The Obscure Subject of Desire: Lucretia Borgia in Nineteenth-Century Literature
[1]With special thanks to Bettina Wahrig, for countless discussions of poison and the abject — and even more inspiring comments.
The abject has only one quality of the object — that of being opposed to I. (Kristeva, Powers of Horror)
This zone of uninhabitability will constitute the defining limit of the subject's domain [. . .], that site of dreaded identification against which [. . .] the domain of the subject will circumscribe its own claim to autonomy and life. (Butler, Bodies That Matter)
1 Among the norms and values that shaped the ideal nineteenth-century subject, domestic solidity, middle class respectability and concern for morality figure first and foremost. However, if we consider the many pitfalls this subject was subjected to at a time of rapid and massive technological change, urbanization, and industrialization, it is clear that the balance between right and wrong, good and evil, subject and Other was rather delicate at times. The way to money and property did not always follow moral and religious requirements; scientific discoveries shaped new methods of achieving collective goals — and new ways of doing so in secret at the same time. Where the virtues of the subject were redefined with more strictness than ever before, its shadowy Other began to haunt the collective unconscious in crime novels and magazines, in reports on bank fraud and murder scandals.
2 Rather than dealing with crime in the conventional sense — where the line between ideal subject and Other seems all to clear—, I will be concerned with the more secretive technique of poisoning in order to pursue a kind of non-subject that reaches out for subjecthood and negates it at the same time. I will use the Kristevan term of the abject in order to describe a figure whose formation reflects a) a gender economy that denies access to full subjecthood to women, b) a specific balance between surface and substance, seeming and seeing, linked to this gender economy, and c) the edges of that economy linked to notions of the Other as much as the sublime or love. Legal offence is, from this perspective, framed by an emerging order of secrecy that renegotiates the lines between those who know and those who don't, whether on the basis of scientific knowledge, financial genius or psychological wisdom. Where poisoning draws on the secret workings of substances — and thus on scientific secrets —, its most frequent motive — bank fraud and legacy hunting — draw on the secret workings of money, which in the nineteenth century gain a new complexity especially with the spread of life insurances. At the same time the traditionally male figures of the detective, the toxicologist, and the reporter emerge on the scene to counterbalance this new configuration.
3 Within that context, the legendary star poisoner Lucretia Borgia — as myth rather than historical fact — will serve as a foil for reading the figure of the female poisoner, whose motive is money, power and respectability. The poisoner in that sense is never the common criminal and cruel barbarian we associate with murder, but an intelligent, overly civilized and often knowledgeable person, who seems to confirm rather than contradict collective ideals. As a woman she is also on the less powerful side, but in spite of her gendered position (she is rarely a scientist herself), she increases her power through knowledge, finding an ally in scientific advancements, which provide more and more elaborate means of destruction. Magazines and newspapers, from the nineteenth century onwards, collaborate with science in satisfying an ever-increasing thirst for knowledge, but they also represent a critical instance when science is abused for immoral purposes. Questions of guilt and innocence gain a public dimension hitherto unforeseen, and while the female reading public is growing steadily, categories of gender seem to become more central in public negotiations of subjecthood. If, like in the case of Lucretia, the murderer is female, a whole series of new questions enter the scene. Besides the traditional affiliation of women and poisoning and the fear of powerful women, or of the association of sexuality and death, the debate of several concrete poisoning scandals framed — and might have triggered — new representations of Lucretia in the second half of the nineteenth century.[2]Female poisoners are central in nineteenth-century novels like Flaubert's <em>Madame Bovary</em>, Wilkie Collin's <em>Woman in White</em>, Hoffmann's <em>Fräulein von Scudery</em>, Chamisso's <em>Die Giftmischerin</em>, or Thackeray's <em>Catherine</em>. On Lucretia and the Borgia family see for example J.H. Stocqueler, <em>Lucretia Borgia: A Romance of History</em> (1844), Swinburne, <em>The Chronicle of Tebaldeo Tebaldei</em> (1861), F.E. Paget, <em>Lucretia; Or the Heroine of the Nineteenth Century</em> (1868), Felice Romani, <em>Lucretia Borgia: A Lyric Tragedy</em> (1839), Ferdinand Gregorovius, <em>Lucretia Borgia</em> (1904), Antonio de San Martin, <em>La Raza Impura - Lucrecia Borgia</em> (1889), W. Grothe, <em>Die Kinder des Papstes</em> (1867), Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, <em>Angela Borgia</em> (1891), Ludwig Scoper, <em>Lucrezia Borgia, oder: des Papstes Tochter</em> (1834), Richard Voss, <em>Unter den Borgia</em> (1897), apart from the versions of Hugo, Heine and Bulwer-Lytton discussed here. There will be more, of course, in the twentieth century, and it is only then that female authors pick up the theme on a massive scale. From the many existing versions, those of Bulwer-Lytton, Heinrich Heine and Victor Hugo reveal different contextualizations of gender while discussing the poisoner as non-subject, a poisoner whose desire corresponds to collective ideals while her methods reflect the dark side of that same configuration and at the same time comment on the secret workings of money and murder. Non-subjecthood here is what Kristeva's term of the abject points to, as it is produced by the same logic as the subject herself, but reveals that logic in its negatory rather than affirmative power. The abject is the hidden underside of the subject, it is, as Kristeva says, "opposed to 'I'" and in that quality resembles the object, which is always in some way subjected to something. Abjection in that sense is the rejection of "that which is not me" (Kristeva, Powers 2), the rejection by which "I" is made possible, through the exclusion of Not-I. Whereas the abject can manifest itself in any form of "uninhabitable zone" (Butler 3) that challenges the borders of the self, the female poisoner is a more complicated phenomenon as she reaches out for the status of subject, claiming free will, autonomy and reason as her defining features.
4 To begin with, a few words on the historical Lucretia Borgia, who entered history as the daughter of Pope Alexander VI: The originally Spanish family of the Borgias came to Italy in the late Renaissance, and became soon known for cold-blooded murder, bribery, and sexual orgies. Lucretia's son Giovanni was thought to be the result of incestuous relations with her father or brother. Like many others who stood in the way of the Borgias' political or economic aspirations, one of her husbands as well as several of her lovers died under mysterious circumstances, and considering the Borgias' traditional stratagems of swords, daggers, garrotting and poison, the identity of the murderer was never questioned. There is no historical evidence, though, that Lucretia participated actively in any of these murders: In spite of her reputation as husband-killing wife and master-poisoner she might not have killed a single person in her whole life. Nevertheless, history chose her as an icon in a long tradition of female poisoners, which is closely associated with Italy herself, and continued to have different repercussions in the following centuries.
5 In the nineteenth-century, representations of Lucretia were strongly influenced by a renewed interest in the poisoning business in general. A whole series of new poisons was discovered: Morphine, strychnine, brucine, quinine, conium, and nicotine are just some of items added to an already substantial list that included arsenic, antimony, mercury, and opium. Another important factor in this revival of interest is the birth of modern toxicology, triggered by the work of the Spanish scientist Orfila. He published his Treatise on Poisons, Or General Toxicology in 1814/15, and was soon consulted as a kind of court of last appeal where he decided whether somebody had been poisoned or not.