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Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Volume 30, Number 3&4, Spring-Summer

2002, pp. 363-380 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/ncf.2002.0014

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ncf/summary/v030/30.3engelking.html

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Renée Vivien and The Ladies of the Lake

  

The “Ladies of the Lake” haunted the imagination of nineteenth-century artists

and writers. The Pre-Raphaelites in particular were fond of depicting beautiful,
often crazy, preferably dead or dying women, associated with water. These
women surfaced in their works as Ophelia, the Lady of Shalott, Elaine, and also
from Arthurian Romance, Vivien, or the Lady of the Lake. Ophelia in particular
was a subject no nineteenth-century artist seemed able to resist. Her popularity
extended into the new century where representations of the mad heroine on
stage, on canvas, and, thanks to a new process of photoengraving, in book and
magazine illustrations, reached a broader audience than ever before. In his book
Idols of Perversity, Bram Dijkstra extensively catalogues images of women from
the period 1880-1920 which he characterizes as a “veritable iconography of
misogyny” (viii ). The numerous representations of Ophelia he reproduces are
among the most striking, and reinforce Elaine Showalter’s observation that
“Pre-Raphaelite images were part of a new and intricate traffic between images
of women and madness in late nineteenth-century literature, psychiatry,
drama, and art” (“Representing Ophelia” 85).
Showalter focuses on Ophelia, but Shakespeare’s heroine is only the best-
known variation on a theme also represented by Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott and
Elaine. All three are madwomen who sacrifice themselves for love. Their
resulting suicides leave them floating downstream, much to the delight of late
nineteenth-century artists such as John Everett Millais and John William
Waterhouse whose respective renditions of “Ophelia” (1851) and “The Lady of
Shalott” (1888) are no doubt familiar to most readers. The insanity and self-
sacrifice of these women are representative of feminine devotion to the male, an
ideal of feminine behavior that was admired and encouraged by the late
Victorians who were more and more threatened by the advent of the inde-

Nineteenth-Century French Studies 30, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring–Summer 2002 363

pendent and strong-willed New Woman. Theirs was a period when, as Jan
Marsh puts it, “traditional patriarchal social structures were under stress” (10).
Women were seen as the moral guardians of society, and as such, those who
violated their domestic roles presented the worst possible threat to the Victorian
status quo. In literature and art this threat often took the shape of various femmes
fatales such as Vivien of the Lake, the wily sorceress who succeeded in beguiling
Merlin and stealing his book of spells.
Drowning women such as Ophelia and fatal women such as Vivien of the
Lake represent two sides of a feminine gender dynamic that was shifting during
the late nineteenth century: the self-sacrificing way women were expected to
behave, and the possibilities of breaking that pattern as women began taking
control of their own (sexual/creative/linguistic?) destinies. These “Ladies of the
Lake” have been revisited from time to time, and since the 1980s they have
become the topic of a serious critical inquiry by feminist literary critics and art
historians. Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock, for example, point to the role
Pre-Raphaelite representations of women play in reproducing and defining
constructs of masculinity and femininity that reinforce patriarchal ideologies.
Others, such as Linda Shires, scrutinize the gender politics of Tennyson’s Idylls
of the King, and relate his use of female figures in the retelling of the Arthurian
legend to “a disturbance in gender roles that would only increase as the
nineteenth century wore on” (65). But rather than see the female figures that
dominate late nineteenth-century art and literature as weak-willed and passive
victims of a Victorian ideal of femininity, some feminist critics such as Elaine
Showalter, Nina Auerbach and Griselda Pollack have developed strategies to
recuperate them as rebellious heroines – positive role models for contemporary
women readers. Similarly, Linda Dowling has linked decadence, whose por-
trayals of women as femmes fatales are usually seen as misogynistic, with the
New Woman in that “both opposed values considered essential to the survival of
established culture” (435).
It is in the context of this current feminist debate and renewed interest in late
nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century representations of women that
I want to examine the figures of Ophelia and the Arthurian Vivien in the poetry
of the turn-of-the-century British poet Pauline Tarn, who, significantly, wrote
in French under the name Renée Vivien. Tarn’s problematic identification with
“The Ladies of the Lake” provides important insights into the difficult position
she found herself in as a woman writer at the turn of the century and especially
the gender ideologies that worked to undermine her feminism. This focus
diverges from two of the main branches of Vivien criticism today. One would
identify Vivien as an important “forerunner to the contemporary gay move-
ment” (Rubin v) by emphasizing the positive Sapphic elements in her poems;

