TW: Suicide

"Sadie took the box of bullets out of the side and put them on the bench, so no accidents would happen. They went deep into the labyrinth in the backyard together"

Sadie taking these precautions is interesting, especially considering her constant need to fantasize about the possibility of killing Marie (while being powerless to save her). But then there's the wording: no accidents. Not so no one is hurt, but so that no one is hurt when she does not intend it.

But this passage and the discussion of duels, along with the in media res duel that kicked this whole thing off, have me churning through a shitton of dueling that I've inflicted on myself over the past five years so here goes.

Context

I'm going to talk about dueling mostly in the French literary/theatrical context because of Marie Antoine and Sadie (and the distinct French influence in their names - with many reading Marie -> Marie Antoinette & Sadie -> the Marquis de Sade) rather than English - even though them being in the Golden Mile and of their social class (particularly Sadie as an Arnett) is, atp, dominated by anglophones (as we can also see by the poems the two girls read - Rosetti and Tennyson being English poets). The dueling contexts in both countries do overlap significantly (as do dueling practices in much of Europe, including Russia) though there are certainly nuances I'm going to lose because of my much greater familiarity with the duel in French & Russian literature.

So, the Duel

Before the advent of pistols, and even afterwards depending on the country, swords were the weapon of choice. Generally, dueling was made illegal (and otherwise most greatly discouraged) during the 17-18th centuries. However, making a practice illegal does not mean it does not happen and the practice fluctuated depending on enforcement. It was not uncommon to see two parties engage in a duel and the victor have to run off to Geneva or something. In terms of the Canadian context, right around the time our girls would be pointing loaded guns at each other there would be the last (known) duel in Canada - albeit in Newfoundland.

Dueling is a marker of class

It originally served more as a function of dispensing legal justice; however Louis XIII ended the practice of trial by combat in French law. Nonetheless, the dueling impulse continued and the sense of dueling as restitution remained. Instead of repairing injury for a crime, in the legal sense, it became a means to restore one's honour (or otherwise 'defend' it). Later, among the nobility in France, continuing to practice the duel could be one way to emphasize your belonging to the noblesse d'épée (nobles of the sword, aka those who descended from those who performed military duties in His Majesty's service; a contrast to the noblesse de la robe, nobles of the robe, which were venal nobles who either inherited from, or purchased themselves, a title from the King when they took on bureaucratic functions in finance or administration) and it became a rising practice among the bourgeoisie to signify their elevation in class (even though nobles were getting turned-off from it at that point, like they usually are the moment the bourgeoisie gets their hands on anything).

For example, Michel-Jean Sedaine's 1760 Le Philosophe sans le savoir prominently features a 'duel' in its central conflict. Despite being lukewarm to critical of the practice, the play was feared to be in favour of dueling and subject to censorship and scrutiny. Censorship was not uncommon in the French theatre and, when Sedaine published the play he followed the time honoured tradition with a gloss that showed some of the censored content. It also had a bit of a renaissance during the 19th century in France, particularly in the 1850s, though I don't think this would've crossed over that much to Sadie/Marie in the 1870s. But I digress. The duel in PSLS takes place between the son of a merchant (M. Vanderk) and a man who insulted said merchant's profession (participating in trade like this was considered distinctly ignoble). M. Vanderk was himself a former member of the French aristocracy who was forced to flee because he duelled another; he has subsequently 'fallen' to the lowly ranks of wealthy as fuck Dutch merchant (significantly, the play valorizes him not only for his career but also for his happy love marriage to his wife and his doting on his two children). When his son informs him that he intends to duel, Vanderk isn't the most enthused (it is, crucially, scheduled to overlap with his daughter Sophie Vanderk's wedding lol). However, he ultimately counsels his son to do what he feels is honourable and begins making preparations to help his son getaway with it. At Sophie's wedding, her brother is mistakenly pronounced dead by Vanderk's clerk before it is revealed that the two dueling parties did not actually try to kill each other. The play's a comedy, you see, no one ever dies in a comedy✨.

Dueling is also masculine

Women were not supposed to practice it and are often voices that counsel against it in literary/theatrical works (unless they're a scheming shrew/coquette aiming to play their lovers against each other or something). They simply don't have the nerve for it, the poor things (so many duels end in two deaths: the duelist and his mother). Usually a man takes up the woman's cause if she has cause for defending (e.g., Dangerous Liaison's final duel). As Ignaz Matthey summarizes in their article on the mythologization of women in duels: "Although duelling was considered a male monopoly, from time to time there have been women who defended their honour in single combat. However, the stories about them are often unreliable if not demonstrably fabricated. Some of these myths were intended to ridicule dueling by women or women’s emancipation in general, but there are also anecdotes in which a female duellist in male attire plays the part of a heroine by defeating a man."

Julie d'Aubigny (aka Mademoiselle de Maupin), herself an opera singer, is an infamous 17th century example around whom there's a jumble of myths and stories. Maupin was possibly bisexual, known for getting into these duels by kissing a woman that a man (or many men) had their eyes on; she had to seek a pardon from the King and spend some time in exile in Brussels. She also had a reputation for cross-dressing and the duels (such that we have a record of them compared to her career) often took place while she was in masculine dress.

