{"id":133503,"date":"2019-02-11T09:00:28","date_gmt":"2019-02-11T14:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=133503"},"modified":"2019-02-10T19:42:07","modified_gmt":"2019-02-11T00:42:07","slug":"feminize-your-canon-isabelle-eberhardt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/02\/11\/feminize-your-canon-isabelle-eberhardt\/","title":{"rendered":"Feminize Your Canon: Isabelle Eberhardt"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Eberhardt in 1895, photographed by Louis David<\/p><\/div>\n

When the Swiss-Russian writer and explorer Isabelle Eberhardt died in the Algerian Sahara in 1904, she was physically ravaged. She was only twenty-seven, but heavy smoking, drinking, and drug use had taken their toll, as had poor nourishment. On her travels she\u2019d carried a gun, but not a toothbrush, and so she had lost her teeth. She suffered from malaria and possibly syphilis, and just before her death had spent weeks hospitalized with fever. An assassination attempt a few years earlier, when a religious enemy attacked Eberhardt with a sword, had nearly severed her arm and left her in constant pain. Despite her youth, her body could no longer carry on. Her strange and brilliant mind, though, was immortalized by the travelogues, journalism, and fiction she left behind. \u201cNo one ever lived more from day to day than I, or was more dependent upon chance,\u201d Eberhardt wrote shortly before her death. \u201cIt is the inescapable chain of events that has brought me to this point, rather than I who have caused things to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A devotee of Islam and a Sufi initiate, Eberhardt repeatedly invoked the principle of mektoub<\/em>: it is written. It was an all-purpose fatalism that allowed her to accept heartache, since it was, in her words, \u201ctotally useless and absurd\u201d to rebel against sorrow. She rebelled against nearly everything else. She had innumerable erotic encounters with young Arab men (\u201cGod made me sensual\u201d) and gave free rein to the wanderlust that took her, in male guise, across the desert plains of North Africa. With preternatural boldness, she cast off all strictures\u2014sartorial, behavioral, and sexual\u2014associated with turn-of-the-century womanhood. Her early French biographer Claude-Maurice Robert marveled that she \u201cdrank more than a L\u00e9gionnaire, smoked more kif<\/em> than a hashish addict, and made love for the love of making love.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eberhardt\u2019s roots were cosmopolitan, tangled, and romantic. According to some accounts, her mother, Nathalie, was the result of a liaison between a fraulein Eberhardt and a wealthy Russian Jew. Eberhardt\u2019s biographer Annette Kobak, however, describes blonde, elegant Nathalie as the legitimate scion of an aristocratic Prussian family in Moscow. Regardless of her lineage, Nathalie made a good marriage to Senator-General Pavel de Moerder, a senior adviser to the tsar. They had three children, two boys and a girl, for whom a tutor was engaged. This rather mundane development turned momentous. The household\u2019s new member, a dark-bearded Armenian named Alexander Trophimowsky, was a defrocked priest, an anarchist associate of Mikhail Bakunin and Tolstoy, and irresistibly attractive. Barely a year passed before Nathalie ran away to Switzerland with the tutor, who was also married, and her children. After nine months another son, Augustin, arrived. Isabelle Wilhelmine Marie Eberhardt followed five years later. She was registered as the fille naturelle<\/em>\u2014illegitimate daughter\u2014of Nathalie.<\/p>\n

Though Trophimowsky was almost certainly her father, Eberhardt grew up calling him by his nickname, Vava. As an adult, she enjoyed weaving stories around her ambiguous parentage. Her real father, she once claimed, was a doctor who raped her mother. More often, to bolster her adopted Islamic identity, she referred to her father as a Tatar Muslim. In one fanciful theory, advanced by Arthur Rimbaud\u2019s biographer Pierre Arnoult long after Eberhardt\u2019s death, she was the daughter of the idolized French poet. The evidence, including the eighteen-year-old Rimbaud\u2019s presence in Geneva when Eberhardt was conceived, is wholly circumstantial. Still, it makes for a compelling piece of apocrypha. The two writers, who both fled repressive bourgeois Europe for the stirring atmosphere of Africa, had a passing facial resemblance and shared a restless, visionary, live-fast-die-young spirit. At sixteen, Rimbaud declared, \u201cI\u2019m now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? I want to be a poet \u2026 The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering.\u201d Eberhardt\u2019s diary from when she was twenty-two contains a similar sentiment:<\/p>\n

