u/GiovanniJones

And we are back in Paris, after a very eventful trip to Italy - in 27 rue de Helder, neighborhood of the parvenus le Comte et Comtesse de Morcerf (formerly known as Mercédès and Fernand); and Dumas, as a means of introduction, provides us with an extremely detailed picture of the pavilion inhabited by the young vicomte Albert de Morcerf:

>Puis partout, le long des murailles, au-dessus des portes, au plafond, des épées, des poignards, des criks, des masses, des haches, des armures complètes dorées, damasquinées, incrustées; des herbiers, des blocs de minéraux, des oiseaux bourrés de crin, ouvrant pour un vol immobile leurs ailes couleur de feu et leur bec qu'ils ne ferment jamais.

>Then, everywhere, along the walls, above the doors, on the ceiling, were swords, daggers, kris, maces, axes, complete suits of alded, damascened or encrusted armour, as well as herbaria, blocks of mineral samples and stuffed birds spreading their brilliant, fiery wings in immobile flight and opening beaks that were never closed. (Buss, 439)

>On the walls, over the doors, on the ceiling, were swords, daggers, Malay creeses, maces, battle-axes; gilded, damasked, and inlaid suits of armor; dried plants, minerals, and stuffed birds, their flame-colored wings outspread in motionless flight, and their beaks forever open.  (Gutenberg)

At the end of this enumeration of inanimate objects emerges a marvelous flock of stuffed birds with leurs ailes couleur de feu (literally “their wings the color of fire”).  Their appearance is dramatic, and yet ironic; at first, the present participle ouvrant indicates the birds are in the active process of opening their wings; but this idea is immediately contradicted by the oxymoron vol immobile (“motionless flight”); and then one recalls that this promised flight is only an illusion of taxidermy.  The final clause qu’ils ne ferment jamais (“that they never close”) finishes with a flourish of poetic irony - the word “close” pairing with the idea that the wings and beak will forever remain open, which connects to the irony of the stuffed bird “opening” its wings and beak, though in fact they are and always will be open, having been snatched out of tense and time and frozen like a platonic form.  

I have my usual gripes with the translations of the stuffed bird passage.  They fail to maintain the poetic irony found in the original.  They add and substitute words for no apparent benefit.  They fiddle around with the verb tenses - for instance, the Buss switches to the past tense to describe the continuous present (“beaks that were never closed” instead of “beaks that they never close”) - which is in awkward contradiction to the fact that their beaks did close in the past, back before the birds were killed, perhaps with one of the blunt objects enumerated earlier in the sentence.  Furthermore, both the Buss and the Gutenberg weaken the open/close symmetry by using “spreading/outspread” instead of “opening”.  “Spreading” and “opening” in this context are, admittedly, interchangeable, but only one of these words was used in the original, and only one of these words creates a clear symmetry with the word “close”.  Finally, the Gutenberg removes any chance at symmetry by ending the sentence with “forever open” instead of “never close”.  This is unfortunate, since the original sentence ending with “never close” imbues it with a sense of finality, a sense of the tragedy of the death of these once living creatures, once a vibrant expression of life with their wings, the color of fire, lifting them into the air in a majestic flight; but now each is embalmed for eternity in a grotesque caricature of its former self, gathering dust along with the other objects briefly desired and then discarded, taking their place in the detritus of a wanton, insatiable and inconstant lust to consume and possess for possession’s sake.

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When reading the above passage in the original French, the attention that Dumas gives to the prose in creating this vivid, poetic image of the stuffed birds stimulated my brain to form an association with Mercédès, who lurks unseen, somewhere on the premises.  A stuffed bird seems to symbolize her current predicament, trapped in this dusty hotel full of random stuff; once a vibrant and active character, she seems now to be just another object among the bric-a-brac.  To peek ahead slightly to the next chapter, this view of Mercédès’ transformation is further supported by the description of her portrait in chapter 41, “The Presentation”, in which her former existence is represented as an object that hangs on the wall, tucked away in Albert’s pavilion because it reminds Fernand of a time in the past, uncomfortable for him, when she was free and independent, and when he was plotting to put her then financé in jail.  And even though Albert remarks that Mercédès is a talented painter, it is not a self portrait that hangs on the wall, but rather one signed by the famous artist Léopold Robert, who, we recall from a prior episode, had painted Summer Reapers Arriving in the Pontine Marshes, which Albert wanted to mimic for the carnival at Rome.

This taming of Mercédès - her reduction to a portrait on the wall - has an odd parallel to a story that the art historian Whitney Chadwick relates in the preface to her book Women, Art, and Society.  When it was first established in 1768, the British Royal Academy included two talented women painters, Angelica Kaufmann and Mary Moser, who were founding members and active participants in the academy.  However, when Johann Zoffany created a portrait commemorating its creation (The Academicians of the Royal Academy, 1771-2), instead of Kaufmann and Moser being included in the lively group of thirty-four queue-wigged male artists, who in the painting are shown actively studying and discussing the methods and techniques of artistic representation, they were instead, in a token gesture, pictured in two rather morose painted busts that hang inconspicuously on a wall in the background of the scene. “Kaufmann and Moser have become the objects of art rather than its producers” remarks Chadwick, who goes on to add:

