This month, Hayden Panettiere checked out at the age of 36. After years of struggle with mental illness and addiction, she was found dead in a North Carolina apartment. She had outlived her stardom (her most recent roles were direct to video or uncredited) but not her demons. In fact, her only notable media presence recently has been as herself. Earlier this year she revealed the harrowing details of a sexual assault by a famous man at the age of 18, which was engineered by an older woman she trusted. She didn’t name either party.

Hayden is the latest to join a group of women I have long kept classified together in my head: I call them the 36 Club.

Unlike the more famous 27 Club, whose members are primarily male rockstars who died because of drugs (Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain…), my 36 Club are women who were, at one point, renowned for their beauty. “Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse” has a different valence when referring not to bloated male junkies but to starlets who live by their looks. While the 27 Club is often pointed to as an example of the dangers of drugs and alcohol, the 36 Club has a different message.

One by one, the women of the 36 Club checked out, or were checked out, before there was time for their beauty to expire. They make concrete a cultural belief—that women in a sense “die” when their sexual power over men diminishes. Symbolically, they cheated the hangman—rather than losing their looks, they lost their lives and have thus lived on as as ever-beautiful legends in pop culture. The 36 Club are, through no fault of their own, ghastly, literal embodiments of the end of female youth. They lived as long as they were beautiful and then, conveniently, they disappeared into the void. Furthermore, they died in circumstances that were often violent, random, and beloved by conspiracy theorists.

To be clear, I don’t intend to glamorize these women’s deaths or suggest that to die young is desirable. On the contrary, I think each woman’s death represents a tragic, too-soon ending to a life that could have offered the world much more. However, I think the way our culture remembers them indicates much about how we feel about women.

The most celebrated member of the 36 Club is, of course, Marilyn Monroe, in a tangle of expensive sheets and prescription bottles and a more dangerous tangle of secrets and questions. Did she sleep with JFK? RFK? Did she threaten to expose their secrets? What happened in Mexico City? Was she an innocent victim of powerful men? Was she an out-of-control fantasist, calling the White House switchboard drunk and demanding to speak to Mr. President?

She never grew old—she barely grew middle-aged—she stayed a whispery girl-child forever. She is remembered as an eternal seductress, her name and face popping up in the most unexpected places. I vividly remember being twenty years old, watching a Criterion Collection DVD of Army of Shadows with scholarly commentary by Ginette Vincendeau. Midway through the French classic about the Resistance to the Nazis, a battered-looking middle aged woman is introduced. With gallic indifference, the commentator Vincendeau intoned something along the lines of, “And this is Simone Signoret, who used to be beautiful, but following her husband’s affair with Marilyn Monroe, she turned to drink and lost her looks.” A deeply female tragedy, embodied in the name of Marilyn, briefly clouded my vision as I clutched my Blue Moon and wondered how long it took to lose your looks.

Marilyn never found out, although she was, herself, no stranger to the bottle or to romantic disappointment. Did she kill herself because she couldn’t face the inevitable necessity of creating a mature identity not based on sexual desire? The most respected solution to this conundrum, motherhood, had been closed to her. Despite her ardent desire to have a baby, it seems she was unable to get pregnant.

If she had lived, would she have found a way to live as an “older”, then frankly old woman? What would society have made of a Marilyn who they could no longer sexualize?

The live but aging body of Marilyn would have presented more problems to her male admirers than her corpse. An older boyfriend I had in my youth once told me that on arriving in America for the first time as a young man, speaking little English, he asked the taxi driver to take him directly to the address Marilyn died at—12305 Fifth Helena Drive. It was the only address he knew by heart in America. Hugh Hefner bought the funeral niche next to her. An LA businessman demanded that his widow bury him in the spot above Marilyn, and she complied, although she later had to auction off the macabre property. It sold for $4.6 million. The urban legend goes that the businessman, Poncher, was buried face down so he could stare at Marilyn’s decaying face for eternity. Even in death, she couldn’t escape the male gaze.

The second member of the 36 Club is perhaps the only 20th century blonde to rival Marilyn in fame—Diana, Princess of Wales.

What is there to say that hasn’t already been said? She is, to me, the premier secular saint of our times, her life story paralleling that of the archetypal Medieval Virgin Martyr. A beautiful but humble maiden of high birth, married off as a teenager to an older royal man who didn’t love her, a paragon of earthly virtue, dead in photogenic violence before she could misbehave too badly. I’ve often thought that what so captured the public imagination about Diana was not her modernity but her antiquity—she was the last celebrity woman whose life followed, or could follow, this trajectory. Today’s princesses are college educated working women or Hollywood starlets or army officers.

I have made a lot of art about Diana, and when people ask me about it they inevitably end up talking to me about their mothers and childhoods. I myself have my first memories of Diana holding my mom’s hand and looking at her picture on tabloid covers as we waited to check out at the grocery store (Dr. Freud might like me to mention here that my mother had me when she was 36).

The earliest entrant in the 36 Club is—or so I thought—Marie Antoinette. I always believed her to be the founding member, but I must confess that in researching for this essay, I was shocked to realize she was actually executed at 37. Mea culpa— but I won’t delete her as she is a firm member in my headcanon.

The only genuine martyr in the bunch, Marie Antoinette was a fascination of mine as a teenager. I always thought of the poor old woman who died at the guillotine until—the years passed. As a thirteen year old, I could viscerally feel the eyes on her as she was forced to undress while crossing the Austria-France border. Now I can imagine her final journey to the scaffold, searching for a priest stationed at a window to absolve her from a distance.

Like all queens, Marie Antoinette’s body belonged to the public, and from the time she married the Dauphin at fourteen, it was subject to public comment. Had she actually consummated her marriage? Was she pregnant? Was she losing the baby? Was she fatter? Thinner? Older? Most of all, her appearance at her final trial was much remarked on, as she had seemingly aged decades in a few years of imprisonment. Today, though, we remember her mostly as a frivolous young person, which might have distressed the pious, serious mature woman.

The other members of the Club include more and less famous names. Ana Mendieta was either murdered by her older partner, or she fell from a window, or she killed herself. She was a great artist, she drank too much, she loved not wisely but too well, she was beautiful. Her work was about her body, herself, her history, her loves. She didn’t live to make art about her body growing old.

Ada Lovelace, mathematician and daughter of Lord Byron, died of cervical cancer at 36—curiously, the same age at which her father died. The only legitimate child of the Romantic hero, she made a deathbed confession to her husband that made him abandon her in her final days.

Catherine Parr was the last wife of Henry VIII. She is, thus, most remembered as Survived in the nursery rhyme formulation of Henry VIII’s wives (Divorced [47], Beheaded [28-35], Died [28-29], Divorced [24], Beheaded [18-19], Survived [35]). In fact, she only survived Henry by 20 months. She died in complications from childbirth, having married in secret soon after the king’s death.

As I was writing this list, another name was added: Cheyenne Roundtree’s intensely moving article for Rolling Stone recounts the story of Katherine Early McCollough, who died in circumstances that I find almost too painful to contemplate. Her angelic face haunted me for days after reading about her.

Hayden Panettiere died days before her 37th birthday. I never knew much about her in life. However, I felt strangely affected when I saw news of her death, in part because I had seen headlines about her abuse allegations and substance struggles, and in part because I associate her with my own teenage years. I knew her as a face on a magazine when people still bought magazines, when the teenagers on their covers were still my age. The truth is that something about her at that time rubbed me the wrong way. For one, her unisex given name was also the name of my first love. He unceremoniously dumped me around the time she became a star. Seeing her grinning tabloid face, oddly, reminded me of him. For another, as a self-consciously artistic teenager in Texas, she was too much the cheerleader ideal.

But give Hayden time. One by one, the women of the 36 Club have made it into my conscious mind, then come to haunt my subconscious and appear, unbidden sometimes, in my paintings. With each passing year, they grew closer to me in time—until one day—I knew—I hoped—I would leave them behind, waving from the window of an unmarked black car as it disappeared into the foggy night of the future.

Last month, I turned 37.

“I have tried reading [Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen] maybe seven times so far, and each time I make it only 40 or so pages before I have this urge to do dishes and clean my entire house, anything but live inside upper middle-class concerns about who marries who among the 18th-century English gentry. I know many people of all walks of life adore this book—so this one is clearly my own failing. Evidently, I just can’t get into a book about rich people dancing in ballrooms and having tea and getting “flushed” from trotting along country roads.”

Why this particular quote re-emerged now is a mystery to me, but Austen readers responded by pointing out that Vuong did not understand the brass tacks finances in Austen’s books:

There were also, of course, the usual claims that Vuong was sexist and counter-claims that Austenites were over-reacting. I’m perfectly willing to accept that Vuong simply doesn’t like Austen (there’s no accounting for personal taste) and that he spoke casually and isn’t guilt of capital M misogyny. Most notably, Vuong has himself written about women forced into arranged marriages and survival prostitution, in a different time in place, in his best-selling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

However, like many other readers of Austen, I felt compelled to weigh in on X in part because I do believe that contemporary readers unfamiliar with the economic conditions of women in Austen’s era may miss the dire hazards her female protagonists face, particularly when if comes to sexual bondage.

Because we live in a time when sexual matters are discussed openly, and because Austen’s glossy, genteel prose may hide the life and death reality underlying her works, I wanted to write on this topic at more length. Principally, I want to point out how the specter of being compelled into survival prostitution haunts the works of Jane Austen. This legitimate fear in women’s lives courses through Austen’s work in a way that would have been legible, if not blindingly obvious, to readers of her time. The business of sex runs beneath all of her novels, a raging river that women know they can fall into if they trip the trap door of reputational harm.

Where we may see romantic comedy in the rakes who break the hearts of her heroines, the stakes in Austen’s world were much higher than in ours. The deceiving men who falsely dangle marriage before young women experience little danger— if they desert their lovers, they will be considered cads, but they will be forgiven. However, if Austen’s women agree to sex under false pretenses, their lives will be permanently ruined in a material sense. They will likely be homeless, penniless, and left with only their bodies to sell.

To be clear, I am not objecting to a woman choosing to become a prostitute, a courtesan, a kept woman, or, as we would put it in 2026, a sex worker. I am speaking of something different: a society that forces women into de facto survival prostitution because there is no other way for them to support themselves.

The moral wrong inflicted on a woman who is forced into sex work in this manner would have been compounded by the circumstances of Jane Austen’s society, where a kept woman would have been shunned by her family and friends, unable to fully participate in the community in which she had been born. A woman once “fallen” would be barred from ever returning to the “straight” world. This is why 19th century denizens said that prostitutes occupied a demi-monde—a half world. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave…

A woman in this position would have been forced to descend the 19th century rungs of fallen women, her body less saleable with age, starting with (in the best case scenario) elegant mistress and ending with street walking.

