| Clara | |
|---|---|
| The Torture Garden character | |
 Clara, by Jeannette Seelhoff, 1931 | |
| Created by | Octave Mirbeau |
| In-universe information | |
| Gender | Female |
| Nationality | English |
Clara is the main character in the French novel The Torture Garden ((in French)Le Jardin des supplices, 1899), by Octave Mirbeau.
Clara, who has no last name or civil status, is an English woman with red hair and green eyes: “a greyish green of the young fruits of the almond tree.” Single, rich and bisexual, Clara lives near Canton, and leads an idle existence, entirely devoted to finding perverse pleasures. She is fully emancipated, financially and sexually, and freed from oppressive laws and taboos prevailing in the West and which, according to her critique of anarchist inspiration, prohibit the development of the individual. Clara thus claims to enjoy complete freedom. She particularly enjoys visiting the city prison every week, which is open to tourists on Wednesday. Clara delights in watching the death row inmates, many of whom are innocent or guilty of minor offenses, being brutally tortured and put to death.
This protagonist meets the anonymous narrator, a petty political crook, aboard the Saghalien, where the pseudo-embryologist was sailing to Ceylon, as part of an official mission. In reality, his primary goal is just to distance himself from France. She seduces him, awakening his sexual desire along with the need to unburden himself, and becomes his mistress. She takes him with her to China, where both the narrator and Clara share a lover, Annie.
Two years later, the narrator, who had fled from Clara's pernicious embraces and gone to Annam, returns. Clara regains her power over him and is pleased to dominate and humiliate him. She takes him to visit the torture garden of the prison, where they wander around. During a crescendo of horror, Clara experiences waves of ecstasy and has a hysterical fit. [1] She then feels almost purified after climaxing. The scene takes place in a "flower boat", a floating brothel, where orgies take place. According to the narrator, the area is more like a place of punishment than a garden of delights. But, as Ki Pai, the boatman who regularly accompanies Clara, says, "It will start all over again!"
The enigmatic character of Clara, "fairy of mass graves, angel of decomposition and decay", seems to be based on pure fantasy, unrelated to a plausible reality that the novel would be expected to reproduce mimetically, to the point at which the narrator becomes haggard wondering whether she is not a figment of his imagination: "Does she really exist?... I wonder, not without fear... Was she not born out of my debauchery and fever?... Is she like one of those impossible images, like a child in a nightmare? ... A criminal temptation, lust sparking the sick imaginations of murderers and madmen?... Could she be nothing but my soul, escaped outside of my body, despite myself, which materialized in the form of sin?... "
This character is an illustration of a fin-de-siècle femme fatale, an all-powerful ghoul who treats men as puppets and enjoys their humiliation. Sadistic and voyeuristic, she experiences an intense and ever growing pleasure to view sophisticated executions, whose art was perfected by China, as opposed to industrial and technological massacres, which were practiced on a large scale in Europe without any concern for art. As Jean-Luc Planchais wrote, she is a "bloody tribade who castrates ideals", who "believes herself to be God, the destruction of the other confirms her supremacy". [2]
However, she is equally masochistic because she likes to imagine herself in the role of a victim whose suffering is an unparalleled source of ecstasy. For example, when witnessing the “iron rods” torture, she says, "It felt like the rod entered the small of my back with every strike... It was atrocious and very sweet!" Perverse, she is an apologist for "lust" in all its forms and sees it as "the perfection of love" because "all the mental faculties of man are revealed and sharpened" and that "it is only by lust" that can achieve "development total personality. " And it is through lust that she intends to initiate the shy narrator.
This character's perhaps monstrous values and claims seem totally at odds with the humanism of Octave Mirbeau, a defender of Alfred Dreyfus. However, one could make the argument that the novelist was using Clara's character as a means of denouncing English and French colonialism. [3] The reader can only be disconcerted and uncomfortable and may lose his aesthetic and ethical bearings.
