(Re)Framing Madame X: Art, Narrative, and the Ethics of Neo‑Victorian Revivification

Abstract

This article situates John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X (1884) alongside two textual accounts of Madame X the historical figure, to examine hybrid life-writing genres’ possibilities and limitations in recapturing the nineteenth-century past. Our texts are Gioia Diliberto’s biographical novel I am Madame X (2003), and Deborah Davis’s creative non-fiction Strapless (2003). Their authorial attempts to restore the enigmatic woman in the painting to cultural memory – particularly in the absence of substantial archival evidence – illuminates the collision of history, fiction, art and narrative, thus providing a framework to interrogate biofiction and the politics of memory.

Keywords:

• Life-writing
• biofiction
• Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau
• John Singer Sargent
• ekphrasis
• cultural memory

Introduction: Positioning the Painting

John Singer Sargent’s now iconic painting of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau – since titled Portrait of Madame X – caused such a scandal when it was shown at the 1884 Paris Salon that afterward Sargent sequestered it for some twenty years.¹ The source of the scandal was manifold: there was the subject’s odd pose, in which her body faces the viewer assertively but her face is turned, perhaps haughtily, away; the strange, bluish/purplish tinge to her skin color, produced by her use of popular cosmetics but which seemed, captured by the portrait, to insinuate death and decomposition to those who saw the image at the salon; and the fallen strap of her dress² which, together with its form-fitting fabric, suggested an active sexuality that might not be reserved for her husband.³ The outrage seemingly surprised Gautreau, and her initial approval for the portrait turned to mortification after witnessing the public’s scathing response.⁴ When Sargent sold the painting to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art⁵ in 1916, the year after its subject died, he insisted that Madame Gautreau’s name should not appear in the portrait’s title – reputedly due to their falling out some years before. The artwork was subsequently known simply as Portrait of Madame X.⁶

Such was the painting’s power as “an emblem for vanity gone awry”⁷ that the story of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau – Madame X herself – ­languished, and minimal biographical information survives today. We know that Gautreau was born in 1859 to Creole parents whose family owned a plantation in New Orleans, Louisiana; however, she lived in Paris for most of her life, where she married and had one child.⁸ Other biographical information is primarily derived from Parisian gossip column commentary describing her clothing, hair and makeup. Diliberto characterizes the historical Gautreau as “a gorgeous Parisian celebrity, notorious in the late nineteenth century for her bold dress, her passion for self-display, and her reputation for promiscuity.”⁹ This celebrity glamour – combined with the scent of scandal and paucity of historical detail – render Gautreau’s story rife for adaptation. Indeed, Madame X has been reworked visually, in both satire and homage – notably by Nicole Kidman in a 1999 issue of Vogue – since it was first displayed. Like the painting, the real-life Madame X has been reimagined in a 1908 play (Madame X), a 2003 biographical novel (I am Madame X), a 2003 work of creative non-fiction (Strapless), and a 2016 ballet (also titled Strapless, in reference to Davis’s book as source material). Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau exists today primarily via the portrait and these recent, creative, reworkings of her life – through which authors have attempted to write her story back into the frame – and restore the one-time Parisian celebrity to cultural memory.¹⁰

In this article, we situate Madame X the portrait, alongside creative accounts of Madame X the historical figure, to examine how hybrid life-writing genres impact attempts to recover nineteenth-century memory, and to interrogate the ethics of creative Neo-Victorian revivification. Our two textual case studies are Gioia Diliberto’s biographical novel I am Madame X: A Novel (2003) and Deborah Davis’s creative non-fiction Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X (2003). Davis’s project reveals the tension between text and image: In Davis’s Introduction, the painting is described as a window to the past; however, it requires narrative to explicate the view’s meaning. Diliberto’s biofiction – with its extended narrative descriptions of Gautreau’s painted form – ekphrastically¹¹ emphasizes the overlap between art and narrative, as it reanimates the nineteenth-century past.

Diliberto, a talented biographer, initially approached Gautreau’s life as an historian; however, the archival evidence proved elusive: “I decided to write a nonfiction book about the painting. But scant biographical material was available about Virginie Gautreau herself. I could find no letters, diaries, or memoirs that would enable me to recreate her personality, so I abandoned the idea. Still, I remained fascinated by her image. … I found myself thinking more intensely about the painting, and I decided to try my hand at a historical novel. I am Madame X is the result.”¹²

Diliberto’s explanation foregrounds the slippage between art and narrative, and between the historical woman and the painting as biographical subject. Diliberto ostensibly wanted to write a non-fiction book about “the painting,” but it becomes clear she means about its enigmatic subject – not the physical painting nor its creator. Davis, unlike Diliberto, persisted with her non-fiction, but responded to the scarcity of historical evidence by supplementing Gautreau’s story with anecdotes about her contemporaries, including Dr. Samuel Pozzi, Judith Gautier, and John Singer Sargent himself. Despite their generic differences, both texts begin with a fascination for the woman in the painting, and with a desire to know more – before ultimately conceding how much is lost to the historical record. Their respective responses illuminate the collision of history, fiction, art, and narrative, thereby providing a framework to examine biofiction and the politics of memory.

Life-Writing in Limbo: The Ethics of Creatively Revivifying Historical Figures

Since its origins in the eighteenth century, historical fiction has stepped into the interstices of history, fleshing out the historical record by imagining interiority, speech, and other elements less visible to the historical record. Biofiction is a particular type of historical fiction that reimagines the lives of real people from the past. Biofiction’s hybridity has naturally positioned it as a site for debate, with some scholars seeing it as fundamentally opposed to historical fiction, rather than – as we do – a subset of it. Michael Lackey, for instance, argues that “biofiction signifies a rupture rather than continuity with historical fiction.”¹³ In Lackey’s view, biofiction evolved as a reaction against the deterministic mindset of the historical novel, promoting human agency, and authorial artistry, instead of a more rigid conceptualization of history as mere scientific replication.¹⁴ Conversely, Julia Novak and Caitríona Ní Dhúill envision overlap, rather than “rupture” between biofiction and historical fiction, “Conceding to biographical fiction a place in the vast domain of historical fiction.”¹⁵ Our own conceptualization of biofiction as a form of historical fiction also draws upon Jerome De Groot’s description of the varied ways we can encounter history. De Groot modifies Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Heteroglossia” into “Historioglossia,” to identify the “multiplicity of hybrid discourses accruing around a single instance. The historical has multiple meanings, all of which might be simultaneously in operation.”¹⁶ In our view, the revivification of past figures as characters within a novel-world, alongside other historical referents, positions the biographical novel as a form of historical fiction.

The nineteenth century has proven a particularly fruitful period for biofictional revivification due, at least in part, to its historical contiguity as a site for emerging modernity and life-writing experimentation,¹⁷ and connecting with the broader range of “Neo-Victorian” fiction, which purposefully reimagines the Victorians.¹⁸ The genre focuses particularly on those whose stories have been lost to the historical record, including narratives of women, servants, stories of same-sex desire, and history told from the perspective of minorities.

