1 Intimacy and Posturality
Elisabeth, Queen of Romania, Carmen Sylva’s names through history are, like her works, legion. Bestowed by all the Muses, her protean, perhaps genial personality overlaps with a complex, carefully-composed identity that is reflected not only in her own literature (memoirs, poetry, novels, short stories, theatre), but also in the way nineteenth- and twentieth-century biographers retrieved it. This chapter explores Sylva’s real and fictional personae, and hypothesizes a plurality of postures, each one with various degrees of self-disclosure and authenticity (Giddens, 184–205). Even though extremely relevant in showing a writer’s versatility, genre considerations have been put aside in the remarks
Defined by theorists such as Alain Viala and Jerôme Meizoz, the notion of posture implies, from a spatial point of view, “a way of placing oneself in social space” and “a way of taking a position” (Meizoz 18; Viala, “Eléments de sociopoétique” 216). Viewed from a temporal perspective, it is connected with ephemeral dispositions, with moments, thus with short spans of time. Also, it seems the most appropriate for our case study because, endowed with a certain plasticity, it can open the essentialist concept of identity, thus it can support various aggregations of gestures, behaviours, and discursive expressions (Meizoz 40–41; Viala, “Eléments de sociopoétique” 216). Photographs and writings of or about Sylva are thus collated in order to prove that the plurality of postures leads, in her case, to a collective sense of intimate space and time. While the concept of intimacy usually evokes “something that is hidden away from a larger world” (see this volume’s Introduction), it is worthwhile testing its complexity by trying its limits and by putting it in a paradoxical equation: intimacy and the collective. “In contradiction to what is suggested by our popular conception of intimacy (up close and personal)” – B.C. Parry argues – “spaces of intimacy may be stretched out such that they extend their encompassing arc across not only great geographical distances but also, curiously, across social parameters that may seem to be non-negotiable as conditions for the construction of intimacy” (Parry 35).
In line with the concept’s “private turn” (Valentine 297), our idea of collective intimacy emerged from several questions shedding light on Carmen Sylva’s specific case: Does intimacy have the same meaning for a queen and woman writer as for everyone else? Are the habits of privacy, familiarity, and informality altered by status? What emotions are predominant in a queen and women writer’s intimacy? Is the body the only mediator, the only locus for intimate acts? The answers refer to Carmen Sylva’s specific case as woman writer and queen, but may be taken as a starting point in a more general debate on public intimacy in general, and on writing intimacy in particular: “Keeping in mind the exposed nature of intimate writing [of all kinds of writing, our comment],
Collective intimacy is also grounded on a “collective” definition of memory, supported by D. Caracostea’s remark on Sylva’s creativity as “dynastic” rather than as “individual”, on her personal destiny as an episode of Romanian national history rather than as a story about disclosing the authenticity of self (483–504). It follows that our study works on the concepts of spatiality and temporality by subsuming them to the larger concept of memory: for the queen-poetess, intimate spaces function as “realms of memory” (lieux de mémoire) (Nora 1–21), whereas postures, closely connected to her wardrobe pieces, render a temporal sense of identity.
From a civil viewpoint, she was born Princess Elisabeth Pauline Ottilie Luise of Wied, whereas from a political perspective she was Queen of Romania, the founding mother of the Romanian dynasty and, as biographers contend, the king’s trustworthy advisor. In fact, “Carmen Sylva” is only one, albeit, the longest-running, of the queen’s literary pseudonyms: while she signs her youthful verse as “E. Wedi”, for more mature and experimental fiction she uses, beside “Carmen Sylva”, mysterious anagrams of Dido and Carol such as “Dito & Idem” or “F. de Laroc” (Tartler 12; Marinescu 120). Various metonyms used by her contemporaries also point at her royal person and are indicative of the queen’s exceptional versatility: the widely-circulated “poet-queen” and “mother of the wounded”1 can be rounded off with a rich list of attributes such as “the Rhine princess”, “the queen of the Carpathians”, “the globetrotter queen”, “the lonely queen”, “a star of the Belle Epoque”, “the exile”, “an intellectual ogre”, “the Danube muse”, “the little fairy”, “the storm”, “the forest rose”, “the (little) wild rose of Wied”,2 and so forth (Manolache 45–46; Bengescu 25; Sylva and Loti 43–44; Badea-Păun 7; Nixon 36; Zimmerman 26; Roșca 11; Badea-Păun 7–18, 175–185; Sylva, Colțul penaților mei i 103; Sylva, Colțul penaților mei ii, 29; Deichmann 54).
