docked at La Rochelle. Boufflers arranged to have her baptized in Paris on 16 September.15
Even these details remain difficult to verify, and many writers seem to have relied on Duras’s fiction to fill in those historical gaps. Roger Little, for example, writes about Ourika’s life in France as if it were a fairy tale, an exceptional rags-to-riches narrative complete with happily-ever-after ending. In this version, Ourika was treated as a member of the Beauvau family, showered with “tenderness and love,” and surrounded by the “brilliant salon” of her adopted family. Nothing appears to have been denied to her. According to Thérèse De Raedt, however, the chevalier gave Ourika to his uncle, M. de Beauvau, to repay him for his help in securing the Senegalese governorship. Little also writes of Ourika’s “possible excessive fondness for her adopted brother,” Juste de Noailles, and her lovesickness over him. Little then appears to take a step back, declaring, “a story is not History” (Une histoire n’est pas l’Histoire).16
Around 1793, when Beauvau died, Sophie de Tott (1758—ca. 1840) painted a portrait of Ourika (fig. 4).17 Although the girl in the image is smiling and seems to be well cared for, the bracelets high on her arm and ankles and her single bare breast and bare feet sexualize her, referring the viewer to a type of Orientalist fantasy about Africa. The bracelets are reminiscent of slave shackles, and her non-Europeanness is emphasized by the contrast with the ornate furniture, her benefactor’s white marble bust (he had been a member of the Société des amis des noirs), and the laurels she wears and is placing atop the bust.18
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein, commonly known as Mme. de Staël, a close friend of Duras, also met Ourika in a salon and used her name for a character in Miraza, Lettre d’un voyageur (1795). Another aristocrat, the Marquise de Henriette Lucie Dillon La Tour du Pin, whose memoirs chronicle a half century of life in France, wrote about spending time with the young Ourika. The memoirs offer some insight into Ourika’s childhood and her status in Parisian social circles but also demonstrate the casual racism of the marquise. According to La Tour du Pin, “In the evening, we made music, accompanied by Mme. de Poix, who was an excellent musician, and Mme. la Maréchale was amused to see me create a tableau with her little negress Ourika. I took her on my lap, she wrapped her arms around my neck and pressed her little face, black as ebony, against my white cheek. Mme. de Beauvau never tired of this scene, which bored me greatly, because I always hated artificial things.”19 It is unclear exactly which part of the night she found so boring and artificial: the music or the display of affection by the little girl. Was La Tour du Pin offended by the fact that Ourika had the run of the room or that her mistress encouraged Ourika’s physical proximity with her white friends? Was Ourika’s “performance” in this space disconcerting? What is clear, however, is that La Tour du Pin sought to emphasize the contrast between her white cheek and Ourika’s skin, “black as ebony.”
FIGURE 4.
Sophie de Tott (1758—ca. 1840), Ourika, ca. 1793.
The date of this painting and Ourika’s apparent young age suggest that it may have been rendered of her at an earlier age then she would have been in 1793. Reproduced with permission from R. Little and the University of Exeter Press.
On 15 December 1794, when she was about fourteen years old, Ourika “appeared before a notary . . . to make a formal declaration of her emancipation in front of seven witnesses, as required by law because her biological parents were unknown to her” (fig. 5). The court noted that “because she was known to be intelligent and a person of good morals,” her request for emancipation was granted, and one of the witnesses, Jean Nicolas Deal, became her guardian (curateur).20 She received an annuity, though the source of the funds was not recorded, but had no dowry. There is also no further information regarding her relationship with Deal—for example, whether she worked for him. Ourika signed the document herself, indicating that she had learned to read and write.
The only other extant document with Ourika’s signature is a 28 March 1798 agreement (fig. 6). Historian Pierre Boulle finds this signature “particularly interesting,” seeing signs of maturity in her penmanship: “The writing, though recognizable from the earlier one, no longer is that of a little school girl, but of someone who’s developed her own mature identity.’21
Less than a year later, Ourika died, probably of pneumonia or tuberculosis. At the time of her death, she was described as eighteen, single, and black, and she was buried at Saint-Germain-en-Laye on 19 January 1799. Her benefactors were subsequently revealed to have been Mme. de Beauvau; Pierre Chambert and his wife, Genevieve Marguerite Solly; and Antoine Arnoult Lavallard and his wife, Marie Antoinette Chambert.22
FIGURE 5.
Ourika’s signature, taken from her declaration of emancipation, 15 December 1794. This is one of only two surviving examples of her signature.
Courtesy of Archives de Paris.
FIGURE 6.
Ourika’s signature, 28 March 1798. This is the second known signature of Ourika, on the agreement to reduce the rente viagère (annuity paid to her), dated 8 germinal an VI (March 28, 1798), ten months before she died. Other than Ourika’s declaration of emancipation, this is the only surviving document with Ourika’s signature. Additionally, it demonstrates a development in Ourika’s penmanship during the four years between the signing of the two documents. Courtesy of Archives de Paris.