Amélie Gautreau’s languishing – yet seemingly salacious – story likewise appeals to Neo-Victorianism’s prurient interest in scandal, and biofiction’s compelling ability to partially circumvent the archive, fueling our “voyeuristic” impulse by providing (imagined) access to hidden aspects of celebrity lives.¹⁹ Neo-Victorianism’s restorative proclivities thus collide with its ethical tensions. This tension extends to the relationship the genre instantiates between past and present; indeed, Neo-Victorianism is sometimes charged with presentism, as it molds the past to explicate the present.²⁰ Davis and Diliberto emphasize the connections between a nineteenth-century Parisian past and the twenty-first century in which they write: each narrative reads Madame X (the painting) as an index to discover Madame X (the historical figure). Davis positions the painting as “Sargent’s greatest psychological portrait, [which] revealed the unattainable beauty and self-destructive narcissism of both the woman and the decadent society she embodied.”²¹ Diliberto interprets this narcissistic beauty as enigmatic modernity; the woman in the painting is “radiant with a mysterious, timeless beauty … Though Sargent had painted her in a previous century, she struck me as extraordinarily modern.”²² Diliberto’s description elides historical, and even cultural, distance, encouraging readers to identify with Gautreau. Referring to Gautreau as “Paris’s hottest ‘it girl’,”²³ Davis’s approach likewise resonates with a readership for whom celebrity culture – consumed as it is by professional beauties like the Kardashians and other social media influencers – has become essential.

Madame X – Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau – preserved on canvas, and narratively re-created in Strapless and I am Madame X, epitomizes the inherent complexities of crafting fiction from historical remnants. Davis and Diliberto were both inspired by Sargent’s artistic rendering to revivify the statuesque historical woman captured within Sargent’s frame. We have described Davis’s text as creative non-fiction, and Diliberto’s text as biofiction to distinguish their nuanced approaches to a shared subject; regardless, both texts are implicated in debates about ethically revivifying historical figures. Marie-Luise Kohlke argues that biofiction’s precarious perch between genres provokes more ethical considerations than those mandated by generic historical fiction, because biofiction repurposes a life that once existed beyond the text.²⁴ Her contention is also true for the imaginative portrayal of historical subjects in creative non-fiction like Davis’s, since “Biofictional subjects thus partake of an uneasy liminal existence, an inter-subjective half-life between self and Other, fact and fiction, embodiment and textualization.”²⁵ Diliberto’s biofictional rendering of Madame Gautreau – whom Diliberto calls “Mimi” – foregrounds this liminality by emphasizing the subject’s own disconnect with her painted image, and her lack of agency within her own story: “The woman in the painting certainly cast a glorious figure, but I couldn’t believe she looked much like me.”²⁶ Furthermore, this portrait is ambivalently linked in Mimi’s mind to her turbulent experience with Dr. Samuel Pozzi, a Parisian gynecologist whom Sargent also painted, and whose legacy Diliberto questionably revivifies.

Nineteenth-century Parisian scandal sheets connected the historical Gautreau to Pozzi – a renowned ladies’ man. Actress Sarah Bernhardt famously called Pozzi “Docteur Dieu, Doctor God”²⁷ – in reference to his performance in bed.²⁸ Even after historical Pozzi’s affair with Sarah Bernhardt concluded, they remained good friends,²⁹ suggesting Pozzi possessed some admirable character qualities in addition to his sexual prowess. Nonetheless, Diliberto’s fictional rendering of Pozzi and Gautreau’s romantic relationship is authorial speculation, since, as Diliberto concedes, “Aside from the rumors of the time, there is no hard evidence of these affairs. The best clue that Madame Gautreau and Dr. Pozzi were lovers lies in his ownership of Sargent’s Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast, the small oil painting that the artist inscribed to Virginie’s mother. How Dr. Pozzi came to possess it is a mystery.”³⁰ Paratextually intervening in the debate via her Author’s Note, Diliberto acknowledges that “It is not certain how Madame Gautreau met Sargent. The artist painted Dr. Pozzi in 1881, and it’s possible that Virginie attended one of the sittings.”³¹ This would make Gautreau significantly older than fifteen – which is the age Diliberto’s biofictional Mimi meets biofictional Pozzi – and already married to Pierre Gautreau.

Diliberto amends these historical dates to emphasize Mimi’s naïve helplessness: Sargent captures and frames her image, just as Pozzi controls their relationship. Mimi reflects: “[Sargent] had caught me, and now in a small way he owned me. For one of the first times since my affair with Dr. Pozzi, I had the emptying sense of not being in control.”³² In the novel, Dr. Pozzi seduces the virginal teenaged Mimi and callously casts her aside when she falls pregnant. Diliberto paints Pozzi in a distinctly unflattering light, while Mimi is portrayed as a young girl in love: “Dr. Pozzi never mentioned his other women, and though it’s hard to believe I was once so naïve, I assumed he had given up everyone else for me. I actually believed that we’d be married when I was older and he had received his surgeon’s title.”³³ Diliberto’s Pozzi encourages Mimi’s perception of his commitment by gifting her a gold and diamond ring, reminiscent of wedding jewelry.³⁴ When she eventually falls pregnant, Mimi rapturously envisions Pozzi at last marrying her; instead, he unsympathetically offers to abort their baby. Mimi and her family refuse, and Pozzi disappears from the narrative until – some decades later – he contacts Mimi requesting a favor. Pozzi is preparing an exhibition, and he wants to borrow Sargent’s painting of her raising her glass in a toast, to hang next to Sargent’s painting of Pozzi. Although she is surprised by his “audacity” and “arrogan[ce]”³⁵ in requesting a favor, Pozzi convinces Mimi to lend him the portrait by reminding her that he “introduced [her] to love.”³⁶ However, despite his assurances otherwise, Pozzi never returns Mimi’s portrait: he once again steals part of Mimi’s identity and tarnishes it.

Diliberto – ventriloquizing Mimi – subtly assigns sociopathic tendencies to her fictional rendering of Pozzi. Reflecting on her teenage infatuation, Mimi understands that Pozzi used her for his own sexual satisfaction, and their discussions always centered on Pozzi; Mimi “rarely got a chance to say anything.”³⁷ When Mimi reveals her pregnancy, Pozzi’s “eyes hardened,”³⁸ he refuses to marry her and therefore “ruin both our lives in a hasty marriage” before offering to “cut it [the baby] out. … Pozzi spoke flatly, his face a blank dispassionate mask.”³⁹ Pozzi responds to Mimi’s accusation of deceit by stating “I haven’t deceived you. I’ve supplemented you.”⁴⁰ After Pozzi refuses to marry Mimi, her mother arranges for her to marry family friend Pierre Gautreau instead. This marriage is presented as a mariage blanc – an agreement to cover her pregnancy and her husband’s long-term affair with a married woman. Mimi herself remains damaged: “my heart had hardened, not only to Pozzi but to his entire sex. Though I’d have several lovers over the years, I could never give myself entirely to any of them, never rely on their assurances, never persuade myself that things would work out.”⁴¹ Diliberto’s treatment of Dr. Pozzi – specifically how she uses fiction to dubiously flesh out a scant historical record – raises questions about biofiction’s ethical limits. While Pozzi may have been notoriously promiscuous, there is no documented reason to think he was as predatory and callous as he appears in the novel; these elements are included in the text for narrative effect.

