Renee Vivien (1877 - 1909) , born Pauline Tarn, was an English lesbian poet. She wrote in French and perhaps English. She took up the style of the Symbolists and Parnassinism and was well known during the era of the Belle Epoque (the Beautiful Age) for producing Sapphic verse and living as an open quasi butch lesbian poet; her verse derived from the ancient poet Sapphos, also famed for her love of women.
To say Vivien lead a tumultuous life may be an understatement. Born to an American Heiress and a Scots father John Tarn, and the family lived in Paris for a short time until her father died in 1886. Vivien's mother desperately held onto John's family inheritance and gave Vivien hell as a child, frequently putting her under lock and key for perceived misbehaviour and trying to have her declared insane as to inherit the family fortune when it was bequeathed to her upon return to London in 1886.
Pauline became Renee in 1899 when she moved to Paris to escape her abusive mother, and in Paris she dedicated herself to poetry, writing exclusively in French, and running around Paris with wealthy lesbians dressed as Hamlet. She frequently pushed phallocentric narratives and kept to her own agenda in the patriarchal system she found herself living in. Whilst in Paris though she often attracted 'unwanted attentions' from male admirers and so would a body double stand in for her at her poetry performances. In Paris, her ground floor flat on 23, Avenue Foch (then Bois de Boulogne) opened onto a Japanese Garden, and was decorated with antiques from London and 'Eastern art' manufactures of shrines, statues and Buddhas which she smattered around the flat amidst fresh floral bouquets of lilies and offerings of Lady Apples with an ever coming and going stable of wealthy lesbian lovers.
Her first relationship was with Violet Shillito, then Natalie Barney in 1899 with Shilotto dying in 1900, and Barney splitting up as a result of Vivien's grief in 1901, with her first book published in the same year. She became involved in a relationship in 1902 with Baroness Helen van Zuylen, a branch of the Rothschilds family in France. Vivien, known for her aesthetical flair, was reliant on Zuylen who was married with children. Vivien considered herself married to Zuylen, but upon recieving a letter from the Turkish admirer, Kerime Turkhan Pasha, who was also married and so their relationship only developed through their letters. In 1907 however, Vivien was dumped by Zuylen and Vivien travelled to Japan in a rather dramatic relationship rebound to escape the gossip in the Lesbian circles of Paris. Kerime also stopped writing in 1908, turning to drugs, alcohol and sadomasochism of all things. Ever the eccentric, she continued living her lavish bohemian lesbian lifestyle until something we may recognise today as EDNOS caused her death in 1909.
Vivien was an aesthete, and this is evident from how she presented herself in society and how she lived her life. Her translations of Sappho from the Greek at Oxyrynchus, her globetrotting and her multinational heritage clearly played a role in how she came to own and understand other cultural artifacts and concepts, such as the Kimono, which I shall explore somewhat here with regards to viewing the Kimono through the Aesthetes lense.
The Aesthetical Movement, (approximately 1870-1900) in relation to Japanese design was the English answer to French design, developed into the Modern Style which later became Art Nouveau on the Continent. It's better known 'aesthetes' or purveyors of beauty included at the time figures such as Oscar Wilde and Mary Eliza Haweis (author of the Art of Beauty). Figures such as Wilde and Edward Carpenter championed the closeted lifestyle of Gay men, Wilde through his connections in the art world, under the guise of the 'Hellenic' or 'Japanese' worlds (see the Decay of Lying 1891) which touted historical literature as a sort of escapist revisionist Gay Arcadia, and Japan played this role from 1870 - 1933 for figures in the Bloomsbury scene such as Virginia Woolf (see Vogue review of Tale of Genji 1925).
Decadence, the aesthetical era which Vivien was born into, prized Vapanese (Japanese as the Victorians saw it) art as purely aesthetical, and extension of the art for arts sake mantra popularised in France at the turn of the 19th century.
"'No, not Sappho' said Renée Vivien, who had come in with her light step , wearing an empress' s kimono and carrying a sheaf of roses in her arms , which she offered me by way of greeting.
-The Muse of Violets (1904;1977)
In this passage, the Kimono is celebrated as a mark of wealth, compared to Sappho (high poetry) and Roses (expensive natural beauty denoting a Englishwoman perhaps) and Empresses, which to the decadent aesthete was a raucous display of finery and nothing more, for beautiful objects were said to have enough merit to exist on their own and as such were viewed as art objects (see Whistler's 1878 trial for more on the matter of substance.)
In context therefore, we see that in the transnational context, Kimono can be used to exemplify new ideals of beauty or aesthetical standards. The Kimono Vivien wears or said to be wearing was a popular staple among bohemians of the era and was used to denote that its wearer was part of the fashionable upper class, less so by the Edwardian era, but still if original a highly coveted item of great beauty and 'refined taste'. The Hellenic and Japanese worlds in a gay Vapanese notion, were regarded as in-code for the wealthy gay lifestyle in this time and place, and which later diverged as fodder into the new form of 'camp' with the inclusion of items such as fans used by performers today positively as cultural appreciation (think Mae West's Drag 1927; the Maltese Falcon 1931, Lindsay Kemp from 1959-2018 etc, also see Roger Bakers Drag, 1995).[1][2][3][4][5]
Next week I shall return to patterns, but the next essay will discuss cultural appropriation in an American context.
Bibliography
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9e_Vivien
[2] http://www.suzannestrohcreative.com/the-cruellest-month-for-renee-vivien/
[3] The Muse of the Violets : Poems, Renee Vivian, 1977, p.9
[4] Orientating Arthur Waley, 2003
[5] Drag: A History of Female Impersonation in the Performing Arts, Roger Baker, 1995, p79
See Also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aestheticism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Style_(British_Art_Nouveau_style)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decay_of_Lying
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-radiant-prince-comes-to-fifth-avenue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_for_art%27s_sake
http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=nicholas-frankel-on-the-whistler-ruskin-trial-1878
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapphic_stanza#:~:text=The%20Sapphic%20stanza%2C%20named%20after,a%20rhyme%20scheme%20of%20ABAB.
Social links:
https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/KaguyasChest?ref=seller-platform-mcnav or https://www.instagram.com/kaguyaschest/ or https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5APstTPbC9IExwar3ViTZw, or https://www.pinterest.co.uk/LuckyMangaka/hrh-kit-of-the-suke/
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