Fatal Attraction: Loving the Guillotined Woman, from Washington Irving to Alexandre Dumas

Abstract

Résumé:

Alexandre Dumas' 1848 novella, La Femme au Collier de Velours belongs to a centuries-old lineage of narratives about a young man courting a mysterious woman who conceals a fatal neck wound. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, this narrative template, now featuring a guillotined woman, becomes a relatively popular device for reflecting on the events of the Terror and its lingering presence in the French and wider European cultural imaginary, even and especially for those born too late to actually witness them. In this article, I trace developments and embellishments in the guillotined woman narrative from Washington Irving's "The Adventure of the German Student" (1824) through Dumas' novella. I argue that the self conscious repetition of this narrative both amplifies and ironizes the masculine anxieties it evokes. Through constant recirculation and reanimation, the guillotined woman becomes both a figure for the uncannily restored monarchy and an allegory of degraded cultural production.