Biographical records in fact indicate that the historical Pozzi championed women’s health and wellbeing, even teaching gynecology pro bono, when the University of Paris medical Dean refused to formally schedule it.⁴² Pozzi’s “surgical technique gained him worldwide fame”⁴³ but rather than only treating the wealthy, or high-profile cases, he also treated poorer women in the public hospital system. Pozzi’s devotion elevated him to celebrity status across Parisian social strata, and “picture postcards of him were sold in the streets.”⁴⁴ Author Marcel Proust, mourning his friend Pozzi’s death, recalled the doctor’s “kindness, his intelligence, his talent, his beauty.”⁴⁵ Caroline De Costa and Francesca Miller describe Pozzi as a “humanist,”⁴⁶ however, this humanism is absent in Diliberto’s fictional rendering of Pozzi, where his function is to ensure compassion for Mimi.⁴⁷

Unlike Diliberto, Davis ostensibly positions her text as non-fiction; however, her creative input is evident from the outset, as she repeatedly describes her narrative rendering as a “story,” inspired by Madame Gautreau’s enigmatic image: “The story of this book, like that of the painting Madame X, begins with a stunning black dress.”⁴⁸ Davis borrows a dress for a Hollywood awards ceremony, and the dress provided is “a black evening gown with a revealing bodice, a discreet train, and slender metal shoulder straps that looked jeweled in the light.”⁴⁹ The dress sparks Davis’s memory of John Singer Sargent’s painting, Madame X: “I knew the image, but I knew nothing of the story behind it.”⁵⁰ Intrigued, Davis researches the portrait, and publishes her creative non-fiction. This generic distinction positions the text on a continuum between standard biographical reporting on one end – and biofictional invention on the other. At the forefront of her “Ten rules for biography,” Hermione Lee explains that, although a certain measure of conjecture is acceptable in biography (which is, after all, a narrative) speculation that ventures into fictionalization “can give the genre a bad name.”⁵¹ The level of authorial (inter)vention is therefore an essential factor in distinguishing between the different forms of life-writing, and how they inform our historical encounters. While “creative non-fiction” is often used interchangeably with hybrid life-writing and can include biofiction, we have called Davis’s text “creative non-fiction” to distinguish (a) its commitment to factual accuracy, compared with Diliberto’s more overt imaginative treatment; and(b) its focus on the lives of a broader range of figures, rather than a tighter focus on recreating a single life. Duncan Brown and Antjie Krog, for example, define creative non-fiction as “writing which makes its meanings at the unstable fault line of the literary and journalistic, the imaginative and the reportorial.”⁵² These are all traits creative non-fiction shares with historical fiction, even though the former may not be focused on people, places, and events from the past.⁵³

Davis supplements the limited documented evidence on Gautreau with discussions of Sargent and other contemporaries of theirs who are also “characters in this behind-the-canvas tale of art, celebrity, infatuation, and betrayal,”⁵⁴ such as Dr. Samuel Pozzi, Judith Gautier, and Albert de Belleroche. Describing these figures as “characters” further emphasizes the text’s creative aspects, even as Davis situates it within the non-fiction genre by outlining her meticulous research – thus self-consciously establishing her authority to tell this story, and asserting its veracity. Acknowledging she had “a great appreciation for, but no formal schooling in, art history,”⁵⁵ Davis describes her methodology in ways made familiar by historical novelists who discuss their craft: she meticulously interrogates secondary sources, romanticizes the drama of discovery in the archive, meets Gautreau’s and Sargent’s relatives, and follows the subjects’ footsteps: “In Brittany, I found the physical world that Gautreau and Sargent inhabited still very much alive. … I touched the antique oak banister that seemed to hold traces of the artist and his model, and stood in the drawing room that once echoed with the sounds of Gautreau’s piano, her favorite possession.”⁵⁶ Visiting physical locations once inhabited by her subjects effaces the distance between past and present, consolidating the impression of access to the past, via its material traces.

Davis’s main narrative elides direct reference to the archival and historiographic sources paratextually referenced in the Introduction. Moreover, since little is factually established about Amélie Gautreau’s life, or indeed about Sargent’s personal life, the book suppresses moments extrapolated from scant evidence, briskly transitioning from speculation to assertion. Rumors of Gautreau’s romantic involvement with French politician Léon Gambetta transmogrifies to fact: “When an older Amélie entered society as a married woman, she attended political dinners where Gambetta was a guest, held his arm at public events, and, according to rumor, met him for private tête-à-têtes. Gossips speculated that she was the ‘Madame X’ the newspapers referred to as Gambetta’s secret mistress. But Amélie’s reputation was protected by his long association with her relatives – he could feign familial interest in his beautiful young companion even as he was secretly making love to her.”⁵⁷ Such moments mark Davis’s departure from biography proper, designating the text as creative non-fiction. Beginning by registering the rumor of his affair with Gautreau as gossip that was never substantiated, here Davis ends by contributing to this view herself with her assertion that Gambetta could feign familial interest while making love to her in secret.

As a work of non-fiction, Davis’s text ostensibly privileges documented fact. Nonetheless, in moments like these, it asserts as fact what it had previously identified as speculation, drawing Davis’s creative non-fiction into debates about the politics of memory by nudging Strapless towards biofictional terrain. Novak and Ní Dhúill stress that “literary biography, whose artful style may often approach that of fiction, … avoids making things up.”⁵⁸ Strapless’s overarching style is reminiscent of literary biography, but Davis here crosses the line from intervention to invention, by overtly assigning credibility to unverified rumor. Davis’s speculative slippage may, however, be explained as a burst of salacious creativity, in keeping with the historical Madame Gautreau’s lively appearances in nineteenth-century Parisian gossip columns. Lee concedes that gossip does form part of the biographical milieu, since one of biography’s aims is to capture human complexity and vitality, rather than a “smoothed-over figure.”⁵⁹ Nonetheless, gossip should be rigorously interrogated in a traditional biography,⁶⁰ whereas hybrid life-writing arguably affords more speculative freedom – albeit with the possibility that it may become injurious.

