I am my own heroine
In May 1884, an unknown young woman named Marie Bashkirtseff staked her desire for fame on the publication of her personal journal. She knew that she would have little time because of advanced tuberculosis. Her right lung had already been damaged, while his left was slowly deteriorating.
She wrote what would become the definitive version of
her Journal's preface to the point: she wanted immortality, by any means
possible. If she had enough time left before her death, she would want to gain
posthumous renown through her painting. In case of premature death, her journal should be published.
She failed, despite her efforts, because she was not
part of literary or artistic circles at the time; she did not even come out of
an illustrious line of poets or painters. Russian gentry, her maternal family
had left what is now called Ukraine in 1858, touring Europe with the family
doctor and a retinue of servants. At fourteen, she started writing her Journal.
Desire for glory and fame
She elaborated in detail the means by which she aimed
for glory and fame. First, she tried to achieve celebrity through her voice,
consulting with singing masters in Nice, Paris and Rome, imagining herself
feted on the stages of Europe. Chronic laryngitis, probably the first symptom
of the tuberculosis that would end her life, nullified this aspiration.
In her Journal, she wrote long, glowing descriptions of
her face and her nudity, passing this undue attention to herself as a grandiose
gesture toward posterity. She slyly remarked that she would be spared the
trouble of talking about her physical appearance.
In front of the mirror, she described herself in the
act of admiring her "incomparable arms", the whiteness and delicacy
of her hands, or the shape of her breasts, effectively transforming the pages
of the Journal into places for the exhibition of her physical appearance that she
could not show in public.
Letters sent to famous writers
Anonymously, she first wrote to Alexandre Dumas Son
(illegitimate son of the writer Alexandre Dumas), author of The Lady of Camellias. In 1883, she sent
letters to Émile Zola, a 19th-century French writer and one of the leading
writers of French naturalism, author of Germinal,
The Experimental Novel, and The Human Beast.
Likewise, she contacted Edmond Goncourt, French writer, author of an intimate journal, novels and plays. In 1884, he published Chérie, a novel he had first announced in his preface to La Faustin in 1882. Describing it as "a psychological and physiological study" of a girl's first steps toward womanhood, he solicited what she called "female collaboration," directing her readers to jot down their teenage memories and send them anonymously to his editor.
With her characteristic bluntness, Marie informed him
that Chérie was full of inadequacies.
She said that she herself had been writing her own impressions from an early
age and now proposed to send them to him. Whether Goncourt received the letter
no one knows; if he did, he did not respond.
In 1884, months before her death, she and Guy de
Maupassant, a French writer and poet, exchanged nineteen letters that years
later were revealed through the press. Many people has been speculated about
whether the painter and the writer met and, around this hypothesis, the most romantic
hypotheses were woven.
Undaunted by her lack of success in inscribing herself
into the lives of literary greats, she promptly wrote their names in her
preface. The Journal's value as reading material lay, she asserted, in its status
as a human document: the public had only to consult Messrs. Zola, Goncourt and
Maupassant. It was an exaggeration, as she well knew.
The Journal, her last attempt to go down in history
Now I do not just write at night anymore, but also in
the morning, in the afternoon, in all my free moments. I write as I live. Marie
Bashkirtseff, Journal, Wednesday, April 5, 1876.
I see a very strong relationship with the Japanese
writer Higuchi Ichiyô and the Brazilian Carolina Maria de Jesus, whose journals
were published. The Japanese writer was also a victim of tuberculosis and died
young, at the age of 24.
Marie wrote her Journal without sketches, without a
first draft of the work, even the drawings are almost absent there, although it
is quite natural to fill in the lines with illustrations when you know how to
draw. There are also no corrections, so frequent in writers, after meditating
on the sentence.
She takes care of the purity of her Journal like an oral
job, but treated as a serious job. The characteristic feature of the text
signed by her is that it is charged with spiritual energy, unlike so many
others who die as soon as they see the light.
When Marie Bashkirtseff's Journal appeared in France in
1887, published by the publisher Fesquelle for its prestigious collection
Bibliothèque Charpentier, this first two-volume edition was an editorial
success.
In its pages, it fully exposes itself: I, as an object
of interest, may be very insignificant for you, but imagine that it is not me,
imagine that this is a human being who tells all his impressions since
childhood. It will then be an extraordinary human document.
Her feelings, her reflections, her contradictions, her
remorse, her humility, her joys, her extreme narcissism, everything,
everything, since her adolescence she entrusted the reader with more than
nineteen thousand manuscript pages that in the complete French edition
published between 1995 and 2005 covered sixteen volumes.
The Journal earned the aspiring painter the fame she so
craved, but she did not get it in life. It was one of the first attempts by a
woman to secure celebrity through personal brand curation – and the shape she
shaped female ambition in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In the next post, we will deal exclusively with her Journal. The publications and the repercussions generated after her death.
Literature, your innate gift
As for writing, she said more than once that it was
her innate gift, an activity she did not have to struggle to study for, as it
had to do with music or painting or as it should. She confesses that if she had
had time, a less limited life, she would have dedicated herself to journalism
or Literature.
A trunk in her quarters held dozens, perhaps hundreds,
of draft articles, plays, and novels that she never had time to tackle or
finish. The chronicles she left in his Journal about the stories of his trip
through Spain or the art reviews she wrote for La citoyenne the death of Léon
Gambetta, a French republican political leader who helped direct the
defense of France during the Franco-German War of 1870 – 1871, testify to its
literary power.
