SOURCE: Pascoe, Judith. “Embodying Marie Antoinette: The Theatricalized Female Subject.” In Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship, pp. 117-29. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.

[In the following excerpt, Pascoe discusses Mary Robinson's encounter with Marie Antoinette, as recounted in her Memoirs, her tract Impartial Reflections on the Present Situation of The Queen of France, and her poetry.]

The preoccupation with the body of Marie Antoinette … is matched in the work of Mary Robinson, whose interest in the French queen took several forms. Robinson, like Burke, met Marie Antoinette in person, although Robinson's encounter with her came a decade after Burke's 1773 meeting. Robinson's Memoirs, a text begun by Robinson but purportedly completed by a friend,¹ describes her interview with the queen in fascinating detail:

The grand couvert, at which the King acquitted himself with more alacrity than grace, afforded a magnificent display of epicurean luxury. The Queen ate nothing. The slender crimson cord, which drew a line of separation between the royal epicures and the gazing plebeians, was at the distance but of a few feet from the table. A small space divided the Queen from Mrs. Robinson, whom the constant observation and loudly whispered encomiums of Her Majesty most oppressively flattered. She appeared to survey, with peculiar attention, a miniature of the Prince of Wales, which Mrs. Robinson wore on her bosom, and of which, on the ensuing day, she commissioned the Duke of Orleans to request the loan. Perceiving Mrs. Robinson gaze with admiration on her white and polished arms, as she drew on her gloves, the Queen again uncovered them, and leaned for a few moments on her hand. The Duke, on returning the picture, gave to the fair owner a purse, netted by the hand of Antoinette, and which she had commissioned him to present from her, to la belle Anglaise.

(MMR [The Memoirs of Mary Robinson] 2:94-95)

The passage is preceded by the information that this encounter was the first appearance of the queen of France since her “accouchement with the Duke of Normandy,” underscoring the postpartum status of the queen's body and the fact that it would be revealed in a new and changed state. This prefatory signaling of the unique physical condition of Marie Antoinette is followed by a tableau in which the queen's body is repeatedly marked off as a fascinating other. In the midst of “epicurean luxury” the queen “ate nothing.” A “slender crimson cord”—again underscoring the queen's newly maternal status in its resemblance to an umbilical cord—acts as a line of demarcation, separating the spectacle of the queen's body from its spectators. In a scopic exchange resembling that of a striptease, the queen draws on and then takes off her gloves, exposing her “white and polished arms” to her admiring audience. These marmoreal appendages serve as a metonymic representation of the queen's sexual body, substitute sexual objects of the type cast in Freudian terms as fetish.²

The fascination with the queen's body is not, of course, unique to Robinson's Memoirs. Pierre Saint-Amand writes of the “fetishistic delirium” of Marie Antoinette's biographers, and Emily Apter, in a discussion of Dr. Cabane's 1899 Cabinet secret de l'histoire, describes that work as “a peephole survey” ranging “from Marie-Antoinette's putative nymphomania to Citizen Marat's diseases and the fetishism of Gambetta's eye.”³ The interest in Marie Antoinette's body chronicled by these commentators, as well as Hunt and Castle, is matched by Marie Antoinette's own fascination with her body as an object of display. Madame de La Tour du Pin describes the elaborate dressing ritual of the queen at Versailles, a ceremony that necessitated a revolving audience of ladies-in-waiting.⁴ If Marie Antoinette was guilty of self-fetishization, she was matched in this propensity by Mary Robinson. The aspect of the Memoirs account that distinguishes it from other accounts of Marie Antoinette is the extent to which a kind of reciprocal fetishization occurs. Marie Antoinette serves for Robinson as model and mirror.