In Austen’s day, the word “seduction” covered a range of male misbehaviors from enthusiastically consensual affairs with young women to violent rape. Any woman who was “seduced” was damaged goods, struggling to ever marry, let alone marry into the same economic circumstances as her family of origin. This was crucial because, to state the obvious, most women depended on their husbands for money and a roof over their heads. While it was routine for married women or widows to work in family businesses led by their husband or in-laws, unprotected single women had a limited range of employment options, the largest of which were: teaching (where rigorous chastity was absolutely demanded); domestic service (where virtue was expected but women were habitually sexually abused by employers1); manufacturing or public facing work in a shop/café (where openness to sex work was assumed); or actual prostitution.

This situation is rarely stated openly in Austen, and if so usually euphemistically, but it was well known to 19th century readers. Let’s look at a few examples of how this plays out in Austen’s work.

In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth’s younger sister Lydia is “seduced” by a worthless scamp who absconds with her to London. The family is initially angry that she has married without permission, until the full horror strikes—Lydia has not married at all, and is in fact living unmarried with a man. At this point, if her family cannot force the man to marry her, Lydia, at 15, will be entered irrevocably into a life of selling herself. Once this man drops her, she will be forced to find another man to support her. She is only saved by the combined efforts of her father (whose friends encourage him to abandon his wayward daughter) and her sister’s wealthy and powerful male admirer.

In Sense and Sensibility, the Romantic teenager Marianne falls for the older Willoughby, who, it transpires, has previously impregnated and abandoned a penniless young woman who is (coincidentally!!) the ward of a family friend, Colonel Brandon. Brandon reveals that this young woman is in fact the daughter of Eliza, woman who was raised in his home and whom he loved—but who fell into prostitution:

“I could not trace [Eliza] beyond her first seducer, and there was every reason to fear that she had removed from him only to sink deeper in a life of sin. Her legal allowance was not adequate to her fortune, nor sufficient for her comfortable maintenance, and I learnt from my brother that the power of receiving it had been made over some months before to another person. He imagined, and calmly could he imagine it, that her extravagance, and consequent distress, had obliged her to dispose of it for some immediate relief.”

Eliza subsequently died after giving birth to a daughter. Brandon has raised the daughter, but she followed in her mother’s footsteps:

“The first news that reached me of her,” he continued, “came in a letter from herself, last October. It was forwarded to me from Delaford, and I received it on the very morning of our intended party to Whitwell; and this was the reason of my leaving Barton so suddenly, which I am sure must at the time have appeared strange to everybody, and which I believe gave offence to some. Little did Mr. Willoughby imagine, I suppose, when his looks censured me for incivility in breaking up the party, that I was called away to the relief of one whom he had made poor and miserable; but had he known it, what would it have availed? Would he have been less gay or less happy in the smiles of your sister? No, he had already done that, which no man who can feel for another would do. He had left the girl whose youth and innocence he had seduced, in a situation of the utmost distress, with no creditable home, no help, no friends, ignorant of his address! He had left her, promising to return; he neither returned, nor wrote, nor relieved her.”

The unexpressed fear of Marianne’s family is that she will end the same way—as an ill, impoverished prostitute because of her love and trust in an unworthy man. In a climactic scene, a drunken Willoughby (now married to a wealthy heiress) forces himself into a family friend’s home and begs Marianne’s sister for forgiveness. Her horror at his appearance comes in part from the unspoken anxiety that, despite his marriage, Willoughby could still trap Marianne. If Willoughby managed to see Marianne rather than her upright sister, Marianne may have agreed to run off with him, sealing her loss forever. Marianne is instead prevailed upon to marry (and love?) the noble but boring Colonel Brandon, who is twice her age.

But what of the more subtle examples? In Mansfield Park, the wealthy Mrs. Rushmore is foolish enough to run away with the dashing Henry Crawford from her respectable but tedious marriage. After the elopement founders, she is confined with her aunt to a modest house in a foreign country for the rest of her life. Austen slyly records the different outcome which awaits the male sinner:

“That punishment, the public punishment of disgrace, should in a just measure attend his share of the offence is, we know, not one of the barriers which society gives to virtue. In this world the penalty is less equal than could be wished…”

Emma is perhaps Austen’s lightest book, precisely because Emma is independently wealthy, and thus able to freely choose her own marital/sexual partner(s), or choose no partner at all. But in the minor characters, we see darker sexual realities. In Harriet, a young woman who Emma befriends, we see the consequences incurred by women who had erred sexually extending beyond themselves to follow their children for life. Harriet is “the natural daughter of somebody” i.e. a child of unmarried parents. They have provided enough money for her to receive an education and board indefinitely at her school, but she knows nothing about her parents’ identities, and never expects to know them.

As Harriet approaches marriageable age, she is in an extremely vulnerable position. Because of her status as a bastard with no fortune, she cannot hope to marry into a status similar to that in which she was raised. An honorable farmer proposes marriage, but she is, mostly through Emma’s interference, unwilling to lower her social position by marrying him. Emma induces her into flirtations with two “gentlemen” who would never consent to marry a woman of such a dubious background. Contemporary readers would have understood the dangerous game Emma is playing with Harriet’s future. If one of the men seduces her, Harriet would have no male relatives to protect her, and she would be cast into the demi-monde of courtesans and kept women, likely to have children who would be forced to grow up with no knowledge of their mother.

A minor drama in the book revolves around the extravagant gift of a pianoforte to Jane Fairfax, a young woman who was born into the same sphere as Emma but who was orphaned early and thus grew up impoverished as a ward of a friend of her father, Colonel Campbell. Jane must soon leave this wealthy home, where she has grown up as a guest, to earn her own living as a governess. Emma and other local gossips surmise that the pianoforte, which was given to Jane anonymously, comes from Colonel Campbell. But is this the innocent gift that the reader might assume? It could imply a sexual overture—or payment for services rendered—from an older man who has absolute power over Jane.

As independent Emma laughs, we the reader may cringe. If the pianoforte really is from Colonel Campbell, what kind of relationship does it suggest from the man who has raised Jane from childhood? As it turns out, the gift has come from another unscrupulous, but not abusive, wealthy man.

We modern readers may well take offense when Jane compares her upcoming employment as a governess to slavery. While the comparison is indeed inappropriate in light of what we know about the lives of enslaved women, it must be born in mind that English governesses were financially exploited, having no ability to negotiate fair wages and often working for little more than bed and board until they could not work any more. Because of their grey-area social status, between servant and gentlewoman, they were expected to maintain absolute sexual purity, which made it difficult for them to ever marry and have their own children and homes.

Governesses were also notoriously targets of sexual abuse by their male employers, whose homes they lived in. What recourse would a young woman have if her employer-landlord sexually abused her? More likely than not, if she spoke up, she would be blamed and ejected from the home without the all-important reference that allowed future employment. In fact, Emma’s former governess has married, only after Emma was grown up, to a much older man in the neighborhood. The marriage, while happy, is even more hierarchichal than usual in a 19th century marriage. The former governess considers herself beholden to her husband for lifting her out of an uncertain state.

It fell to an equally famous female writer of the next generation to lay out what the life of a governess entailed. This writer is of course Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre2. This Jane arrives as a teenaged governess, penniless and friendless3, to the isolated home of the single Mr. Rochester, whose young “ward” is in fact his daughter (maybe?) from an affair with a French courtesan.

Rochester and Jane fall in love, although she initially resists his advances due to the danger of her circumstances. When he finally proposes marriage, all seems well—until their wedding ceremony is interrupted by the arrival of a mysterious traveller who reveals that Rochester has been concealing a secret, mad wife in his attic. Rochester cannot marry Jane because he is already married—so she flees with only the clothes on her back.

The great Jane Eyre fan fiction has already been written: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys4 imagines the previous life of the mad wife in a work of poetic and feminist genius.

But another fan fiction I’ve often imagined about Jane Eyre is, I think, quite realistic. Let’s suppose that the mysterious traveller is delayed by just one day: Jane has (as she believes) married Rochester, and their marriage has been consummated. The morning after, she discovers the secret wife and flees, as she did in the book.

Let’s suppose that she ends up in the same position as in the book, as a teacher, but soon realizes she is pregnant. Do we suppose that her employer (the puritanical St John Rivers) would believe this cock and bull story about a mad wife and a sham marriage? Or would he have assumed that she had simply had sex outside of wedlock and then thrown her out?

At this point, the errant Jane would have been unable to find work as a domestic servant of any kind, let alone an “upper servant” like a governess, because of her pregnancy.

Her only choices would have been to return to Rochester and live with him as his mistress (with no legal protections from a man who clearly has few moral scruples), or to enter some form of sex work in order to support her unborn child.

But let’s leave the speculative Brontë fiction (with, I hope, the reader’s pardon for my detour) and return to the more respectable, less melodramatic work of Austen. I think what is happening is that when readers today encounter Austen, they perceive her characters as disapproving of “bad” behavior on prissy, moralistic grounds. We don’t have a moral objection to two unmarried young people running away together for an illicit weekend, so why doesn’t Austen loosen up? The truth is that her characters’ fears are eminently material, not moralistic: a woman who lost her reputation would be literally ruined, unable to provide for herself and any possible children, and thus have no leverage to say no to the “protection” of any exploitative man who might come along. She would also put herself outside the protection of the law. The idea that a prostitute could be sexually assaulted or abused by a john would have been laughed at by Austen’s society, who would have considered such an outcome as indistinguishable from the degradation of her “choice” of profession.

In closing, and despite what some may have us believe, the options women have in 2026 are objectively better than those they were given in 1826, and no amount of elegant and discreet prose on Jane Austen’s part should conceal this reality from the astute reader.

“Shall a woman be flayed alive because it is unfeminine in her to fight for her own skin? What is the good of being⁠—feminine, as you call it? Have you asked yourself that? That men may be attracted, I should say. But if a woman finds that men only take advantage of her assumed weakness, shall she not throw it off? If she be treated as prey, shall she not fight as a beast of prey? Oh, no;⁠—it is so unfeminine!”