364 Tama Lea Engelking

the other dwells on the darker self-destructive “decadent” elements in her work
that, according to Lillian Faderman, made Vivien’s life inauthentic, and her
poetry irrelevant to contemporary lesbians (363). My reading of Vivien uses the
“Ladies of the Lake” as a focal point from which to identity the dangers and
conflicts inherent in undertaking a feminist project at the turn of the past
century, in order to highlight the ambivalence at the heart of Vivien’s feminist
revisions.1
Pauline Tarn was born into a wealthy British family in 1877, and like all
upper-class British girls of that era, was presented at Queen Victoria’s royal
court when she had her coming out at age seventeen. Several years later in
France she was to experience another coming out when she fell in love with a
woman and decided to adopt Sappho as her principal muse. She spent her
formative years on both sides of the English Channel, absorbing influences
from both cultures. It was at French boarding school, however, that she fell in
love with French literature and adopted French as her literary language of
choice. Vivien felt the calling to be a poet from an early age, and to that end
enlisted the services of Charles-Brun. He was a poet and classics professor who
taught her the subtleties of French prosody and also tutored her in classical
Greek so that she could realize her ambition to translate Sappho’s poems into
French from the original. He remained her friend, mentor, literary advisor and
witness to Vivien’s tireless dedication to her work as she constantly revised her
poems in her quest for perfection. Her effort was prodigious, resulting in more
than eleven volumes of poetry, including two volumes of translations from the
Greek, several collections of short stories, one novel and an unfinished
biography.2 All were produced during the short but intensely productive nine-
year period preceding her death in 1909, and all were written in French.
Vivien’s early admiration for the poetry of Ronsard, Victor Hugo, and
Baudelaire (whose poems she read in secret at age 15), help explain her choice of
French, as do the symbolist influences in her work. Yet, her personal library also
contained fifteen well-worn and annotated volumes of Swinburne’s works, and
the Pre-Raphaelite influence in her verse is also evident. French, then, was more
than an aesthetic or literary choice for Vivien. According to Jean-Paul Goujon,
Renée Vivien’s refusal to write in her mother tongue represented a refusal of the
mother she claimed to have neglected her, as well as the Victorian England
whose restrictions she abhorred (Tes Blessures 41). Goujon’s assessment seems
accurate, especially given that Vivien physically reinforced this linguistic
barrier when she became financially independent at age 21 and was thus able to
permanently move to France. She published her first poems there in 1901,
initially hiding her gender behind the name R. Vivien, and then the masculine
form of the name René before definitively adopting the feminine penname

Nineteenth-Century French Studies 30, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring–Summer 2002 365

Renée Vivien. Her decision to write under a French name is further evidence of
the distance she sought from her fatherland, father’s name and mother tongue.
Her choice of a pen name that seems to signal her re-birth (renée) as a French
writer, and as a powerful female figure (Vivien of the Lake), reflects both her
personal and literary rebellion against the repressive social and literary
conventions of her day, but, as we will see, her name can also be read as a key to
the forces that worked against the ultimate success of that revolt.
The American heiress Natalie Clifford Barney shared French and Greek
lessons with Vivien, became her first lover, and was the inspiration for many of
her poems as well as an autobiographical novel. The two women even briefly
shared a villa on the island of Lesbos in 1904 where they had hoped to establish
a colony of women writers in the spirit of the women’s academy they believed
Sappho once directed there. Although their mutual dream was never realized on
Lesbos, Barney established herself as a central figure in Paris-Lesbos where her
fashionable salon on the left bank became a gathering place for the lesbian
writers and artists who made Paris their home in the early twentieth-century.3
While Barney’s feminism and place in lesbian history are secure, the mixed
legacy left by Renée Vivien is difficult for her readers to sort out. A talented poet
and scholar who was noted for the formal purity of her French verse, Vivien
became known as “Sappho 1900” because of her audacious lesbian love poems,
translations and expansions of Sapphic fragments. She dared to write openly
lesbian verse inspired by her principal muse whom she attempted to recuperate
from male-dominated literary history as an important lesbian precursor. Yet
Vivien herself was often depressed, paranoid and self-destructive, and this dark
side of her psyche found its way into her poetry. She suffered from anorexia,
alcoholism and drug addiction; the abuse she heaped on a body that she appears
to have detested eventually killed her in 1909 at the age of 32.
Vivien’s tragic early death, and the parade of destructive and negative women
that figure in her work, are at odds with the more positive aspects of her life and
work. Positive celebrations of women and female sexuality in her work are
intermixed with a morbid fascination with death – often linked to water.
Vivien’s poetry overflows with various manifestations of the “Ladies of the Lake”
such as sirens, water nymphs, and female figures such as Vivien of the Lake,
Sappho, Ophelia and Aphrodite, whose life or death are linked to water. In her
poems women’s bodies take on water-like qualities reminiscent of the organic
lines of art nouveau, often dissolving into and becoming inseparable from the
reeds, water lilies, reflections and waves that ripple across the surface of the
water.
Vivien’s life and work are marked by an aesthetic that also seduced Tennyson,
the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers, one that is perhaps best represented by