The search for recognition through naturalistic painting
At nineteen, her ambitions became more focused. In
1877, she joined the Académie Julian
in Paris, the atelier for European girls with serious artistic ambitions whose
gender prevented them from entering the École
des beaux-arts. She worked doggedly, spending long hours in the studio
during the day and at night, calculating in her Journal how many months it would
take to catch up with and surpass the studio's most talented students.
Marie stood out for the social meaning she wanted to
give to her work, this reflection, we can think, of her commitment to the new
political conceptions she had embraced and which very likely made it possible
for her to understand the painful reality of those defenseless beings she chose
as models.
As a painter, she enrolled in Naturalism, the literary
and artistic current that defended an authentic vision of the reality of the
time. She painted the humble beings of the Paris suburbs. She met the young
Jules Bastien-Lepage, leader of this current, to whom she was united by a friendship
that was accentuated with the illness and the proximity of the death of both.
In 1878, when she was still in her early months at the Académie Julian, at the Paris Salon, he presented his much-discussed painting Les foins (Hayfields), the first in a
series of works that would make her a star and guide for many young painters of
the time.
These times were the turning point between traditional
painting that still captured historical or mythological themes or beautiful
girls and naked angels and the new currents, among which Impressionism was
already thrashing in full force.
Bastien-Lepage's work is a peasant couple taking a
midday break, and there the realism of the image leaves little room for beauty
as understood by academic painters.
Marie, impressed by the rawness of naturalism in the
work of Zola or Maupassant, Daudet and Flaubert, must have been drawn to
Bastien-Lepage's naturalistic painting.
Five years later, at the Salon of 1883, she presented
three works. She had all her expectations fixed on the oil painting Jean et Jacques, two kids on their way
to school. The jury, however, gave her an honorable mention for a pastel, the
portrait of her cousin Dina, which plunged the artist into deep irritation.
With Jean and Jacques she makes her debut as a
naturalist painter when, in the conservative eyes of the jury, a placid,
minor-genre pastel portrait more appropriately fitted the archetype of a
respectable young artist. Marie hung the honorable mention from her dog's tail
and it looks like the jury never forgave her.
From 1883 onwards, among the few works by Marie
Bashkirtseff that have not disappeared, we have two other testimonies of her
commitment to Naturalism: The Umbrella,
one of the many girls who sheltered the asylum next to her house, on Rue Ampère
de Paris and housed the children Jean and Jacques.
The painting won her the acceptance of the public and
the critics, with which she hoped to get the long-awaited medal. However, the
Salon jury, perhaps still offended by the rudeness of the previous year, and
demanding on the subject, turned their backs on her.
Devastated, she could no longer paint because of
illness and because the attempt to deliver her Journal to a talented executor
such as Maupassant or Goncourt had failed, she mustered her last energies to
console her admired Jules Bastien–Lepage, a naturalist painter, who was also
dying. An unexpected altruism took the place of the egomania that dominated her
life.
Aníbal Ponce,
Argentine thinker and essayist, noted: from
that moment on, the last pages of the Journal are lit up with the glow of
twilight. Until then, Maria Bashkirtseff knew only ambition: since that visit,
she has known kindness.
Feminism and the lament for the feminine condition of her century
Perhaps it is now difficult for us to understand how
much contempt there was in that (disqualification at the Paris Salon), the
election of Marie Bashkirtseff, in a universe in which even women themselves
accepted their role as secondary protagonists — mere spectators most of the
time. The right to vote was just the tip of an iceberg of limitations,
prohibitions and submissions that the stronger sex imposed so naturally.
Women had no civil rights, a decent young woman could
not propose marriage, every young man could and should lead a life of levity,
but a respectable girl had to be a virgin, a young artist could not address
transgressive themes... Marie Bashkirtseff regretted this with a game of
consonances, l'honneur et le bonheur
(honor and happiness) as he shed disconsolate tears over the death of his
admired Leon Gambetta, republican leader: what
I cry now... could only describe it correctly if it had the honor of being
French and the happiness of being a man.
She lived with Parisian high society by joining a
socialist feminist association. There she promoted and funded the creation of a
newspaper in which she excelled in another of her great vocations, journalism.
If, in the classical sense, tragedy is the death of
the hero, in that memory revered by its readers, Marie Bashkirtseff's unhappy
epic was its main substance. "I don't chapter," she once wrote
standing up, pen and brush in hand, like a mythical Amazon facing the evil that
would take her to her grave.
At the moment when a new feminine paradigm emerged -
exactly the one that today's women defend - to inaugurate the rebellion against
a world dominated by men who instituted marriage as their only and immemorial
destiny, the girls shuddered with the battles of this fragile girl who she
fought her crusades deploring the feminine condition of her century.
Used and suggested links
Writing about Marie Bashkirtseef requires a lot of research and condensation for the limited space of this blog. This text was based on the blog Diario de Marie Bashkirtseff del José Horacio Mito.
He discovered Marie Bashkirtseff as a youth in Buenos Aires in the 1970s, reading the Journal, a yellowed edition he found in one of the many legendary second-hand bookstores on Avenida Corrientes.
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