Tautological Crimes: Why Women Can’t Steal Jewels

Abstract

Max Ophuls's 1953 film de... begins with a close-up of a woman's gloved hands opening a jewelry box and carefully handling its contents. The camera follows her fingers as they visit her exhaustive collection of beautiful things, caressing and evaluating each one. is the nameless (and, at this point, faceless) woman hoping to find? Despite her apparent devotion to these precious possessions, Louise de... is in the process of locating the single object from which she can separate herself most painlessly. As her face appears in the ornate mirror hanging over her jewelry box, she begins to delimit the boundaries of her search. She pronounces that she would rather commit suicide than separate herself from her diamond necklace and that she adores her cross too much to part with it. Although-and possibly because-they were a wedding present from her husband, she settles on a pair of heart-shaped earrings as the precious objects she must sacrifice to pay her debts. She returns them to M. Remy, the jeweler who initially sold them to her husband. Later that evening, she stages a frantic search for the jewels at the opera to allay her husband's suspicions about the missing objects. Her plot is foiled when M. Remy resells the earrings to her husband. The film traces how these previously unwanted jewels move in and out of Louise's life through a series of fortunate and unfortunate coincidences. Later, when they become gifts from her lover and are confiscated by her husband, their value in her eyes increases exponentially; ultimately, she offers M. Remy the expensive clothing and jewels of the beginning scene in exchange for the earrings. While these jewels begin as the most dispensable objects for the heroine, they end up at the center of her and the narrative's lives. As the opening titles read, Madame de... was a very lovely, elegant and adulated woman. It seemed that she could look forward to a serene, uncomplicated life. And probably nothing would have happened were it not for this jewel.... Ophuls's nineteenth-century period piece maps the process through which what Louise desires least is transformed into her most treasured possession. The film suggests that the answer to Freud's famous question What does a woman want? is What she seems to want the least. In what follows, I will trace this formula for female desire to a period in literary history that engaged in public debates on the legal relationship between women and property. Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1968) and Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds (1872) narrate the conflicts emerging around the reform of the married women's property laws beginning in the late 1860s. In response to the anxieties surrounding married women's emerging status as property holders, these novels introduce the narrative tradition of the tautological crime. Through their depiction of woman's overly intimate relationship to her gems and to herself as gem, they figure female ownership as redundant. These narratives deploy a discourse of fakes and