The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope

In a recent piece for the New Yorker, John Cassidy compares Jeffrey Epstein to Augustus Melmotte, the central character in Anthony Trollope’s 1875 satirical novel The Way We Live Now. Like Epstein, Melmotte is an outsider financier who becomes, overnight, a key player in metropolitan high society. He may or may not be Jewish1. Appearing in London in middle age from no one knows where, with a fortune earned via no one knows what, his frontal assault on the elite by means of extravagant spending makes him a power broker for royalty, politicians, aristocrats, and celebrities. Within three years of his arrival in London, he has risen to the heights of success and then crashed and burned along with his fortune, based on a railway Ponzi scheme. When he knows for sure he’s finally lost it all, he kills himself to escape life in prison. Curiously, from the very beginning of the 350,000 word tome, the sophisticates around Melmotte seem to know he is a crook, variously describing him as a “rogue”, a “swindler”, and a “thief.” However, despite knowing exactly what he is, London’s elite seem unable to resist being drawn in, moth-like, to the blaze of his fabulous wealth, until he and they are consumed by it. The very fact of his wealth acts as its own alibi—why would a man so self-evidently wealthy bother to steal the paltry fortunes of lesser men?

From this précis, it is easy to see why Cassidy made the comparison. This last month I have been re-reading The Way We Live Now, and I have many times been startled by the way the novel parallels the unfolding Epstein revelations. However, I disagree with Cassidy about Epstein himself being a Melmottian figure. A far better analog for the chaste but greedy Melmotte is Bernie Madoff. It is the society of The Way We Live Now itself which acts as a kind of crowd-sourced Epstein, a bonfire of young women’s virtue fueled by the vices of older, dissolute men. The fates of the novel’s female characters parallel the fates of Epstein’s victims.

Beneath the complicated machinery of the Victorian plot runs, like a fetid sewer, the theme of women’s lives constrained by the vices of men. From the farmers to the gentry to the aristocrats, women are unable to live lives of basic dignity because the men who are their masters are living lives of excess. After their fathers, brothers, or husbands have lost the family’s fortune by drink, gaming, and financial speculation, the women are left with only their bodies to sell, via honorable marriage or no.

Starting from the bottom of the social hierarchy, Ruby Ruggles lives with her grand-father, a “respectable” farmer who beats her when he drinks. He wants her to marry a similar young plebian called John Crumb, but she has been dazzled by the worthless aristocrat Lord Felix Carbury, a degenerate alcoholic and gambling addict with no intention of marrying her. I was arrested by the following description of Ruby’s class of women, which could equally well apply to the young girls from Florida and Belarus whom Epstein preyed upon:

…with the men of the Ruggles class one can generally find out what they would be at, and in what direction their minds are at work. But the Ruggles woman⁠—especially the Ruggles young woman⁠—is better educated, has higher aspirations and a brighter imagination, and is infinitely more cunning than the man. If she be good-looking…her thoughts soar into a world which is as unknown to her as heaven is to us…Her education has been much better than that of the man…But her ignorance as to the reality of things is much more gross than his…To the young farmer the squire’s daughter is a superior being very much out of his way. To the farmer’s daughter the young squire is an Apollo, whom to look at is a pleasure⁠—by whom to be looked at is a delight…She thought, as the moths seem to think, that she might fly into the flame and not burn her wings.

As another character, Mrs. Hurtle (about whom, more later), puts it:

Miss Ruby isn’t the girl to have come to her time of life without a preference. The natural liking of a young woman for a man in a station above her, because he is softer and cleaner and has better parts of speech⁠—just as we keep a pretty dog if we keep a dog at all⁠—is one of the evils of the inequality of mankind.

This is what the manosphere calls hypergamy—because young women like Ruby, pretty but lower class, are able to sleep with men of higher rank, they believe these same men are going to commit to them, and thus are easy marks for callous seducers who make false promises—whether of marriage or of modeling contracts.

One step up on the social ladder, Lady Carbury (mother of the odious Felix) and her daughter Henrietta are living in distress because of Felix’s extravagance. Lady Carbury was once herself a penniless young woman who married an older man for money. He was an abusive alcoholic (again!) whose death has freed her. However, she is once-again unable to pay her bills because of her love for her awful son. Because of her own sacrifice in marriage to a man she didn’t love, she feels justified in attempting to force her daughter into an unhappy marriage with an older man. She does not, however, feel any need to tell her son to curb the spending that is ruining the family. Men must have their vices, and women must work around them.

At the top of the book’s social hierarchy, Marie Melmotte, the daughter of the great financier, is being sold to the highest bidder in marriage to keep her father’s pretense of success afloat and the daughters of the equally worthless father and son Longestaffe duo are unable to marry because of their rich-on-paper male relatives’ gambling in cards and mortgages.

For the men who preach a RETVRN to traditional values, no-fault-divorce, etc, this is the fundamental issue: one of the worst positions a woman can find herself in is under the control of a man whose vices make her life impossible.

Even Paul Montague, the book’s hero, has seduced and abandoned the widow Mrs. Hurtle. Paul’s actions are deemed forgivable because Mrs. Hurtle is American (deprecatory) and thus probably guilty of bigamy and/or killing her husband in a duel2. It is here I must confess my own bias, because Mrs. Hurtle is my favorite character. In a typically Victorian nominative flourish, she is also Paul and Henrietta’s “hurdle” to eventual marital happiness (spoiler).

In Mrs. Hurtle, we see what happens to women who attempt to avenge themselves on a man’s world. Paul promised to marry her while living in America, but changes his mind after hearing rumors about her unsavory past (and, not coincidentally, meeting the younger and more innocent Henrietta Carbury). He writes Mrs. Hurtle a letter from England ending their relationship, but she shockingly appears in London to try to win him back. When Paul explains the rumors that made him jilt her, she justifies her actions in a tour-de-force of a monologue, the kind of thing that might have gone viral in 2017 if a rape survivor read it at a trial:

You have heard that up in Oregon⁠—I shot a man. That is no lie. I did. I brought him down dead at my feet…Do you suppose that the sight of that dying wretch does not haunt me? that I do not daily hear his drunken screech, and see him bound from the earth, and then fall in a heap just below my hand? But did they tell you also that it was thus alone that I could save myself⁠—and that had I spared him, I must afterwards have destroyed myself? If I were wrong, why did they not try me for his murder? Why did the women flock around me and kiss the very hems of my garments? In this soft civilization of yours you know nothing of such necessity.

In other words, she shot a man to protect herself from what the Victorians called “a fate worse than death.” Nevertheless, Paul is disgusted with her and sees her face aging before his very eyes in the wake of her revelation.

In another passage, Mrs. Hurtle has said that “a woman’s weapon is her tongue.” Accused by Paul of physically fighting her former husband (once again, an abusive alcoholic), Mrs. Hurtle replies, “I was always fighting him. What are you to do but to fight cruelty, and fight falsehood, and fight fraud and treachery⁠—when they come upon you and would overwhelm you but for fighting?” Her self-defense is viewed as fatally unfeminine, and Paul will not marry her.

What else can we think of here but the slandering of Epstein’s victims as crazy, as tramps, as sluts? Their speech is their only weapon, and it is a a doubtful one. The woman who defends herself from men’s vices by unseemly means, whether via gun or tongue, is rendered unfeminine and subject to doubt by the very fact of her resistance.

As for the political commentary of the book, the complete submission of political beliefs to the power of capital is the main theme. One character is said to have “but a confused idea of any difference between commerce and fraud,” and so it is with most of the characters whether on the right of the political spectrum—where fraud is absolved by commercial success—or the left side—where commercial success is assumed to be the product of fraud. The more things change, the more things stay the same, and the horseshoe theory of politics prevails.

Ultimately the heroes of the book are the two young women who manage to live independent lives after being jilted by Sir Felix—Marie Melmotte, whom he intended to marry for her money, and Ruby Ruggles, the farmer’s daughter whom he seduced and abandoned. Marie’s fate is to depart for San Francisco, where the real scammers are, married to an upstart American financier/grifter. There are parallels here with the life of Ghislaine Maxwell, who also fled England for America after the suicide of her powerful, disgraced father.

In the Epstein case, most of the main heroes and victims are dead or in jail. In the novel, it is debated whether a member of the British royal family can attend a party at Melmotte’s home: “it’s rather an awkward thing, letting the Prince go to dine with a man who perhaps may have been arrested and taken to gaol before dinnertime.” In this case, a British prince has himself been arrested.

Epstein himself, of course, died by suicide in jail. Virginia Guiffre died by her own hand in the wilds of Australia, an example of the way in which a woman’s only weapon, her tongue, can be turned against her. She can die by its sharpness—she can choke on it—or be choked—like Jeffrey in his lonely cell. Ghislaine Maxwell is in jail in Florida, and former Prince Andrew’s fate hangs in the balance. Donald Trump, as usual, seems likely to face no consequences for his inconvenient friendship with Epstein, but then again, neither do any of Epstein’s other political friends from both left and right of American politics.

The way we live now is the the way we have been living for quite some time—to the exploitation of young girls by capital, and the selling of their virtue for worthless shares in chimerical enterprises, there is no end in sight.

I’ve always thought of Mallorca as the perfect location for Dracula’s winter palace—austere, melancholy, arresting. More than once, when driving through the northern mountains, I’ve asked someone else in the car, “Cómo se dice spooky?” I’ve never gotten a satisfactory answer. Consulting Google Translate returns escalofriante (literally “giving hot-cold chills,” and better translated as “hair-raising” or “blood-curdling”), misterioso (“mysterious”, not at all the same as “spooky”), and fantasmal. Fantasma means ghost—and while fantasmal—“ghostly”—is not the same as spooky, it may be the best descriptor for Mallorca.

The word spooky contains an inherent silliness which is not consonant with the Mallorquin character as I have come to know it. Fantasmal is a serious word, and fantasmal is what Mallorca is. I am always coming across ghosts here.

There is, for example, a well-known ghost story about Lluc, the spiritual center of the island. Lluc is a sanctuary on top of a mountain which houses a statue of the Our Lady once said to be miraculous. Once upon a time, there was once a beautiful young woman who lived in a village at the foot of the mountain. She was pious and virtuous, but her wicked fiancé was nonetheless jealous because of her great beauty. One day, he invited her to go with him to visit the sanctuary, knowing the pilgrimage would appeal to her piety. When they had ascended to the halfway point of the climb, the fiancé became mad with jealousy and pushed the young woman over the edge of the mountain. Immediately wracked with guilt, he ran the rest of the way to the sanctuary to beg forgiveness from the miraculous statue. When he entered the church, he found his fiancé peacefully kneeling before the statue, having been miraculously saved from death.

If I had written this story, it would end with the beautiful young woman then throwing her fiancé off the mountain, but that’s not how it ends. According to legend, she married her would-be assassin and they lived happily ever after. I wonder: was he living with the woman herself, or with her ghost, haunting him perpetually for his crime? I hope it was the latter.