During Ourika’s lifetime, the maréchal’s affection for her appeared genuine, and his wife came to feel the same way. Nevertheless, Mme. de Beauvau’s writing about the girl was condescending and displayed benign racism: Ourika “was born with great spirit, and the most remarkable quality of her mind was an accuracy and natural taste, which surprised me every time in the reading we did together. Her purity can only be compared to that of the Angels.’23 Mme. de Beauvau was “surprised” to find intelligence and purity in a black female body. Mme. de Beauvau also remarked on Ourika’s “gentle and modest pride” and “natural propriety,” pleasing figure, beautiful eyes, grace, and charm. But, she continued, Ourika’s “color might have made us fear for her”—presumably a reference to her lack of marriage prospects had she lived.24
Mme. de Beauvau was deeply saddened at Ourika’s passing, writing that “the death of my dear Ourika has been gentle as her life.” Beauvau found a handwritten note in Ourika’s wallet stating, “my mother and father abandoned me, but the Lord had taken pity on me.” The memoirs thus depict a mutually affectionate relationship, with a girl who was grateful for the Beauvaus and white benefactors who returned her regard. Yet like Boufflers so many years earlier, Mme. de Beauvau saw Ourika as a connector to someone else: “Ourika was given to M. de Beauvau, or else neither he nor I would have wanted her,” and the girl “reminded me of him who had loved her so much.” Although Ourika would not be there for Mme. de Beauvau in her old age, she “found solace in thinking that this cherished young woman who had loved him almost as much as I had would become a kind of protector, and mother for him. I no longer had to worry about Ourika.”25 In death, Ourika is no longer a burden for Mme. de Beauvau and simultaneously becomes a guardian angel or mother for M. de Beauvau.
An anonymous painting of an older Ourika (fig. 7) shows a somber-looking young woman. There is no way to determine how this image relates to the happy child in Tott’s painting. Was Ourika saddened by her removal from her home and by being “gifted” to strangers half a world away? Did she feel genuine affection for her mistress? If Mme. de Beauvau’s account is accurate, Ourika spent most of her life with people who cared for her and thought of her almost (but not quite) as family. Nevertheless, Boufflers forcefully removed her from her childhood home and her biological family, and her benefactors, the Beauvaus, always maintained some emotional distance. There is no way to determine whether she felt rescued, stolen, or some combination of the two. Ourika would have been no more than seven when Boufflers acquired her, meaning that she likely had few memories of her life before that time, though she evidently retained a feeling of abandonment. Is her sadness in this painting (like the one of her smiling earlier) not also a projection of the artists that depict her, marking her with their views on race and her life of belonging (or not belonging) in Paris? We may know little about Ourika both before and during her time in Parisian society, but she clearly played multiple roles in elite identity, serving as plaything, status symbol, rescuer, benefactor, confidant, and muse, often simultaneously.
FIGURE 7.
Anonymous, Ourika. This painting of Ourika as a young woman is likely the last depiction of her created during her lifetime.
SARAH BAARTMANN
Sarah Baartmann was born in South Africa, fifty miles north of the Gamtoos River, probably during the 1770s.26 Little is known about Baartmann’s life before her arrival in London in 1810, but she may already have been married and had children.27 According to musicologist Percival Kirby, Baartmann was smuggled out of British-occupied Cape Town by Hendrik Cesars (the brother of her old master, Peter) without the colonial governor’s knowledge.28 They sailed from Cape Town on 7 April 1810 aboard the HMS Diadem, with Baartmann the only female on board, and arrived in Chatham, thirty miles from London, in July. At some point, Cesars entered into a partnership of sorts with surgeon Alexander Dunlop, who was notable for his penchant for exporting “museum specimens” from South Africa and who had first seen Baartmann in Cape Town around 1809. According to an alleged contract between the two men and Baartmann, she would perform domestic duties and be exhibited in England and Ireland, and a portion of her earnings would fund her repatriation to South Africa after two years.29 Because she was considered an oddity, her handlers hoped that European fascination for certain types of human curiosities would garner income and fame.
The arrival in London of “the Hottentot,” as Baartmann was known as early as her time in Cape Town, generated considerable public excitement (see fig. 8). For a small fee, spectators could enter an arena in which “a stage [was] raised about three feet from the floor, with a cage, or enclosed place at the end of it; . . . the Hottentot was within the cage; [and] on being ordered by her keeper, she came out, and . . . her appearance was highly offensive to delicacy.”30 According to one official, she was “dressed in a color as nearly resembling her skin as possible. The dress is contrived to exhibit the entire frame of her body, and the spectators are even invited to examine the peculiarities of her form.’31
FIGURE 8.
