Ever since Critical Inquiry issued the inspirational volume on Intimacy (edited by Lauren Berlant), this concept has been regarded as one that “builds worlds, it creates spaces and usurps places meant for other kinds of relations”, closely associated with particular affects (Berlant 1–8). In Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (2008) Jonathan Flatley
In this chapter I am looking at the gendered reaction to the making of the Romanian modern identity, in the context of transnational mapping, whereby intimacy becomes a key tool of investigation. From sexuality and women’s roles in the couple to the organization of the household and family, a plethora of what used to be regarded as intimate concerns in Romanian culture flooded the turn-of-the-century agenda, thus pointing to the new relevance of the concept for both the private and the public. My stance is that this intimate geography of Romanian space generates women’s self-fashioning their identity through blending writing with the performativity of their own biographical experience. In this sense, I am examining the biographies and narratives of three Romanian-born French women writers in order to trace the development of intimacy as a key tool of identity construction, showing the transition from the private sphere to a public cultural category which permeated social roles and determined social judgements. In all three cases, the writers’ narratives of intimacy become transient spaces where both gender and political emancipation discourses are intertwined, an in-betweenness which touches upon the subtle transfer of French modernity into the Romanian culture,1 and vice versa, via women.
Elena Ghica (1828–1888) – pen name Dora d’Istria, Anna de Noailles (1876–1933), and Martha Bibesco (1886–1973) are three interesting and convergent cases, since all three chose to write in French, addressed Romanian and French culture at its most intimate, and all three fashioned themselves as belonging to a pan-European identity.
However, since my concern is to articulate how the politics of intimacy is mediated by gender and culture, this is not a straightforward account of women’s participation in the making of modern Romania; the mode of exposition is
1 An Intimate Geography
Romanian culture may be regarded as an interesting case study for the recent developments in cultural theory; the shift from one civilization to another, from one paradigm to another, the Byzantine and Ottoman (pre-modern) one to the Western (namely French) modern one of the Romanian principalities (Moldova and Ţara Româneascã) in the nineteenth century, in just a few decades has concerned many Romanian (and not solely) scholars. Throughout the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, debates concerning Romania’s national identity focused repeatedly on the cultural heritage of the Roman Empire and the Latin origins of the Romanian language, as this translatio was considered irrefutable proof of a Western European identity and allegiance. Eventually, for most Romanians, Latin origins came to mean French and France was regarded as the most dignified heir of the late Roman Empire, not only economically and politically, but especially culturally.
As a consequence, France and its capital city became a Mecca for young Romanian intellectuals seeking a Western European identity. For the ethos of the present chapter, I will briefly mention what I believe are the most significant Romanian studies on the matter: the 1898 analysis by Pompiliu Eliade titled De l’influence française sur l’esprit public en Roumanie [The French influence over the public spirit in Romania], his PhD thesis at the Sorbonne and a much more recent one, first published in 1989 in French, and then in several editions in Romanian, by another Romanian scholar who studied at the Sorbonne, Neagu Djuvara. Both studies are concerned with the phenomenon of acculturation which occurred in the nineteenth century in two Romanian principalities,2 namely the clash between the eastern and the western cultures; they both deal with this phenomenon from a non-eventful and cultural perspective. Pompiliu Eliade contends that the sudden shift to modernity is strictly indebted to the French influence over the public space in Romania. In his more recent study, Neagu Djuvara nuances Pompiliu Eliade’s rather
direct social interactions among individuals generate a sui-generis reality, different from the social reality generated by the influence of societal structures. In other words, the performativity characterizing direct contacts among individuals becomes a social reality in itself, a particular kind of social order which influences individual behaviour.5 (19)
This is where I situate the present study, in the realm of the somewhat irrational, passionate forces that led to a true societal – spatial, cultural, political, and otherwise – metamorphosis. In the aftermath of the first period of acculturation (1800–1848), Romanian intellectuals admitted that they were following the model of French Western civilization as the beacon for their new cultural, political, and social identity and embraced a more organic, performative, both individual and societal transformation of their Romanian identity.