In spite of the queen’s natural pudeur, of her growing love for solitude, and of her attempt at hiding under a mask, the pseudonym Carmen Sylva did not favour “the development of an alternative identity” as in other famous cases – for instance, George Sand – because the literary signature was constantly coupled with the Queen’s political and civil postures (Nixon 95). With a
Recent analysis has shown that Elisabeth of Wied was always caught between her literary and civil facets, which would explain, as in Marie Corelli’s and Margaret Oliphant’s cases, her belonging to a grey area of nineteenth-century hot issues: the emancipation of women, the Jewish question, etc. (Nixon 22). Always aware of her public posture, she did not dare attack taboos and conveyed a conservative perspective on the world, which – scholars assume – might have been politically justified, biographically and psychologically determined, or, given her preference for medieval art, even aesthetically formatted (Manolache 47; Sylva Colțul penaților mei i 37; Zimmermann 102). As in the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the same effigy also reflected Elisabeth’s innate shyness and longing for dissolution as well as a double-dip craving for popularity (Sylva, Colțul penaților mei i 55, 165–166; Sylva Colțul penaților mei ii, 15). The queen-consort internalized Charles I’s dictum “Everything for the country, and nothing for me”; the female writer tried to force her way through to the centre of the nineteenth-century literary canon, which she assumed was the same as exposing her true self as much as possible.
Designating traits of simultaneous active personae, the name Carmen Sylva is an effigy, so its uses are closer to market brands than to literary pseudonyms. Standing for a sheaf of names and postures, the Carmen Sylva (royal) brand suggests versatility. Such an idea might be also supported by the fact that Sylva – like Queen Victoria and many other kings and queens who consented to participate in “the royal culture industry” of the nineteenth century
2 The Taming of Intimacy
Sylva’s love for mise en scène affected her sense of intimacy and its spatial-temporal expressions. There are enough testimonies evidencing that both her solitude and her public appearances had a studied scenic effect. Indeed, she loved to play the part of an august statue, draped in a marble-white gown. Grounded on “dynastic creativity” (Caracostea 483–504) rather than on individual creativity, the queen’s authorial posture thus belongs to a space in time where collective memories are internalized as personal memories and, viewed the other way round, where personal recollections become moments of Romanian national history. Likewise, personal objects such as clothes, furniture and other artefacts participate in “the act of creating intensely intimate relations without personal interaction” (Parry 35).
Sylva’s romantic taste for reclusiveness – nurtured by childhood reminiscences of wild landscapes – is confirmed by her choice of residences: from the Swiss hunting pavilion near the Peleș Castle in Sinaia to the house in Constanța from whose terrace she used to bless, via a megaphone, all the boats leaving the port (Maria, Regina României, Povestea vieții mele ii 314–315). Commenting on Queen Mary’s memories (Maria, Regina României, Povestea vieții mele i 298), the biographer Gabriel Badea-Păun notices that Sylva had a preference for dark little corners such as the one called “The Paradise of Laces”:5
Everywhere, trinkets, family memories, photos and portraits of Princess Mary [Sylva’s daughter] … priceless laces were hanging all around, clinging to the attic and the walls, covering the tables, the pillows, the sofa … In the attic, there was Sylva’s studio, a big square room, with beams
badea-păun 135–137richly sculpted with fantastic animals. Beautiful curtains were covering the easels where prayer books were waiting for her miniature drawings. In a niche, a stocky couch looked as if it was inviting intimate discussion or rest.6
Perhaps unconsciously echoing Dickens’ famous portrait of Miss Havisham, the biographer describes in the fragment provided above a space where time seems to have stopped. Like a cocoon or like an industrious female-spider, the queen is surrounded by real and abstract networks: laces, needlework and, of course, memories.
