Realism and Romanticism

Recently I started reading a novel by Marge Piercy, Braided Lives, that I abandoned after 160 pages because I really didn’t care about the sex life of the heroine and her oafish boyfriend as they got through a joyless freshmen year at the University of Michigan and a summer in Detroit.

I lived that life. If I read someone else’s experience, I want it leavened by perspective and I want it in a style better than my own.

In frustration, I took down a book from the shelf as different as I could find. I ended up with a movie promotion edition of Alexandre Dumas’ Camille written more than 130 years before. It was one strange object, a thick paged Grosset and Dunlap from 1927 with photographs from the Norma Talmage production set in the 1920's interspersed with Dumas’ 1840's text.

The first problem was language. I was never sure how much simplification had been done beyond translation from the French. However, since the plot concerned a "kept woman" with a friend who provided the narrator with information on the economics of such a life, I figured it couldn’t be too bowdlerized.

The second reading problem was the conventions of the genre. While Piercy wrote about her experiences in the first person, Dumas used a third person to narrate his personal story. The anonymous narrator retells the story of a man he met when he bought a book at Marguerite Gautier’s estate sale that the stranger had given her. The lady of the camellias’ final days are described through the journal she left with a friend.

By the end of 150 pages I was bored by Dumas and went to bed. The next evening I tried again, and resumed at the point where the narrative crosses the threshold of engagement to takes on its own compelling life. This engagement existed despite the fact that the story concerned a prostitute dying from tuberculosis who gave up her pampered life to life with a jealous young man who truly loved her only to be punished by his family for her earlier ways.

At the time it was published the stereotype was fresh, but its very success - by Wikipedia’s count at least 20 movies starring women like Theda Bara and Greta Garbo, as well theatrical adaptions with Eleanore Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, Lillian Gish, and Tallulah Bankhead and the opera La Traviata - has rendered it too familiar.

So why does the one autobiographical novel work better than another? I can only think the distancing required by the romantic conventions makes it easier for the author to transform private experience into the public domain without destroying the reality of the personal for the author. The imaginative leap necessary to produce art is simply easier when one can deny it’s my true life.