"The fact that such objects can exist, beautiful quite apart from the painter's interpretation of them, satisfies a sort of innate materialism in us, against which our reason contends, and acts as a counterpoise to the abstractions of aesthetic theory. It was - this water-colour - the portrait of a young woman, by no means beautiful but of a curious type, in a close-fitting hat not unlike a bowler, trimmed with a ribbon of cerise silk; in one of her mittened hands was a lighted cigarette, while the other held at knee-level a sort of broad-brimmed garden hat, no more than a screen of plaited straw to keep off the sun. On a table by her side, a tall vase filled with pink carnations. Often (and it was the case here) the singularity of such works is due principally to their having been executed in special conditions, so that it is not immediately clear to us whether, for instance, the strange attire of a female model is her costume for a fancy-dress ball, or whether, conversely, the scarlet cloak which an elderly man looks as though he had put on in response to some whim of the painter's is his professor's or alderman's gown or his cardinal's cape. The ambiguous character of the person whose portrait now confronted me arose, without my understanding it, from the fact that it was a young actress of an earlier generation half dressed up as a man. . . . But above all one felt that Elstir, heedless of any impression of immortality that might be given by this transvestite costume worn by a young actress for whom the talent she would bring to the role was doubtless of less importance than the titillation she would offer to the jaded or depraved senses of some of her audience, had on the contrary fastened upon this equivocal aspect as on an aesthetic element which deserved to be brought into prominence, and which had had done everything in his power to emphasise. Along the lines of face, the latent sex seemed to be on the point of confessing itself to be that of a somewhat boyish girl, then vanished, and reappeared further on with a suggestion rather of an effeminate, vicious and pensive youth, then fled once more and remained elusive. The dreamy sadness in the expression of the eyes, by its very contract with the accessories belonging to the world of debauchery and the stage, was not the least disturbing element in the picture. One imagined moreover that it must be feigned, and that the young person who seemed ready to submit to caresses in this provoking costume had probably thought it intriguing to enhance the provocation with this romantic expression of a secret longing, an unspoken grief. At the foot of the picture was inscribed: 'Miss Sacripant, October, 1872.' I could not contain my admiration."
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 906-908
Proust is in Elstir's studio and stops to examine a specific water color painting. Art runs throughout Remembrance of Things Past, and Proust will both reference famous actual works but also describe fictional works, which he does so effortlessly that you end up believing they're real; a great proof of which would be that I searched to find a copy of Miss Sacripant, and was dismayed to discover that it was fictional. I knew that Elstir was a composite of different artists, but I thought that this was a description of a painting of one of those artists. Although, I guess I should be too dismayed because I'm sure my imagined version of the painting would be more moving than the actual painting, as these things usually go when the brain is free to create its own narrative. There is a book entitled Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time by Eric Karpeles, which is supposed to be quite good and which I need to track down. It might be the perfect use of the Amazon prize money that I received for having my Yemen picture rewarded in Champlain's international picture contest. As I've said, I'm trying to avoid reading too much scholarly research on Remembrance of Things Past at this point because I'm trying to immerse myself in the work and struggle with the deeper meanings on my own. However, I then want to go back and so some research, so I'll be better prepared for a second reading down the road.
Liminal space, as we've discussed, also seem to play a very big role in the novel, and I would argue that this is another example. Proust writes of "the ambiguous character of the person whose portrait now confronted me arose, without my understanding it, from the fact that it was a young actress of an earlier generation half dressed up as a man," and he even refers to her "transvestite clothes." Later he writes, "Along the lines of face, the latent sex seemed to be on the point of confessing itself to be that of a somewhat boyish girl, then vanished, and reappeared further on with a suggestion rather of an effeminate, vicious and pensive youth, then fled once more and remained elusive." Part of this, doubtless, relates to the fact that Proust is always drawn to the ethereal and the mysterious and the sublimely sad, which I think is expressed in his celebration of the subject's "secret longing, an unspoken grief." That said, I do think there's more going on here. So many of the characters in the novel, and Proust himself in real life, live lives of gender fluidity that transcend categorization, and this seems to be another example.
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