The sinister quality that the island has may come from the harshness of its terrain. For centuries, Mallorquins struggled to scratch a living from the rocky soil, with results that now impress the viewer. From afar, the transition from rocky mountainsides to man-made stone walls and churches is almost imperceptible, a fine gradient sifting the work of God from the work of man. The first time I visited Mallorca, almost fifteen years ago, I noticed that the leaves and branches of the olive trees are wild and irregular on top but mowed flat as a board on the bottom. I later found out that this regular trimming is done by hungry goats. The trees can thrive only above the exact height which the goats’ mouths can reach—above, the harvest for man; below, the gleanings for beast.

Mallorquins like to say that if you arranged all the stone walls that criss-cross Mallorca into one straight line, it would be longer than the Great Wall of China. This may be true.

What is certainly true is that in each tiny plot of land, the rocks were laboriously dug out of the soil and used to create the walls simply because there was no other place to store such a quantity of stone—and stone will not feed hungry mouths. The walls are beautiful, but they represent human hunger and toil. Until the tourism boom in the 1960s, Mallorca was one of the poorest regions in Spain. A member of my Mallorquin family told me that when he was a child in the 1950’s, penicillin was so impossible to obtain that when his younger brother fell dangerously ill, his father had to contract with a contrabandist to smuggle it in from British Gibraltar. The contrabandist brought the penicillin in by boat, leaving it in a cave with the rest of his blackmarket goods to be collected by shepherds with handcarts.

Now, thanks to tourism, Mallorca has become one of the richest regions of Spain. But, as any reader of ghost stories will tell you, if you make a deal that turns stones into gold, there will be a catch. In choosing wealth, Mallorca has been forced to sell off its own patrimony, piece by piece. The coasts are full of foreigners, generally German and English, and the Mallorquin language, which patriots fought to preserve through the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, is now in danger of falling victim to globalization. Mallorquins are now too rich to break their backs tilling the soil for stones to build their famous walls, so they are built by Moroccan immigrants.

One of the first Anglo revenants on Mallorca was Robert Graves. Traumatized by his service in World War I, he sought relief from the modern, industrializing world of his native England in the then-hopelessly-remote village of Deià, in the northern mountains of Mallorca. There he wrote his memoir Good-bye to All That, which recounted his time in the trenches and announced his permanent farewell to England. He became a celebrated writer in the English speaking world, producing such classics as I, Claudius and The White Goddess, but he commented that the only way he was able to live a peaceful life amongst his Mallorquin neighbors was that he deliberately never had his books translated into Spanish. Noah Kumin, in a recent piece for Romanticon (to which I have also contributed), expounded on the death wish that seemed to unite Robert Graves and his American lover Laura Riding as they descended into a folie à deux in Mallorca in the 1920s and 30s, believing that they could stop time itself. Any Anglo visitor to a Mediterranean island can sympathize with the feeling that time here has stopped, even if they don’t share Graves’ and Riding’s other more exotic beliefs.

Before moving to Mallorca, I made a painting about its ghosts and legends, images of which illustrate this article. Having painted it from memory in New York, I decided to bring it with me, and, as I write this, it is floating somewhere over the Atlantic in a 40-foot-long container on a ship.

I have noticed something curious which other Americans do when they ask about my move to Mallorca. They first ask several questions about how to access Mallorca by train or car. After I have repeated several times that it is, in fact, an island, they give up and say that they hope I will be happy there, with the clear implication that they believe I will henceforth be lost and inaccessible to all human contact. Good-bye to all that.

I have often observed that Manhattan is the island on earth that feels least like an island. When you decide to leave New York, people there treat you like you are dying. They pat your arm gently and wish you good luck in the the great beyond—but their eyes say that they don’t believe for a second you will find it. “I guess we’ll all have to leave…someday…” they say, and it’s clear from their tone they don’t believe it will ever be their turn.

I know that it is possible to live outside of New York because I was born in Texas. When the Spaniards first landed in the Americas, they estimated that their new territories might be as large as three Spains. They were, of course, dramatically underestimating what they had found. Early in the Spanish conquest, in 1528, a man named Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca shipwrecked on an unknown island he called Malhado which we can loosely translate as “The Bad Place.” It took him 7 years of walking to reach Spanish civilization in Mexico City. When he appeared, people who had known him before took him for a ghost. The island he landed on is now called Galveston, and it is where I spent my summers as a child. But no one in my family lives in Texas anymore—Galveston is, for me, another Island of Ghosts.

When I closed my eyes at home, on the mainland, in Texas, I could feel the continent stretching on and on in all directions. On an island, I have to resist the sensation of being trapped. I can feel the sea closing in on me on all sides—if you can’t get into your car and drive for hours, until you reach another state, another country, another continent, where are you?

But I’m fighting this feeling. Out into the world, like a message in a bottle, I send my greetings from the Island of Ghosts.

***

The most surprising obsession that the novice reader of the Marquis de Sade will encounter on beginning The 120 Days of Sodom is, without a doubt, math. From the title onwards, numbers and counting are a compulsion, rivaling sex, violence, and incarceration for most conspicuous theme in his work. Consider the following early passage, on the procurement of suitable virgins:

Sixteen intelligent procuresses, each accompanied by two lieutenants, were sent into the sixteen major provinces of France, while a seventeenth was occupied with the same work in Paris only. Each of these outfitters was given a rendezvous at one of the Duc’s estates on the outskirts of Paris, and all of them were to appear there, during the same week, exactly ten months after the date of their departure - this was the period they were given for searching. Each was to bring back nine subjects, which came to a total of one hundred and fifty-three girls, from which one hundred and fifty-three a choice of only eight was to be made.

More than erotic fiction, this sounds like a problem from the math section of the SAT. If one procuress leaves Paris at 2 PM going 30 mph and another leaves Lyon at 3 PM going 20 mph…. From the beginning, the reader senses more pleasure being taken in the numbers than in the pleasures.

When I first picked up the 120 Days of Sodom, I was amazed by the sheer number of numbers thrown at the reader. An almost sensual pleasure in addition accrues as, with de Sade, we count our way through libertines (4), aged courtesan-cum-storytellers (4), studs (8), kidnapped virgins (16; 8 boys and 8 girls), categorized pleasures (600), and, of course, days (120). For the de Sade novice, a primer: the very plot of The 120 Days of Sodom is a tale told in numbers. Four libertines assemble four aged courtesans, eight virile young men, and sixteen virgins in a remote castle. They plan to stay there for 120 days. Each night for a month, one of the courtesans will tell 5 tales of debaucherous pleasures, which escalate in wickedness from day to day. At the end of the 120 days, 600 tales of pleasures will have been told. They are divided into four parts comprising 30 days and 150 tales each. Go ahead and check the math. It checks out.

Here are some more of the numbers in the 120 Days:

• 2 million: the number of louis spent by the libertines on creating their fantasy

• 4: the number of supper-orgies held weekly by the four libertines in one of four country houses at the four edges of Paris

• 10: the number of bottles of wine the Duc de Blangis, one of the libertines, drinks daily

• 32: the number of teeth that Marie, one of the aged courtesans, has

• 14: the number of children she has whelped, then killed “from fear they’d turn out ne’er-do-wells”

• 6: the number of times Fanchon, the fourth courtesan, has been hung in effigy

My informal analysis suggests that de Sade loves submissive numbers: numbers that are easily divisible, that can be split into two and four and eight and twelve and then reconstituted. If you encounter 16 virgins in de Sade, you can be sure that you will soon hear about their erotic adventures in groups of 2, 4, and 8, and that you will never be allowed to enter the world of prime numbers, and only rarely the world of odd ones. Threesomes are allowed, but foursomes are better. De Sade is, in a word, anal.

When the words “anal” and “de Sade” appear in the same sentence, the reader could be forgiven for assuming the worst. But de Sade is anal in the non-obscene sense of the word as well as the obscene one. His counting is meticulous. He seems to delight in careful counting, making his numbers add up and thoughtfully choosing complementary numbers for each orgy. God forbid that anyone be left out. I myself am anal in the same decorous way as de Sade, and, though after each orgy I pause to check his math, I have never found him in error when it comes to numbers of partners.

As the end of the book approaches, an anal Sade reader like me may become nervous, noticing that while The 120 Days is nearly over, the 120 days are not. The remaining pages dwindle, but more than three-quarters of the promised 600 pleasures remain to be told, as well as 90 of the promised days.

De Sade, writing in frantic haste from his prison cell in the Bastille as the French Revolution approached, entered into a kind of numerary trance. The final three parts, as the “pleasures” become more violent and extreme, are merely a long numbered list.

53. He goes to confession for the sole purpose of making his confessor’s prick rise aloft; he lists a quantity of infamous misdeeds, and frigs himself in the confessional all the while he speaks.

54. He wishes the girl to go and make her confession, then fucks her orally the moment she emerges from the confessional.

55. He fucks a whore throughout a mass being said in his private chapel, and discharges when the Host is raised.

Note, in number 53, the list within the list. As de Sade sheds all narrative and framing, we see only numbers, stretching into the future...

57. He locks her into a black dungeon, surrounded by cats, rats, and mice; he gives her to understand she has been put there for the rest of her life, and every day he goes to her door, frigs himself, and banters with her.

59. He attaches a girl to a St. Andrew’s cross suspended in the air, and whips her with all his might, flaying her entire back. After which, he unties her and casts her out through a window, but mattresses are there to lighten her fall, upon hearing which he discharges. Give further details of the scene in order to justify his reaction

Racing against time, de Sade begins to make mistakes. At the end of part two, having arrived at 151 pleasures instead of the planned 150, he writes a note to himself:

(Find out why there is one too many.)

At the end of part three he has again miscounted and ended up with 151 pleasures. He again writes to himself:

(Determine why there is one too many; if one is to be deleted, suppress the last, for I believe I have already used it.).

By the end of part four, the reader is able to resolve the Mystery of the Two Extra Pleasures, although apparently de Sade was too distracted by this point to figure it out. This time, he arrives at 148 pleasures and notes:

148. The last passion.

(But why the last? Where are the other two? They were all there in the original outline.)

“They’re in the other two sections!” we long to shout at him, but, alas, this future correction never came. Before he could re-tally his numbers and fill out the numbered list with detail, Sade’s number, as it were, came up. On July 4th, 1789, he was removed from the prison cell he had spent 10 years in, 10 days before the Bastille was stormed by a revolutionary mob on July 14th. The modern numbers obsessive admires the conjunction of these two most famous dates for liberty in the life of the most famous libertine and hopes de Sade had time to appreciate the satisfying confluence of 10s later on in life.

In the moment, he only had time to hide his masterpiece in a literal hole in a wall, hoping, presumably, that he could one day reclaim it. He was never able to. Like the suitcase of drafts Hemingway’s first wife Hadley left on a train, de Sade’s lost manuscripts became a major source of strain in his marriage. His wife was supposed to claim them from the Bastille, but in the chaos of the early days of the Revolution, she was unable to. De Sade excoriated his wife for this failure, writing to his lawyer later to ask, rhetorically and melodramatically, “whether Mme de Sade, who had ten days in which to act, can be forgiven for allowing me to be robbed of…the manuscripts for which I mourn every day in tears of blood.”

