Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Series Editors’ Preface
- Introduction: Revolutionary Preoccupations: Or, Transatlantic Feeling in a Radical Sense
- 1 Framing the Pétroleuse: Postbellum Poetry and the Visual Culture of Gender Panic
- 2 Becoming Americans in Paris: The Commune as Frontier in Turn-of-the-Century Adventure Fiction
- 3 Radical Calendars: The Commune Rising in Postbellum Internationalism
- 4 Tasting Space: Sights of the Commune in Henry James's Paris
- 5 Restaging Horror: Insurgent Memories of the Commune in the 1930s
- Epilogue: Barricades Revisited – The Commune on Campus from FSM to SDS
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Framing the Pétroleuse: Postbellum Poetry and the Visual Culture of Gender Panic
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Series Editors’ Preface
- Introduction: Revolutionary Preoccupations: Or, Transatlantic Feeling in a Radical Sense
- 1 Framing the Pétroleuse: Postbellum Poetry and the Visual Culture of Gender Panic
- 2 Becoming Americans in Paris: The Commune as Frontier in Turn-of-the-Century Adventure Fiction
- 3 Radical Calendars: The Commune Rising in Postbellum Internationalism
- 4 Tasting Space: Sights of the Commune in Henry James's Paris
- 5 Restaging Horror: Insurgent Memories of the Commune in the 1930s
- Epilogue: Barricades Revisited – The Commune on Campus from FSM to SDS
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
La Pétroleuse! (petroleum-thrower): what a terrible significance has this newly invented name. Is it possible that those who belong to what is emphatically styled the gentler sex can perpetuate such atrocities?
Harper's Weekly (1871)All her utterances, and especially her speeches at the anarchist gatherings, are wired throughout the country as fully and eagerly as though she were a Louise Michel or a Pétroleuse of the Paris Commune.
The Galveston Daily News on Lucy Parsons (1886)In perhaps the most climactic moment of The Bostonians, Henry James's 1886 novel of feminist agitation and tragicomic love triangles, Basil Ransom, having successfully snagged Verena Tarrant away from at once Olive Chancellor, the suffrage movement, and a life on the public stage, does not watch Olive as she contemplates replacing Verena by herself ascending the stage to face the increasingly mob-like crowd at the Boston Hall she had rented for her protégée's entrée into the public eye. Writes James,
If [Ransom] had observed her, it might have seemed to him that she hoped to find the fierce expiation she sought for in exposure to the thousands she had disappointed and deceived, in offering herself to be trampled to death and torn to pieces. She might have suggested to him some feminine firebrand of Paris revolutions, erect on a barricade.
Olive is imagined here as at once martyr and virago, poised to face the public rather than an onslaught of bullets, or, rather, about to face the hissing crowd as if it were an onslaught of bullets, the scenes melting into, or altogether overwhelming, one another. But what to make of the strange slippage here between mounting a platform and a barricade? For the connection is not quite as off-hand, or as strictly metaphorical, as James's conditional tense implies. While the plurality of the reference – summoning any, all Paris revolutions – dispels its curious particularity, the figure of the “feminine firebrand” nevertheless quite strikingly conjures one of the most terrifying remainders of the Paris Commune – namely, the figure of the female petroleum-thrower or pétroleuse laying waste to the city, even as it points to the way that this figure so often haunted that of the suffragist in the late nineteenth-century American imaginary:
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- Sensational InternationalismThe Paris Commune and the Remapping of American Memory in the Long Nineteenth Century, pp. 23 - 51Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016