366 Tama Lea Engelking

Edgar Allan Poe’s famous declaration: “The death of a beautiful woman is,
unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”4 She incorporated this
notion into many of her poems, and one might say even into her life – and death.
The line separating Vivien’s life and work is not very distinct, and this adds a
further complication to our understanding of this complex writer who tended
to literalize and internalize the artistic aesthetic she practiced. For example, on
the cover of one her volumes of collected poems, Vivien poses as a “Dogeresse”
who, in a verse drama by that name, is mysteriously drawn into the dark waters
of the Venetian canals, and drowns herself (La Vénus des aveugles 204). In her
most famous portrait by the Belgian symbolist Lévy-Dhurmer, she poses against
a Lesbos-like seascape (see figure 1). The setting is very likely a reference to the
cliff from which Sappho is said to have flung herself, a scene Vivien recreates in
several of her verse dramas. Since Vivien owned a villa on Lesbos, she had first
hand knowledge of the island she recreated in many of her poems. Another
example of collapsing the line between life and art is the tableau vivant in which
Vivien participated, posing as the fated Lady Jane Grey on her way to the exe-
cutioner’s block. According to Colette’s account in Le Pur et l’impur, Vivien
starved herself for ten days prior to the performance to better look the part of the
tragic lady. Another photograph, probably taken not long before Vivien’s death,
shows an emaciated Vivien holding a bouquet of lilies in a Pre-Raphaelite-
inspired pose. As mentioned earlier, Vivien’s health broke down due to self-
induced starvation, and abuse of alcohol and the Victorian Lady’s drug of choice
– laudanum. Vivien also had photos of herself taken dressed as Anne Boleyn,
and when she died she was working on a biography of the ill-fated Boleyn.
According to one of Vivien’s biographers, the tragic figure of Anne Bolyne had
replaced the more positive image of Sappho in Vivien’s personal mythology
(Goujon, Tes Blessures 385).
Vivien’s personal and poetic “death wish” is at odds with the inspiring and
powerful figure of “Vivien,” the Arthurian Lady of the Lake whose name she
took when she was reborn as a French Sapphic poet. Critics such as Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar are among those who want to read Pauline Tarn’s
transformation into Renée Vivien as a gesture of empowerment. They count
Vivien among the modernist women who “sought to make their names into
icons of female artistry” (War of the Words 241). But does Vivien’s poetic use of
her namesake challenge or reinforce male-generated images, and what are the
implications for her particular vision of “Vivien”? Sometimes seen as a New
Eve, or compared to Lilith, Delilah and other dangerously sensual femmes
fatales, Vivien of the Lake represents a sort of New Woman. She is the star femme
fatale in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, a long collection of poems that constitutes
a remake of Arthurian Romance with an emphasis on Victorian morals and

Nineteenth-Century French Studies 30, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring–Summer 2002 367

values.5 She also inspired several paintings, most notably Burne-Jones’s “The
Beguiling of Merlin.” Here, the Pre-Raphaelite artist depicts Vivien’s seduction
of the aging wizard Merlin at the moment she steals his books of spells. When
this huge and impressive painting was first exhibited in 1877, it enchanted the
public who mistakenly believed it to be an illustration of Tennyson’s poem.
Burne-Jones’ more dignified Vivien falls short of the repulsive creature de-
scribed by Tennyson, although she is still a far cry from the frightened Nimuë,
an older name for the Lady of the Lake as she appears in Malory’s Morte
D’Arthur. Burne-Jones apparently pleaded with Tennyson not to call his wily
and wicked Lady of the Lake by the name of Nimuë, and Tennyson obliged by
naming her Vivien instead. In fact, Burne-Jones’ various portraits of the Lady of
the Lake, of which “The Beguiling of Merlin” is the most famous, make up a
“continuing defense of the enchantress” according to Carole Silver (257). The
artist used his mistress as the model for Nimuë and identified himself with
Merlin. Though he portrayed Vivien with Medusa-like hair, he did not feel that
Vivien should be hated for the consequences of her beauty. For the art critic
Debra Mancoff, however, “the ‘Beguiling of Merlin’ released the full malicious
power of the enchantress. Burne-Jones’ vision of the event fully transformed a
mysterious tale of female victimization into a shocking representation of erotic
domination” (217).
Gilbert and Gubar also link Vivien’s poetry to the Burne-Jones painting, with
a particular emphasis on the book of spells Vivien of the Lake tricks Merlin into
giving her. “[R]eborn (‘Renée’) as ‘Vivien,’ she took on the power ascribed to the
seductive Vivien of Arthurian legend, who wrests from Merlin the book that
represents and contains his magical authority” (War of the Words 242). This
book, however, appears nowhere in Vivien’s poetry, and Merlin himself is
completely absent from her later poems about Vivien. Instead, erotic
domination prevails in Renée Vivien’s first “Viviane” poem published in her
1903 collection Evocations. She portrays the legendary Lady of the Lake as an evil
temptress whose call the tired wizard can finally no longer resist. The seduction
takes place at sun set, signaling the end of Arthur’s reign, as Merlin, described as
“le penseur,” succumbs to the sensual eroticism that emanates from Vivien
“comme un parfum plein de poisons.” The sorceress artfully uses her words to
conquer the aging wizard whose defeat becomes “l’exquise trahison” (111). The
poem includes several stanzas of conversation between Vivien and Merlin,
reminiscent of Tennyson’s “Merlin and Vivien,” and like Tennyson’s version
of the sorceress, this Vivien displays snake-like qualities as she encloses Merlin
in her arms “insinuants et frais ainsi qu’une liane.”
« Je te plains, ô Penseur dont le regard me fuit,
Car tu n’as point connu, toi qui vois toutes choses,