Marie Antoinette was at the time of her encounter with Robinson a half-dozen years away from the proliferation of pornographic pamphlets that would fashion an obscene tapestry of her personal history, but Robinson already had experienced being the focus of prurient interest. Robinson's liaison with the Prince of Wales inspired a flood of titillating literary commentary, a representative example of which is provided by the anonymously published 1784 pamphlet titled The Memoirs of Perdita; interspersed with Anecdotes of the Hon. Charles F———x; Lord M———; Col. T———; P———E of W———s; col St. L———R; Mr. S———N, and many other well known characters.⁵ The peek-a-boo title, though most likely motivated by the threat of libel charges, served in addition to underscore the tantalizing nature of the text, a fictional portrayal of Robinson's liaisons transformed into soft-core pornography. Robinson's trip to Paris was, in fact, an escape from the aftermath of her scandalous affair with the Prince of Wales, and from the newspapers that equated her name with prostitution.⁶

Despite Robinson's treatment by the press, there is evidence throughout the Memoirs of her fascination with public presence as a kind of display. In the portrayal of her encounter with Marie Antoinette (as well as in earlier, similar accounts more certainly written by her own hand), her desire to see the queen is matched by her desire to be seen by the queen in a particular fashion: “A pale green lustring train and body, with a tiffany petticoat, festooned with bunches of the most delicate lilac, were chosen by Mrs. Robinson for her appearance, while a plume of white feathers adorned her head; the native roses of her cheeks, glowing with health and youth, were stained, in conformity to the fashion of the French Court, with the deepest rouge” (MMR 2:93). The detailed attention to Robinson's fashionable embellishments suggests her acute awareness of her body as an object of display. Her “conformity to the fashion of the French Court” in the matter of facial rouge registers the extent of her identification with the French queen.

Marie Antoinette was the obvious model of high style for a woman as acutely attuned as Robinson was to the importance of public performance. Marie Antoinette epitomized fashion (Cecil Beaton claimed she was responsible for seventeen changes in women's hat styles between 1784 and 1786), and Robinson participated in bringing her sartorial standards to England.⁷ An edition of the Morning Herald from the fall of 1782 provides a running commentary on the latest dress sensations introduced by the queen of France: “The chemise de la Reine, in which Mrs. Robinson appeared at the Opera, is expected to become the favorite undress among the fashionable women.”⁸ Robinson's stylistic identification with Marie Antoinette extended beyond clothing fashions to her vehicle of conveyance. Her propensity for riding about in extravagant carriages … followed a standard set by the French queen. As Saint-Amand reports, even the berline that was to carry the royal family into exile displayed a colorful elegance.⁹ Robinson drew attention to her own carriage at one point by having it decorated with a crest resembling that of royalty. Her absorption in the model provided by Marie Antoinette took a variety of forms.

In the firsthand encounter described in the Memoirs, the queen's interest in the brooch on Robinson's bosom and Robinson's prolonged observation of the queen's arms attest to a mutual admiration based on a seemingly reductive attention to particular physical attributes. Furthermore, the purse “netted by the hand” of the queen and granted to Robinson as a token of her visit … would seem to represent fetishized objects of the type Freud defines. In the Freudian paradigm, here sketched by Emily Apter, “aprons, handkerchiefs, ribbons, veils, and undergarments all have in common instrumentalization as a cache-sexe deterring perception of the dreaded spectacle of maternal castration and thereby occluding the implied threat of emasculation.”¹⁰ The fact that women derived pleasure from Marie Antoinette's veil, purse, or arms, however, complicates these objects' assumed status as surrogate phallic objects.

Naomi Schor, in her study of the female fetish, suggests an alternate way of conceptualizing the reciprocal fetishization of Robinson's encounter with Marie Antoinette. Schor opts to read female fetishism as a strategy rather than a perversion, an appropriation of “the fetishist's oscillation between denial and recognition of castration” and thus a refusal to reduce sexuality to a single pole.¹¹ Schor draws on Mary Ann Doane's effort to theorize a female gaze, an attempt to locate the female spectator somewhere other than in false consciousness or self-absorption, what Doane describes as “the masochism of over-identification [with a male gaze] or the narcissism entailed in becoming one's own object of desire, in assuming the image in the most radical way.” Doane ascribes the problem represented by a female gaze to a lack of distance between the female spectator and the image—“she is the image”—and finds a remedy to this crisis of subjectivity in the masquerade. In “the hyperbolisation of the accoutrements of femininity” Doane locates a means by which the female subject can differentiate herself from her overdetermined object status: “The effectivity of masquerade lies precisely in its potential to manufacture a distance from the image, to generate a problematic within which the image is manipulable, producible, and readable by the woman.”¹²

