The Meaning Beyond the Dress: Alterity and Economy of Desire in Mallarmé's Berthe Morisot

摘要

This essay explores Mallarmé's late prose text Berthe Morisot,1 the preface to the catalogue of the 1896 posthumous exhibition. Morisot was one of Mallarmé's privileged others. Their relationship sheds light on the economy of desire and evolving cultural practice in two major figures of late nineteenth-century France. I aim to show how poet and painter came to speak the same language via a remarkable intercultural and gender exchange. The narrator's relational self hides behind the dispassionate art historian's mask, yet emerges in unexpected ways.