I assume for the gallery the borrowed mask of the cynic, the debauched layabout. No one yet has managed to see through to my real inner self, which is sensitive and pure and which rises above the degrading baseness I choose to wallow in, out of contempt for convention and also out of a strange desire to suffer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Being the secret offspring of a canonized literary rebel who slept with both men and women, devoured opium and absinthe, and pioneered new poetic forms would have appealed to Eberhardt. But whether or not she shared his genes, it was Trophimowsky who wielded the most decisive influence.<\/p>\n

The runaway family lived in the Villa Neuve, a large house in the countryside outside Geneva, set on four and a half verdant acres surrounded by pine trees. Eberhardt, according to neighbors, would \u201cdance about like a little wild animal along the garden paths. Untamed and unfettered, she did whatever took her fancy from morning to night. Her fantasies knew no bounds.\u201d The children were taught at home by Trophimowsky, whose anarchist principles dictated that boys and girls alike should be intellectually nurtured. Along with an eclectic program of reading that included Voltaire, Plato, Turgenev, and Zola, Trophimowsky taught Eberhardt\u2014who grew up bilingual in French and Russian\u2014Latin, Italian, and Arabic.<\/p>\n

By age sixteen, Eberhardt could read the Koran in Arabic, and was already feeling the magnetic draw of faraway lands. Spellbound by the novels of Pierre Loti and their evocative fictionalizing of his travels in \u201cthe Orient,\u201d she set her heart on going to North Africa. It was a place, she wrote, that exerted \u201can extraordinary attraction\u201d before she\u2019d ever seen it. Her short story Visions of the Maghreb<\/em>, written when she was eighteen and still living in Switzerland, is an eerily precise projection of Eberhardt\u2019s future. Published under a male pseudonym in the French journal Nouvelle Revue Moderne <\/em>(whose contributors also included Loti and Rimbaud\u2019s erstwhile boyfriend Paul Verlaine), this precocious, atmospheric tale depicts a young Russian woman\u2019s encounters with Halim, an Islamic mystic in Algeria. Its portrayal of Halim could be of the author herself a couple of years hence:<\/p>\n

Of medium height, his slenderness seemed almost feminine beneath the wrapping of his coarse clothing typical of a man of the people \u2026 He sat down near the fire across from me, and in its rekindled glimmer, I saw his pale face, almost unreal in its beauty, with dark eyes that seemed illuminated from the interior by a mystical flame beneath the perfect arch of his black eyebrows.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Eberhardt\u2019s cross-dressing began under Trophimowsky\u2019s scholastic regime, where girls were expected to perform physical as well as intellectual labor. At his behest, Eberhardt had short hair and wore boys\u2019 clothing, all the more practical for chopping wood, gardening, and riding horses. In her late teens, when she was old enough to wander Geneva by herself, Trophimowsky allowed her to do so only if she wore trousers. She had a dalliance with a married man she met in the city, a \u201csensualist\u201d like herself named Charles Schwarz. On one of their dates, Eberhardt was drunk and dressed as a sailor. Schwarz bet her that she wouldn\u2019t dare embrace him in public. But, as she delightedly relayed to her brother Augustin, she called his bluff. They kissed at length while sitting in a drugstore. This type of homoerotic role-playing, a recurrent theme of Eberhardt\u2019s sexual escapades, is the animating force of her only novel, Vagabond<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Drawing on Eberhardt\u2019s experiences as well as those of Augustin, Vagabond<\/em> is a bildungsroman that charts the determination of a young Russian, Dimitri Orschanow, to maintain the freedom he adores. At the beginning of the novel, Orschanow, a medical student, falls in love with Vera, a clever and thoughtful political activist. But the normal life that stretches before him\u2014marriage, children, a respectable career as a doctor\u2014cannot compete in his imagination with the alternative:<\/p>\n