Broadside advertising an appearance by the Hottentot Venus in Chester, England, ca. 1810. This advertisement demonstrates the manner in which Sarah Baartmann was perceived as a consumable commodity, able to be displayed and viewed by English society for the profit of her exhibitors.
Actor Charles Mathews visited the exhibition and according to his wife, Anne (who wrote her husband’s memoirs and also apparently viewed Baartmann), found Baartmann surrounded by a crowd: “One [person] pinched her, another walked round her; one gentleman poked her with his cane, and one lady employed her parasol to ascertain that all of her flesh was, as she called it, ‘nattral.’ This inhumane baiting the poor creature bore with a sullen indifference, except upon some great provocation, when she seemed inclined to resent brutality, which even a Hottentot can understand. On these occasions it required all authority to subdue her resentment. At last her civilized visitors departed.”32
Anne Mathews was apparently offended by the treatment Baartmann received, particularly at the hands of women. However, according to Mathews’s account, her husband’s attention was immediately distracted from Baartmann’s suffering by the arrival of another celebrated actor, John Kemble, who was shocked by the treatment of the “poor, poor creature!” and refused an offer to poke Baartmann. And despite her discomfort with Baartmann’s treatment “by some of our own barbarians,” Mathews uses language that demonstrates that she saw Baartmann as subhuman (“even a Hottentot” can “resent brutality.”) Moreover, Mathews’s words indicate that Baartmann did not submit willingly to this treatment, though it is not clear what sort of “authority” was needed to “subdue” her.33
Mathews also wrote about Baartmann’s body: “In those days, when bustles were not, she was a curiosity, for English ladies then wore no shape but what Nature gave and insisted upon.”34 The Mathewses were both fascinated and repulsed by Baartmann, underscoring the power she was believed to exert over others, and Anne Mathews seems to have believed that at least on some level, Baartmann had control over her situation. The struggle for control over her body revolved around the outrageous spectacle of Baartmann on display and the remarkable ease of those who abused her.
In November 1810, Zachary Macaulay and other abolitionists began legal proceedings to determine whether she was being held against her will. Documents relating to what was aptly yet derogatively titled the Case of the Hottentot Venus highlight the contradictions surrounding her voyage to England and the ambiguous nature of her status, and speak to a strong need to represent Baartmann as an active and free agent in her own exhibition. According to the court documents, she was “perfectly happy in her present situation; had no desire whatever of returning to her own country, not even for the purpose of seeing her two brothers and four sisters.” According to the record of her three-hour interrogation on 27 November 1810, Baartmann testified that she had made an agreement with Dunlop and had “personally” asked for permission to make the voyage. Moreover, the document asserted that she was happy and said she had “everything she wants,” including two negro boys to wait on her. Her only complaint was the desire for warmer clothes.35
But Baartmann did not respond to the question of whether she could go back to Cape Hope at any time, and the validity of her testimony is challenged by the fact that she could not read or write (her first-person voice never appears in the text) and by the possibility that she spoke her African language and Dutch but not English. According to the transcript, “she understands very little of the Agreement made with her by Mr. Dunlop on the twenty ninth October 1810,” so it is unclear how she could have corroborated its contents. Nevertheless, notary Arend Jacob Guitard signed an affidavit declaring that she wanted to be exhibited and that she said she was being treated well and wanted to stay in England. He also claimed that the agreement had been translated for her benefit (though he did not indicate by whom) and read to her numerous times and that he had questioned her directly.36
Macaulay and his fellow abolitionists painted a far different picture. They emphasized Baartmann’s treatment while on exhibit and her demeanor—“morose, sullen, distressed, mortified, miserable, and degraded”—as evidence of her coercion. They stressed the parallels between her treatment and that of zoo animals and noted that her handler regularly threatened her so that she would perform. They also asserted that she refused to answer when questioned in Dutch about her condition, contradicting Guitard’s account.37 In short, the men who brought the court case seemed determined to prove that Baartmann needed to be freed from Cesars—that she was in fact enslaved.
Thus, efforts to make Baartmann appear a willing participant in her exploitation were crucial. If she were acting under her own free will, her treatment simply became part of a job to which she had lawfully, contractually, and voluntarily agreed, and those viewing her were absolved of any responsibility for the fact that she was being held in a cage and apparently forced to perform. But this battle to define her status overlooked the fact that the slave system operating in Africa and Great Britain meant that by definition, she could not possibly be acting under her own free will. It also negated the fact that she had been purchased as a slave before traveling to England.