As such, Diliberto’s (arguably) injurious biofictional amendments to Dr. Pozzi’s life and character warrant additional consideration. David Andress emphasizes historical figures’ status as “ethical subjects” who once had “real lives,”⁶¹ and Lucia Boldrini believes that biofictional ethics “are at the core of the form, insofar as it contends with the ethics of assuming another’s voice, of narrating another’s story … it is the historicity of these individuals – the fact that they are not (or not just) characters and situations constructed ad hoc to explore a theoretical question, but are presented as, and recognized by readers as, real human beings who had real voices and stories… .”⁶² For Andress and Boldrini, desecrating a real person’s legacy by imputing uncharacteristic actions is ethically dubious – even when enacted under the guise of fiction. Myth stealthily shapeshifts into fact, compromising historical memory – something Cora Kaplan notes can be “so easily … soured into persecution of the dead … .”⁶³ Living people can sue for libel, often receiving compensation for invented, or even embellished, stories deemed to cause reputational damage; however, dead people are not afforded this right. Biofictional author Thomas Mallon expresses concern for living family members adversely impacted by their biofictionally revivified relatives, concluding that “One cannot libel the dead, but one can refrain from distortions as hurtful as they are preposterous.”⁶⁴ Many historical figures have living descendants; the ethics of memory thus affect the living as well as the dead.

Memory of past figures and events is clearly important, both individually, and collectively – as evidenced by the proliferation of monuments, museums, and memorials devoted to preserving legacies and, particularly following the burgeoning of cultural memory studies in the 1980s, the role of fiction in the formation and communication of memory has received considerable critical attention. Building upon Pierre Nora’s influential concept of “lieux de mémoire, sites of memory,”⁶⁵ Ann Rigney has noted the novel’s capacity to function as a “textual monument,”⁶⁶ arguing that fiction plays significant, multiple roles in the way images of the past “are formed and transformed over time.”⁶⁷ This, she argues, is because of their unique properties, which make them immersive and memorable, giving them a particular, imaginative power: “Stories ‘stick.’ … fictions often prove difficult to displace because it is not easy to come up with a non-fictionalized account that has the same narrativizing and aesthetic power.”⁶⁸ Fiction can, in fact, be serious business.

Scholarly conversations about biofictional ethics necessarily debate who “owns” the facts, and whether it is permissible to usurp a historical figure’s agency by speaking on their behalf. Bethany Layne terms these tensions “the custody battle over the facts of a life that biographical fiction effects.”⁶⁹ However, probing the ethical dilemma of making real historical figures do “bad” things remains curiously de-emphasized. Critical discourse tends to scrutinize the potential pitfalls of rewriting history more generally (amending historical dates for instance), querying biofiction’s “voyeuristic” invasion,⁷⁰ or deliberating “the repurposing of historical lives into commodities for profit and consumption.”⁷¹ Such concerns have overshadowed the reputational quandaries engendered by inauspicious biofictional renderings of specific historical figures.

These ethical considerations are arguably more urgent when the generic mode is realism, which suppresses the markers of its own fictiveness. When invention and historicity are invisibly intertwined in a way that feels authentic, readers are encouraged to – even unwittingly – invest in the details to an extent unparalleled in blatantly anti-realist novels. Playfully disregarding historical fact in a novel featuring obviously unreliable narrators, or set in a parallel universe, is perhaps expected: in this realm, inauthenticity is courted and skepticism is the default approach. Conversely, biographical novels’ hybrid life-writing techniques can produce narrative realms where everything seems believable.⁷² Post-millennial Neo-Victorian biofiction’s realistic aesthetic thus collides with the Trump-era proliferation of “fake news,” to complicate and make urgent longstanding concerns about the ethics of narrative power and cultural memory.⁷³

Issues of narrative power likewise underpin global conversations in the international relations sphere. Linus Hagström and Karl Gustafsson argue that “We are living at a time when people appear to have become more aware of the power of narratives in international politics. Understanding how narratives exercise power is therefore more pertinent than ever.”⁷⁴ What was our postmodern suspicion of absolute truth has seemingly produced a new problem: namely, that the absence of Truth (capital “T”) can be filled with cavalier disregard for fact. Todd Avery suggests that biofictional authors’ entitlement stems from a core belief “that biofiction is ultimately not really about the putative subject at all, but about themselves.”⁷⁵ Lackey likewise seems to privilege the agency of the biofictional author over that of the historical figure, positing that “the real protagonist of the biographical novel is, not the biographical subject, but human agency, the ability that enables a human to create one’s environment.”⁷⁶ On the whole, he minimizes the biofictional “paper person,”⁷⁷ who primarily functions as a liminal enabler since “the author of biofiction fictionalizes a historical person’s life in order to project into existence his or her own vision of life and the world.”⁷⁸

Nonetheless, narratively enlisting a real person to confront historical fiction’s positivism should not be an inventive carte blanche. Whilst biofictional authors may be justified in certain factual manipulations to communicate “something more substantive,”⁷⁹ the continuum of ethical biofictional representation exposes the scholarly gap in scrutinizing where to draw the line. Narratives retain power and, as Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben observe, “Today, neo-Victorian biofiction vies with biographies and history books in (re-) defining the cultural memory of the nineteenth century.”⁸⁰ There does appear to be an ethical difference between biofictional amendments that deliberately misdate the fall of the Roman Empire for aesthetic purposes, and examples that invent disquieting fictional doppelgängers for real historical figures. Given the genre’s traditional commitment to recovering lost voices, in the case of Neo-Victorian biofictions like Diliberto’s, spuriously misrepresenting historical figures, particularly in a narrative that does not self-consciously reference its own fictionality, may counteract one of its foundational elements.

While the novel’s capacity to be memorable is a locus of particular anxiety when it comes to narrating real events, persons, or places – what if readers are “duped” by inaccurate or false information that is made to appear true? – there are other aspects of the form that make it particularly suited to telling complex stories about past lives. Birgit Neumann contends that novels have the capacity to create and invest in multiple perspectives at the same time, creating nuanced versions of past lives and events.⁸¹ Similarly, Astrid Erll suggests that “literary works can display and juxtapose divergent and contested memories and create mnemonic multiperspectivity,” challenging univocal narratives.⁸² Moreover, Erll argues, fiction is both “memory-productive and memory-reflexive,” so that it contributes to cultural memory, while also often – though by no means always – reflecting on the processes by which the past is communicated and remembered.⁸³ For biofiction, this means that within the form lies the capacity to produce a complex portrayal of a life, even if this capacity is not always realized. In Diliberto’s and Davis’s texts, the juxtaposition of different portraits (i.e. painting and text) is the means to rehabilitate Gautreau’s image, although, as we have seen, this can be to the detriment of other figures, like Pozzi.

Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words? Art, Narrative, and the Politics of Memory

With so little known about Gautreau’s life, her portrait becomes a site of authorial inspiration, connecting art and narrative as tools to excavate the past. Both Davis and Diliberto were inspired to narratively portray Gautreau after her painted image entranced them, and their different creative approaches to viewing the portrait and discovering the paucity of historical detail highlights generic differences in revivifying the past. Davis contextualizes Gautreau’s vivid Parisian experiences, whereas Diliberto simulates access to Gautreau’s most intimate thoughts and conversations. In each instance, while the art is evocative, narrative description is necessary to flesh out Gautreau’s story.

In nineteenth-century novels, portraiture often reveals the inner life of its subject: Elizabeth Bennet recognizes Mr. Darcy’s true character, and its value, upon viewing his portrait at Pemberley; Dorian Gray’s portrait reflects its aging subject’s corruption, even as Dorian himself remains young and physically attractive; and Lady Audley’s portrait suggests her character is other than it appears, while also revealing her identity to her estranged husband.⁸⁴ Diliberto’s novel assigns this understanding of portraiture as revelation to Gautreau herself: “painting … I began to believe, could reveal something greater than reality. In the right hands, with the right chemistry between artist and sitter, painting could illuminate a higher truth.”⁸⁵ Nonetheless, the prime documentary source for Gautreau’s life is her highly stylized portrait, created under arduous and artificial conditions. The historical Gautreau took extreme measures to shape her image, in what Susan Sidlauskas terms a “performance of self.”⁸⁶ Such laborious artificiality provokes questions about this portrait’s ability to access the authentic Gautreau, who also remains narratively elusive due to her negligible archival presence.

Davis conceives of her project as one of recovery, observing, “Madame X was aptly titled, for Gautreau had become a sphinx: a woman who today no longer had a name, let alone a biography.”⁸⁷ She subsequently positions the painting as both the riddle and answer. Sketching a fantasy of direct access to a lost past, Davis offers the painting as revelation: “More than just an image, Madame X is a window into a rich and provocative world; it allows us to experience directly the brilliance, the decadence, the spectacle of Belle Époque Paris.”⁸⁸ This conception of painting providing an authentic past experience aligns with aspects of the “visual” or “pictorial” turn in history, which appears at times to privilege images as particular remnants of the past, available for consumption in the present.

John Berger claims of historical art images that “No other kind of relic or text from the past can offer such direct testimony about the world which surrounded other people at other times.”⁸⁹ W. J. T. Mitchell, who otherwise argues against the association of images with direct mimesis, claims: “a verbal representation cannot represent – that is, make present – its object in the same way a visual representation can. It may refer to an object, describe it, invoke it, but it can never bring its visual presence before us in the way pictures do.”⁹⁰ Paintings are positioned, here, as special traces of the past, inhabiting the present, bringing the past before us in a way that eludes narrative description.

Davis’s Introduction foregrounds the painting-as-inspiration, describing the ensuing text as “the anatomy of a masterpiece, revealing the often surprising, always vivid drama of Sargent, Gautreau, and the painting that made them immortal.”⁹¹ What we want to highlight here is Davis’s interest in “the anatomy” of a painting, which implies both a focus on the physical object, the painting itself, but also – as Davis surely means – an attempt to make the painting live and breathe, by animating its temporal realm, and imbuing the associated characters with anatomical flesh and blood. The book’s cover supports this interpretation, as it reproduces the painting, or rather, a segment of the unfinished copy of the painting, with the strap removed altogether, inviting the reader who opens the book to step inside the painting itself. A review quoted on the frontispiece notes: “With a cool, knowing eye, Davis give us a piquant and detailed portrait of a great artist, a doomed beauty, and a fabulous era.” (Nancy Schoenberger, frontispiece; emphasis added). Schoenberger’s use of “portrait” underscores Davis’s verbal portrait of a visual one.

Davis’s book tends to fall back on what Sidlauskas describes as our own, contemporary, reading of the portrait, as the story of “vanity gone awry.”⁹² On the morning the salon opens, the narrative pictures Amélie “dressed mindful of her reputation as reigning beauty and certain that this year she would get even more attention than ever … anticipat[ing] that [the portrait] would draw the envious congratulations of her friends and the praise of columnists and critics.”⁹³ Davis appears to endorse Sargent’s view that “Madame X, with its subject’s artificial pallor and stylized pose, was an accurate reflection of the real woman.”⁹⁴ The ensuing prose supports this interpretation. The paragraph describing the finished painting, hanging in the salon, is a sustained piece of ekphrasis. Davis invites the readers’ gaze to travel lingeringly, with her own, over the full length portrait, describing in detail “the hair arranged in a chignon, with a few tendrils escaping at the nape of her swan neck”; “The rosy ear and carmine lips” as “the only spots of color on the canvas”; the “shoulders and arms … firm and sculpted”; “her bosom high and full under the heart-shaped bodice of her form-fitting gown.”⁹⁵ In contrast to this vivid description, as her gaze shifts from artwork to woman – or rather from Sargent’s visual portrait, to her own verbal one, it is accorded far less impact. She records only an eyewitness account that claimed: “As for the model, slumped in a corner … she cried real tears despite her enamel over her offended beauty.”⁹⁶ The painting’s ekphrastic representation is rendered more powerfully, more vividly, than descriptions of its subject, bathed in tears at the public outcry. From there, the narrative follows Sargent, and details his reaction and retreat to England, leaving behind Amélie Gautreau.

This narrative turn mirrors the portrait’s historical effect, wherein the Madame X Salon debacle engendered rumors of the “real” Amélie’s reclusion.⁹⁷ But the effect in a book seeking to recover Amélie, is that the portrait, and the narcissistic meaning attributed to it, subvert larger biographical intent. According to Hermione Lee, biography’s heterogeneity should produce “a living person in a body, not a smoothed-over figure – even if seen or caught … fleetingly.”⁹⁸ This description positions the biographical portrait as seemingly opposed to the visual one: Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X certainly appears as a smoothed-over figure, or as Sidlauskas suggests, “The cameo profile [of Sargent’s Madame X] … reinforces the illusion that the subject, as painted, is a unified aesthetic entity, displaced from the real world.”⁹⁹ Yet the illusion of a unified aesthetic entity is what the process of biography disassembles, by drawing attention to the “relics, legends and fragments, … the parts and bits and gaps which are left over after the life has ended [that] biographers use to piece their stories together, trying to make a solid figure, embodied on the page, out of what has gone.”¹⁰⁰ In writing the life of Amélie Gautreau, Davis attempts to break apart the solid figure on the canvas, to unpick the aesthetic unity of Madame X and put her back together in a different way. Three figures remain, alike but different: on the page, the living person, and the painting.