To become a free vagabond sleeping on the side of the road, someone who possesses nothing and envies no one, someone at odds with neither himself nor with his fellow men, but happy in his independence, master of things, not dominated by them, and master above all of the infinite horizons.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Orschanow indulges his \u201clove of the bewitching elsewhere<\/em>.\u201d Abandoning the devoted Vera, he goes to seek a life of proletarian simplicity, liberated from domestication, sameness, and middle-class convention. It is a beautifully written, highly idealized fantasy. Yet the novel\u2019s exaltation of nomadism, and its philosophical rejection of ambition and materialism, is as thought provoking today as it was a hundred years ago. \u201cA subject to which intellectuals never give a thought,\u201d wrote Eberhardt in a notebook, \u201cis the right to be a vagrant, the freedom to wander. Yet vagrancy is deliverance, and life on the open road is the essence of freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Isabelle Eberhardt<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

At around the age of twenty-one, Eberhardt began to travel around the Maghreb dressed as a young Arab or Turkish man. She would introduce herself as Si Mahmoud Saadi. If her biological sex was evident to some, Arab codes of courtesy meant that she wasn\u2019t challenged. Dressed in loose garments, with a fez atop her shaved head, she went on horseback expeditions through the Sahara, shared sleeping tents with groups of men, hung around the souks, and visited brothels with soldiers out of, she said, an \u201cartist\u2019s curiosity.\u201d In Vagabond<\/em>, a fascination with masculinity often shades into homoeroticism. Take, for example, this portrait of a group of dockers:<\/p>\n

Their blue linen trousers were stained with tar and oil, their torsos seem molded into their blue and white vests, and loose red wool belts fell from their waists \u2026 The warm, rose-gold evening air brushed against their muscular necks and the bronzed contours of their faces.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When the dockers go on strike to protest their wages being undercut by migrant Italians, the politically jaded Orschanow views the action as foolhardy. Nevertheless, he is \u201cmesmerized by the savage beauty of the crowd, by these healthy, robust men in their working clothes \u2026 suddenly dignified by their anger, their broad shoulders highlighted by the pools of alternating red and blue from the gas and electric lights.\u201d It is startling, and amusing, to read such an unabashed sexualized portrayal of blue-collar masculinity from an educated and privileged nineteenth-century woman.<\/p>\n

The novel\u2019s renunciation of femininity extends to Orschanow\u2019s experience with a pale-faced young prostitute. Her lovemaking, he notes with approval, \u201cwas bitter and brutal, without the sentimentality or spinelessness of most girls.\u201d Eberhardt might have been talking about herself. Voraciously and unemotionally promiscuous, at times she lamented her \u201cvulgar\u201d side. Yet a friend from Tunis recalled that \u201cwhen she saw a man she wanted, she took him. She\u2019d beckon him over and off they\u2019d go. She never made any pretenses; she never hid her adventures. Why should she?\u201d<\/p>\n

Eberhardt didn\u2019t seem to worry about pregnancy. Judging by her readiness to live among men in the most basic conditions, she probably didn\u2019t menstruate. If she was anorexic, as has been suggested, it ties in to both her religiosity and her masochism. \u201cSuffering is a very positive thing,\u201d she wrote, \u201cfor it sublimates the emotions and produces great courage or devotion; it creates the capacity for strong feelings and all-encompassing ideas.\u201d Like her fellow Aquarian mystic Simone Weil, who starved herself and insisted on doing tough physical labor, Eberhardt would always choose a hard floor over a soft bed. Physical abnegation was a means of liberation, of transcendence over inconvenient biology.<\/p>\n

Kobak remarks that Eberhardt \u201cwas living out in reality to an extraordinary degree the omniscience and androgyny that many writers take on in their imaginations.\u201d By the same token, she viewed writing as a form of exhilarating exploration. \u201cFor me it seems that by advancing in unknown territories,\u201d she wrote, \u201cI enter my life.\u201d Despite the compulsions\u2014sex, drugs, alcohol, travel\u2014that occupied her waking hours, her writing was of central importance, and she was eager for publication. She was driven to maintain, she wrote, \u201ctwo lives, one that is full of adventure and belongs to the Desert, and one, calm and restful, devoted to thought and far from all that might interfere with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