The legal case was dismissed and ultimately only generated further attention to Baartmann and increased the popularity of her exhibitions. In 1811, she performed in Bath and in Manchester, where the Reverend Joshua Brookes baptized her on 7 December (fig. 9). The name on her baptismal certificate is not the Dutch Saartje Baartmann but the Anglicized Sarah Bartmann.38
Baartmann’s trail subsequently becomes more difficult to follow. She is believed to have married while in England, though no documentary proof has been found. When Dunlop died in July 1812, Cesars’s whereabouts were unknown. Baartmann was displayed in Ireland in 1812, and she apparently met up with traveling shows (and may have hired herself out to them) until Henry Taylor took her to France in 1814. She appeared on public display there, but little additional information is available about her time in Paris prior to her death there as a result of tuberculosis or smallpox in late December 1815 or early January 1816.39
FIGURE 9.
Sarah Baartmann’s baptismal certificate, 7 December 1811. The folds in the paper indicate that it had been opened and reopened on numerous occasions, which suggests that the document had meaning (or usefulness) for her. Reproduced with permission from Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, Paris.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the empirical knowledge provided by scientific study increasingly became a way to make sense of France’s many distressing political and cultural reorganizations, including their own society, people around the world, nature, and the human body. Long-standing discussions about race merged with these studies. As scientific communities, particularly in France and Germany, sought to evaluate and classify all people, including people of African descent, medical journals, conferences, anthropological studies, and legal statutes featured numerous images of and references to black people. But constructions of race were also informed by gender roles.40 The guise of “impartial” scientific rhetoric helped to naturalize opinions about acceptable societal boundaries, and the spectacle of Sarah Baartmann in Paris allowed scientists to manipulate data to solidify already held beliefs. Developing racial hierarchies served as justification for colonial occupation and imperial domination. These scientists perpetuated the notion that body size and shape correlated to intelligence and social roles, making those peoples (and their bodies) inferior to whites (and their definitions of ideal beauty and proper social roles). Scientists altered and even falsified data to perpetuate the idea that Baartmann’s body and other black bodies were inferior to those of whites.
In his discussion of the iconography of female sexuality in the nineteenth century, Sander Gilman writes, “While many groups of African blacks were known to Europeans in the nineteenth century, the Hottentot remained representative of the essence of the black, especially the black female.”41 Gilman posits that the Hottentot Venus “served as the emblem of black sexuality during the entire nineteenth century, a sexuality inherently different from that of the European.’42 T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting concurs, stating that the Hottentot Venus exerted an “immense influence on nineteenth-century Western racial-sexual science.”43 Enlightenment ideology was based on the dominant hierarchy of the lowest to highest in anthropologist Christian Meiners’s “chain of being,” and aesthetics constituted an important factor in determining how these placements could be understood. George Mosse contends that in the eighteenth century, anthropologists considered Hottentot Africans among the lowliest “creatures” in the link between animals and humans.44 Within William Cheselden’s perception theory and other eighteenth-century European debates regarding blackness, German dramatist and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s aesthetic theory consolidated and provided a template for linking “ultimate filth,” aesthetics, and blackness into a single but far-reaching archetype: Hottentot Africans. If Greeks provided the ultimate eighteenth-century standard of beauty, Hottentot Africans provided the repugnant antithesis.
Popular ideas of racial inferiority received legitimacy via placement within a “scientific” context. Joanna De Groot posits that
the founding of learned societies, journals, and academic institutions for medicine, anthropology, geography, and linguistic studies brought the study of human characteristics, differences, or cultures firmly into the sphere of science, rationality, and professional expertise. . . . This is by no means the only or even the most powerful source of images of “sex” or “race,” but it certainly constituted one of the most authoritative and influential ways of grounding the “Otherness” of femininity or ethnic identity in “real” knowledge wielded by prestigious professionals (doctors, academics, “experts”).45
While eighteenth-century scientists believed that environment made blacks inferior, nineteenth-century science emphasized race itself as the cause of black inferiority. Moreover, because race was biologically determined, inferiority was an inherent characteristic. As Europeans observed Baartmann and discussed her supposed inferiority or ugliness, they constantly reevaluated and reworked those conversations.
However, the obsession with the “Hottentot African” ran the risk of also generating desire: one covets what one sees. To protect the viewer’s identity and objectivity, the gaze must be narrowly focused and specifically directed—explained as a means of identification and classification, nothing more. According to Gilman, “To meet . . . scientific standards, a paradigm was needed which would technically place both the sexuality and the beauty of the black in an antithetical position to that of the white.’46 Baartmann became extremely useful in this effort. By attributing her body to a racial characteristic, she became a scientific specimen.47 But as imagery of and discussions about her show, white Frenchmen did not always succeed in creating these boundaries.