But what memories? Despite their darkness and shown-off cosiness, Sylva’s rooms do not function as intimate spaces, but as a sort of collective intimacy, in the line of Nora’s definition of “realms of memory” (lieux de mémoire) (Nora 1–21). Here, in her private rooms, royal emotions can turn into a subject of collective interest and communal bonding; here, in her private rooms, people are encouraged to revere and remember a mother’s pain at the loss of her child, a dynasty’s failure to produce an heir, an artist’s tormenting toils, a woman’s hardships in finding her own voice. Turned itself into a museum piece, this queen’s life could thus figure – despite the fact that she has always been perceived as a foreigner – as a piece of national history (Mironescu 22–26) or as a local legend, very much in the fashion of those gathered by Sylva in the collections published between 1880 and 1910: Robia Peleșului, Poveștile Peleșului [Legends from river and mountain, Tales from the Carpathian mountains], Insula Șerpilor, Puiu, În luncă (o idilă), Poveștile unei regine [The serpent-isle, In the meadow. A love affair, Stories of a queen] and so forth. In actual fact, the museification of emotions (sorrow, pain) is already a traceable stylistic device in Pilgrim Sorrow: A Cycle of Tales (1884).
Published in 1908 and translated partially as From the Memory’s Shrine (1911),7 Mein Penatenwirkel hybridizes several biographical genres because the author
While nineteenth-century fiction contains plenty of letters, billets doux, diaries, and albums (Duțu 88–91), Sylva’s fondness for letter-writing does not belong to a model of seduction, but to a rationalist and aulic model of chancery. This is also supported by the fact that while she kept writing literature as an amateur in her youth, it was only around 1880 that she decided to act as the secretary of her own life and behave as a self-conscious professional writer. Chancery letter-writing and the corresponding posture of the (woman) letter writer fulfil the same function as Sylva’s private rooms: to interbreed the time of storytelling and the time of living, to tame privacy, to propose an open intimacy. For example, one of Sylva’s short stories Uă scrisóre [A Letter] shows how letter-writing serves for the main character Agata as an incentive for recalling, understanding, and discoursing her entire life (Sylva, Nuvele 5–61). Once publicly exposed, this character’s intimacy undergoes a process of abstraction.
3 The Wild Rose of Wied and Her Wardrobe
As mentioned above, many of the princess’s nicknames contain the noun rose. Presumably, Sylva herself and her biographers might have undertaken usage of an iconic code: the English rose stood for all accomplished beauties. While sub rosa always lies mysterium, it is also possible that Sylva’s youth nickname indicates a deeper psychological mechanism stirred by a problematic relationship with the body (Sylva, Colțul penaților mei i 61): on the one hand, there is the acknowledgement of fleshly ephemerality, on the other, there is the rejection of bodily-related matters such as marriage and motherhood. Widely used as a
Explained by biographers as a sort of saeculum, the queen’s excessive pudeur is reflected in her unremitting rejection of décolleté clothing and, after her daughter’s premature death, by her refusal to be consulted by a gynaecologist (Sylva, Colțul penaților mei i 27; Badea-Păun 110). These biographical details might fit in the same frame with the queen’s restatements of her fear of marriage, with her stylizing motherhood to the point that it becomes a marked psychological complex. The prevailing chronotope of the primordial in the fictional works, her interest in the magnetization of bodies and, later, in theosophy and spiritualism indicate a certain unease so far as the body is concerned (Sylva Colțul penaților mei i 27–30, 53; Caracostea 487; Manolache 50; Sylva, Colțul penaților mei i 160; Badea-Păun 41–42). “The body”, Sylva remarks in her memoirs, “does not matter and it is only meant to be conquered” (Sylva Colțul penaților mei ii 61).
