In a perceptive review of Laurent Binet’s novel The Seventh Function of Language (2017), Lauren Elkin, the translator of Michelle Perrot’s The Bedroom (first published in France in 2009), observes that semiotics is a lot like detective work. The decoding of objects’ symbolic value has been a particular preoccupation of French intellectual life since the 1970s, which is perhaps what gives The Bedroom both its musty, dated air and a sense, in the initial chapters at least, that the text might have been imagined by Binet himself as part of his satire on the rock stars of deconstruction.
Grandiloquent statements – “the bedroom crystallizes the relationship between space and time” (as opposed, say, to the second law of thermodynamics) – are tossed gaily through the text like abandoned underclothes in the boudoir, while solemn banalities – “many women died in childbirth” – are earnestly footnoted. The overall effect is of an entrant to the grandes écoles rehearsing for her viva. The usual suspects – prominent among them Barthes and Foucault – are carefully cited, but the extent of Perrot’s research often appears to reach no further than the contents of her own bedroom bookshelves.
Medieval history
“Before the bedroom there was the room, before that almost nothing”, Perrot announces. She chooses to leapfrog over much medieval history and begin with a description of the king’s bedroom at Versailles under Louis XIV – an account for which she relies heavily on the memoirs of the duc de Saint-Simon, who spoke to the Sun King twice. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie is more thorough as an interpreter of the stultifying etiquette of the Versailles system, and Nancy Mitford much funnier; there is no fresh research or information in Perrot’s summary, which is at best indecisive as to the significance of the royal bedroom: “the king’s chamber guards its mysteries”.
That said, we learn that Perrot intends to trace the origin of the desire for a “room of one’s own”, which mark of individualization is apparently less universal than it might appear. The Japanese had no notion of privacy, we are told, which might have come as news to the ukiyo-e artists of the seventeenth century; nonetheless, Perrot is broadly correct in her account of the evolution of private sleeping space as depending on the movement from curtained or boxed beds to separate chambers during the same period in Europe.
This is about as far as the tracing of origins goes – Perrot then makes a brief detour into the communal apartments of Eastern Europe before the collapse of communism (though anyone interested in the psychological consequences of this would do better to read Orlando Figes), before announcing confidently that the conjugal bedroom became customary for the middle classes in the West after 1840, in imitation of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who married that year. On page fifty-five we are reminded once more that “the bed retains its mysteries”, not the least of which is why didn’t the editors step in and attempt to organize Perrot’s material?
Simply baffling
Many of the aphoristic asides in The Bedroom possess a certain charm: in the section on “Sleeping” Perrot notes that “at three o’clock in the morning we are always failures”. Others are simply baffling: “it is as difficult to move from standing to lying down in an apartment as it is on the battlefield”. (Surely the latter is all too easy?) Thoughts and characters appear to float onto the page in a random, dreamlike fashion. Juliette Gréco pops up next to Jeremy Bentham, Fragonard’s painting “Le Verrou” evokes Lytton Strachey’s memory of sharing a bedroom with Duncan Grant, but while whimsicality feels appropriate to the space under discussion, any sense of method or indeed argument remains elusive.
At times Perrot’s vagueness is simply too cavalier, as though she begins a thought and then loses the energy to complete it. “The origin of the diary is uncertain” is the opening to a paragraph on writing in the bedroom, as if the vast body of scholarly literature on journal-keeping does not exist. Elsewhere, Perrot is simply wrong (Zola’s Nana dies of smallpox, not syphilis), if not downright bonkers. As non sequiturs go, “the fin-de-siècle dandyism exacerbated the need to remove oneself from the crowd yet to remain in the city, a necessary background that obsessed Baudelaire, a lover of the city as well as its cats” is unbeatable.
While Perrot is explicit about the limited scope of her “intimate history”, stating that it will be largely confined to France and England, the reliance on nineteenth-century French authors unbalances The Bedroom even further. Proust is cited so often that we begin to feel as desperate for a breath of fresh air as poor Albertine. John Donne wrote wonderfully about bedrooms, and Samuel Richardson’s metonymical use of the eighteenth-century “closet” in relation to the female body (which might have provided an interesting comparison with The Captive) are just two of many neglected examples which spring to mind when considering the bedroom from an English literary perspective. Andrew Marvell and Robert Graves provide parallels to the bedroom as the site of both love and death, but Perrot offers only more Baudelaire. A list of Perrot’s omissions would indeed be a serious objection to the thesis of this book, were it to have one.
Courtesan’s courtesan
In her repeated references to Zola’s Nana, Perrot posits that the bed is one of the supreme metaphors of fin-de-siècle French culture. In 1878,when he set out to write his “poem of the cunt”, Zola created the whore’s whore, the courtesan’s courtesan, flesh in all its terrible beauty. Nana incarnates a power before which a whole society of worthies will fling aside their dress coats and roll on her bear- skin carpet begging to be kicked. After the French defeat at Sedan, Alexandre Dumas had attacked the enervating consequences of prostitution, the sapping of the national virility by a generation of gullible boys who had made goddesses of chorus girls instead of minding their bayonets. So for Nana, his golden-fleeced impératrice, Zola needed an emblem of decadence, a field of Venus to decimate the products of the Champ de Mars. He gave her a bed. Impregnated with Nana’s intoxicating scent, this becomes the theatre of her society’s decline. In solid gold, chased in silver, scattered with golden roses and mucky little cupids, Nana presides over that “altar where all Paris would come to worship”. Its rose-coloured curtains, tented into a canopy by silver rosettes, signal the illusions of the Second Empire, its flimsy theatricality, as surely as the bed’s cacophony of styles render it an artistic pastiche, a fake work of art for a bastard society. “Our century has no form”, complained Alfred de Musset, discussing the reprehensible influence of mercantile money on aristocratic taste. Nana’s bed enacts this disturbing challenge to social hierarchy, its excess rendering it shapeless, except insofar as – gold encasing pink velvet encasing gold encasing pink flesh – it mirrors the only paradise Zola’s world would pay to find. Nana, the theatre star who can’t act or sing, yet for whose nakedness the crowd riots; Nana the million-franc whore who cheerfully turns a trick on the pavement to pay her baker’s bill; Nana in her bed as a great beautiful false gem, with a whole world panting to hurl itself upon the fool’s gold between her legs.
This is not an argument that Perrot elaborates, however. She informs us several times that Nana’s removal in death from her opulent apartment to the ignominy of a hotel room is a symbol of her decline, but one feels that here, as throughout this unsatisfactory “history”, Perrot might have pursued her investigation further.
- Times Literary Supplement
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