368 Tama Lea Engelking

 La pâleur des pavots et le rire des roses,
L’ardeur et la langueur des lèvres dans la nuit.
Pourquoi railler et fuir la volupté profane,
L’appel de Viviane? »

Et Merwynn répondit : « Ma passive raison

Subit le charme aigu du mensonge et l’ivresse
Du péril. Ton accent persuade et caresse,
Modulant avec art l’exquise trahison.
Entre tes doigts cruels un lys meurtri se fane,
Perfide Viviane. » (Evocations 111-12)

Renée Vivien again mentions her namesake in “Telle que Viviane” (La Vénus
des aveugles, 1904). In this short poem, the poet does not identify directly with
“Viviane,” but instead describes her Vivien-like lover against a decadent
backdrop of black swans gliding over a lake of shadows where she casts a love
spell with her languorous words and “chers poisons.” Renée Vivien’s final
tribute to “Viviane” is found in A l’heure des mains jointes, a pivotal volume
published in 1906 that takes its title from a poem by the Pre-Raphaelite writer
Dante Gabriel Rossetti. This volume marks a turning point in Vivien’s creative
work which, after 1907, contains no further references to Sappho who is the
dominate figure and inspiration for Vivien’s earlier poems. Vivien not only
abandoned Sappho, but also became a recluse who withdrew her books from
circulation, and whose health began deteriorating. The profound pessimism
that marks her post-1906 work contrasts sharply with the more optimistic tone
of her earlier work. Some of Vivien’s most positive poems in the Sapphic mode
such as “En débarquant à Mytilène” and “Psappha revit” appear in A l’heure des
mains jointes, along with deeply disturbing portraits such as the tortured poet
described in “Le pilori.” This is a crucial context for understanding the twenty-
six rhymed couplets that make up “Viviane.” In this poem, “Viviane la fée”
appears less as a seductress than a sorceress whose power comes from her ability
to transform herself. She uses illusion and magic to surround herself in mist, to
change her appearance, name and voice. She transforms herself from brunette
in the evening, to blond in broad daylight, and redheaded at sunset; no one has
seen the true face of this changeable and irresistible enchantress:
Et Viviane est plus puissante que le sort;
Elle porte en ses mains le sommeil et la mort.

Plus que l’espoir et plus que le songe, elle est belle.

Nineteenth-Century French Studies 30, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring–Summer 2002 369

 Les plus grands enchanteurs sont des enfants près d’elle.
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]
Des rois ont partagé son palais et sa table,
Mais nul n’a jamais vu sa face véritable.

Elle renaît, elle est plus belle chaque jour,

Et ses illusions trompent le simple amour.
(A l’heure des mains jointes 283)

Vivien’s choice of the verb “renaître,” which recalls the past participle
“renée,” can be read along with the verse “Les violettes ont salué Viviane,” to
suggest that this is the “Viviane” with whom the poet most closely identifies.
Renée Vivien was known as “La Muse aux violettes,” a symbol she adopted after
the death of her dear friend Violette Shillito. She had the purple flowers printed
on her calling cards, and posed with a bouquet of violets in several portraits
including the famous Lévy-Dhrumer pastel. The color is also a reference to her
principal muse, Sappho. Vivien beacons her readers in this poem, “Ecoutez . . .
Nulle voix n’est pareille à sa voix.” The voice of the sorceress is also that of a poet,
an actively creative and imaginative woman who stands in stark contrast to the
Victorian ideal of passive womanhood. In her discussion of Victorian visions of
female sages and sorceresses, Susan Casteras argues that sorcery and madness
represented creative and liberating escapes for Victorian women, a chance for
them to take active control of their lives and transform themselves from passive
martyrs and “Angels of the House” (170). More to the point, Casteras sees the
female magician as “an archetypal image of the artist who, with wand, pen, or
brush, summons extraordinary creations through her divination and her
imagination” (170).6
Vivien’s sorceress-poet falls short of being a positive role model, however,
because of the cruelty, deception, and treason, that characterize “son pouvoir
féminin,” which is frequently turned against other women. In the hands of a
creative woman, the power to transform through words may have negative
consequences. The pessimistic poems showing the poet as tortured, paranoid
and misunderstood present one possibility. Another lies in Vivien’s inter-
nalization of the femme fatale’s destructive energies, and the way she channels
those forces against women. Unlike the Burne-Jones’s painting that shows
Vivien in possession of Merlin’s book of spells, Renée Vivien gives no hint that
the power of the enchantress she envisions is derived from men. Although her
first “Vivien” poem contrasts the passive reason represented by the “thinking”
wizard with “Viviane’s” purely feminine sensuality, in the woman-centered
world that dominates Renée Vivien’s poetic vision, men become irrelevant. The
Vivien-like lover in the 1904 poem, for example, practices her charms on other

