The Meaning Beyond the Dress: Alterity and Economy of Desire in Mallarmé's Berthe Morisot

Abstract

This essay explores Mallarme's late prose text Berthe Morisot,the preface to the catalogue of the 1896 posthumous exhibition. Morisot was one of Mallarme's privileged others. Their relationship sheds light on the economy of desire and evolving cultural practice in two major figures of late nineteenth-century France. I aim to show how poet and painter came to speak the same language via a remarkable intercultural and gender exchange. The narrator's relational self hides behind the dispassionate art historian's mask, yet emerges in unexpected ways. This elegiac text stages an eroticized encounter with a feminine alter ego that takes on broader significance, a 'symptom' of the foreign that disrupts and enriches French culture. Speaking as an outsider, yet clearly implicated, Mallarme's narrator moves from the intimate to public sphere and from the foreign to the national. The poet recovers a marginalized, private form of discourse, previously eschewed, to forge une poesie a cote de la loi such as Kahn had wished, revealing the passionate attachment to the other generally erased for ideological reasons. Ostensibly evacuated from Mallarme's poetic practice as fitting only for autobiography, le sentiment, purified according to Morisot's definition, is conveyed in a language of restrained sensuality.