We are left, then, with the power of the image, and Sargent’s assertion – endorsed by Davis – that he painted simply what he saw. Davis somewhat tragically connects Amélie and Dorian Gray, suggesting that the real woman, like Oscar Wilde’s fictional creation, “was condemned to live … tyrannized by her own image. … Both painting and woman were works of art. But Madame X, not Amélie, proved the real and enduring masterpiece.”¹⁰¹ Attempting to unravel the aesthetic unity of the (artistic) portrait, and to fill in gaps and produce her own (textual) portrait, Davis ultimately reinforces the lingering enigmas affixed to Madame X – emphasizing the varying capacities of hybrid life-writing genres in recapturing the past. Davis’s narrative alignment with more conventional biography limits her ability to revivify her subjects, whereas Diliberto’s biofictional approach allows her to imagine more freely, animating her characters with invented conversations and exploits. While such creative license can prove problematic – as with Pozzi’s portrayal – it invigorates Gautreau.

Nineteenth-century rumor affixes narcissism to Gautreau, but Diliberto shapes this characteristic more sympathetically into vanity misunderstood. Wielding Sargent’s painting to contest a description of Gautreau in a 1948 memoir written by Gabriel-Louis Pringue (friend to Gautreau’s daughter Louise), Dilberto writes how Pringue’s memoir “portrays Madame Gautreau (whose name he [Pringue] misspells) as a cold, stiff narcissist of great vanity and little conversation. I see in Sargent’s painting a very different person – one who was vain, of course, but also sexy and high-spirited. It is this version of the real woman that inspired the fictional character.”¹⁰² Pringue’s memoir is the only sustained, extant documented description of Gautreau’s personality, which aligns with the symbol of vanity. Nonetheless, Diliberto wields the painting, not to support this reading of Gautreau, but to propose her own interpretation – which she paratextually communicates via her Author’s Note. Diliberto’s Author’s Note appears at the end of the novel, consciously circumventing distraction from the reader’s fictional immersion in Gautreau’s story.¹⁰³ The main story, which takes the form of a faux-memoir, is written in the first-person – “I” – and from Gautreau’s perspective, a narrative decision reinforcing Diliberto’s desire to recover Gautreau’s voice.

A fictional “Foreword” introduces the memoir, functioning as a framing device to enable vital nineteenth-century exposition. Ostensibly authored by Gautreau’s friend Richard Merriweather, who now works as a curator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Foreword explains that Gautreau sent him a manuscript of her memoir shortly before her death in 1915: “Perhaps you’ve heard her name, Virginie Gautreau. You recall it like an old melody echoing yet from a long-ago party, or as a kind of epithet whispered harshly under the breath. Maybe you’ve even seen her picture—seen the picture. God knows, there are a few out there who truly have, though once all Paris claimed to have viewed it and recoiled at the insolence, the vulgarity, the unmuted sex. ‘Monstrous,’ one critic said. ‘A singular failure,’ sniffed another. John Singer Sargent’s career nearly derailed, though he’s famous now, living in England and making a fortune painting bored aristocrats.”¹⁰⁴ Richard’s Foreword continues, describing the (in)famous portrait as being underappreciated for being too modern, “too far in advance of its time.”¹⁰⁵ In this biofictional rendering, Sargent’s continued use of “Madame X” as title is not a convention to protect Gautreau’s identity; rather, it thwarts her desire for recognition and enhanced celebrity. Diliberto’s Gautreau is furious that Sargent will not let the portrait be shown, nor will he identify her: “‘Don’t I have a name?’ she cried, rising out of her chair. She strode across the room to a wall of windows and pivoted to face me. ‘If Sargent had any honor, he would call my picture Portrait of Virginie Avegno Gautreau. After all, it is my picture as much as his’.”¹⁰⁶ Couching the novel as Gautreau’s memoir captures her at the end of her life mourning her waning celebrity. The novel’s framing device thus appeals to a narcissistic presentation of Gautreau. Her memoir is a concerted effort to ensure her legacy lives on: “She wanted history to remember who Madame X was,”¹⁰⁷ Richard tells us.

Yet if Gautreau is vain, as the framing device suggests, the use of biofictional memoir also enables a depiction of Gautreau – Mimi, as she is called in the novel – as markedly sympathetic. Mimi describes her fame not as something she sought, but as something thrust upon her: first by a gossip columnist, and subsequently cultivated by her mother, who encouraged the use of arsenic and cosmetics to whiten her daughter’s skin: “My mother saw me as her ticket to the top, and she pushed me relentlessly. It never occurred to me to resist … At fourteen, it’s a heady experience to be told constantly how beautiful you are, to have men fawning over you and women eying you jealously. I love it, and I began to expect it.”¹⁰⁸ Critically, the novel positions Mimi’s husband as the source of the notorious black dress, rewriting aspects of Gautreau that most support her depiction as vain, as the interventions of others. Diliberto brings Sargent’s painting to life, narratively imagining how the dress enchants Gautreau: “I lifted the lid, pushed aside the tissue, and pulled out a beautiful black dress. It was much simpler and more revealing than anything I had ever worn or seen anyone else wear … the theatrical daring of the dress immediately appealed to me.”¹⁰⁹ She colors her hair, with henna, for the first time to ensure it does not look drab against the black fabric. This new look, in turn, “seemed to demand more dramatic makeup,”¹¹⁰ so she begins to daub her face in the mauve-white tint for which she was famous. Next came rouging her ears, the idea inspired by having seen an actress play Cleopatra with reddened ears.

The infamous painted pose itself, which visitors to the Salon and its reviewers rejected as unnatural, Diliberto rewrites as naturally maternal: “I heard Louise crying, her voice carrying from the second-floor nursery, down the staircase behind me. I turned quickly, pushing off with my hand from a round Empire table, and twisting and stretching my neck. One of my dress straps slid off my shoulder. I started for the staircase and Louise, but Sargent threw up his arms. ‘Hold that pose!’ he shouted.”¹¹¹ Here, the pose is not about vanity, seduction, or promiscuity, but rather a woman’s response to her child’s cry. Hauteur is reinterpreted as maternal anxiety. In the novel, Gautreau is at pains to distance herself from the pose, and to assert a distance between herself and the image: “Everyone who knows me well knows the sketches he did of me in this manner [reclined] reflect my personality far better than the formal portrait. In the sketches, I’m sensual and a touch melancholy. But Sargent wasn’t interested in that. He wanted something else, a cooler more iconic image. I wanted my beauty reflected back to me. I wanted the painting to render me immortal – the eternally adored woman. Sargent wanted to personify elegance. He did not know me, after all.”¹¹² By asserting a different reading of the painting, the novel demonstrates the dangers of reading the portrait as an analogue for Gautreau herself. And yet – ironically – Diliberto enlists Gautreau’s painted image to contest Pringue’s narrative rendering of the nineteenth-century beauty. Art and narrative offer simultaneously competing and complementary approaches to excavating the past. The ensuing enigmas fuel Neo-Victorian biofiction’s voyeuristic craving to recover historical figures’ secret selves. However, such repeated attempts to capture interiority also provoke the essential ethical considerations examined hitherto.