At one point she considered settling down to a quiet life with Slim\u00e8ne Ehnni, an Algerian soldier with whom she fell passionately in love. Like Eberhardt, he belonged to the Qadriya, the oldest Sufi order. \u201cGod had pity on me and heard my prayers,\u201d she wrote. \u201cHe gave me the ideal companion, so ardently desired, and without whom my life would always have been incoherent and mournful.\u201d The young lovers talked about acquiring a small business to run together, a grocer\u2019s or a caf\u00e9. When they got married in October 1901, Eberhardt wore a wig, for once bowing to convention.<\/p>\n

But it was ludicrous to suppose that marriage would slow Eberhardt\u2019s constant movement. While Ehnni\u2019s post as a quartermaster kept him in the north of the country, she worked as a war correspondent, reporting on Moroccan-Algerian border clashes between Berber tribes and French forces making territorial incursions. She also carried out intelligence missions for Hubert Lyautey, the French brigadier general in charge of Oran, and acted as intermediary between him and the local people. With her perfect idiomatic Arabic and intimate knowledge of the region, Eberhardt proved a valuable asset. Though she tended toward an anti-colonial viewpoint, she apparently trusted that a French protectorate conducted according to Lyautey\u2019s methods would benefit the Arab Muslims in Morocco. \u201cWhat a delight,\u201d wrote the general, \u201cto find someone who is truly himself, who rejects prejudice, servitude, banality, and who moves through life as freely as a bird through the air.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the fall of 1904, when Eberhardt met up with her husband in the Saharan village of A\u00efn Sefra, they hadn\u2019t seen each other for eight months. They spent a happy night together. The next day, at around eleven o\u2019clock, a deafening torrent of water rushed down from the mountains and obliterated a quarter of the town. Ehnni was swept away by the current and survived, but Eberhardt\u2019s body was found pinned under a beam of the house. She had just completed a manuscript of stories, and the muddy pages surrounded her. Under Lyautey\u2019s orders, soldiers sifted through the devastation to find all her papers, which were painstakingly reassembled and preserved.<\/p>\n

Eberhardt never made much money from her writing, and what little she had she spent quickly on tobacco, books, or gifts for friends. Vagabond<\/em> began as a serialized story in Al-Akhbar<\/em> in 1903, but she often filed installments late, or not at all. Her work appeared in book form only posthumously, with several collections of stories and reflections published to critical acclaim in the years after her death. Vagabond <\/em>made its debut as a novel in France in 1922; in 1988 the Hogarth Press put out Kobak\u2019s English translation, now out of print. Two anthologies, The Oblivion Seekers<\/em> and In the Shadow of Islam<\/em>, are currently available from the independent British press Peter Owen. These writings, which foreground the lives and experiences of North Africans, have established Eberhardt as a vital early critic of imperial rule. Her perspective, according to the Tunisian scholar H\u00e9di A. Jaouad, \u201cmay have inaugurated the theme of decolonization in the Maghreb, for it expounded a theory of sociology and oppression whose theorists and critics would later include, among Francophone writers, the Martinican Frantz Fanon and the Tunisian Albert Memmi.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eberhardt\u2019s legacy as a feminist, meanwhile, rests less on her writing than on her incredible and uncompromising life, which has acquired legendary status. The \u201cAndrogyne du Desert,\u201d as she was called in France, has inspired plays, films, a 2012 opera by the composer Missy Mazzoli, and even, in 2015, a New York musical, The Nomad<\/em>. Such splashy glorification would have bewildered Eberhardt, who wrote, the year of her death, \u201cSoon, the solitary, woeful figure that I am will vanish from this earth, where I have always been a spectator, an outsider among men.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read earlier installments of Feminize Your Canon here.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Emma Garman has written about books and culture for\u00a0<\/em>Lapham\u2019s Quarterly Roundtable,\u00a0<\/em>Longreads,\u00a0<\/em>Newsweek,\u00a0<\/em>The Daily Beast,\u00a0<\/em>Salon,\u00a0<\/em>The Awl,\u00a0<\/em>Words Without Borders, and other publications.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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