I must admit that even I, an admirer of de Sade so devoted that I have read literally hundreds of his pages on coprophilia, think he could have let up on his wife for this one. She did, after all, put up with a lot, and, as the wife of a Marquis and thus an aristocrat, she was busy fleeing Paris for her life.

The final page of The 120 Days is an addition in the French sense, a tallying of morbid pleasures at the end of a wicked meal:

FINAL ASSESSMENT

Massacred prior to the 1st of March,

in the course of the orgies: 10

Massacred after the 1st of March: 20

Survived and came back: 16

Total: 46

With what regards the tortures and deaths of the last twenty subjects, and life such as it was in the household until the day of departure, you will give details at your leisure and where you see fit, you will say, first of all, that thirteen of the sixteen survivors (three of whom were cooks) took all their meals together; sprinkle in whatever tortures you like.

The Marquis de Sade died not knowing the fate of The 120 Days, and we read it with the numbers accounted for, nicely tallied up, but the details left out. Following the death of the Marquis de Sade, his noble family was so embarrassed by their most famous member that for generations they did not use the infamous title Marquis de Sade and instead referred to whichever head of the family was current as the Comte (or Count) de Sade. Does one dare invoke Sesame Street’s Count von Count (I count the spiders on the wall...I count the cobwebs in the hall...I count the candles on the shelf...When I’m alone, I count myself!)? I can imagine him cheerfully tallying de Sade’s type of objects: One monk, two virgins, three sisters, four libertines…

Nearly half of the Marquis de Sade’s life was spent behind bars, most of it in indefinite detention. This means the majority of his writing falls under the category of prison writings. He was imprisoned originally under a lettre de cachet, one of the most hated symbols of the ancien regime. Lettres de cachet were arrest warrants in the form of letters signed by the king that merely stated that the recipient would be imprisoned, with no charges or release date given. It seems inevitable that the Marquis de Sade must have counted his days, weeks, months, years, in prison, but what good was such counting?

He knew the start date of his incarceration but had no idea what the end date would be. His love of numbers thus presents itself as a horror of the infinite. Combine this with his horror of conception, pregnancy and motherhood–in other words, a fear of zero, of the act of potential and generation that zero promises–and his love of numbers becomes more legible.

Early in his imprisonment he wrote to his wife:

In the sixty-five days I’ve been here, I’ve breathed only five hours of fresh air, on five separate occasions, in a sort of cemetery some forty feet square, surmounted by walls over fifty feet high...Ten or twelve minutes a day, I’m in the company of the man who brings me food. I spend the rest of my time in solitude, weeping.

In fact, the early days of his imprisonment may be where his obsession with numbers began. During his first imprisonment, as Francine du Plessix Grey points out in At Home with the Marquis de Sade, he began to see chimerical numerical codes in the letters he received, which he hopefully interpreted to refer to the date of his release. Writing on the margin of a letter from his wife:

Received on the 29th, plus 9 equals 38, which leads to August 1780.

Elsewhere:

I’m constantly finding marks on every 36 lines. I was hopeful that it meant ‘36 weeks.’ But...do they refer to months?

Numerology and kabbalah were fashionable in the eighteenth century, and du Plessix Grey writes that in prison de Sade “invented a bizarre alphabet wherein each number “signaled” certain human emotions--home, aggressiveness, deceit, etc.” He himself received the moniker Monsieur le 6 from his jailers in reference to his cell number. I hope the roundness and divisibility of this numerical identity satisfied him.

I imagine him in his cell–counting days, counting virgins, counting weeks, counting courtesans, counting years, counting pleasures. Anything to make the infinite time pass more quickly. At least on paper, he could make the numbers add up: from a clear beginning to a finite ending; from an independent and hopeful 1 to a round and harmonious 120.

In Louis XIV’s day, it was common for fashionable court ladies to commission paintings of themselves as the penitent Mary Magdalene. They beat their heaving bosoms in paintings while baring them in the gaming rooms at Versailles. Aesthetically, the contrast was much like Dasha Nekrasova posting thirst traps in between musings on Catholic dogma on Instagram.

Should we consider these acts of hypocrisy in puritanical terms (i.e. as pathetic and culpable) or in artistic ones? These women desired painted doppelgängers who performed the piety they were too weak to perform in life. In other words, they wanted their own pictures of Dorian Gray. At least two of Louis XIV’s mistresses voluntarily left court to join convents, where they were noted for their piety in later life. Perhaps François de La Rochefoucauld thought of such women when he wrote in his aphorisms that “Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue”—a phrase that has always sat well with me, a poor sinner and hypocrite myself. Louis XIV’s ex-mistresses were some of the first refugees from increasingly mainstream secularism back to the Church.

On the subject of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde himself was a late in life Catholic convert, returning to his cradle Catholicism after his brutal, health-destroying imprisonment. Many suspected the trollish Wilde of insincerity, or simply of having running out of other ways to shock society, but his conversion was apparently sincere. Such accusations of insincerity or trolling are commonly directed at Catholic converts today.

Lest we forget, Ernest Hemingway was also a Catholic convert—not as an act of expediency to marry his second wife Pauline in 1927, as some believe, but apparently in a foxhole when he served on the Italian front in World War I. A glance at The Sun Also Rises, reveals many scenes of prayer in Catholic churches and late-night bedrooms.

Lesser known today is the writer J.K.Huysmans, who after writing the popular decadent work À rebours (Against Nature) in 1884 wrote a tetrology inspired by his own Catholic conversion in the 1890s. The first and most famous of the works, Là-bas (an untranslatable French phrase meaning “Down There” but connoting “Hell”), introduces the series’ hero, the writer Durtal, who, bored by his secular life in modern Paris, becomes obsessed by the occult of the Middle Ages. He fixates on becoming a Satanist and being allowed to witness a legendary Black Mass supposedly held on the outskirts of Paris. The book culminates in his attendance of the Black Mass which reveals it to be nothing but a boring, shabby attempt at a spectacle—a pantomime of rebelling against a God no one present really believes in. The women are ugly, the priest pathetic—a sham from beginning to end. Those who persevere in the series follow Durtal’s conversion to Catholicism, which mirrors Huysmans’ own. The writer eventually became an oblate (a lay Catholic monk), shocking his decadent friends.

Jean Cocteau, the avant-garde novelist, filmmaker, and artist turned back to the Catholic Church of his birth after recovering from opium addiction in his forties. He was buried, by his request, in the floor of a 12th century Catholic chapel. Salvador Dalí collaborated with Luis Buñuel to write the 1930 film L’Age d’Or, which was considered so heretical that the Catholic Church threatened its French aristocratic funders with excommunication. By 1949, Dalí had publicly announced his reversion to his Catholic faith. Otto Dix, who became famous for his prints depicting the godless world of the trenches of World War I, spent his life after World War II creating traditional Catholic works: the Gospel of Matthew, the Passion, the Crucifixion. Bob Dylan, the boomer messiah, is confirmed to be a Christian convert, and rumored to be a Roman Catholic.

I could go on, but to me, the conversion of artists to Catholicism seems like the most natural trajectory imaginable. What is the Catholic Church, in fact, but the greatest art project in the history of the world? On my first day of art school in New York City, one of my professors, an eminent conceptual artist born in the 1940s, waxed poetic about God. “What you will learn about New York,” he said, “is that no one talks about God. When I was a child in the midwest, I was always jealous of the Catholics. They have ceremony…” He later recused himself from critiquing a performance art piece I made on the basis that he found it “unbearably sexy.” I am not now, nor have I ever been, a performance artist, but I was trying to fit in.

When critics suggest that young people are only converting for the “aesthetics” of the Church, it raises the question: what are aesthetics for? In the case of Catholic architecture, music, painting, and other art forms, they have an explicit purpose: to draw the mind of man to God. If a person converts to Catholicism for aesthetics, the aesthetics are working as designed. After trying psychedelics for the first time, shortly after experimenting with performance art, I purchased a copy of Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, from which I remember little, but I remember the essay it was published with, Heaven and Hell. In it, Huxley proposes the idea that the great Gothic cathedrals were themselves drug art, inspiring psychedelic experiences in the rural peasants who visited them when suffering from mind-bending malnutrition. In my own case, I eventually got tired of holding the aesthetics of the Catholic Church that so moved me at an ironic distance—the only thing left to do with such emotion was to take it seriously.

In fact, in many ways, Catholic aesthetics are a victim of their own success. When we see Catholic images as “creepy” or see them through the the eyes of the occult, it is because of artists who have appropriated the power of their imagery. Nuns bleeding through the eyes, young girls stabbing themselves with a crucifix—these images, originally shocking to viewers, stole valor from images developed over centuries of Catholic art, as a shortcut to communicate power, majesty, sanctity—and horror. The co-optation of Catholic images has been so complete that, to many people, they call to mind cheap horror movies rather than holiness.

I must confess here that I have a personal connection to a Catholic aesthetic scandal. In 2022, I was confirmed into the Catholic Church and married in the same parish where Sabrina Carpenter later shot the infamous 2023 Feather music video that led to a rebuke of the parish priest by the Bishop of Brooklyn and, according to Sabrina, contributed to the subsequent investigation of Eric Adams. When I first saw the video, I was not shocked—just bored. In fact, what could be less shocking than a pretty young woman gyrating on the altar of a Catholic Church? It is a copy of a copy of a copy of something that shocked someone once. The iconography of Catholicism has been so commercially exploited that it has lost its power to offend.

There are many paintings from the Middle Ages representing the Incarnation. This is the moment in which God chose to assume a physical body in the form of a fragile male baby. The subject was so often repeated in the era (the Feast of the Incarnation was a major holiday) because, to the pre-modern mind, the idea of God existing did not need to be proved or emphasized—it was assumed. No, what was tough to swallow was not that God existed, but that God would choose to become a lowly human. In our materialistic era, this can be hard to understand—we today struggle to believe in the existence of God at all. Leo Steinberg, in his magisterial work The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, writes about how artists of the early Renaissance had no hesitance in painting Christ nude—it was important to show him not just as a human but as a fully virile man. It was only when people started disbelieving in God that they wanted to cover His nakedness. His penis was no longer proof of His humanity—it was disproof of His divinity.

Is it possible for us to regain the power to be shocked? By a woman’s sexuality? By God’s Incarnation? By His naked body? The mass conversion of artists has been overstated, but it reveals something real—the desire of the modern artist to retain enough humanity to believe in the sacred—enough humanity be shocked.