Further, I will illustrate how in the exile of these three women, displacement and deterritorialization are intimately negotiated: in Bucharest, Dora d’Istria, Martha Bibesco, and Anna de Noailles (through her family) seize French space and internalize it early on in their lives. Romanians living in Paris as well as other members of French high society are grouped in Martha Bibesco and Anna de Noailles’ salons which showcase the most famous writers of that era: Marcel Proust, Andre Gide, Jean Cocteau, Paul Valéry, and Pierre Loti. Around these women, the Paris of the first half of the century became a non-place situated in a mythical chronotope, encapsulating transnational identities and generating a supra-identity, a European one. In this respect, the three Romanian-French women further brought into discussion will function as incontestable agents of change. The cultural dimension and intellectual power of their ideas, manifested both within and outside their écriture, triggered social or political empowerment, with strong symbolic significance. We will see how, through the power of their ideas, the three women writers’ social and political intervention in their nation’s destiny is rather mediated, subtle, and indirect, intimately intertwined with their experience of exile and melancholia.
not all melancholies are depressing. More precisely, if by melancholia we mean an emotional attachment to something or someone lost, such dwelling on loss need not produce depression, that combination of incommunicable sorrow and isolating grief that results in the loss of interest in other persons, one’s own actions, and often life itself. In fact, some melancholies are the opposite of depressing, functioning as the very mechanism through which one may be interested in the world.
flatley 1
2
The story so far starts with Elena Ghica (1828–1888) – pen name Dora d’Istria – who was the first woman to be placed in the wake of the great French intellectual tradition in Romania, concerned with metaphysical idealism and romanticism. Born in one of the most prominent and cosmopolitan families of the time, the niece of two princes (Grigore Ghica and Alexandru Ghica), Princess Elena Ghica was soon to be introduced to French culture, of which she remained a keen admirer throughout her life: her mother was both a writer and a translator of classical French literature. Her uncle being removed from the Wallachian throne by the Ottomans, in 1842, the entire family was forced into exile for political reasons.
a place of jealousy, disunion, of irreconcilable hatred, of the most terrible passions which torment the human heart? Do you believe that a young woman should be brought up in such a manner, or that a son should find
himself disputed by the most irreconcilable contraries … not knowing which of the two, his mother or his father, is more despicable? (72–73)6
Although her work has been often dismissed as being superfluous,7 lacking proper scientific input, Dora d’Istria is in many ways a pioneer: she dealt with the entire cultural inheritance of the south-eastern parts of Europe. This fringe of Europe, generally regarded as the monolithic “Other” was quasi-unknown to Western culture; as a keen traveller and “an organic intellectual” D’Istria felt it was her duty to map the intimate within the cultural particularities of the Orient via her extensive travelling experiences.8
Thus, she translates her experiences in writing her travelogues, ethnological in spirit, highly analytical and imbued with a Christian Orthodox doctrine.9 The ethnological diversity of the women analysed in d’Istria’s two feminist studies – Les femmes en Orient and Des femmes par une femme – is impressive. She attempts to reorganize the world in accordance with her own view of an intimate geography, a feminine one. Her view is larger-than-life: she gives accounts of Eastern women (Romanians, Dalmatians, Montenegrins, Turks, Albanians, etc.) in the former and western women (Latins – French, Italian, Spanish and Germanics – Germans, Saxons, Austrians, Anglo-Saxons, Dutch, etc.) in the latter. The majority of her travelogues deal with women’s emancipation issues, advocating against the widely spread discriminatory and humiliating practices to which women were subjected. For example, when analysing the Ottoman gynoecium (harem), Dora d’Istria states: “sex is reduced to the most dreadful, the most degrading form of slavery” demanding urgent “equitable and liberal laws which could repair,10 at least partially, the damaging effects caused by violence and despotism.”11 (d’Istria, La Suisse allemande, 107).
3 A Room of Her Own
Although she herself was not exiled (but her parents were), Anna de Noailles (1876–1933) is part of the Romanian (and by extension, South-Eastern and Christian Orthodox) diaspora in Paris. Born and raised in France, Countess Anna Elisabeth Brâncoveanu, born Bibesco- Bassaraba de Brâncovan, a Romanian-Greek aristocrat, was a celebrated writer (especially as a poetess) and not at all a keen traveller. Upon her father’s death, the family travelled to Romania and there on to Constantinople to visit some relatives. This was in fact de Noailles’ only encounter with the Orient but it was to be a mark of her later self-fashioning. In 1913 de Noailles finds herself confined in this intimate space due to health problems which immobilized her in bed, contemplating out of the window: “This room and the horizon beyond that window … Nothing prevents me from believing that, under that ardent sky, we’re in Constantinople”
Without Marcel Proust, without his hymns in the morning, his angelus in the evening, which reached me in envelopes overloaded with surcharges … I would not have written the poems that Marcel Proust’s predilection demanded. His dazzling friendship influenced me, changed me, as only a noble love of the verb is capable of.14
proust 6–7
Attracted by the outstanding persona of Anna de Noailles, Jean Cocteau, too, became one of her greatest admirers and was soon to be raised by her into the European stratosphere. He became her best friend for life. Denied any physical intimacy by the real Anna, he turned into Anna-male, her masculine variant: he imitated her mannerisms, her voice and outfits; eventually he started his own “salon” following her model to open his room to his guests.