In Mary Robinson's attention to feminine regalia one sees such a strategy at work. In meeting with Marie Antoinette she met with her perfect audience, one that could register the full complexity of her performance. Implicit in Robinson's appreciation of Marie Antoinette's body is a tacit acknowledgment of the female body's performative capacity and potential power. It is worth noting how masculine figures of monarchical power are carefully contained in the description of her meeting with the queen. The vignette begins with a disparaging allusion to Louis XVI: “The King acquitted himself with more alacrity than grace.” After this initial mention the king's presence is ignored, while the Prince of Wales, heir to the British crown and the impetus for Robinson's trip abroad, is represented by a static miniature version of himself. The prince becomes an object of exchange—the miniature is lent to the queen, who reciprocates with a netted purse—in what can be read as a parodic inversion of conventional gender roles. Robinson, who had already been supplanted by the next in a line of the prince's mistresses, employs a token of the future king as currency in an exclusively female marketplace.

It is possible to read this moment as a lesbian interchange with the Prince of Wales serving as a triangulated object of desire,¹³ but I prefer to dwell on the parallel between the fetishistic aspects of this scene …. I choose, that is, to view Robinson's encounter with Marie Antoinette as a moment of idolatrous identification that grants the fetishizer a theatrical power. To further this perspective on the exchange, we might return to Wayne Koestenbaum, whose description of opera divas and their relation to royalty bears a striking similarity to the situation of Mary Robinson in her liaison with Marie Antoinette. Koestenbaum writes: “Though fêted by crowned heads, the nineteenth-century diva, like other musicians, was not considered part of polite society. A silken cord at private gatherings separated her from the wealthy playgoers she was paid to entertain. And yet the diva masquerades as regal. Queens and divas understand each other. The diva believes—and this may be not grandiose delusion but truth—that she and the queen are secret sharers, conversing in winks and nods.”¹⁴ Mary Robinson identifies with Marie Antoinette—she serves in England as a kind of understudy to the French queen—and from this act of identification she derives a sense of her own spectacular power.¹⁵ Her positioning of herself as a second Marie Antoinette curiously mirrors her former position as princess manquée in relation to the Prince of Wales.

One can, of course, arrive at a less affirmative reading of Robinson's deployment of herself and Marie Antoinette as figures of wholly theatricalized femininity, interpreting Robinson's behavior as capitulating to rather than resisting a particular and limiting female subject position. In “The Legs of the Countess,” a fascinating study of female self-fetishization, Abigail Solomon-Godeau discusses the extraordinary nineteenth-century photographic archive of the Countess de Castiglione, finding in the countess's collection of pictures of herself not the self-authorizing creations of a female performance artist but rather evidence of “a radical alienation that collapses the distinction between subjecthood and objecthood.” The parallels between Robinson and the countess are arresting: both were cast in the role of court beauty, of whom Solomon-Godeau comments, “The babble of the popular press, the gushing of her admirers, the ritualistic tributes to feminine beauty are not only overdetermined, but serve, crucially, to mask the nonidentity of the feminine position, its nullity in relation to an acknowledged subjectivity.”¹⁶ But Robinson departs from the countess in her laborious effort to fashion alternate versions of herself—and of that counterego to herself, the French queen.

