Ghosted

Marie Duplessis died at 23 years old, but has haunted the narratives of cultural heavyweights for almost two centuries.

Marie Duplessis in an 1840 portait painted by Jean-Charles Olivier. She would have been around 16 years old here.

The thing about tropes is that they all originate somewhere.

Think about a sex worker in pop culture and two come to mind: Julia Roberts’ Vivian Ward in Pretty Woman, and Nicole Kidman’s Satine in Moulin Rouge!.

Both are emblematic of a couple of the most common tropes that apply to women who ply ‘history’s oldest trade’ – that of the ‘hooker with a heart of gold’ and that of the tragic woman who had to sell her body to slimy rich men, while giving her heart to a smitten artist who immortalizes her after she dies (because she always dies.)

Like many of the most popular canonical literary tropes that are endlessly riffed on today, these came from Alexandre Dumas fils, who was so struck by the loss of one of his favorite courtesans that he wrote a novel inspired by her. This novel was then adapted into several different operas, all of which have had outsize influence in their own right.

La Dame aux Camellias (The Lady of the Camellias) appeared first as a novel, written and then quickly adapted into a play by Dumas. From there, it was then adapted by Giuseppe Verdi into his iconic opera La Traviata, and re-named and re-worked under the name Camille for English-speaking audiences. It has also been adapted into a ballet.

It is a piece of performed art that has launched and made the careers of countless icons of the stage and screen – Sarah Bernhardt, Isabelle Huppert, Theda Bara, Greta Garbo, Alla Nazimova, Margot Fonteyn. The list is long with names that have themselves become synonymous with their own archetypal visions of femininity.

But I must point to the woman who rests at the origin of this world: the courtesan Marie Duplessis, who like many other grandes horizontales of her time, forever shaped a culture that insists on forgetting her and those like her. For a sex worker may always be the foundation on which great art is built, but she is rarely given her flowers for it.