The secret that I promise you and that betrays women, here it is, my love; please make sure of their passion, their attachment, take your heart away
from them for a moment, torment them, make them jealous, infuse doubt in it, make them suffer, even a little, if only, and these happy and proud foreheads will bend helplessly under the awful yoke of lost confidence, and calm and astonished cries will descend on these beautiful faces, and you will see before you only the lamentable Eve who was humbly born of Adam's generous body.15 (164–165)
De Noailles’ identity construction is problematic. Describing her oriental exoticism, Proust makes use of the topos of the Orient, highly fashionable in the literary tradition at the turn of the twentieth century. However, her identity is much more complex than this performative, hieratic orientalism. French by birth and marriage, she confesses oftentimes her deep sense of belonging to the French culture as she held her (real) Oriental fragmented ethnicity as a sort of taboo in the social milieu of the French aristocracy. In effect, having a Romanian-Greek, Byzantine Orthodox lineage, Anna de Noailles’ identity resides in her living in-between spaces As Claude Mignot-Oligastri (1986) remarks “For Anna, being French, Greek, or Persian is not contradictory; she seeks ubiquity, in space, and time” (Mignot-Ogliastri 225).16 Proust describes with fascination her private space he found in the lavish Brâncoveanu household in Paris: “Her shining oriental boudoir …, tempting … like bazaar jewels, [which] preceded a gallery where portraits of ancestors carrying sceptres and crowns were framed in carved oak” (de Noailles, Le Livre de ma vie 12).17 She was the Scheherazade of the French society becoming so utterly famous that everybody who wanted to be somebody in the elitist Parisian society,18 Romanian or French alike, would come to her “salon” to be endorsed by a woman who had stirred their imagination through her striking new imagery and the suggestiveness of her lyrics. However, as is the case with Dora d’Istria, despite their tremendous contributions to literary and cultural history evaluation still fails to
4 La Nymph Europe
In contrast to her cousin Anna de Noailles, who had tried to conceal her real ethnic identity (Romanian-Greek) by fashioning herself a mythical oriental persona, Princess Martha Bibesco (1886–1973) reportedly once remarked: “Nothing will make me an exile in France!” (Eliade 76).19 Born in Bucharest of Romanian parents, her family of Byzantine descent moved to Paris in her early childhood where she was brought up in the spirit of Romanian and French nationalism; she became a princess by marriage and soon developed an illustrious career as a prolific writer and genuine intellectual. She was, indeed, a true European spirit, and beyond, a true salonière and an astute politician: all over Europe and the United States, she too had counted Marcel Proust (in 1928 she would write a book on her intimate friendship with the French writer: Au bal avec Marcel Proust [Marcel Proust at the Ball]), Paul Claudel, as well as countless artists, scholars, and heads of the Church among her friends. Unhappy in her marriage, she would often return to Romania, but for a long time she resided in Paris. The Second World War found her in her country. Then she wanders from Istanbul to Bucharest, before settling in Paris in 1945, this time as an exile, saving herself from the atrocities of the Bolshevik regime in Romania.
Her project of remapping European history from a different perspective than the classic centre versus periphery rapport had begun in 1923 when she published Isvor, le pays des saules [Isvor, Country of Willows], a novel dedicated to her beloved Romania, imbued with the traditions and folklore of her people. Here Bibesco depicts a mythical Romanian culture, constructing a space in which she invests affective meanings and memories. For instance, when describing profoundly traditional, ancient Romanian traditions, she will insert Romanian words in the original text in French (with further translation or explanations), in order to create a dramatic effect for the reader and confess to one’s impossibility to translate one’s deepest lieux de mémoire:
This is what the traditional cake Romanians eat on the occasion of the most important Christian holiday of the year: Easter. The making of the Easter cake [pâque in orig., translator’s note], a sweet cake made of wheat
flour, as far as Outza has described it to me, involves a ceremony full of mystery. These people, as wheat growers, find a million ways to use wheat in their food. For them, the occasion has to be grand: it is either in death or in resurrection! In their noble vocabulary, they will denominate wheat as cinstea mesei, which comes to signify the Honour of the meal. And corn is simply called: the nourishment of the home, Hrana casei.20 (109)
I am passing through a phase of geological pride. I feel intimately tied with this land, one of the oldest in Europe. At a time when only a small part of Ireland had emerged from the waters, and only a small part of Scandinavia, this land upon which I am treading had already been here. This was already dry land and this dry land served its purpose! Is it not that the pride of noblemen is all about this: to have been served from immemorial times? I am very fond of this roadless country, although I deeply feel the poetry of grand avenues. I am fond of it because its entire spatiality is a wide road, a way of access, a huge way of access for the entire humanity to come into being. I love this land for its longstanding story and for its enduring sufferance.21
bibesco, Isvor xliv
She has a citizenship, the one she chooses; she will not have, she will never have a nationality. All her allegiances will be voluntary, agreed to by her, and respected. She will love with a love that goes beyond the self-esteem of countries, people, things that only love themselves and will hate each other for as long as it takes to come back from the war to peace and vice versa. She will always be amazed, seeing the enemies of yesterday seek each other out, share the same cars and the same honours, whether it is always after and never before.22 (38)
By presenting the European idea as a Nymph Martha Bibesco employed her gendered perspective laying out an intimate geography whereby time, European centres and peripheries are merged to reveal a feminine, bodily, cathartic affective experience.