Conclusion: (Re)Framing Madame X

Sargent created a painting of a painting – or at least a “living statue.”¹¹³ Gautreau had already applied cosmetics to produce her pale, lavender-hued skin, making Sargent’s painting that of an already-painted woman. The “original” painting is likewise elusive, in fact, it no longer exists. Following the Salon scandal, Sargent repainted the fallen strap, so today’s painting differs from its Salon appearance.¹¹⁴ Gautreau is thus doubly removed: even if the portrait could provide access to the original subject, the original painting is unrecoverable. Narrative accounts of Gautreau’s life are inevitably filtered through this complicated visual representation. While Davis and Diliberto might themselves distinguish their texts as biography versus biofiction, or non-fiction versus historical fiction, any access to Gautreau is buried in layers of representation.

According to Diliberto’s biofictional Mimi, the portrait did not reveal who she was. Paradoxically, then, Sargent’s painting of Madame X remains the most influential source for remembering the historical Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau – even though it does not identify her by name. Sargent’s painting has often been seen as depicting a woman who was haughty, vain, and seductive; nonetheless, Gautreau’s image has also imprinted upon cultural memory, enshrining the woman in the painting as alluring and memorable, albeit elusive. Davis and Diliberto were both captivated by the painting, inspired to narratively represent – or re-present – the mysterious woman. In the end, as we read these texts, we appear left with an echo-chamber of representation: Gautreau’s careful self-presentation, represented by Sargent, in turn represented by writers like Davis and Diliberto. The prominence of the portrait, and scarcity of other evidence, render Gautreau an enticing subject for Neo-Victorian textual revivification. Art and narrative each flesh out the other, yet they also present competing (sometimes dubious) versions of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau and her companions. Madame X – both the woman and the portrait – thus tests the limits of ethically and authentically re-framing the nineteenth-century past. How text and image impact future generations remains to be seen: will Gautreau’s face-in-profile be interpreted as “vanity gone awry” (as it was initially) or as maternal attentiveness (as rewritten in Diliberto’s biofiction)? Will Sargent’s simpatico rendering of Dr. Pozzi in paint counteract Diliberto’s questionable narrative portrayal? Meanwhile, Sargent’s 1881 painting of Dr. Pozzi at Home has been on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art – home to the Portrait of Madame X for over a century. They are reunited, and poised for further (re)interpretation.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kate Mitchell

Kate Mitchell is Director of the Research School of Humanities and the Arts and Professor of Literary Studies at the Australian National University. Her research is focused on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary and cultural history, with a particular interest in Neo-Victorian fiction and film and contemporary historical recollection in literature and film more generally, including fiction and creative non-fiction. She is author of History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages and co-editor of Reading Historical Fiction: the Revenant and Remembered Past. Her articles on historical fiction have appeared in journals including Neo-Victorian Studies, Australian Literary Studies, Victoriographies, College Literature and in a number of edited collections.

Kathryne Ford

Kathryne Ford is a researcher in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at the Australian National University, where she also completed her PhD. Her research interests include Neo/Victorian biofiction, life-writing, cultural memory, and narratology, and she has published articles on these topics in The Dickens Quarterly, The Wilkie Collins Journal, and The Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies. Prior to moving to Australia, Kathryne studied English at the University of Memphis. She previously managed the Australian Literary Studies academic journal, and she is currently Deputy Director of Graduate Research in Curtin University’s School of Education.

Notes

1 Ormond, Kilmurray, and Fairbrother, Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends, 12; 92.

2 Sargent repainted the strap after the outcry at the salon, and that is the painting we have today.

3 Sidlauskas, “Painting Skin,” 11–12; 23; Fairbrother, Sargent: The Sensualist, 75.

4 Block, “Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau,” 113; The Metropolitan Museum of Art website audio description of the painting; see also Fairbrother, “The Shock of John Singer Sargent’s ‘Madame Gautreau’” for a detailed description of the portrait’s reception.

5 The Met purchased the painting for 1000 pounds – over 100,000 pounds in 2023 currency. Today it would be worth millions of pounds.

6 Diliberto, I Am Madame X: A Novel, 253–254. Diliberto provides this historical context in her Author’s Note, where she addresses the reader as a biographer, rather than as a novelist. See also Fairbrother “Shock” 95 for additional historical detail on this quote, which is extracted from a 1916 letter Sargent penned to Met Museum Director Edward Robinson.

7 Sidlauskas, “Painting Skin: John Singer Sargent’s ‘Madame X’,” 10.

8 Diliberto, I Am Madame X: A Novel, 248.

9 Ibid., 247. Again, this is Diliberto paratextually positioning the historical Gautreau. Sidlauskas likewise characterizes the historical Gautreau as “a notorious beauty” (11).

10 See Bethany Layne Henry James in Contemporary Fiction (2020) for reflections on the structural affinities between biofiction, adaptation, and appropriation.

11 James Heffernan defines ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of visual representation” (1993, 1).

12 Gioia Diliberto, I Am Madame X: A Novel, 247.

13 Lackey, Biofiction: An Introduction, 16.

14 Ibid., 10.

15 Novak and Ní Dhúill, “Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction,” 4.

16 De Groot, Consuming History, 13.

17 Kohlke and Gutleben, Neo-Victorian Biofiction, 10.

18 See Heilmann and Llewellyn The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century.

19 Novak and Mayer, “Disparate Images: Literary Heroism and the ‘Work vs. Life’ Topos in Contemporary Biofictions about Victorian Authors,” 25.

20 See Kohlke, “The Lures of Neo-Victorianism Presentism.”.

21 Davis, Strapless, 255.

22 Diliberto, I Am Madame X: A Novel, 247.

23 Davis, Strapless, 2.

24 Kohlke, “Neo-Victorian Biofiction and the Special/Spectral Case of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus,” 4–5.

25 Ibid.

26 Diliberto, I Am Madame X: A Novel, 196.

27 De Costa and Miller, “Sarah Bernhardt’s ‘Doctor God’,” 354; emphasis original.

28 Diliberto, I Am Madame X: A Novel, 127.

29 De Costa and Miller, “Sarah Bernhardt’s ‘Doctor God’,” 354.

30 Diliberto, I Am Madame X: A Novel, 250.

31 Ibid., 250.

32 Ibid., 198.

33 Ibid., 127.

34 Ibid., 127.

35 Ibid., 239.

36 Ibid., 241.

37 Ibid., 127.

38 Ibid., 133.

39 Ibid., 135.

40 Ibid., 134.

41 Ibid., 150.

42 De Costa and Miller, “Sarah Bernhardt’s ‘Doctor God’,” 353.

43 Ibid., 354.

44 Ibid, 354.

45 Ibid., 356.

46 De Costa and Miller, “Sarah Bernhardt’s ‘Doctor God’,” 355.

47 Davis portrays Pozzi more sympathetically: Her Pozzi is a philanderer with a heart of gold, and Davis points out that Pozzi artistically adorned his medical practice to create a safe and pleasant space for his patients (244).