The de-corporealization and abstraction of intimacy become immediately apparent if one takes a glance inside the queen’s wardrobe. Closely connected to her multiple personae and to the way they are aggregated under the same brand, the wardrobe is not only a place where royal clothing is stored; it is also a place where royal clothing gets exposed as if having a life of its own; it is also a place where the gesture of returning to the past acquires a stylistic significance. As a matter of fact, Sylva’s short story Năluca [The ghost] includes a very interesting scene in which, completely unassisted by bodies, silk gowns, damask tunics, priests’ vestments, and other ceremony apparel start moving and revolving around a “snow-white bridal dress”.8 Only a barely perceptible motion of laces and garments testifies to an invisible presence therein. This phantasmic gathering – in a richly lit hall, at midnight – represents a preview of the aristocratic marriage between the German princess Meta, heiress of Kommbach castle, and a young knight. Herself a wild rose’ like Elisabeth of Wied, Meta is the daughter of a Bluebeard father and of a religious mother, whose eccentric lifestyle drags her among the spirits that haunt her parents’ castle. As the ending of the story suggests, Meta turns into a ghost herself and is never to be wed (Sylva, Nuvele 354–358). If Meta is Sylva’s alter ego, then the scene of the animated wardrobe pieces is meant to convey a sort of uneasiness as far as marriage (thus bodily intercourse) is concerned.
In point of fact, Gabriel Badea-Păun remarks that the queen designed a clothing line all for herself: the white silk dresses with a tunic cut, matched with costume jewellery and lace of her own making, huge capes garnished with expensive furs and ridiculous hats resembling night bonnets (Badea-Păun 149). In her memoirs, Queen Mary of Romania also depicts Elizabeth, dressed in long white dresses (Maria, Regina României, Povestea vieții mele ii 314–316). Reportedly, a white dress was also part of the dramatic entrée the queen set up when Pierre Loti visited her for the first time: friends remember her as she left the great organ, where she had just finished playing Bach, descending from the bandstand in a blindingly white dress (Badea-Păun 169). Robert Scheffer’s controversial novel Misère Royale begins with the stormy entrance of Queen Magda (Sylva’s fictional projection), who wears a white woollen gown (Scheffer 1, 18). In Mite Kremnitz’s novel Radu, Princess Fermanu – “tall”, “stout”, “blue shining eyes”, “blonde, wavy hair”, and “eagle nose, which gave her the aspect of a queen” – is dressed in “a sparkling white gown”, simple and richly garnished with pearls (Kremnitz 32–33).
finch 338
The female body is articulated as a vessel for an (absent) unworldly object of desire, and her clothing as a vessel for the (absent) female body. The relation between body and clothes has been transformed; whereas pre-modern period clothes and underclothes were placed in relative, stark opposition to the body … by the end of the Victorian era, the female body and its clothes had become, not exactly exchangeable objects, but metaphors of sorts for one another.
Such metonymic expression of bodily matters might explain the more pronounced Gothic features of Sylva’s fiction, announcing Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Nixon 18, 34, 173, 265) but also inheriting the features of the eighteenth-century “feminized (popular) Gothic” (Davison 85), which challenged old ideals of sociability, chiefly the segregation between public and private domains: “Due to its commercialized character, low cultural status and structural openness, the novel in general, and the Gothic novel more specifically, offered women writers a unique venue in which to engage in a variety of important cultural debates” (Davison 85).