Unfortunately, to date, despite Martha Bibesco’s huge international popularity during her lifetime, Romanian scholars have consistently claimed that very little of this woman writer’s literary achievements, or political for that matter, can be acknowledged, either before or after the Communist regime, primarily due to her linguistic inaccessibility.
5 Feminine Transnational Re-mapping of Fringe Spaces
Traditionally, women are the professional manipulators of symbolic objects, they are the main actors in the intellectual debate, they appear as instances of
At the beginning of this chapter I illustrated the fact that throughout the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries Romanians’ fascination with Paris and French cultural models, as well as their effort to transplant French culture to Bucharest, have taken many different forms: it has been a place of nostalgia, a mythical space situated somewhere between fiction and reality; the categories of centre and periphery, on one hand, and private and public, on the other, become a continuum. Intoxicated with the political and cultural fiction, the myth that was the French Revolution, Romanian intellectuals who came to Paris laid the foundation of what was to become the u-topos of France (and eventually Paris) in the Romanian cultural imaginary. Moving to Paris, they were adamant to prove to themselves and the world that they, too, could be Europeans through their social and cultural input, becoming symbols of European citizenship avant la lettre. Thus, territorial distance and traditional boundaries were made irrelevant and the fluidity of space between Bucharest and Paris attracted waves of exiles in search of a new performative identity.
In the cases of all three women writers discussed, an undercurrent binds intimacy and feminist discourse with a sense of displacement and deterritorialization: from their biographies to their writings, in-betweenness prevails in one way or another. Their gaze focuses both on the centre (Paris) and the fringes of Europe (Bucharest). Two of these women writers are consumed by a profound longing for their Romanian culture: Dora d’Istria and Martha
The contribution of these bilingual women writers points the spotlight at a matrix, an idealized Europe, which both encapsulates and replaces their national territory. Indeed, Dora d’Istria, Anna de Noailles, and Martha Bibesco’s work is a testament to French, Romanian, and European literary history. Their (self-)narratives of intimacy become a space where both gender and political emancipation discourses are intertwined, an in-betweenness which underlines the subtle transfer of the paradigm of (French) modernity into the Romanian culture, via women, through the “intimate revolt”.23
Thus, the contours of a politics of intimacy start to appear within the less defined boundaries between the centre and fringes, the personal and the public, between the division of the masculine public space and the feminine private space, where intimacy shapes and is shaped from the domestic to the national and beyond, in a continuum.
As stated in the Introduction to this volume, the concept of in-betweenness has not been coined as a concept per se. Here I employ this space of in-betweenness as a fringe space, a semi-peripheral locus, as explained in the Introduction.
Here, acculturation is understood as “assimilation to a different culture, typically the dominant one” (see Oxford Dictionary).
“<o minoritate activã> care adoptă cu pasiune ideile și moravurile Apusului și care prin acțiunea ei politică și intelectuală izbutește, în mai puțin de două generații, să preschimbe în adîncime cultura unui neam întreg.” The translations of all quotations in this chapter are mine, unless otherwise indicated.
“Nu mi-am propus să incerc vreo explicație teoretică a fenomenului, ci doar să dau o imagine a întregii societăți la un moment dat”.
“Interacțiunile sociale directe dintre indivizi generează o realitate sui-generis, diferită de realitatea socială generată de influența structurilor sociale. Cu alte cuvinte, performativitatea ce caracterizează contactele directe dintre indivizi devine o realitate socială în sine, un tip particular de ordine socială care influențează comportamentele individuale”.
