(Re)Framing Madame X: Art, Narrative, and the Ethics of Neo‑Victorian Revivification

Abstract

This article situates John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X (1884) alongside two textual accounts of Madame X the historical figure, to examine hybrid life-writing genres’ possibilities and limitations in recapturing the nineteenth-century past. Our texts are Gioia Diliberto’s biographical novel I am Madame X (2003), and Deborah Davis’s creative non-fiction Strapless (2003). Their authorial attempts to restore the enigmatic woman in the painting to cultural memory – particularly in the absence of substantial archival evidence – illuminates the collision of history, fiction, art and narrative, thus providing a framework to interrogate biofiction and the politics of memory.