370 Tama Lea Engelking

women. Referring again to the Burne-Jones’ painting, Sandra Gilbert and
Susan Gubar acknowledge Vivien’s lesbian twist to the old legend, which they
read in a positive light.
Thus, usurping a charm that has traditionally enthralled and pacified women,
Vivien appropriates the seductive arts of the alphabet to turn men into sleeping
uglies, while gaining for herself the power to break the male sexual monopoly and
become herself a charmer of women in her lesbian poetry. (“Ceremonies of the
Alphabet” 28)

Susan Gubar has also argued, however, that Vivien’s lesbian is closely linked to
the barren, alienated and sadistic lesbians penned by Baudelaire, Swinburne
and the decadents. According to Gubar, Vivien is able to tap the energy of the
decadent’s lesbian for her art, and, as a lesbian, she is also able to evade “the
heterosexual consummation with is vampiric consumption of women, for in
her view the penetration of women ensures the perpetuation of patriarchy”
(“Sapphistries” 50).7 At the same time, however, Gubar acknowledges that
Vivien suffered the consequences of such internalization in her life (49).
Although Vivien herself remained a virgin, a quality she highly prizes in her
poetry, her sexual independence from men, and the artistic power to create did
not entirely exempt her from the Victorian baggage she carried with her. Steeped
in the decadent ideal of the femme fatale, Renée Vivien portrays an illusory
“Vivien” who duplicates patriarchal plots against women through the lies,
treachery and poison love she uses to turn women, not men, into her victims.
Renée Vivien’s strategy of creating a decadent lesbian version of Vivien of the
Lake with whom she identifies demonstrates what Cassandra Laity refers to as
“the double-edged sword of feminist revisions of Decadence” (232). Laity
discusses the poetry of H.D. and Renée Vivien as representing, respectively, the
best case and worse case scenarios of women writers who attempt to forge a
female poetic from the Decadent-Romantic Past. While H.D. was able to devise
“textual strategies which carefully distinguish her feminist transformations of
Decadent influence from the darker side of the Decadent poetic” (220), Laity
claims that Vivien allowed the “‘dark’ side of Decadence to rule her ima-
gination” (235). Thus Pauline Tarn’s transformation into Renée Vivien, as
empowering and creative as it may be, cannot be seen as an entirely successful
feminist strategy, especially when we learn that Renée Vivien herself became a
victim of her own illusions. Instead, as Laity also points out, “Vivien presents an
example that uncovers the conflicts and contradictions of the feminist
revisionary process” (219).
For every feminist mask she wears, Vivien has several that are anti-feminist
due to the decadent, often misogynistic and death-loving aesthetic that pervades

Nineteenth-Century French Studies 30, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring–Summer 2002 371

her work, and the “Perfide Viviane” she describes is no exception. One of the
most threatening and persistent of these negative forces is Ophelia, another
“Lady of the Lake” whose self-destructive madness always lurks in the
background of Vivien’s poetry. Ophelia was not only one of the most popular
subjects of the fin de siècle, she was also a character to which the French were
particularly attracted as James Vest argues in his book, The French Face of
Ophelia. In Vivien’s poetry, Ophelia represents the culmination of three of her
favorite poetic themes – death, water and flowers. Julien Eymard even goes as far
to argue that “la noyade est le thème dominant de l’œuvre de Renée Vivien”
(114-15). Eymard’s study includes an extensive catalogue of water imagery in
Vivien’s poetry, which he interprets as a lesbian twist to the myth of Narcissus.
Instead of falling in love with her own reflection, Vivien confuses narcissism
and homosexuality as the beloved woman is reflected in the poet’s image (107).
Shakespeare’s tragic heroine first appears in one of Vivien’s earliest poems,
written when she was a teenager. “La Chanson d’Ophélie” (1894) closely relates
to Millais’ famous painting. The decor is pure Pre-Raphaelite with garlands of
flowers, Ophelia’s long hair tangling in the reeds and her gown dragging her to
the pond’s bottom as she sings, “inconsciente en sa douce folie” (OPC 434-35).
As the title suggests, the emphasis is on Ophelia’s song, a metaphor for poetry
inspired by rejection and ensuing madness. The context of this poem is
particularly revealing. The young poet wrote it when she was involved with a
married French industrialist and amateur poet named Amédée Moullé. Their
relationship was probably quite innocent, although it inspired over sixty poems
and a prolific correspondence that was eventually cut short by Mme Moullé
and Mrs. Tarn who placed her daughter under strict supervision. Pauline
rebelled and ran away for five days. When she returned home for lack of money,
her mother tried to have her certified insane by a doctor (most likely with the
intention of gaining control of her daughter’s inheritance). The case actually
went to court and Pauline was declared a ward of the court and her money
administered through a trust. It was this inheritance that eventually allowed her
to escape the restrictions of Victorian England to Paris where she set up house
and began writing poetry in earnest. She narrowly escaped losing her
independence and being labeled “mad.” That this scenario would play itself out
so close to home may have fueled Vivien’s growing feminism, and her
ambitions to control and rewrite plots of female destiny.
As Elaine Showalter observes, all conventions of female insanity can be
traced to Shakespeare’s Ophelia, and carry dual messages about femininity and
insanity that are borne out in the iconography of Ophelia:
The woman with her hair down indicated an offense against decorum, an im-
proper sexuality. Ophelia’s flowers, too, came from the Renaissance icon-ography