“un loc al gelozii, dezbinarii, urii ireconciliabile, dintre cele mai cumplite patimi care chinuiesc inima omului? Credeți că o tânără femeie ar trebui crescută într-o astfel de manieră sau că un fiu ar trebui să fie disputat de cele mai ireconciliabile contrarii … neștiind care dintre cei doi, mama sau tatăl său, este mai de dispreț?” (The English translation was based on the Romanian version).
See Bordaş, “Etnologie şi orientalism romantic” 695–716.
According to Oxford Reference, an organic intellectual is “an intellectual or someone of professional standing (i.e. a doctor, lawyer, or priest) who rises to that level from within a social class that does not normally produce intellectuals, and remains connected to that class. …. The Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci develops this concept in his famous Prison Notebooks”.
For a further account on this ethnological diversity see: Bordaş, 702.
“le sexe est réduit à la forme d’esclavage la plus affreuse, la plus dégradante”.
“des lois équitables et libérales qui pourraient réparer, au moins partiellement, les méfaits causés par la violence et le despotisme”.
“Eloignée par le sort, depuis mon enfance, des bords chéris de ma Dambovitza, je n’ai jamais cessé d’appartenir à la terre natale, dont les destinées étaient l’objet des mes constantes méditations.”
“Cette chambre et l’horizon au-delà de cette fenêtre … Rien ne m’empêche de croire que, sous ce ciel ardent, nous sommes à Constantinopol”.
“Marcel Proust, sans ses hymnes du matin, ses angélus du soir, qui me parvenaient en des enveloppes surchargées de taxes supplémentaires …je n’eusse pas écrit les poèmes que la prédilection de Marcel Proust réclamait. Son éblouissante amitié m’a influencée, modifiée, comme seul en est capable un noble amour du verbe.”
“Le secret que je te promets et qui trahit les femmes, le voici, mon amour; s’il te plaît de t’assurer de leur passion, de leur attachement, retire-leur un instant ton coeur, tourmente-les, rends-les jalouses, infuse en elle le doute, fais-les souffrir, fût-ce un peu, fût-ce à peine, et ces fronts contents et fiers ploieront sans force sous le joug affreux de la confiance perdue, et des pleurs calmes et stupéfaits descendront sur ces beaux visages, et tu ne verras plus devant toi que l’Eve lamentable qui est née humblement du corps généreux d’Adam.”
“Pour Anna, être française, grecque ou persane n’est pas contradictoire; elle cherche l’ubiquité, dans l’espace, et le temps.”
“Son boudoir oriental … brillant, tintant … comme des bijoux de bazar, [qui] précédait une galerie où s’encadraient dans le chêne sculpté des portraits d’aïeux portant sceptres et couronnes.”
See Stoica.
“Rien ne fera de moi un exilé en France!”.
“Voilà pour ce qui est du gâteau traditionnel que les Roumains mangent à l’occasion de la plus importante fête chrétienne de l’année, Pâques: La confection de la pâque, du gâteau de fariné de blé, tel qu’Outza me le décrit, est une cérémonie pleine de mystère. Ce peuple, cultivateur de blé, trouve enfin l’occasion de manger du blé. Pour lui, il faut que l’occasion soit grande: la mort ou la résurrection! Dans son vocabulaire noble, il nomme ce blé cinstea mesei, ce qui veut dire l’Honneur de la table. Et le maïs est nommé simplement: la nourriture de la maison, Hrana casei”.
“Je traverse une crise d’orgueil géologique. Je me sens attachée à ce sol, un des plus vieux d’Europe.Lorsqu’il n’y avait encore qu’un tout petit peu d’Irlande, à peine un peu de Scandinavie émergeant de la mer, cette terre où je suis existait déjà. C’était la terre ferme, elle servait! Tout l’orgueil nobiliaire ne se réduit-il pas à ceci: avoir le plus anciennement servi? J’aime ce pays qui n’a pas de routes, moi si sensible à la poésie des grands chemins. C’est parce qu’il est dans toute son étendue une grande route, une voie d’accès, une marche immense par où l’humanité s’en est venue. J’aime cette terre pour sa longue mémoire et pour son usure patiente”.
“Elle a une citoyenneté, celle qu’elle a choisie; elle n’aura pas, elle n’aura jamais de nationalité. Toutes ses allégeances seront volontaires, consenties par elle, et respectées. Elle aimera d’un amour qui dépasse l’amour-propre des pays, des gens, des choses qui n’aiment qu’eux-mêmes et s’entre-détesteront tout le temps qu’il faudra pour en revenir de la guerre à la paix et inversement. Elle s’étonnera toujours, voyant les ennemis d’hier se rechercher, partager les mêmes voitures et les mêmes honneurs, que ce soit toujours après et jamais avant.”
See Kristeva.
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