Have women, especially young women, been materially changed by the OnlyFans era? The excesses are disturbing—OnlyFans stars Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips have recently generated virality with extreme stunts and large numbers of partners (Of course, we are only speaking of virality in the disembodied sense here).

Thomas Picketty, in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, popularized the thesis that we had returned to an era like the one in which Marx formulated his ideas, the mid nineteenth century. It is nearly impossible to get ahead financially by waged labor, as it may briefly have been in the twentieth century. The only means of safety is in owning capital.

A body can be capital, but it is surely the most quickly depreciating kind. A beautiful woman who aims to get by on her looks is aware that each passing day entails a markdown in the value of her assets. The frank conversion of face and body to money in the digital era, either through OnlyFans, escorting, influencing, or some combination of the above is neither new nor unique, although, like everything online, it is more extreme.

In fact, the last time women selling sex attained such a central place in society and the cultural conversation was the same era that Thomas Picketty writes about. In the middle of the nineteenth century, in wealthy countries, high-class prostitutes became more financially successful than ever, more famous than ever, and thus more openly discussed. They were known by various names, most often courtesans—a rank higher than common street prostitutes, but very clearly not ladies. Were they ruining society? Were they merely a symptom of society’s degeneration at the hands of greedy capitalists? They used the new technologies of the time, including photography, to self-promote. Like today’s OnlyFans models, they existed in a zone of plausible deniability. They were dancers, singers, actresses, milliners—but their actual trade was in their own sexuality. Also like today’s OnlyFans models, they had a similar “look"—instead of today’s duck-lips, fillers, and toned bodies, they were voluptuous, with strong, sometimes almost masculine facial features. They also gave themselves new names—today, it’s Bonnie, Lily, Sofia. Then, it was Olympia, Marguerite, Valtesse.

Their rise was very much linked to the rise of banking and financial speculation replacing land and estates as the major currency of the Western elite. Prior to the nineteenth century, even the wealthiest men had much of their wealth tied up in inherited land and houses which legally could not be sold. Thus, they could only spend so much on women. With the rise of financial speculation, often tied to building projects like canals and railroads, men of all ages and backgrounds were able to amass vast fortunes in cash quickly. Easy come, easy go—money won in a morning by investing in a new South American rail line might be spent in the evening in the company of a fashionable courtesan.

In the same way, the rise of Bitcoin and other crypto assets empowered a generation of young men to speculate financially and blow their quickly acquired assets on, among other things, women. NFTs and OnlyFans rose at the same time, just like impressionism and courtesans.

In the nineteenth century, young women flocked to the capitals, in particular Paris, to engage in their own speculation, with their bodies, not their pocketbooks, as capital. In Grandes Horizontales, Virginia Rounding tells the story of this era through the lives of four women who struck it rich as Paris courtesans. Marie Duplessis, the earliest and in many ways tamest of the women, was dead of tuberculosis before her twenty-fourth birthday in 1847. She emerged from the French countryside into Paris at the age of fifteen, after already enduring a history of childhood sexual abuse. She quickly rose to become the most famous courtesan in Paris, well-known for her demure, elegant apparel and demeanor. Born to a traveling peddler, she died a comtesse. Alexandre Dumas fils, a lover, immortalized her as La Dame aux camélias in a classic novel mirroring her life and death which was itself turned into the opera La Traviata.

As the nineteenth century progressed, courtesans became richer and more brazen. Rounding also recounts the tale of Blanche de Païva, who was born Esther Lachmann to Russian Jewish parents in 1819. By the time she was twenty-two, she had changed her name several times and was already a well-known courtesan. She famously tried to attend an audience with the King and Queen of France at the Tuileries with her common-law-husband, but was rebuffed at the door by a lackey—at which point she broke her fan and threw it in her “husband’s” face in a rage. Many lovers and several husbands later, she died as the owner of one of the finest homes in Paris, Hôtel de la Païva, which stills stands today, and as the chatelaine of a castle in Upper Silesia, Schloss Neudeck.

Newspapers, novelists, and playwrights decried and debated this new class of ultra-rich prostitutes, associating them with societal decay. Frequently, there was anti-semitism mixed into the critiques as it was assumed that Jewish bankers were behind both the rise in speculation and prostitution.

One of the masterpieces of this period is Nana by Émile Zola. I first read it when I was a twenty-year-old in dizzying post-financial collapse New York, and I was entirely shocked at how Zola had managed to inhabit the mind of a young woman. Nana uses her sexuality to destroy the most powerful men in Paris. Rather than show her as a cackling, champagne-swilling villain who enjoys her power, he paints a picture of a woman who is living in a constant state of anxiety, afraid about the next bill coming due, panicked about how to keep her many admirers apart so that she can avoid conflicts and earn enough money to keep herself, nervous about her young child in the countryside, depressed at the prospect of having to sleep with a distasteful man for cash. She is, however, not an idealized, flawless victim of the kind Dickens or Hugo might create. She is petty, small-minded, greedy, and at times brutally sadistic—characteristics that Zola observes come from her wretched childhood in the slums of Paris and early sexual exploitation, which has inculcated in her a desire for revenge on the wealthy men of Paris. He creates a fully rounded female character that is entirely believable—entirely the sort of character that might be created and thrive in such an environ—neither demon or saint.

When will we get the great OnlyFans novel, and who will write it? I hope that it is in progress already.

Sources

Carbonel, M.-H., & Figuero, J. (2003). La véritable biographie de la Belle Otero et de la Belle Époque : ruine‑moi, mais ne me quitte pas. Fayard.

Kavanagh, J. (2014). The girl who loved camellias : The life and legend of Marie Duplessis. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century. Harvard University Press.

Rounding, V. (2003). Les Grandes Horizontales: The lives and legends of four nineteenth‑century courtesans. Bloomsbury.

Zola, É. (2017). Nana (Tite Fée, Éd.). Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. (Original work published 1880)

The divorce memoir is, thus, not a new genre, but it might surprise some fans to learn how old the genre really is. In fact, amongst the first memoirs published by European women under their own names were divorce memoirs of a sort. In the 1670s, two sisters, Marie Mancini and Hortense Mancini, wrote and published narratives to recount and justify their decisions to leave their husbands. While they were never able to legally divorce their husbands, they shocked Europe by choosing to leave them—permanently. Their short memoirs still make surprisingly lively, modern reading, and are available in an excellent English translation by Sarah Nelson, associate professor of French in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Idaho. I am much indebted to Professor Nelson’s scholarship, which includes an online database of Marie Mancini’s letters.

Marie and Hortense were born into great, if recently attained, privilege. Their father was a Roman noble, but their maternal uncle, Cardinal Mazarin, had risen to become one of the most powerful men in Europe. Born in 1602, Cardinal Mazarin had made his career at the French court, where he became the machiavellian advisor to Louis XIII. Since he was a Catholic cleric and thus childless, Mazarin hoped to cement his ties to the French aristocracy through the marriages of his nieces and nephews. When Marie and Hortense were young children, he summoned them, along with their mother, to the French court in Paris. One of their older sisters had already made an advantageous French marriage, and it was hoped that Marie and Hortense could be even more successful. As Sarah Nelson writes in her introduction to her translation of Hortense and Marie’s memoirs, “their standing..[in France]...was entirely dependent on the power and wealth of their uncle, Cardinal Mazarin, and on the marriage alliances he managed to forge between their family and the leading families of France. Conversely, the continuance of the cardinal’s power and wealth depended at least in part on the status he was able to establish for his nieces through strategic marriages.” While advantageous marriages were achieved, almost nothing else went as planned.

Marie Mazarin was the same age as the young king Louis XIV. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, she was dismissed by her mother, considered less attractive than her sisters. She was too thin for the beauty standards of the time, too bookish, too athletic. In other words, she stands out to the modern observer as an exemplar of our own idea of an attractive woman. To everyone’s great surprise, she caught the eye of the king over a summer in 1658, when they were both 19. A steamy romance, spurred on by reading out loud to each other, and horse-back riding, began. Yearning ensued. Like many a passionate teenage romance, it was apparently never actually consummated–which may have made the romance even more intense.

Amongst the power-brokers at court, amusement at the unlikely affair turned to dismay as Louis XIV seemed to be bewitched by Marie, and seriously considering marriage. This was unthinkable. Contemporary geopolitics necessitated that Louis XIV marry a Spanish princess in order to bring peace to the warring realms. Even setting this aside, Marie was far lower than Louis in terms of blood and nobility–his marriage to her would be a scandalous mésalliance decried throughout Europe. Her surprising appeal threatened to undo the influence her uncle had spent decades amassing in France. He was violently opposed to the match, but, of course, no one believed him. The French nobles assumed the relationship was all a devious Italian plot engineered by the sinister Cardinal.

The young lovers were at last forcibly parted, after impassioned recollections of duty were applied to Louis by his mother. In floods of tears, he renounced Marie and sent her away–he did not trust himself when she was near. She was banished to a remote castle until the king’s Spanish marriage was completed. Anyone who has ever been a teenager in love can imagine what she suffered. In her memoir, she wrote eloquently of this time:

“…I cannot conceal the pain that this separation caused me; nothing has hurt me so deeply in my life. All possible suffering seemed to me as nothing in comparison with this absence. There was not a moment when I did not wish for death, as the only cure for my ills. In short, I was in a state which cannot possibly be expressed either by what I have just said or by any stronger terms.

There is scarcely a wretch who does not harbor some hope of relief for his pain…But all the difficulties were surmounted, and only my misfortune proved invincible.”

Watching her throughout was her young sister, Hortense, only thirteen.

After the king was married, Marie was brought back to court. The Cardinal, while opposed to a marriage, was very open to pushing Marie into the King’s bed as an acknowledged mistress. Marie refused, out of dignity rather than moral scruples. Her position at court was now nearly unbearable–she had to watch the King’s delight in his new, young wife and serve the Queen as her absolute inferior. Although she adored France and considered herself nearly a Frenchwoman, she decided she would rather rule in Italy than serve in France. In a fit of recklessness characteristic of her, Marie agreed to a marriage with an Italian prince, Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna. By signing the marriage contract, she effectively agreed to leave behind her liberated life in France forever, beginning a new future in the more conservative Italy. In 1661, she began her journey to her homeland.