Although the episode recounted earlier took place in 1783, it is being recalled through Robinson's writing of the Memoirs in the late 1790s. Robinson had written much earlier about Marie Antoinette, entering her response to the Burke-Wollstonecraft debate with her 1791 tract Impartial Reflections on the Present Situation of the Queen of France, published anonymously, as the title page records, by “A Friend to Humanity.” Robinson's claim to impartiality is, of course, disingenuous, given her prior associations with the French queen, but her choice of words should be taken seriously. This text is “impartial” in its effort to show Marie Antoinette as more than the sum of her body parts, as greater (in a transcendent sense) than those pleasing arms that play such a striking role in the Memoirs. In order to defend the queen, Robinson first has to disembody her so as to rescue her from “the absurd fabrications, the ridiculous innuendoes [sic], the cruel sarcasms and unprecedented reproaches thrown upon the conduct of an illustrious Character” (IR [Impartial Reflections] 6).

Robinson's choice of words is instructive: her Impartial Reflections represents a determined effort to depict Marie Antoinette as a “character,” in the Popean rather than the theatrical sense of the word. She describes the French queen as “transcendently discreet,” writing, “Though perpetually taunted with the barbarous insults of irritating malice; she has never, even for a moment, forgot that true, that innate dignity of character, which places the human soul far above the reach of sublunary calamity” (IR 25). The body of Marie Antoinette, which is a point of fixation in the popular culture of the period, is supplanted in this text by Marie Antoinette's soul: Robinson bases her argument for the queen's exoneration on her intellectual and spiritual attributes. Susan Wolfson, in her analysis of the gendering of the soul in the romantic period, asserts that women writers (such as Maria Jane Jewsbury) argue for a “common intellectual soul in men and women,” one that “in women's dreams … is drawn to the paradise of intellectual satisfaction denied to them by their material existence in this world.”¹⁷ Marie Antoinette, through Robinson's act of mind-body division, is here lifted out of a cultural milieu in which the female is allied with sexual and political corruption.

Robinson asserts early on in this argument that a “vacuity of mind, is the most dangerous calamity that can threaten humanity,” and then proceeds to argue for the vigor of the French queen's intellect (IR 11). She compares Marie Antoinette favorably to Queen Elizabeth, whose “strength of mind” she describes as having been “elevated almost to a degree of masculine fortitude” (IR 13). Marie Antoinette, she claims, is possessed of “an innate dignity” as well as an “unaffected and artless vivacity” of mind (IR 14). If any fault can be attributed to the queen it is, in Robinson's account, due only to the inadequacy of a court education and not to Marie Antoinette's “elegant and munificent mind” (IR 23). By the end of the essay the “innate” quality of mind that she repeatedly attributes to the queen is broadened into a more generalized and transcendent assessment: “Innate greatness of soul, preserves its sublimity, whether it reposes on the purple of a throne; or enjoys the felicity of conscious worth on the flinty pallet of a loathsome dungeon!” (IR 30).

That Robinson's tract is a response to Burke and Wollstonecraft is clear from the extent to which she conflates both polemicists' lines of argument. Robinson draws on Burke's metaphoric figuration of the French queen, recalling how “every inferior constellation in the courtly circle, borrowed radiance from the refulgence of her superior brightness!” (IR 28). But she does so while glorifying the same Revolution and revolutionaries that Burke vilifies. She calls the Revolution “the most glorious achievement in the annals of Europe” and claims that “the members of the National Assembly, by their eloquent debates, and temperate proceedings, have done honour to the French nation” (IR 8, 19). Similarly, she adopts the rational rhetoric that Wollstonecraft uses to denounce Burke's excessive sensibility, but does so in order to build a case for the individual who precipitated Burke's (in Wollstonecraft's opinion) deluded response. Wollstonecraft addresses Burke as “You, who could not stand the fascinating glance of a great Lady's eyes, when neither virtue nor sense beamed in them” (VRM 18). Robinson makes a case for the queen's intellect and for the “sublimity” of her soul.