372 Tama Lea Engelking

 of female sexuality; in giving them away, she symbolically “deflowers” herself. Even
her death by drowning has associations with the feminine and the irrational, since
water is the organic symbol of woman’s fluidity: blood, milk, tears. (Female
Malady 11)

In her examination of cultural history, Showalter contrasts masculine repre-

sentations of Ophelia with those created by women, and concludes that Ophelia
can be recuperated as a positive symbol of woman’s rebellion. (“Representing
Ophelia” 91). Vivien would eventually recuperate many heroines such as Lilith
and Vasthi, and rewrite their stories in a more positive light, as part of what Karla
Jay terms her “rescue mission,” but Ophelia is not among them (Jay 40). Her
youthful rendition of Ophelia is rather conventional and does not point to the
subversive turn some of her more mature prose and Sapphic poetry would take.
Any yet, the Ophelia theme runs throughout Vivien’s work, persisting side by
side with poems that many consider to be a feminist tribute to lesbian sexuality.
Her early identification with Ophelia is found in the last stanza of “La
Chanson d’Ophélie”:
Puissé-je ainsi mourir, les mains pleines de fleurs
En chantant jusqu’au bout, sans larmes, sans terreur
Chantant jusqu’à ma mort, entraînée quand même
Par le fleuve inconnu, mystérieux et suprême
Par le fleuve funèbre où va l’homme banni
Par le fleuve profond qui mène à l’infini. (435)

The young Vivien expresses her desire for what one might call a “picture
postcard” death as beautiful as Ophelia’s. In fact, Vivien’s wish for a death worthy
of a painting or poem led her to an unsuccessful suicide attempt. She sur-
rounded herself with flowers, believing that their perfume would overwhelm
and eventually suffocate her as they did Albine in Zola’s novel, and Swinburne’s
Lesbia Brandon.8 This gesture illustrates the extent to which Renée Vivien
literalized images of women found in fin-de-siècle art and literature. It also
suggests, as many critics have commented, that Vivien’s creativity was inspired
by life-denying or negative images drawn from the decadent aesthetic of writers
she admired such as Swinburne and Baudelaire.
Elisabeth Bronfen focuses on representations of women’s suicides in her
study of death, femininity and the aesthetic. Like Showalter, she is able to put a
positive feminist spin on the subject by reading this act as a form of writing with
the body. In a culture that denies women the subject position, Bronfen argues
that “the choice of death emerges as a feminine strategy within which writing the
body is a way of getting rid of the oppression connected with the feminine body”
(142.). One example Bronfen analyzes is Elaine, another Lady of the Lake who is

Nineteenth-Century French Studies 30, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring–Summer 2002 373