Meanwhile, Hortense was growing into a stunningly beautiful adolescent. Her sister’s romantic tale added to her mystique. Resolving not to miss this second opportunity, Cardinal Mazarin plotted an early marriage for her. From the time she was nine or ten, Armand-Charles de La Porte de la Meilleraye, who was fifteen years her senior, had been besotted with her. Armand-Charles was wealthy and noble, but also, unfortunately, insane. Even by the standards of the time, he was considered a religious fanatic, especially severe on the morals of women. It is curious–or perhaps, not so curious–that this jealous, puritanical man wanted for his wife a girl who was considered ravishingly beautiful and quite wild, known for parties and mild scandals. The Cardinal was on his deathbed when he reluctantly agreed to the marriage. The couple was married on the heels of the Cardinal’s death–the bride was fourteen, the groom twenty-nine.

Armand-Charles quickly showed his abusive side. He sequestered Hortense in her home, not allowing her to see anyone and suborning any servant who might try to help her. He was known for knocking the genitals off the Roman statues he had inherited, removing the teeth of his female servants so they would not tempt any man and thus commit a sin, and whipping himself.

By her twentieth birthday, Hortense had given birth to four children in an environment of escalating abuse, Hortense was desperate. For years, she endeavored to get a legal separation from her husband. At the time, an aristocrat who left her husband would be considered in violation of the law unless she had a court ruling. Things came to a head when, late one night, her husband demanded she surrender all her jewels to him. Her horrified reaction had nothing to do with female vanity or cupidity. At this time, European women were not allowed to own any real estate, cash, or other valuables apart from their husband. The only items of value they possessed in their own name were their jewels. Thus, a woman’s jewels were her only insurance policy against an abusive or insane husband. In an extremity, she could sell them to escape or maintain herself and her children. Without them, she would be well and truly trapped–a duchess on paper, but without a cent to flee. I will recount the dramatic tale in her own words from her memoir:

“...there was almost nothing of value left to me but my jewels when Monsieur Mazarin [Armand-Charles] took it into his head to seize them from me. He took advantage of his opportunity to lay hold of them one evening when I came home very late from the city…Monsieur Mazarin, who, as you will see, had taken steps to keep me from going out when I wished and to make a prison of my palace, threw himself in front of me and pushed me very roughly, in order to block my way; but my grief and vexation gave me extraordinary strength, and I broke through even though he was strong, too. And though he screamed like mad out the window to close all the doors and especially the gate of the courtyard, nobody, when they saw me all in tears, dared to obey him. I went around to the other side through the street, which was very crowded, in this sad state, alone, on foot, and in the middle of the day, to reach my usual refuge. This scandal was the result of the care he had taken to wall up the doors that led from my brother’s palace to ours, and by which I had run away the previous time; but those who heard about this precaution judged from it that he had no intention, if I were to return to him, of treating me any better than in the past, since he was trying to ensure that kind of control for the future.”

With great bravery, the twenty-two year old planned her escape. A literal fugitive, she fled in the night, hoping to reach her sister in Italy. The Duke of Savoy, an admirer, gave her refuge, but she was still an outlaw and could not return to France without running the risk of being legally forced to return to living with her husband. Eventually, she made her way to Rome to live with Marie.

Marie’s marriage, while initially lavishly celebrated and containing real affection, became a disaster. In particular, Marie bristled at the more conservative regulations on women’s behavior in Italy compared to her beloved France. Her difficult marital relations got worse when Marie, after giving birth to her husband’s third son, declared that she wished to end their sexual relations and have no more children. As she wrote in her memoir, “since this gift [i.e. the birth of the child] cost me much dearer than the first two, and even threatened my life, I took the view that I should give [my husband] no more of these gifts which might expose me to such perils. However, it was not enough for me to have made this resolution, if he did not confirm it with his consent.”

This decision may have been influenced by the trauma of the death of one of Marie’s older sisters in childbirth when Marie was eighteen. Marie eventually came to fear that her husband was plotting her murder. Moreover, after having spent her formative years in the more modern French court, Marie chafed under the restrictions placed on Italian women and was constantly creating scandals. Eventually, she made the same decision as her sister, otherwise almost unprecedented amongs the high European nobility, to leave her husband and live her own life.

In 1672, the two women dressed as men, Hortense armed with pistols, and fled once again, this time to the seacoast, where they hoped to catch a boat to France and throw themselves on the mercy of the King, hoping that as Marie’s former lover he would take pity on them.

Throughout their journey, their legend grew. Already famous because of their uncle, Marie’s affair with Louis XIV, and their high-profile marriages, they became infamous amongst Europe’s elite, their every move covered in the gazettes, the tabloid magazines of the era. In her memoirs, Hortense recounts that “Madame de Grignan had the charity to send us some shifts, saying that we were traveling like true heroines of a novel, with an abundance of jewels but no clean linen.”

The 1600s were the century in which Miguel de Cervantes published Don Quijote, and the narratives of the Mancini sisters have much in common with the tale of the errant knight of La Mancha. This is not only in their fearless, or foolhardy, tilting at windmills. There is a deeper, structural connection between the narratives.

In the the 1600s, European intellectuals and artists were interested in contrasting reality and illusion and exploring how the two can be confused and transposed. In Cervantes’ novel, Don Quijote’s troubles begin when he becomes consumed with romantic, fantastical novels about knights and their deeds–novels much like the ones that Marie and Louis XIV had bonded over, leading to her quixotic dream of becoming Queen of France. Losing himself in the fictional tales, Don Quijote comes to believe that the tales are real and that he is living inside one. This leads him to leave his boring but comfortable life to engage in adventures which are mostly inside his own mind. After the great success of Part I of Don Quijote, in the days before copyrights, Cervantes’ work was much-copied, with unauthorized fan fiction volumes appearing purporting to be the continuation of the knight of La Mancha’s adventures. Annoyed by this appropriation of his work, and its financial implications, Cervantes wrote Part II, threading it throughout with a surprisingly postmodern meta-narrative.

Throughout this second volume, the real Don Quijote is preceded by phantom, (meta)fictional versions of himself–when he enters towns and villages throughout Spain, locals tell him that a man claiming to be him has just left and recount adventures of which he has no knowledge. He is at pains to prove to them his own reality–and that the other Dons are imposters. On the other hand, he also meets “fans” who have read the first volume and eagerly collude to make his fantasies come true. He struggles with the idea that he himself is bewitched, or that the people around him are.

In fact, in this case, life imitated art (in imitating copyright infringement). Marie Mancini set out to write her memoir after a fictional version of her life, purporting to be written by her, was published and widely circulated amongst the elite of Europe.

In a further melding of reality and fiction, Hortense was a fan of the book, even identifying herself with one of its characters. As Elizabeth C. Goldsmith recounts in a joint biography of the sisters, The King’s Mistresses, “[Her friend] Saint-Evremond knew that Hortense was fond of chivalric romances like Amadis of Gaul, and he read with her from Don Quixote, suggesting to her that he was like the besotted knight and she his elusive Dulcinea. Hortense entered into the game, for years signing her letters to him ‘Dulcinea to Don Quixote,’ and he signing his ‘to Dulcinea, from the sad-faced knight.’” Lest we forget, Dulcinea is not real–she is a figment of Don Quijote’s imagination, a transformation in his mind of a village drab into a noble lady.

The sisters were not welcomed in France as they had hoped, and were in fact confined to a series of convents as fugitives from their husbands. Eventually, they separated–Hortense made her way to England, where she became the mistress of the king and lived out a boozy, vertiginous life. Despite her nickname of Dulcinea, she was always more of a Quijote, even once being involved in a scandalous swordfight with another woman in a public park. After her death, her husband demanded the return of her body to France, where he carried it with him for months before burying it. Marie criss-crossed Europe for the next forty years, fleeing her husband’s agents and putting up with almost any indignity rather than return to him, at times confined in convents and prisons by order of her powerful husband. She died, however, a free woman in Pisa in 1715.

I would like to conclude with the tale of another Mancini sister, which, while digressing from the tales of Hortense and Marie, returns us to the proto-surrealist world of Spanish culture in the 1600s. Olympe was forced to leave Paris, also a night-time fugitive, after being accused of witch-craft by a court initiated by Louis XIV. She eventually made her way to Spain, where she befriended the Queen, a Frenchwoman who had been forced to marry the mad, impotent Spanish king. Olympe supported her as she resisted him as best she could, notably when he suggested they try to cure his impotence by having sex on an altar in front of a priest.

Her independence and the reputation of her sisters brought her to the notice of the King of Spain (known as Carlos the Bewitched), who ordered her banished because he claimed she was causing his impotence with ill-wishing. Thus a third Mancini sister found herself on the run from a dangerous and powerful man. The Queen of Spain died soon after, under suspicious circumstances. There was no heir, and Spain was consumed by wars of succession for many years after the King’s death.

It is true that these hair-raising tales from the seventeenth are far distant from the divorce narratives of women today. The women who write today’s divorce memoirs are allowed to own property and are not legally prohibited from separating from their husbands. However, the shadow of this history overcasts the present. In my own artwork, I have been inspired by the Mancini sisters, making several paintings about them as well as a short, animated adaptation of Hortense’s memoirs.

For me, the Mancini sisters represent a female archetype as powerful as Don Quixote–the woman who leaves, the woman on her own, the woman who rejects the home for the unknown. She may always be on the move, but she is not going anywhere.

Sources

Note: I am not a historian by training or profession, and I am immensely obliged to Sarah Nelson and Elizabeth C. Goldsmith for their scholarship and writing in my study of the Mancini sisters. In particular, I’m so grateful to Professor Nelson, who has kindly corresponded with me over the period of years in which I have researched and made art about the Mancini sisters. All errors are very much my own!

Fraser, Antonia. (2006). Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King. Anchor Books.

Goodwin, Robert. (2015) Spain: The Centre of the World 1519-1682. Bloomsbury Press.

Goldsmith, Elizabeth C. (2012) The Kings' Mistresses: The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini, Princess Colonna, and Her Sister Hortense, Duchess Mazarin. PublicAffairs.

Mancini, Marie, Mancini, Hortense, & Nelson, Sarah. (Translator). (2008). Memoirs. University of Chicago Press.

She would be the perfect bride for the heir to the throne, or, at least, that’s what her dress said.

In 1985, tormented by her husband’s neglect, Diana appeared at a White House gala in an off-the-shoulder black dress which cried out for sexual attention. She got it when John Travolta, the heart-throb of the moment, led her in a dance. In 1992, when she covertly collaborated with journalist Andrew Morton to write a weepy tell-all book about her hateful marriage, she appeared on the cover in a masculine, military-inspired jacket. She was ready for war.

In June of 1994, Prince Charles and Diana were separated. However, he had never publicly addressed his infidelity which, according to Diana, was the reason for their marital breakdown. In his typical oblivious manner, he accidentally confessed to the affair in a filmed ITV interview. The very night it was to be broadcast, June 29, Diana appeared at an even in the Serpentine Gallery in the sexiest and most revealing dress she had ever worn publicly. The press dubbed it the Revenge Dress or, more pointedly, the Fuck You Dress.