Perhaps a bit too extravagant for local tastes, Sylva’s Gothic was criticized as sensationalist and artificial because the queen was alleged to have come up with rehashed versions of the Romanian people, mores, and folklore (Delavrancea 350–408; Ardeleanu). In actual fact, her legends about Romanian sites make little reference to the inhabitants’ private lives, the lack of ethnographic insight being compensated through universal psychological situations. The result is a romantic geography about mountains and rivers (Omu, Caraiman, Ceahlău, Furnica, Jipii, Peleș, Vârful cu Dor, Piatra arsă, and so forth) that could have been inspired more by her native Rhineland than by Romania. Indeed, in spite of her close collaboration with the best stylists among all Romanian writers (Alecsandri, Coșbuc, Eminescu, and so forth), the queen did not, in reality, manage to understand and communicate the subtleties of Romanian culture, so as to secure full access to what has commonly been called le génie de la langue (Fumaroli 216).
There was, whatsoever, another way for her to access the genius of the Romanian language and culture: by supplementing her white royal wardrobe with plenty of Romanian traditional white blouses and by spreading photographs of herself and of her ladies-in-waiting dressed as peasants, in an idyllic, rural and sometimes working posture. For example, Franz Mandy’s 1883 photo set presents Sylva as a Romanian country woman in front of an easel or in front of a writing case, which are bizarre matches if one considers that at that time, 90% of the Romanian population was illiterate. The recently proclaimed
Wearing a Romanian traditional costume in an intimate setting – be it an idyllic pose in the fields or a cosy pose in a library – sends out a message of familiarity with the queen’s adoptive culture. By the same token, we may infer here an intimacy sub specie communitatis.
4 Intimacy Unchained
Besides an obvious effort to become acquainted with Romanian culture (by redefining local legends and by wearing traditional costume), many of Sylva’s portraits also project images suggesting that, in her mind, the intimacy of literature is held in predominance above all else (Duțu 73–85) and thus, the only one acceptable to be portrayed as a royal pose. Most of the time, the queen is surrounded by books, in a pensive or working posture: at the table in her boudoir at the Peleș Castle (1888); on the terrace of Domburg Castle (1895); in bed while self-exiled in Italy (1892); in front of a writing case (1883); with her royal husband and caressing a book (1883), on a couch in Neuwied (1900), weaving in the library of the Bucharest Palace (1910), etc. Sylva’s pictures, while reading a book or in front of the typewriter, indicate an unmistakable one-on-one relationship with literature, in fact a type of “instructive intimacy”, which involves the dissipation of self into a text that is being read or written (Schlanger 9–23, 127–150). For that reason, the maximum degree of royal intimacy, “the pure relationship” (Giddens 49–65) seems to be reached only in the presence of books, only through medialization. If that be Carmen Sylva’s case, not only physical (related to fear of marriage), but also emotional intimacy turns out to be problematic.
The royal couple exchanged many letters, for instance, while Elisabeth was seeking treatment for infertility or while Charles was on the field of battle in the Russo-Turkish War. However, there is an utter imbalance in the number of letters written to each other. Between 1869 and 1888, Elisabeth wrote six times more letters than her husband. The editors of the most recent volume of royal correspondence noticed that Charles i – renowned for his laconism and discreteness – only kept letters that he himself considered relevant for historians (Zimmerman and Constantinescu 8). However, according to the nineteenth-century code of romantic behaviour, it was not uncommon for couples to take
While you unreservedly trusted strangers, allowing them into the intimacy of your inner life, I was excluded, and when I drew your attention to the fact that you did not tell me this or that, you would always serve me the stereotypical answer “I am always silent”. This claim was a self-deception, because you could never be silent about the others … Before, you had no reason to entrust the most sacred secrets to third parties. Now there is a devastating proof of your boundless indiscretion … It’s about the infamous novel by R. Scheffer … You sacrificed what should have been most precious in your life … No longer was this world enough for your literary pride and they [the queen’s entourage], through visions and ghosts, made you believe you are in contact with immortality.9