only able to get the attention of the man she loves by staging her own beautiful
death. “By transforming suicide into an act of self-textualisation, Elaine at last
controls her own life and insists on the public recognition of her love denied to
her during her lifetime” (153).
As an adult poet, Vivien went even further afield from the feminist
possibilities Showalter and Bronfen suggest when she takes up Ophelia’s fate
only to pervert it into “la perverse Ophélie” whose lovely pond is transformed
into a stagnant marsh. Vivien’s perverse Ophelia does not die because of
Hamlet’s betrayal, but the poem’s female speaker believes that she herself is the
one who drowned her, “T’ai-je noyée hier dans le marais stagnant / Où flotte ton
regard, ô perverse Ophélie?” (La Vénus des aveugles 182). This same perverse
Ophelia reappears in Vivien’s Une femme m’apparut . . . , an autobiographical
novel she wrote about her love affair with Natalie Barney whom she portrays as
Vally. During a dream sequence, the narrator sees Vally floating in a pond, her
bruised breasts like two blue water lilies. She senses with horror that “Je l’avais
noyée autre fois dans le marais stagnant. Elle flottait, les cheveux mêlés d’algues
et d’iris, comme une perverse Ophélie” (87).
As a mature poet, and one whose sexual orientation was firmly established as
homosexual, Vivien no longer relates to Ophelia, but instead feels responsible
for her fate. Ophelia becomes, in effect, another victim similar to those seduced
and betrayed by the Lady of the Lake in Vivien’s versions of the legend. Vivien
has manipulated these familiar images, not to rewrite them with a feminist
twist, but to inscribe them in an anti-female decadent aesthetic that feared
women as evil and destructive and promoted the notion that the only good
woman is a safely dead one. Vivien’s evil, destructive and self-destructive
women are not man-killers, but in the woman-centered world she creates in her
poems, their victims are clearly other women.9 And yet, she is the creative artist,
the author and not the victim of the plots she weaves.
In much the same way, we can read Pauline Tarn’s transformation into
Renée Vivien’s as an ambivalent gesture that tries, but sometimes fails, to break
the hold patriarchy has on the plots of female destiny. This danger is inherent in
the naming process itself. In their discussion of the female autograph, Gilbert
and Gubar point out the double bind in which women are caught: “Without the
alphabet, women would seem to be without a history of their own; yet history
itself would seem to have been constituted by precisely that alphabet that has
denied women a place in history” (“Ceremonies of the Alphabet” 23). Renée
Vivien’s attempts to write both within and against masculine traditions such as
Decadence, Symbolism, and Pre-Raphaelitism are one case in point that is also
demonstrated by her names. How this double bind restricted her becomes more
evident when we add a third name to our discussion, Paule Riversdale. Rivers-

374 Tama Lea Engelking

dale was the collective pseudonym of Renée Vivien and her lover, the Baronne
Hélène de Zuylen de Nyevelt with whom she published several volumes of
poems. Pauline/Paule and Renée are all variations of the male form of the
names Paul and René. The added letters convey the feminine form without
changing the masculine root of the name, which remains intact. Similarly, if
Pauline is reborn as Renée, the “renée” reminds us of how married women
designate their maiden names as “née.” As an unmarried “maiden,” Vivien
could retain her maiden name, yet she created a new one for herself that
contains a sort of reminder of how the father’s name remains attached to the
daughter. Tarn, the family name on Vivien’s father’s side of the family, which
was Scottish, comes from an old English word meaning “mountain lake.” Like
Vivien (of the Lake), and Tarn (mountain lake), Paule Riversdale is yet another
Lady of the Lake, whose name continues the obvious association with water. An
undercurrent of signification not apparent on the surface links these three
names, so that although Vivien may have signaled her rebirth when she rejected
her father’s name, language and country and renamed herself after the Lady of
the Lake, she nevertheless remained the daughter of the lake (Tarn).
During her short but prolific career, Renée Vivien struggled valiantly to keep
her head above water, swimming against the forceful patriarchal current of the
Victorian era that continually threatened to pull her in. She could change her
name, her voice and her face, as in her poem about “Viviane,” but un-
fortunately, many of the words she speaks, the voices she uses, and some of the
masks she wore – including the Lady of the Lake – ultimately served to reinforce
patriarchal definitions of femininity. Still, she was able to draw on images of
femininity circulated among artists and writers such as the Pre-Raphaelites to
create works of art where women could dominate, desire, and sometimes die.
The “Ladies of the Lake” records the woman poet’s struggle to negotiate with a
masculine literary tradition that reveals both the restrictions suffered by creative
women, and the disruptive possibilities of feminist poetic revisions.

Department of Modern Languages

Cleveland State University
Cleveland, OH 44114


1
It is tempting to relate these two figures to the two contradictory poetic stances that
Shari Benstock has identified in Vivien’s poetry: “one combining images of mor-
bidity, exoticism, and enclosure; the other transforming these images to one of
fertility, independence, and the freedom of a liberated female body and spirit” (Wo-
men of the Left Bank 286). Although I agree that Vivien’s poetic stances are definitely

Nineteenth-Century French Studies 30, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring–Summer 2002 375