According to Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles, “She had declined the invitation until two days before the event, when news of the adultery quote began to leak in promotions for the broadcast. That’s when one of the gala’s organizers, an old family friend of Diana’s, got a surprise phone call: “She said she wanted to come after all. I said, ‘What are you up to?’ And she said, ‘You’ll see.’” All became clear when the friend realized the gala was the same night as [Charles’ broadcast].”

All of this is to say that Bianca Censori, wife of Ye (formerly Kanye West), is not the first woman who has performed her marriage publicly through her dresses. While she is not the first to do it, she may be the most direct. However, while the famous “Invisible Dress” [NSFW, obviously] she wore to the 2025 Grammy’s was transparent, her intentions are not. Having arrived in a full-length fur coat, she debuted the “dress,” designed along the lines of the Emperor’s New Clothes, at a signal from her husband. As Ye stood clothed head to toe in black at her side. she dropped the fur coat to the red carpet to reveal–nothing, nothing at all. First from behind, then from the front, she displayed her stark naked body, covered only in an absolutely transparent nylon mini-dress–the precise opposite of Diana’s wedding gown. The “dress” has been variously interpreted as an act of personal courage, a transmutation of life into art, an example of her husband’s escalating abuse, and a cry for help. Censori herself has remained silent–apparently her final statement on the matter was the drop of her fur coat.

She didn’t commented on an increasingly deranged public tweetstorm by Ye which culminated in him embracing Hitler and Nazism. She has not yet weighed in on a series of Daily Mail pieces claiming she and Ye are headed for divorce–instead, there are quotes from “experts” and “insiders”.

Although we are only a few months into 2025, Censori is not the most powerful or famous wife to speak to the public through fashion so far this year. That title smust go to Melania Trump, neé Knavs, who set the internet ablaze with her inauguration lewk on January 20. Unlike Censori, her outfit put the focus not on her body but on her head. Melania’s body was armored in a precisely-tailored but traditional black coat-dress which drew the eye of the viewer up to her astonishing hat. The style of hat, properly called a bolero or a cordobés, is often worn by Spanish bullfighters. Melania’s version was black with a white band, and its wide brim almost entirely hid her eyes. Some interpreted this look as an indication of her thirst for revenge–and it is certainly true that her look did appear rather like a Hollywood villain. However, it is also possible that Melania, who is famously uncomfortable in her public role as first lady, simply wanted a disguise which would keep her face hidden.

Is the Censori-West marriage a happy one? What about the Knavs-Trump marriage? These are not facts I am able to reveal. But it is true that there is a long history of famous women performing the state of their marriages publicly through their clothing, and I propose that Censori and Melania, through their recent outfits, have joined that lineage.

Marie Antoinette is perhaps the most famous example of the intentional manipulation of marital fashion. Like the other women mentioned here, the first move in her own game of communication by dress was made to her, not by her. As a teenage bride, she was required to strip totally naked in front of a room full of courtiers on the border between France and Austria. Her Austrian clothing was removed, leaving her looking (if she was lucky) much like Bianca Censori at the Grammys. Thereupon, she was dressed in all French clothing in a ritual which symbolized her revocation of her old identity and assumption of her new one.

As a young wife, she emulated the extravagant dresses of the mistresses of kings who had for generations ruled the French court in place of queens. As a maturing queen and mother, she was inspired by the writings of Rousseau to assume a style termed creole (inspired by the dress of the women of the French colonies in the West Indies) or déshabillé (literally, undressed) which consisted of simple, thin white cotton dresses. Her new dresses were, by the standards of time, scandalous because they were too simple (queens were expected to show their regality by lavishly underwriting the French couture industry) and too revealing. Marie Antoinette herself viewed them as exemplifying her role as simple wife and mother of the nation. We all know how this ended for Marie Antoinette–perhaps she should have continued dressing like a mistress.

Another example is Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, a contemporary and friend of Marie Antoinette. Her advantageous marriage to the Duke of Devonshire, one of the wealthiest noblemen in England, was famously miserable. His constant affairs and open dislike for his beautiful wife made both of them targets of mockery. Unable to find happiness at home, she became renowned as one of the most fashionable women of her day, introducing trends such as ostrich feathers and three foot high hairstyles.

As Ashley Schoppe, Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Catawba College points out in her journal article about Georgiana, Always Ambitious of Having Me Appear to Advantage, “If the press acknowledged [Georgiana’s] pre-eminence in style, it frequently portrayed her modishness as problematic, a dangerous breach of etiquette for a married woman and an aristocrat. The Westminster Magazine complained ‘that instead of a Matron, she has become a Milliner—supplying patterns, rather than examples’.” The comment was particularly pointed because, as Schoppe continues, in the 18th century, “milliners were widely seen as sexually suspect.”

Georgiana’s looks were often interpreted in political terms, as she varied the color and style of her dresses to suit the political party she supported, even wearing foxtails to indicate her political and erotic alliance with politician Charles James Fox. In the 2008 biopic The Duchess, Keira Knightley, playing Georgiana, says that a woman’s clothes are “our way of expressing ourselves…[men] have so many ways of expressing yourselves, we must make do with our hats and our dresses.”

Among other things, being a wife is a public performance. It is not necessary to be a married to a European royal or the most famous rapper in the world to make it so. It is not even necessary to be a Tradwife influencer or Mommy blogger. Every wife performs her marriage when she lauds her husband in front of his work acquaintances over drinks or ritually complains about his untidiness with her female friends. A 2019 study found that women are more likely to wear high heels when they are planning to see a man they find attractive and more likely to wear flats when they plan to meet a man they find unattractive. How are we to interpret these most recent acts of sartorial wifeliness? For the time being, it seems we must simply let the clothes do the talking.

Sources

Brown, Tina. (2008). The Diana Chronicles. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Dibb, Saul. (Director). (2008). The Duchess [Film]. BBC Films; Qwerty Films; Magnolia Mae Films.

Foreman, Amanda. (2001). Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire. Random House Publishing Group

Fraser, Antonia. (2002). Marie Antoinette: The Journey. Vintage.

Matthews, Stephen. (2019, September 13). Women are less likely to wear high heels if they are going on a date with an ugly man because they don't want to have sex with them, study claims. Daily Mail.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-7399667/Women-likely-wear-high-heels-going-date-attractive-man.html

Schoppe, A. (2021). “Always Ambitious of Having Me Appear to Advantage”: Renouncing Fashion in Georgiana Cavendish’s Emma; or, The Unfortunate Attachment and The Sylph. Women’s Writing, 29(3), 363–381.

https://doi.org/10.1080/09699082.2021.1959856

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One of the most beautiful paintings in the Caspar David Friedrich show The Soul of Nature, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 11, shows a roiling ocean crashing against a rocky coast by moonlight. The tiny figure of a monk stares out into the void, alone. The juxtaposition of terror and poetry brings to mind a line from the memoirs of François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand, a contemporary of Friedrich’s and a fellow Romantic:

“Not a day passes when, reflecting on what I have been, I do not see in my mind’s eye the rock where I was born, the room where my mother inflicted life on me, the raging tempest that was my first lullaby…Heaven itself seemed so to arrange these circumstances to place in sight of my cradle an emblem of my destinies.”

Caspar David Friedrich’s life spanned an era of revolutionary quests for political liberty and a reaction which sought an internal, spiritual liberty away from the violence of politics. He was born in 1774 on the Baltic coast of Swedish Pomerania (now Germany), and he spent most of his life in Dresden, where he died in 1840. Friedrich rose to prominence as an artist in the first decade of the 19th century with large-scale watercolor and pencil drawings of landscapes imbued with a mystical spirituality. He was a perfect exemplar of the original generation of sensitive young men.

The year Friedrich was born, Goethe published The Sorrows of Young Werther, a proto-Romantic novel about a painfully sensitive young man who, following a sketching holiday in nature, is so overcome with unrequited love that he commits suicide. The success of the book was so immense that it led to international "Werther Fever," which caused young men to dress like the hero and even, reportedly, to commit copycat suicides.

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The most frequently used word in the new film by director Albert Serra is “balls,” but almost as frequently used is “truth.” Following the killing of a bull in which the subject of the film, the young Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, took near-insane risks with his own life, a member of his team approaches to embrace him. As the crowd roars in the background, we hear the teammate shout with emotion to Roca Rey, “La vida no vale nada! La vida no vale nada! Nada! Que cojones tienes!”

I found this moment a perfect encapsulation of the world of bullfighting as I have come to understand it: unique masculine intimacy; admiration for suicidal risk and disregard for life itself; and a preoccupation with balls. I, myself, have heard men in the stands at bullfights point to bullfighters in the ring and remark approvingly, “This guy wants to die!” to express their satisfaction many times–but not as many times as I’ve heard them talk about cojones.

Later, in the van which transports the bullfighter and his team–his cuadrilla–to their respective hotels, the cuadrilla continually repeats to Roca Rey that he showed “truth” in the ring and killed the bull “truly.” It’s a word we will hear again and again–but not as many times as we will hear cojones.

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There were both too many metal guitarists for a stately ceremony on the Seine, and yet, too few. When the broadcast cut to a wide shot of the Conciergerie, it revealed nothing, nothing—a vast expanse of beige wall with a few ant-like figures crawling in its cracks. The primary image of the Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony was emptiness–literal, visual emptiness. Strangely, the planners seemed not to have considered the composition of the huge widescreen shots, so the set pieces on the Seine looked eerily unpeopled—strange puppet-like dancers on pogo sticks floated sparsely and aimlessly in the glowering sky above the Pont Neuf like the souls of the unbaptized in Limbo. A pre-recorded video set in a library was, the announcers intoned, meant to celebrate French literature. Not a word was spoken or read. The only parts of books we saw were the covers. The now-infamous banquet table-cum-catwalk was likewise curiously barren, looking awfully Lenten for the Dionysian banquet we are now assured was intended. Where were the overflowing cornucopias of voluptuous summer fruits? The steaming platters of roast meats dripping in fat? Where, in fact, was the wine? A self-serious sobriety reigned. Don’t you dare revel. In their haste to kill the Catholic God, it seems the French may have also caught Dionysus in the crossfire.

Oscar Wilde famously quipped that when good Americans die, they go to Paris, but where are we supposed to go now that the vapid, jewel-toned aesthetics of global capital have conquered the city of lights? Americans previously marked out for a celestial reward may even now be floating in a lukewarm Purgatory, the flood of Americanish global homogenization overflow having washed them out of Heaven itself, lost, without a Paris to go to, like the aforementioned unbaptized souls of babies who the post-Vatican II Church has announced were never in Limbo at all.

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