Scientists’ alleged expertise enabled them to express themselves in an idiom that laypeople perceived as objective and thus provided cover for interest in sexual matters that would otherwise have been unacceptable. The genitals of black women could be studied as a means to uncover and reinforce the unchanging nature of blacks and their sexual uncontrollability, which, in turn, could then be used to understand other forms of sexual pathology. Understanding the Hottentot Venus might enable scientists to understand black sexuality and sexual desire as a whole, and the medical establishment rapidly began to conflate the “abnormality” of black sexuality with disease: as Gilman writes, “When, in the late nineteenth century, medical literature likened the genitalia of the black female to those of the infected prostitute, the fear (and fascination) accompanying the one became associated with the other.”48
Baartmann’s death thus offered a tremendous opportunity for Georges Léopold Cuvier, whom Napoleon had appointed surgeon general in 1812.49 The French royalist newspaper La Quotidienne announced on 1 January 1816, “The Hottentot Venus is dead this morning after an illness of three days. It is said that the professors of the Museum of Natural History have asked for her body to be turned over to them.”50 Indeed, Cuvier had requested and received permission from the police to obtain Baartmann’s cadaver so that he could dissect and examine it. He not only made a plaster cast of her body (fig. 10) but dissected her buttocks and pickled her brain and genitals, storing them in jars as specimens.
FIGURE 10.
Sarah Baartmann’s body cast, 1816. The cast was made of Baartmann’s body after she died, but given the manipulation of her body in life, there is no certainty that Cuvier did not continue that distortion after death by altering the cast.
© Musée du Quai Branly—Jacques Chirac, Paris.
Baartmann’s genitals were the real prize of Cuvier’s anatomical dissection. He had arranged to have her sketched and examined for three days at the Jardin du Roi in March 1815, but she had refused to allow him to see what he called her “apron” (tablier) while she was alive. As Sharpley-Whiting notes (in language taken from Cuvier): The “most remarkable particularity of her organization . . . between her thighs” remained hidden from him until her death. Only at that point was he [Cuvier] able to see for himself that “the famous ‘Hottentot apron’ [was] a hypertrophy, or overdevelopment, of the labia minora, or nymphae. The apron was one of the most widely discussed riddles of female sexuality in the nineteenth century.” Cuvier had in fact begun his paper about the examination by stating, “There is nothing more famous in natural history than the apron of the Hottentots, and at the same time nothing has been the object of more numerous debates.”51
But Cuvier was not finished there. He also “examined the interior of her vulva and womb, and finding nothing particularly different, he move[d] on to her ‘compressed’ and ‘depressed’ skull and pelvic bone,” which he likened to that of a monkey. According to Sharpley-Whiting, “In 1816, closing his chapter on the black female body, he [Cuvier] ‘had the honor of presenting the genital organs of this woman to the [French] Académie, prepared in a manner so as not to leave any doubt about the nature of her apron.’” Only after Cuvier had literally entered her were the “secrets” that the Hottentot hid between her legs definitively uncovered and analyzed.52 These new records added a certain weight to his conclusions about the hypersexuality of the black female.
Cuvier compared Baartmann with European women, particularly highlighting the difference in sex organs. Because Baartmann’s genitalia were supposedly closer to those of a monkey than to those of European women, the latter were elevated. Henri de Blainville, who had joined Cuvier in observing Baartmann, also published his findings. Fausto-Sterling writes that Baartmann “drank, smoked, and was alleged to be sexually aggressive” (something that Blainville states he is uncertain about), all stereotypically masculine characteristics. Despite comparing Baartmann to an orangutan, however, Cuvier also conceded, notes Anne Fausto-Sterling, that “she spoke several languages, had a good ear for music, and possessed a good memory” even though “her physiognomy—her face—repelled him.”53 Cuvier’s account reveals that she clearly fascinated him in ways that went beyond his scientific authority and exceeded his preconceived notions of black women.
Cuvier’s and other scientists’ notes and diagrams of Baartmann allow us to interrogate the scientists’ findings, sometimes in ways they might not have expected. For example, X-rays of Baartmann’s skull and brain taken at the Jardin des Plantes around 2000 show that her brain was not substantially smaller than the average white subject’s, especially when her stature is taken into account. In addition, Cuvier’s wax models of Baartmann’s genitalia do not reveal the deformities he so trumpeted in his autopsy of her. All of this suggests that he used “objective” science to suit his purposes of reaffirming the black body as inherently inferior on the level of human biology. That subsequent scientists and writers utilized Cuvier’s falsified data and incorrect conclusions as the basis for more than a century of incorrect “scientific” discourse indicates what was at stake in this discussion of the black female body and its inferiority to the white female body.
Fausto-Sterling points out that “Cuvier most clearly concerned himself with establishing the priority of European nationhood; he wished to control the hidden secrets of Africa and the woman by exposing them to scientific daylight.’54 In addition, Cuvier asserted French power to know the Other, thereby helping to further legitimize France’s colonial project. Cuvier “proved” the Otherness of Sarah Baartmann, showed her as a deformed being, and reasserted European white male scientific dominance over both white and black women. The superiority of (male) whiteness was proved within and outside of the academy. It is thus particularly relevant that the only word we have a direct record of Baartmann saying is No in response to Cuvier’s request to access her genitals and that the word was recorded by Cuvier himself in his account of her autopsy. Though Baartmann was manipulated while alive and then violated in death, when she refused to allow Cuvier total access to her body, he had no choice but to capitulate, however reluctantly.
