Madame Chrysanthème

Madame Chrysantheme by Pierre Loti was published in 1888. It’s probable this book’s audience was the novel-reading French bourgeoisie, who by this time had acquired a taste for things Japanese.[4] Loti, a former naval officer “who eventually left the French navy to specialize in stories of passionate but transient romance in exotic Oriental settings”[5] tells the story of a of an autobiographical protagonist’s temporary marriage to a beautiful and childlike geisha, Madame Chrysanthème. This book is striking in its panoramic and sensuously captivating descriptions of “[t]his great Nagasaki... with its numberless petroleum lamps burning, its many-colored lanterns flickering, and innumerable panting djins. Always the same narrow streets, lined on each side with the same low houses, built of paper and wood. Always the same shops, without glass of windows, open to all the winds...”[6] Its prose is beautiful, yet one of the narrator’s goals seems to be the total mystification of Japan and its inhabitants, something which becomes obvious early in the book as he selects his temporary wife, demanding a yellower woman than the one he is offered.[7] This deliberate exoticism is present in the use of the adjective “petit” throughout the novel to describe almost everything, the narrator’s insistence on the fantastic elements of his surroundings— “this tiny, artifiicial, fictitious world”[8]—and, of course, various descriptions of his wife as fairy-like. Nevertheless, some seeds of disillusionment with the reality of industrializing Japan are present: when the narrator first arrives in Nagasaki, he remarks glumly that it’s just like any other town.[9] Nevertheless, he more than makes up for this split-second disappointment with the rest of his novel. Loti’s story doubtless captured the imagination of those who were looking for exactly what Loti gave them: a land of quiet bridges, narrow paths, paper lanterns and wooden houses.

Footnotes:

1 A fact that Edmond de Goncourt lamented, because it meant that japonisme had become vulgarized. Hartman, Elwood. “Japonisme and Nineteenth-Century French Literature.” Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2, East-West Issue (Jun., 1981). Penn State UP. pp. 142. Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/stable/402462. pp 145, 146.

Lambourne, Lionel. Japonisme: Cultural Crossings between Japan and the West. London: Phaidon, 2005. Print.. p 135.

3 Loti, Pierre. Madame Chrysanthème. New York: Current Literature Pub., 1910. Print. p 63.

4 It may be worth nothing that in the French text the word jaune (yellow) is used throughout the conversation the narrator has with the proprietor of the geishas. In the 1910 English translation cited above, however, the word “ivory” is used in its place. Given that the English word “ivory” comes from a latinate term historically used in France to describe this material, and given that its meaning has not changed in English, I don’t see why this change was necessary. These words do not really describe the same color.

5 Op. cit. Loti. p 24.

6 Loti, Pierre. Madame Chrysanthème. Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1893. Print. p 6