I shall return to Robinson's reference to the aesthetic category of the sublime, which came into sharp relief with the publication of Burke's 1757 Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. But before doing so I want to sketch out a connection between Wollstonecraft and Robinson in the last decade of both women's lives. Although Robinson was clearly familiar with Wollstonecraft's ideas when she penned Impartial Reflections in 1791, by the middle of the decade she had established a more personal acquaintance with the author of the Vindication. William Godwin's manuscript diary situates the two women at the same dinner party on June 1, 1796—“sup at Mrs Robinson's, w. Wolstencraft [sic] and Twiss”—and on other occasions after this date.¹⁸ In addition, Wollstonecraft's surviving letters include one missive to Robinson and several mentions of Robinson's work in letters to others. Robinson clearly admired Wollstonecraft's writing and shared her feminist agenda; Robinson's 1799 Thoughts on the Condition of Women is fashioned after Wollstonecraft's more famous treatise and cites Wollstonecraft as proof of female enlightenment: “We have seen a Wollstonecraft, a Macaulay, a Sévigné; and many others, now living, who embellish the sphere of literary splendour, with genius of the first order.”¹⁹ But well before the Memoirs Robinson had parted ways with Wollstonecraft in terms of representational strategy.

In “Monody to the Memory of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France,” a poem purporting to have been “written immediately after her execution” and published by itself in late 1793, Robinson dwells on the queen as the sum of eroticized body parts:

Mark, in her alter'd and distracted mien,
The fatal ensigns of the pangs within!
See those fair tresses on her shoulders flow
In silv'ry waves, that mock the alpine snow!
Where are their waving braids of glossy gold,
That crowned her brow, in many a silky fold?
That brow, so withered by Affliction's blast!
So stampt with age, before her prime was past!
Where are the graces of that 'witching form?
Torn from their home, and scatter'd to the storm!
Those eyes! like sapphire gems were wont to shine;
Bright beaming samples of their native mine!
what are they now? clos'd in the sleep of death!
Their blaze extinguish'd by rebellion's breath!

(PWMR [Poetic Works of Mary Robinson] 1:61-62)

Marie Antoinette's physical attributes are presented here as “fatal ensigns,” transparent indicators of her emotional status, but Robinson's luxurious description undermines such straightforward signification. Her determined effort to subsume the queen's material status to her spiritual status in Impartial Reflections has the effect of curbing the multiple and multiplying significance of the queen's body, but in her later works she seems more eager to exploit this very facet of the queen's persona. In Robinson's “Monody,” Marie Antoinette's body becomes allied with material sumptuousness (gold and sapphire) as well as with a sublime landscape (Alpine snow, the “blast” of Affliction).

Robinson begins another poem, “Marie Antoinette's Lamentation, in Her Prison of the Temple,” written in March 1793 and published in the May 1793 Monthly Magazine, with the stanza:

When on my bosom Evening's ruby light
          Thro' my thrice-grated window warmly glows,
Why does the cheerful ray offend my sight,
          And with its lustre mock my weary woes?
Alas! because on my sad breast appears
A dreadful record—written with my tears!

(PWMR 2:304)

Marie Antoinette's body is truly a kind of “dreadful record,” over-written by many hands and called into service for antithetical political ends. But if the body of the French queen has no stable and reliable currency in the debates over the Revolution, it is perhaps because the subtext of these debates, particularly when they are carried out by women writers such as Robinson and Wollstonecraft, is an inquiry into the place and power of female sexuality in public discourse. Robinson's fascination with the theatrical figure of Marie Antoinette is a fascination with the performing capacity of the female body.

Robinson's eschewal of the body in her Impartial Reflections can be attributed to rhetorical conventions; Robinson sounds most like Wollstonecraft when she is writing in Wollstonecraft's favorite mode: the polemical tract. But I would also link Robinson's subsequent fascination with and deployment of Marie Antoinette's body in her poems and memoir to an awareness of the inescapable aspect of female embodiment, an awareness that would have been strengthened as the decade wore on. The posthumous fate of Wollstonecraft served as a case in point. Godwin penned the story of his wife's life only to have the details of her past love affairs seized on and used to help construct a demon Wollstonecraft, a frightening figure of uncontrolled sexuality which could be called on to discourage feminist enthusiasm. Given the fact that the female body was inevitably invoked and written over by conservative polemicists—antifeminists, anti-Jacobins—I believe Robinson saw no point in or possibility of attempting to disembody the female figure.