JEANNE DUVAL
As is the case for Ourika and Baartmann, many of the details about Jeanne Duval’s life are the product of hearsay, at times both vague and contradictory. Duval is best known as the common-law wife of Charles Baudelaire, a white French poet and icon, and her claim to fame (or infamy) came from Baudelaire’s literary writings describing her as his “Vénus noire” and his copious letters about her. The 1857 publication of his Les Fleurs du mal, a poetic cycle in which numbers 22–39 are influenced by or about her, forever bound her to him. The book was quickly condemned on grounds of obscenity.
Duval is believed to have been born around 1820 in France and has been associated with several surnames, including Prosper as well as Lemer and Lemaire. In addition, she often performed under the stage name Berthe. Her grandmother, Marie Duval, may have been from Saint-Domingue and been of African descent.55 Jeanne’s mother, whose name may have been Jeanne-Marie-Marthe Duval, Jeanne Lemaire, or Jeanne Lemer, was “an old, respectable looking negress, with thick, greasy hair which tried in vain to twirl over her cheeks and ears,” and is generally considered to have had ties to Nantes, although it is not clear whether she immigrated there or was born there. She may have been a prostitute, and both Jeanne Duval’s father and grandfather were almost certainly white Frenchmen, though it is not known whether they were planters, slave owners, or members of the working class, and as far as the documents indicate, she had no contact with either man.56
Baudelaire’s portrayal of Duval in his writings reflected not only his viewpoint but also his agenda. Baudelaire never married anyone else and enjoyed (if this is the correct word) a rather complicated relationship with his mother. In 1852, a decade after he first met Duval, Baudelaire declared of her, “Once she had certain qualities, but she has lost them, and I myself have gained insight. TO LIVE WITH A PERSON who never shows any gratitude for your efforts, who thwarts them by being clumsy or deliberately spiteful, who only considers you as her servant, and her property, with whom it is impossible to exchange one word on politics or literature, a creature WHO DOES NOT ADMIRE ME, and who is not even interested in my studies, who would throw my manuscripts into the fire if that would bring her more money than publishing them.”57 Baudelaire clearly sought to position Duval as duplicitous, stupid, and greedy so that he appeared as her opposite.
But such writings do offer some sense of the contours of Duval’s life. Duval’s existence was not only precarious but for more than two decades was entwined with Baudelaire’s. They served as each other’s lovers, enemies, friends, and caretakers. She was not merely a passive receptacle but an active participant in her own life and an integrated partner in his—because they chose to be with one another. Moreover, her relationship with him brought her into contact with such noted writers and artists as Honoré de Balzac, Maxime du Camp, Charles Toubin, Théophile Gautier, Gonzague de Reynold, Gustave Courbet, Théodore de Banville, Ernest Prarond, and Honoré Daumier, among others. In addition, Duval was also the mistress of one of the most prolific photographers of the nineteenth century, Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, also known as Nadar (1820—1910), although no photograph of her survives in his archive. Duval’s associations with Baudelaire and Nadar meant that she was often surrounded by people of a different race and higher social class than her own.
Despite the fact that Duval was the companion of one of the most important writers in French history and was well known in nineteenth-century Paris’s bohemian circles, there is virtually no record of her life aside from the reactions and opinions of famous white men. Thus, attempts to understand and contextualize her are difficult and potentially hazardous, since the descriptions reflect the observers’ perspectives at least as much as Duval’s reality.
Twentieth- and twenty-first-century black women artists and fiction writers have featured Duval in their works in an attempt to give her a voice, to make her exist in her own right in the realm of Baudelaire rather than to exist solely via others’ representations.58 Yet such attempts often reflect modern anger, sorrow, and voice, merely substituting a more sympathetic viewpoint for Baudelaire’s lens on Duval’s life. She remains a metaphor, a stand-in. But what does the more objective historical record actually tell us? The records offer multiple hints that she maintained a relationship with her mother until her death when Duval was an adult woman. Duval thus had a family beyond one famous white Frenchman as well as a career, albeit a sporadic one.
Duval’s first documented appearance occurs in 1838, when she was in her late teens and Nadar saw her performing as an actress under the name Mlle. Berthe at Paris’s Théâtre du Panthéon. At the time, acting was one of the few professions open to women with little education and particularly to women such as Duval who lacked traditional white families and the networks they provided that were essential for employment and marriage. As Elizabeth Wilson notes, however, acting “was an ambiguous profession for a woman in the mid-nineteenth century,” and Duval is “invariably written off as a prostitute.” Bourgeois anxieties about counterfeiting emotions for cash were a long-standing trope that linked theater and prostitution: Rousseau, for example, had in the eighteenth century criticized theater women as prostitutes, and Lenard Berlanstein calls acting a “deviant path” for women of Duval’s era.59 Her racial Othering thus intersected with gendered fears about emotional inauthenticity.