contradictory, the breakdown Benstock provides is too simple to account for the
complexity of Vivien’s poetic œuvre. Those critics who have provided positive
readings of Vivien’s work include Elyse Blankley, Karla Jay, and my own “Renée
Vivien’s Sapphic Legacy: Remembering the House of Muses.” My discussion of the
“Ladies of the Lake” is not meant as a corrective to my earlier interpretation of Vivien,
but rather one that follows a different path to understanding her rich and complex
work. Faderman is the best example of a negative reading which has close parallels
with Colette’s portrait of Vivien in Le Pur et l’impur. Susan Gubar’s reading of Vivien
also tends toward the negative. She relates Vivien’s revision of Sappho to sadistic
images of the lesbian femme fatale favored by Decadent writers, and claims that her
internalization of these images had consequences in her life (“Sapphistries” 49).
Also of interest is Elaine Mark’s “‘Sapho 1900’: Imaginary Renée Viviens and the Rear
of the Belle Époque” in which she takes critics to task for creating images of Vivien
that suit their own ideological agendas. In particular she criticizes Gayle Rubin for
ignoring the darker side of Vivien’s poetry, what she refers to as Vivien’s “preoc-
cupation with metaphysical anguish and sexual identity” (226).
2
All references to Renée Vivien’s poems here are to Jean-Paul Goujon’s edition Œuvre
poétique complète de Renée Vivien (1877-1909). Parenthetical references will include
the name of the volume in which the poem first appeared (when applicable), followed
by the page from the Goujon edition. This edition contains the nine books of poetry
Vivien published during her lifetime, in addition to three posthumous collections,
poems from her childhood, and selections of poems published under the collective
pseudonym Paule Riversdale.
3
Shari Benstock provides an excellent overview of Paris-Lesbos in her Women of the
Left Bank, 1900-1940. For details of the Barney-Vivien relationship, see Karla Jay’s
The Amazon and the Page.
4
Elisabeth Bronfen’s Over Her Dead Body contains a fascinating deconstructive read-
ing of Poe’s famous proposition, see esp. pp. 59-64.
5
Victorians inevitably reacted quite negatively to Tennyson’s Vivien as she appears in
his “Merlin and Vivien.” Swinburne, for example, calls her “the most base and
repulsive person ever set forth in serious literature.” Thomas Hoberg examines
various reactions to Tennyson’s Vivien in “Duessa or Lilith: The Two Faces of
Tennyson’s Vivien.” Rebecca Umland argues that Victorians such as Swinburne
reacted so negatively to Vivien because they recognized her as a prototype of the
Victorian prostitute. Her thesis reinforces the commonly held notion that Tennyson
“intended Idylls of the King to explore the role of women in maintaining or
undermining the social order” (Umland 278). Sexually active women such as Vivien
posed a powerful threat to that order.
6
Numerous critics have seen Tennyson’s Vivien as an aspect of his poetic identity, and
the conflict in “Merlin and Vivien” as an expression of his creative struggle. See

376 Tama Lea Engelking

Catherine R. Harland, “Interpretation and Rumor in Tennyson’s Merlin and
Vivien,” and especially note. 25 (68).
7
Although Vivien was referred to as “La fille de Baudelaire” by her contemporaries,
her vision of the lesbian as a decadent femme fatale must be read side by side with her
lesbian poetry that advocates community and continuity among women artists.
Shari Benstock and Karla Jay are among those critics who cannot entirely agree with
Gubar’s reading of Vivien, as does this author. The debate over the decadent elements
in Vivien’s work provides yet another example of the many contradictory readings
that characterize critical studies of this complex writer. They are due, I would suggest,
to Vivien’s own ambivalence, as well as the ideological perspectives from which she is
read, as Elaine Marks claims in “Imaginary Renée Viviens.”
8
Bram Dijkstra relates the character of Albine (from Zola’s novel La Faute de l’abbé
Mouret ) to Ophelia in that both have an intimate relationship with flowers. Albine,
however, “does not let virginity rule her behavior” (56). He discusses representations
of sick, crazy and dying women, including Ophelia, Albine, and Elaine, in Chapter II of
Idols of Perversity (25-63).
9
Vivien’s woman-centered rereading of Sappho, on the other hand, demonstrates
that death is not always viewed as a defeat for the woman artist. Vivien’s attempts to
recover a lesbian Sappho from a classical tradition that preferred to see her as
heterosexual include rewriting the motive for her suicidal death by drowning. Vivien
makes the cause of Sappho’s leap unrequited love for a woman instead of a man.
Karla Jay points out that in Vivien’s various poetic treatments of Sappho’s death, she
“arranges matters so that the disciples could prevent the death of Sappho but choose
not to. Neither tradition nor Barney concur with this interpretation, but it was one
wholly consistent with Vivien’s personal cult of death” (Jay’s emphasis, 70). In “Renée
Vivien’s Sapphic Legacy” I opt for a positive reading that focuses on the aftermath of
Sappho’s demise. I argue that Vivien stages Sappho’s death in order to dramatize the
way her female disciples (including Vivien) overcome their grief by carrying on the
Sapphic poetic tradition. Joan DeJean provides an in-depth discussion of Sappho as
she appears in French literary history in her Fictions of Sappho 1546-1937.

 
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Nineteenth-Century French Studies 30, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring–Summer 2002 379

 This image can be viewed in the HTML
version of this article.

Figure 1: Portrait of Renée Vivien, after the original pastel drawing by Lucien Lévy-
Dhurmer. Originally printed as a frontispiece to volume II of Poèmes de Renée Vivien
(Paris: A. Lemerre, 1924).

380 Tama Lea Engelking