48 Davis, Strapless, 1.

49 Ibid., 1.

50 Ibid., 2.

51 Lee, Biography, 7.

52 Brown and Krog, “Creative Non-Fiction,” 57.

53 For further discussion of “creative non-fiction” see Laura Tansley and Micaela Maftei Writing Creative Non-fiction: Determining the Form.

54 Davis, Strapless, 4.

55 Ibid., 2.

56 Ibid., 3.

57 Ibid., 106.

58 Novak and Ní Dhúill, “Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction,” 29; emphasis added.

59 Lee, Body Parts, 3.

60 As part of establishing the difference between biographers and biographical novelists, Lackey explains that “someone doing a biography feels uncomfortable altering facts, and this is the case because the author implicitly establishes a certain kind of truth contract with readers” (Biofiction: An Introduction 2022: 1–2; emphasis added).

61 Andress, “Truth, Ethics and Imagination: Thoughts on the Purpose of History,” 241.

62 Boldrini, “Biofiction, Heterobiography and the Ethics of Speaking of, for and as Another,” 20; 35.

63 Kaplan, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism, 5–6.

64 Mallon, “History, Fiction and the Burden of Truth,” paragraph 12.

65 Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 7.

66 Rigney, “Portable Monuments,” 383.

67 Ibid.,” 361.

68 Rigney, “The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between Monumentality and Morphing,” 347–48.

69 Layne, “Introduction: Biofiction and Writers’ Afterlives,” 1–2.

70 Novak and Ní Dhúill, “Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction,” 21.

71 Kohlke and Gutleben, Neo-Victorian Biofiction, 3.

72 Once again, biofiction’s hybridity provokes debate. Roberta Gefter Wondrich points out that “The very reprisal of a realist mode, even when hybridised with postmodern devices and variations, is a hallmark of most biofictions” (2020, 113). Conversely, Lackey envisions biofiction as projecting “surrealist structures of consciousness” (“Rise” 2016, 54).

73 Neo-Victorian biofictions often emphasize their realism by featuring first-person narrators. The author declines omniscient narrative insight, electing instead to appropriate the dead person’s voice. Ostensibly this privileges previously marginalized perspectives; however, these are real people ventriloquized without permission. Biofictional authors likewise exploit illicit relationships – both real and imagined. In The Mistressclass (2003), author Michèle Roberts re-imagines Charlotte Brontë’s real-life (unrequited) love for the married Monsieur Heger, via letters lost to the historical record. These invented letters are liberally infused with explicit sexual imagery, and biofictional Brontë confesses a desire to name her daughter after her former teacher. She also imagines Madame Heger physically torturing her (2003, 180–182). While we can read these imagined letters as lending a liberating voice to anachronistically explore (notoriously prudish) nineteenth-century Charlotte’s intense feelings, appropriating her voice so voyeuristically – even under the guise of fiction – arguably compromises agency in a story meant to amplify the “real” Charlotte’s voice. Charlotte Brontë’s biography written by her friend, respected Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, pointedly declines to comment on Monsieur Heger, raising further questions about biofictional authors’ appropriating historical figures’ voices without consent, thus “filling certain gaps that historical persons may well have left on purpose” (Novak and Ní Dhúill, “Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction,” 21). See also Boldrini, “Biofiction, Heterobiography and the Ethics,” 21; Kohlke and Gutleben, “Taking Biofictional Liberties,” 19–22; Villegas-López, “(Re)Tracing Charlotte Brontë’s Steps,” 94–321, and Helen Davies Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction: Passionate Puppets (2012).

74 Hagström and Gustafsson, “Narrative Power,” 387.

75 Avery, “Pseudo-Quotations and Alternative Facts: Lytton Strachey and the Ethics of Biofiction in the Post-Truth Moment,” 34.

76 Lackey, “Using Versus Doing History in the Contemporary Biographical Novel,” 56.

77 Lackey, Biofiction: An Introduction, 3.

78 Ibid., 13. Lackey previously offered a similar iteration of this concept, proposing that “while authors of traditional and fictional biographies seek to represent the life (or a dimension of a life) of an actual historical figure as clearly and accurately as possible, biographical novelists […] use the biographical subject in order to project their own vision of life and the world” (Lackey, “Locating,” 2016, 7).

79 Lackey, “Introduction: A Narrative Space of Its Own,” 10.

80 Kohlke and Gutleben, Neo-Victorian Biofiction, 13.

81 Neumann, Birgit. “The Literary Representation of Memory.” 339.

82 Erll, Astrid. Memory in Culture, 150–151.

83 Ibid., 151; italics original.

84 See Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813); Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890); Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862).

85 Diliberto, I Am Madame X: A Novel, 182.

86 Sidlauskas, “Painting Skin,” 18.

87 Davis, Strapless, 13.

88 Ibid., 4–5; emphasis added.

89 Berger, Ways of Seeing, 3.

90 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 152.

91 Davis, Strapless, 5.

92 Sidlauskas, “Painting Skin,” 10.

93 Davis, Strapless, 163.

94 Ibid., 176.

95 Ibid., 170.

96 Ibid., 172.

97 Elizabeth Block contests “sensationalized accounts that have Gautreau retreating from society and living as a recluse after the Salon,” arguing that Gautreau “went on to host and sing at parties as late as 1902” (2018, 113). Davis’s rendering of Gautreau’s reclusion is another instance where Strapless privileges the creative despite its non-fiction categorization.

98 Lee, Body Parts, 3.

99 Sidlauskas, “Painting Skin,” 10.

100 Lee, Body Parts, 5.

101 Davis, Strapless, 217; 218.

102 Diliberto, I Am Madame X: A Novel, 249.

103 Conversely, Davis paratextually communicates how Sargent’s painting inspired her narrative research via an Introduction. This intervention occurs at the start of the text, meaning Davis positions herself as central to the drama of discovery – yet also marginal to Gautreau’s story, since the text proper is Gautreau’s story, and Sargent’s, not Davis’s story of discovery.

104 Diliberto, I Am Madame X: A Novel, 1; emphasis original.

105 Diliberto, I am Madame X: A Novel, 3.

106 Ibid., 3–4; emphasis original.

107 Diliberto, I am Madame X: A Novel, 5.

108 Ibid., 84.

109 Ibid., 151.

110 Ibid., 153.

111 Diliberto, I am Madame X: A Novel, 187.

112 Ibid., 188; emphasis added.

113 Block, “Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau.”

114 Fairbrother, “The Shock of John Singer Sargent’s ‘Madame Gautreau’.”