Duval’s acting career continued at least intermittently for most of the next decade. In 1838–39, Berthe played the role of La Comtesse in Rose et Colas; ou, Une Pièce de Sedaine, a vaudeville in two acts, at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Antoine. She performed as “Thérèse: Domestique de la maison” (apparently with only one line) in Le Système de mon oncle on 2 December 1838.60
Duval again appeared in Le Système de mon oncle in 1840, and in 1842 she was performing at the Théâtre du Panthéon when, according to most biographers, Charles Baudelaire first saw her in an extremely minor part in a minor play: her only words were purportedly, “Dinner is served, Madame.”61 Their relationship continued for the rest of his life. By the end of October 1843, Duval lived with her mother at 6 rue de la Femme-sans-Tête, where she presumably tended Baudelaire when he was ill, though his primary residence was the Hôtel de Pimodan. From the hotel, he first mentioned Duval in an 1843 letter to his mother: “Do come now, come immediately—no prudishness. I am with a woman, and I am ill and I cannot move.”62 By the early 1840s, Baudelaire and Duval appeared together in public, frequenting “Daumier’s digs on the rue de l’Hirondelle.”63
Duval obtained her next known acting job in September 1844, when she appeared at the Théâtre de Belleville. The same year, according to Claude Pichois, “a mysterious Jeanne” and “her comrades from the Théâtre du Panthéon” demanded money that the director owed them. Pichois believes that this woman was Duval. She performed again in August and September 1845 at the Théâtre Beaumarchais (formerly Porte Saint-Antoine). In June 1845, Baudelaire attempted suicide with a knife while sitting next to Duval in a Paris café, requesting that she deliver a suicide note to his financial adviser, Narcisse Désiré Ancelle: “When Mademoiselle Jeanne Lemer brings you this letter, I will be dead.” Baudelaire’s letters suggest that both he and Duval struggled financially, and it is possible that the suicide attempt was intended to persuade Ancelle to provide them with money. Whatever the case, in January 1846, she performed again at the Théâtre Beaumarchais.64
From August until July 1847, Duval stayed with Baudelaire in Neuilly, not far from Ancelle, and they traveled together that October to Chateauroux. In 1850, Baudelaire visited Dijon, where Duval joined him.
In March 1853, Baudelaire wrote to his mother:
A year ago I left Jeanne, as I told you,—although you doubted the truth of this, a fact that caused me pain. . . . For several months, I went to see her two or three times a month, to take her a little money. Well, now she is gravely ill, and in the direst poverty. I never speak of it to Ancelle. The wretch would be only too delighted at such news. It’s obvious that a small portion of the money you send me will go to her. Now I’m annoyed I’ve said that since you’re capable, in your heavy-handed maternal way, of sending her money, without telling me, through M. Ancelle. That would be extremely improper. You don’t want to wound me again, do you? That idea is now going to swell and root itself in my brain, and persecute me.65
In November of that year, Duval’s mother died, and Baudelaire paid for her funeral and burial at Belleville Cemetery, though he, too, continued to have financial problems.66
Duval and Baudelaire apparently reconciled at some point, briefly separated again beginning in December 1854, and then resumed their relationship in January 1855, when they were living at 18 rue d’Angoulême-du-Temple. In September 1856, however, he wrote, “My liaison, my liaison of fourteen years with Jeanne, is broken.’67
By February 1859, Duval had moved to 22 rue Beautreillis, where Baudelaire joined her in March and remained for about six weeks. On 5 April, she suffered a stroke and was cared for at La Maison municipale de santé (the workhouse hospital) on rue du Faubourg Saint-Dénis. According to hospital records, she was “32 years old; without profession; single; living on rue Beautreilly [sic], 22, born in Saint Domingue. Room 8. Entered [the hospital] 5 April, left 15 May 1859.” In May, while she was still in the hospital, her leg became paralyzed.68 In reality, almost none of this information (her marital status, employment, or birthplace) was correct.