sylva, Colțul penaților mei ii 181–183
5 Conclusions
Taking into account Carmen Sylva’s multiple personae – princess, queen, writer, musician, philanthropist, etc. – we have explored postures as intimacy devices. Understood as “a way of occupying a position and of adjusting to it” (Viala, “Posture” 216–218), the notion of posture seemed the most appropriate for investigating the spatial and temporal coordinates of royal intimacy as well as its “partial nature” (Parry 36). In the first part, we provided biographical information about the queen’s protean personality and about the way she made use of pseudonyms and nicknames. In her case, the plurality of postures led to a collective sense of intimacy: considering the queen’s rooms, wardrobe, and literary style as the geometrical loci where personal recollections and collective memories crisscross, we showed evidence for Parry’s theory that “material artefacts … effectively operate as an interface between different knowledge communities. The objects maintain a common ‘public’ or normative identity while still being capable of local interpretations that are the product of very private and individualized engagements. While suffused with different meaning and values for each of these constituencies they nevertheless, or indeed precisely because of their multiple valences, effectively operate as points of mediation and negotiation between each” (Parry 2008, 36). In the second part, we commented on a few of Sylva’s fictional works, letters, and memoirs in order to prove that the queen’s obsolete postures (in terms of both clothing and writing), many of them bearing a phantasmal, Gothic air, testify to a problematic relationship with bodily matters. In the last part, we commented on
This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of Education and Research, cncs – uefiscdi, project number pn-iii-P1-1.1-te-2019-0127, within pncdi iii.
“muma răniților”. All translations of quotations in this chapter are ours.
The Queen’s nicknames travel around biographies, monographs and articles published in four languages: German, Romanian, French and English. The English translations of these nicknames have been established by Sylva’s English biographers and translators (e.g. Baroness Deichmann, Edith Hopkirk, Laura Nixon and others).
“augusta poetă”.
As her memoirs attest, this nickname was used by Queen Mary.
“Paradisul Dantelelor”.
“Peste tot, bibelouri, amintiri de familie, fotografii sau portrete ale principesei Maria. Carmen Sylva avea predilecție pentru micile colțuri întunecate, asemeni alcovului aflat în continuarea budoarului ei și pe care îl numea Paradisul Dantelelor, unde dantele neprețuite erau agățate peste tot, prinse de tavan, pe pereți, pe mese, pe pernițe și pe canapea. (…) La mansardă, sub acoperiș, se afla atelierul lui Carmen Sylva, o încăpere mare, pătrată, cu bârne bogat sculptate reprezentând animale fantastice. Niște draperii frumoase erau aruncate pe șevalete, pe care se aflau pagini din cărțile de rugăciuni pe care le orna cu miniaturi. Într-o nișă, un divan scund invita, parcă, la discuții intime sau chiar la odihnă …”.
1908 is the publication year of the first German edition. It was translated in Romanian as Colțul penaților mei in 2002.
“uă rochiă de mirésă albă ca zăpada”.
“În timp ce unor străini le acordai încredere fără reserve, îngăduindu-le să aibă acces la intimitatea vieţii Tale sufleteşti, eu eram exclus, iar când îţi atrăgeam atenţia că mie nu-mi spuneai cutare sau cutare lucru, mă alegeam cu stereotipicul răspuns eu tac mereu. Această pretenţie constituia o autoînşelare, căci faţă de ceilalţi n-ai putut niciodată să taci (…) Înainte nu aveai, însă, niciun motiv să încredinţezi unor terţe persoane cele mai sfinte secrete. Acum există o probă nimicitoare a indiscreţiei tale fără margini (…) Este vorba despre imfamul roman al lui R. Scheffer (…) Ai sacrificat ce-ar fi trebuit să-ţi fie mai scump în viaţă celor care, prin neruşinate linguşiri, voiau să te aibă la discreţia lor. Lumea asta nu-ţi mai ajungea pentru orgoliul tău de scriitor şi ei, prin vedenii şi fantome, te-au făcut să te crezi în contact cu nemurirea”.
“l’exilée”.
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