I have briefly noted Robinson's polemical and poetic reliance on the sublime in her Impartial Reflections and “Monody to the Memory of Marie Antoinette.” I now return to Burke a final time in order to explain Robinson's references to this aesthetic category in her treatments of the French queen. Burke's two representations of Marie Antoinette can be read as emblematic of the two aesthetic classifications he helped to popularize. Marie Antoinette as astral body shares many of the attributes Burke associates with the beautiful: delicacy, clarity, brightness. The naked fleeing Marie Antoinette participates in a melodramatic tableau that elicits from Burke the response he attributes to the sublime, most notably terror and astonishment. That is, Marie Antoinette herself in this scene is not sublime, but the dramatic situation in which she is cast is productive of an awestruck response. That Marie Antoinette could only indirectly be associated with the sublime in Burke's writings is in keeping with the gendering of the two categories in his treatise. Whereas the sublime is marked as masculine in its association with power, strength, and size, the beautiful is defined by way of the female, most particularly with “that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts.”²⁰ I wish to suggest in closing the possibility that in women's writings one witnesses an attempt to confuse Burke's dichotomous system and grant to the beautiful female body the power of the sublime. In Robinson's attention to the female bosom—her own in the remembered interlude with the queen, and the queen's in “Marie Antoinette's Lamentation”—she recalls Burke's synecdochic figure of beauty, but in doing so invests it with a power only hinted at in Burke's treatise when he alludes to the female body's “variety of surface” as a “deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye glides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried.”²¹ Burke identified with the dizzy spectator; his female contemporaries identify with the dazzling performer.

Robinson's responses to Marie Antoinette underscore her performative potential. Wollstonecraft's denial of the queen's intrigue registers the danger for women of this kind of theatrical power. Her refusal to participate in the cult of the French queen was a reasonable choice for an early feminist intent on substantially revising women's political and cultural status; after all, whatever strange power the figure of Marie Antoinette assumed in women's writings or in the political debates of the period, it was not easily tapped to change the course of even the queen's own history. …

Notes

1. The Memoirs were begun by Robinson on January 14, 1798, and are interrupted at the point at which she describes her liaison with the Prince of Wales. A new narrator takes over, but Robinson's voice is introduced again by way of a long letter used to continue the story of her encounter with the prince. The volume was edited by her daughter and published by Richard Phillips; both of these individuals are possible candidates for author of the “Continuation” of the text, which is presented as having been written “By a Friend.” Given the fact that Robinson was a very prolific writer, it seems unlikely that she was unable to finish the text herself. Possibly she did finish it, writing in the third person as a distancing strategy. That the depiction of her encounter with Marie Antoinette originates with Robinson is supported by a very similar account of the meeting in “Anecdotes of the late Queen of France,” published anonymously in a volume of the Monthly Magazine to which Robinson made several contributions (MM 10 [1800]: 40). If Robinson did, as I strongly suspect, author the portrayal of her encounter with Marie Antoinette, this would provide more support for my emphasis on the theatricality of the moment: the shift into the third person situates Robinson as a witness to her own performance.

2. “The substitute for the sexual object is generally a part of the body but little adapted for sexual purposes, such as the foot or hair or some inanimate object (fragments of clothing, underwear), which has some demonstrable relation to the sexual person, preferably to the sexuality of the same.” Sigmund Freud, “The Sexual Aberrations,” in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Modern Library, 1938), 566.