In 1860–61, Duval lived at 4 rue Louis-Philippe in Neuilly. Baudelaire lived with her for some of that time; at other times, she lived there with a man alleged to be her brother, though there is no record that she had a brother and her relationship with that man deepened the discord between her and Baudelaire. They split again in February 1861, and in March, Baudelaire wrote that Duval had asked someone “to buy some books and drawings from her. . . . It is all one to me, if she chooses to sell souvenirs which every man leaves with a woman he has lived with for years, but I had the humiliation of having to supply my publisher with vague explanations.’69
At the first of April, Baudelaire reported to his mother that Duval “came to me yesterday. She’s just left the hospice and her brother, whom I believed to be supporting her, sold in her absence part of her furniture. She’s going to sell the rest to pay off a few debts.” Though Baudelaire never saw her again, he remained preoccupied with her, and in May 1861, he wrote, “Jeanne will go into a nursing-home, where only what is strictly necessary will be paid. . . . From the beginning of next year, I shall consecrate to Jeanne the income of what capital remains. She will retire somewhere so as not to be completely alone. . . . In four months, since my flight from Neuilly, I have given her seven francs.” Three years later, Baudelaire wrote to Ancelle, “I beg you to send 50 francs in an envelope to Jeanne (address: Jeanne Prosper, 17, rue Sauffroy Batignolles). . . . I believe that this unfortunate Jeanne has gone blind.” In 1865, Baudelaire drew her from memory. Two years later, shortly before his death on 31 August 1867 of complications of syphilis and alcoholism, he dedicated one of his works “À Mlle B.,” which may have been a discreet reference using her former stage name.70 Baudelaire’s words clearly demonstrate that whatever anger he felt toward Duval was also accompanied by caring, and for the rest of his life, he refused to completely abandon his ill former lover. However, he also had Courbet erase her from an 1854–55 painting, L’Atelier du peintre (see fig. 17, p. 106).71
Duval outlived her former lover and continued to interact with their bohemian social circle even as her health further deteriorated. Nadar claims he saw Duval for the last time in 1870, when she was on crutches. Singer Emma Calvé visited with Duval sometime between 1870 and 1878, when she was living
under the name Jeanne Prosper . . . she lived in a modest abode, somewhere in Batignolles.
We were ushered into a stuffy yellow room.
She arrived shortly after, leaning on two crutches, wearing a madras turban from which wild, gray, curly locks and gold earrings escaped.
She must have been nearing sixty but retained a golden complexion and beautiful eyes, of which Baudelaire said, “She has beautiful, soft, and nostalgic eyes that seem to long for the absent coconut palm.” . . .
“You must have been glorious to have been loved by such a great writer?”
“Yes,” she said, straightening up. “Ah! He really loved me. He was always a beautiful lover, so gentle with me, but not funny, always sad with . . . fantasies of another world.”
And with a sigh:
“I do not wish for you to be loved by a poet, my beauties, even if he was the greatest of all.”
Then she pulled out a box of letters, from which she read us some passages, but she did not allow us to touch them. “These are my relics,” she said. “I sold some of them, as I am not rich, but these here, the first ones and the last ones that he wrote me, will follow me into the coffin!”72
According to Calvé, Duval was wearing a madras head covering, more typical of the colonies than of France itself, and seemed to be longing for the tropics—the coconut palm. Yet nothing else in the contemporary writings about or visual depictions of Duval locates her in a colonial setting. This black Frenchwoman living in mid-nineteenth-century France represents the conflation of French, African, and Haitian identities. Though she spent her entire life in France, her contemporaries portrayed her as inauthentic—a representation that persists in scholarly literature to the present. Not only have the box and its contents disappeared, so has she. Though she is believed to have died shortly after her meeting with Calvé, Jeanne Duval’s exact date of death and place of burial are unknown.73
CONCLUSION
The fragmentary nature of the information regarding the lives of Ourika, Sarah Baartmann, and Jeanne Duval makes telling their stories challenging. But at the same time, the fact that they left any traces at all makes these scraps tremendously powerful and the historical erasure of these narratives even more poignant.
Anne McClintock writes that commodity racism, which displaced the more elite scientific racism in England after 1850, reveals how fetishism is integral to European modernity, the metropole, and empire and that “commodity jingoism itself helped reinvent and maintain British national unity in the face of deepening imperial competition and colonial resistance.’74 But in France, this shift was fostered by the First Empire and occurred much earlier in the nineteenth century. As a racial commodity, Sarah Baartmann and her blackness were first consumed in more privatized spheres (as elites paid to see her) before moving to a larger-scale mass consumption through plays, letters (real and faked for consumer consumption), and other forms of consumer culture. The popular fascination with Baartmann constituted a response to the empire’s collapse and a means of reestablishing that power and military prowess back home in the form of a black and spectacular totem. By the time Baartmann came around, the French expressed their anxiety by making a bigger spectacle of her and disguising it as entertainment. With Jeanne Duval, that social and cultural anxiety was complete: she was a living, breathing black Frenchwoman. Those tropes should no longer apply. But they do.
These women’s real counterparts were culturally devoured, sliced, paraded, swallowed, and finally spit out as fantastical representations that bore scant resemblance to the originals. The French need for diversion transformed Baartmann, Ourika, and Duval into new and important types of fetishes for white men and women in France proper, far from the taint of colonies that France no longer unyieldingly and steadfastly commanded. The remainder of this book focuses on fictional productions of these women.