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Uniting libertine sexuality with enduring love proved by self-sacrifice, Marguerite Gautier becomes the incarnation of a particularly powerful male fantasy. Sexually free and experienced, desirable and desiring, Marguerite is also truly loving, utterly selfless, ready to sacrifice every interest of her own on the altar of bourgeois family values.
poor Marguerite, whose name means daisy in French,
was turned into Violetta, which means violet in Italian. The title was also changed. In Italian, traviare means to mislead, to lead astray. This is also the meaning of the English seduce and the German verführen. These words link the question of sexuality to the question of guidance: la traviata is not a threatening femme fatale, but a poor misguided woman.
The visible and public sign of Marguerite’s menstrual cycle, the camellias signify her sex and signal her sexual availability.
“I must tell you the whole story; you will make a book out of it; no one will believe it, but it will perhaps be interesting to do.”
From that time forward, I often met Marguerite at the theatre or in the Champs-Élysées. Always there was the same gaiety in her, the same emotion in me.
“If I had to listen to everybody who was in love with me, I shouldn’t have time for my dinner.”
But when the man who inspires this redeeming love is great enough in soul to receive it without remembering the past, when he gives himself up to it, when in short, he loves as he is loved, this man drains at one draught all earthly emotions, and after such a love his heart will be closed to every other.
That night she was marvellously beautiful. Was I the cause of this coquetry? Did she love me enough to believe that the more beautiful she looked the happier I should be?
was I not like a parasite of love, afraid of having to pay the bill of the banquet?
one thinks such letters, one does not write them.
Well, my friend, you must either love me a little less or understand me a little better.
Is it honourable for you to live like husband and wife with a woman whom everybody has had?”
