Bedrooms and boulevards: the erotics of ambiguous space in Belot’s Mademoiselle Giraud, ma femme

Abstract

ABSTRACTMademoiselle Giraud, ma femme, Adolphe Belot’s 1870 potboiler of devious Parisian lesbians and their cuckolded husbands, is overwrought with spatialized tropes. Scenes of the bedroom, traditionally intimate domestic space, instead separates the couple, subverted by wife Paule’s sexual resistance and husband Adrien’s frustration outside her locked door. The partitioning of intimacy also occurs at the narrative level through constructed layers of a story within a story; Paule is distanced by the retelling, never to speak for herself. In stark contrast, scenes of exteriors – Second Empire urban space newly shaped for freedom of movement – carry significant erotic charge. From their initial meeting along the Champs-Élysées to Adrien’s pursuit of his unfaithful wife along the boulevards marking the thresholds between Haussmann’s old and new Paris, Belot situates the tension of an untenable marriage in the constantly shifting terms of uncertain and unfamiliar boundaries, reflecting back the sense of liberation and disorientation produced by les Grands Travaux.