3. Saint-Amand, “Adorning Marie Antoinette,” 20; Emily Apter, Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 40.

4. “A few minutes before midday, the ladies entered the salon next to the Queen's bedchamber. They all stood, except the elderly ones, who in those days were treated with great deference, and those of the younger ladies who were thought to be pregnant. There were always at least forty people present, often more. Sometimes, we were very closely packed, for our paniers took up a great deal of room. Ordinarily, when the Princesse de Lamballe, Mistress of the Household, arrived, she went straight into the bedchamber where the Queen was dressing. She usually arrived before the Queen had begun her toilette. The Princesse de Chimay, a sister-in-law of my aunt d'Henin, and the Comtesse d'Ossun, the first a Lady-in-Waiting and the second the Mistress of the Robes, also went in. A few minutes later, a footman advanced to the door of the bedchamber and called in a loud voice for ‘Le Service.’ The four ladies on duty that week, and all those who had come, as was customary, to wait on the Queen between their periods of duty, would then enter the bedchamber.” Memoirs of Madame de La Tour du Pin, ed. and trans. Felice Harcourt (London: Harvill Press, 1969), 70.

5. The Memoirs of Perdita (London: G. Lister, 1784).

6. A letter to the editor of the Morning Herald headed “Demireps” notes the paper's coverage of “Mrs. R———'s green carriage” in complaining of the paper's contents: “It is of little consequence to the public whether an impure, as they are fashionably denominated, drives four ponies or two coach-horses; whether she paints her neck or her cheeks; whether she sports a phaeton or rides in a dung-cart; whether she is accompanied by a peer or a pimp; by a commoner or a bully.—The scorn of the virtuous is always exemplifed in a triumph of silence over prostituted infamy!” Morning Herald, July 31, 1782, 4).

7. Cecil Beaton, “Fashions of Royalty,” in Dress, Adornment, and the Social Order, ed. Mary Ellen Roach and Joanna Bubolz Eicher (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1965), 265.

8. Morning Herald, November 20, 1782, 2.

9. Saint-Amand, “Adorning Marie Antoinette,” 29.

10. Emily Apter, “Splitting Hairs: Female Fetishism and Postpartum Sentimentality in the Fin de Siècle,” in Eroticism and the Body Politic, ed. Lynn Hunt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 167.

11. Naomi Schor, “Female Fetishism: The Case of George Sand,” in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 368.

12. Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator,” in Femmes Fatales (New York: Routledge, 1991), 31-32, 22, 26, 32.

13. Such a reading would take seriously Sue-Ellen Case's critique of Doane's conceptualization of the feminine as masquerade in “Toward a Butch-Femme Aesthetic.” Case accuses Doane of erasing the lesbian social history out of which notions of the feminine as masquerade emerged. Case suggests that when the masquerading subject is positioned between women, the myths of penis and castration in the Freudian economy are foregrounded. Sue-Ellen Case, “Toward a Butch-Femme Aesthetic,” Discourse 11, no. 1 (1988-89): 64. Case's paradigm is limited in its applicability to Robinson's encounter with the queen in that, rather than a butch-femme dynamic, we have here a femme-femme dynamic.

14. Koestenbaum, [The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (New York: Poseidon Press, 1993)], 107.

15. A contemporary example of this kind of idolatrous identification is provided by the 1996 auction of Jacqueline Onassis's possessions. Interestingly, one of the most coveted objects in the auction was a leather box bearing the coat of arms of Marie Antoinette, which sold for ＄118,000, seven times what Onassis had paid for it in 1981. According to Christie's auction house official William J. Iselin, Marie Antoinette's name in a pedigree “always has a significant impact on the price, making it a third more or twice the price paid for a similar piece with a lesser provenance.” Quoted in Rita Reif, “Not for Those Who Would Eat Cake,” New York Times, July 14, 1996, Arts and Leisure section, p. 34. On Jackie idolatry, see Wayne Koestenbaum, Jackie under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995).

16. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “The Legs of the Countess,” October 39 (1986): 76, 80.

17. Susan Wolfson, “Gendering the Soul,” in Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1995), 55.

18. William Godwin, diary, June 1, 1796, notebook 7, [Abinger deposit] Dep. e. 202, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

19. Mary Robinson, Thoughts on the Condition of Women, 2d ed. (London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1799), 12.

20. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 105.

21. Ibid.