Another notable instance featured the Marquise de Nesle, Armande Félice de La Porte Mazarin (✨✨), who fought a duel with another woman (Françoise de Mailly-Rubempré, the Comtesse de Polignac and also her cousin). In a sort of irony, the duel was over a man named Armand de Vignerot du Plessis (himself the Duke de Richelieu and known philanderer). Alain Berbouche's article on the history of the duel cites this case as one of the instances of the duel as a practice making a resurgence following the death of the Sun King✨✨✨ as the sensationalized duel occurred between the two women (the Comtesse being pregnant at the time). While the story gets exaggerated, with claims that the Marquise was out for blood when all that really ended up happening was a grazed shoulder, it has made enough of a splash that I would be remiss not to mention it.

Rich Girls with Pretty Guns

While, at this point, I haven't seen the full lead-up to the duel or the duel in action (though I'm sure it's on the near horizon if the girls are rehearsing for it) this is a good point to look at their crystalizing intent. One contributing element that I haven't touched on with my discussion of the duel before this is the psychology of the duelist. Both Sadie and Marie are girls who desperately seek the novel at their own peril. They've both become increasingly fascinated by the idea of death and regularly engage in behaviour that could be harmful... without actually receiving significant harm. Marie now regularly says things that ought to be social suicide, spared by her sheer financial aura; Sadie literally went off a cliff, spared by fortune and her hardy constitution. The duel, in many ways, seems a natural evolution of this impulse. When they discuss 'playing' at a duel, and their annoyance at not being the one allowed to die (choosing to die together), they consider it as a mutual pact that they cannot coexist. Rather, they can not exist at the same time but they can't exist at the same time. However, a joint desire for self-destruction could be achieved in many different ways if the girls were not of their class and gender. After all, why not just a suicide (drowning? cliff's edge? poison?)✨✨✨✨

Sadie, despite a wealthy enough family line to be in the Golden Mile (well, a family line wealthy enough to have a Great-Uncle Who Happened to Die), is not financially comfortable for her social milieu. There are plenty of people who are so well-off they have estates who then have winters with no heat, lose all/most of their servants, because they keep spending their money to keep up appearances in other ways; the Arnetts are one such family. Is this self-inflicted? Entirely. But that doesn't change how she feels her class status is. Marie is bourgeois, no mistake, but she's richer than god bourgeois which (atp) is functionally the new noblesse in a milieu like the Golden Mile. Like the nobility of theatrical comedy she is frivolous and vain in many ways but she has a growing self-consciousness that recognizes how much of what she is given is entirely unrelated to her own talent. Sadie has the bourgeois ethic that she needs to bite and claw to get barely even with 'noblesse' like Marie, every success she takes has claw marks in it✨✨✨✨✨ Both girls, thus, have a no longer nascent envy of the other and a strong desire to find satisfaction in contests in a manner befitting the class implications of the duel. They are also, both, fundamentally of a class where such 'honour' matters in the first place.

In terms of their relationship with their girlhood/femininity, Sadie is the most actualized. She has a brother and she was raised by two parents, thus she was far more aware of what it means to be a girl and the limitations imposed on her. Marie, now that she's older and with Sadie, has begun to come to the same realizations about the hollowness of others' praise specifically in the context of her gender. Further Marie is beginning to see herself as not only less talented but less pretty than Sadie, which is certainly the most grievous sin any woman can commit. Marie sees her weight gain as a physical manifestation of the 'ruin' of her upbringing.✨✨✨✨✨✨ Marie is the bag of sugar with her face on it: she's not the product and she's certainly not the sugar magnate. While Sadie envies Marie's ease, Marie envies Sadie's chance to survive as the times change. Again the parallels between bourgeois and noblesse are present, but they are redoubled by the girls feeling the pressure of non-agency. Both repudiate masculinity: their guns have roses on them, they do not cross-dress, there is no man as the raison d'être. But they perform the duel and take on the agency associated with masculinity.

A duel is a purposeful act, it is no accident. But this duel concludes with an accident. Its sole victim is, ultimately, a maid who tried to warn them that this is completely idiotic. The girls are making a play for their own self-actualization, or rather their own self-aggrandizement, and they will once again not pay the price. It'll be fun to see where it goes from that starting point!

✨Before Diderot's shooters come knocking, I know it was more specifically a drame bourgeois I'm just being a little flippant and don't have the time for a full digression when I've already lingered enough on Sedaine here ✨✨Perhaps more famous for being the mother of the Mailly-Nesle sisters, four of which would be the mistress of Louis XV (aka Louis the Beloved - his title unrelated to the number of mistresses he had) ✨✨✨Berbouche's tone as he enters the section that discusses this duel is iffy but he has the sources and I work with what I can get. ✨✨✨✨ The form of suicide is, itself, commonly gendered during the 19th century depending on cultural context. Drowning (or other elemental deaths, save self-immolation) are commonly feminine in the French context (and more broadly in the European one AFAIK). Masculine suicides typically feature guns or more 'direct' means of action. Thus, the duel as a means of self-destruction is also more masculinized. Poisoning is gender neutral, depending on your poison. ✨✨✨✨✨ A play on David Foster Wallace's "everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it" JIC this gives anyone flashbacks ✨✨✨✨✨✨ Marie more specifically characterizes her physical appearance (with an emphasis on her body weight and the way her face/cheeks holds it) as something that is attractive in a child but will not be in an adult/woman.