Octave Mirbeau was a French novelist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, journalist and playwright, who achieved celebrity in Europe and great success among the public, whilst still appealing to the literary and artistic avant-garde with highly transgressive novels that explored violence, abuse and psychological detachment. His work has been translated into 30 languages.
The Diary of a Chambermaid is a 1900 decadent novel by Octave Mirbeau, published during the Dreyfus Affair. First published in serialized form in L’Écho de Paris from 1891 to 1892, Mirbeau’s novel was reworked and polished before appearing in the Dreyfusard journal La Revue Blanche in 1900.
Rat torture is the use of rats to torture a victim by encouraging them to attack and eat the victim alive.
The Torture Garden is a novel written by the French journalist, novelist and playwright Octave Mirbeau, and was first published in 1899 during the Dreyfus affair. The novel is dedicated: "To the priests, the soldiers, the judges, to those people who educate, instruct and govern men, I dedicate these pages of Murder and Blood."
Business is business is a French comedy in three acts, by the novelist and playwright Octave Mirbeau, performed in April 1903 on the stage of Comédie-Française, in Paris, and worldwide acclaimed, especially in Russia, Germany and United States.
Dingo is a novel by the French novelist and playwright Octave Mirbeau (1913).
Dans le ciel is a novel written by the French journalist, novelist and playwright Octave Mirbeau. First published in serialized installments in L'Écho de Paris between September 1892 and May 1893, Dans le ciel, assembled and edited by Pierre Michel and Jean-François Nivet, first appeared its present form in 1989.
Le Calvaire (Calvary) is a novel written by the French journalist, novelist and playwright Octave Mirbeau, and published by Ollendorff in 1886.
L'Abbé Jules is a novel written by the French journalist, novelist and playwright Octave Mirbeau, and published by Ollendorff in 1888.
Les Vingt et un Jours d'un neurasthénique is an expressionist novel by the French writer Octave Mirbeau, published by Charpentier-Fasquelle in August 1901.
Les Mauvais Bergers is a modern tragedy, in five acts, by the French journalist, novelist and playwright Octave Mirbeau, performed in December 1897 on the stage of Théâtre de la Renaissance, in Paris, then published by Charpentier-Fasquelle in March 1898. The main parts were played by the two most famous French actors at the time: Sarah Bernhardt, as Madeleine, and Lucien Guitry, as Jean Roule.
Farces et moralités is a collection of six comedy plays in one act, written by the French novelist and playwright Octave Mirbeau and published by Fasquelle in 1904: Vieux ménages, L’Épidémie, Les Amants, Scrupules, Le Portefeuille and Interview.
Pierre Michel, is a professor of literature and a scholar specializing in the French writer Octave Mirbeau.
Lucien is one of the central fictional characters in the novel Dans le ciel, by French writer Octave Mirbeau.
Isidore Lechat is a fictional character and the main protagonist of the play Les affaires sont les affaires (1903) by French writer Octave Mirbeau.
Célestine is the main character and the narrator of the French novel by Octave Mirbeau, The Diary of a Chambermaid, 1900.
L'Amour de la femme vénale is the French title of a brief essay by French writer Octave Mirbeau on prostitution. Originally published in Bulgarian in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, in 1922 as Любовта на продажната жена. It was translated into French by Alexandre Lévy,, the essay was published in 1994 by Éditions Indigo and Côté Femmes and was accompanied an introduction by Pierre Michel, a professor specialising the writer Octave Mirbeau, and a preface by historian Alain Corbin. The essay was translated into English and Italian in 2005 by Bérangère de Grandpré.
Contes cruels is a two-volume set of about 150 tales and short stories by the 19th-century French writer Octave Mirbeau, collected and edited by Pierre Michel and Jean-François Nivet and published in two volumes in 1990 by Librairie Séguier. The title was taken from Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, of whom Mirbeau was a friend and admirer.
Jean Roule is the main fictional character in Octave Mirbeau’s proletarian tragedy, Les Mauvais Bergers (1897). During the first performance, Lucien Guitry played the role of Jean Roule.
Louis de Robert was a French writer, winner of the prix Femina in 1911.