>The bizarre but all too common transformation of the woman artist from a producer in her own right into a subject for representation forms a leitmotif in the history of art. Confounding subject and object, it undermines the speaking position of the individual woman artist by generalizing her. Denied her individuality, she is displaced from being a producer and becomes instead a sign for male creativity. (Chadwick, 21)

(Below is an external link to the portrait)

The Academicians of the Royal Academy (wikipedia)

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>If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.   For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro narrow chinks of his cavern.
    —William Blake, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

It is curious, when we encounter a text, an image, a film, or the world around us, how our subjective experience can help to reveal meaning, while at the same time unconscious mechanisms work to obscure it.  Without the benefit of the background provided by Chadwick’s expertise, the exclusion of Kaufmann and Moser would have remained invisible to my eyes; yet in my reading of Dumas’ stuffed bird passage, a subtle poetry emerges from the camouflage of the surrounding prose, as when one suddenly spots the sleek outline of a doe emerge from a deep brush gently illuminated by bright spring sunbeams filtered through a translucent melody of maple, birch, and oak leaves; while the translators, those predators of literal meaning, their focus trained on the mechanical movement of word, clause and sentence, are blind to it.  But, if I may offer a personal anecdote, I have discovered that, despite whatever sensitivity of observation I might claim to possess in the realm of prose and poetry, I am nevertheless quite capable of being blind where another might see - of being prey to an unconscious cultural bias.  Brief, the context of this unsettling discovery:  once upon a time I was participating in a classroom discussion of the Frank Capra film Lost Horizon (1937).  The plot summary is as follows, with minor spoilers:  After a plane crash in the Himalayas, the survivors, who are all westerners, wind up in the magical city of Shangri-La, which is a hidden, peaceful oasis somewhere in Tibet where the humans, once settled there, do not age.  One of the male protagonists soon falls in love with a beautiful, young woman he meets there - a femme fatale who has also wandered into Shangri-La after a similar incident.  But it turns out she is unhappy in paradise; she has lived there for fifty years without having aged a day; and though in appearance she is still in the prime of her youth and beauty, she feels like a prisoner in Shangri-La, and convinces her lover that they should dare to bite the apple and escape from this paradise.  So they cast themselves out of Shangri-La and head out into the snowy mountains beyond. However, not long after leaving the city, the man turns to look at his beautiful young lover and is horrified to see the deeply wrinkled face of an old woman:  now that they have traveled beyond the borders of Shangri-La, her appearance has suddenly changed to reflect her actual age.  The man recoils in shock at her appearance, flees in terror and madness, and throws himself into a deep crevasse.

Throughout the film there is a cultural tension between the westerners and the stereotyped native inhabitants of Shangri-La, and at one point during our class discussion, a student pointed out that not only did the beautiful young woman turn into a wrinkled old woman after leaving Shangri-La, but also that the actor that portrayed the wrinkled old woman was of Asian descent.  So, from the film’s point of view, the young woman changed in appearance from young, white and Western (an object of desire) to old, dark and Asian (an object of repulsion).  As Dumas would say, it is impossible to describe my shock at this moment - shock at the fact that despite having dutifully studied the excerpt provided from Edward Said’s famous book in preparation for the class, I could have been so blind as to not notice this race swap, this blatant display of Orientalism.

To lead this digression back to our novel:  following the infamous “Roman Bandits” chapter, in our weekly discussion there was expressed some criticism of the novel’s portrayal of women, which on a superficial level I tended to agree with; clearly the important action in the novel centers around the male characters, and certainly what happens to Rita in the “Roman Bandits” chapter is horrible and disturbing - but on the other hand, I reasoned to myself, the real world is often horrible and disturbing; should a novel be subject to criticism simply on the grounds that it tells a horrible, violent story?  Furthermore, it seemed to me that, though bound to some extent by their circumstances and social position, both Mercédès and the Marquise de Saint-Méran are rendered as active and formidable female characters.  For instance, as I pointed out in an earlier essay, Mercèdes physically and intellectually dominates Fernand in their scene of introduction; and later, her bold confrontation of Villefort on the street sends him into a full-fledged panic attack.  Still, perhaps due to the lesson of Lost Horizon, I kept these ideas to myself, intuiting that, without a womb of my own, I was lacking some crucial insight, that my understanding of the argument was superficial, and that taking a position on the argument would be as reckless as trekking out to a remote mountain peak without a map, a compass and the knowledge to use them.  And so this unresolved problem was absorbed into that complex, background stew of unanswered questions, half-formed ideas, thoughts and considerations that simmer beneath the immediacy of experience, in anticipation of some coincidence of contact to suddenly unlock or deepen our understanding.

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>One cannot invite the breeze, but one must leave the window open.
    —J. Krishnamurti

Time passes, and muted in the mind, impressions remain.  At the transfer station in my town, alongside the various refuse and recycling chutes, is an area where one can leave unwanted books for free adoption.  During my weekly visits, I make a point to stop and dig through the book piles for a minute or two, because quite often one can find something interesting buried under the self-help titles, obsolete technical manuals, out-of-date travel guides, old magazines, children’s books and unread best sellers. Not long after the aforementioned discussion of the “Roman Bandits” chapter, I was sifting through the bookpile when I unearthed a black and purple paperback with a provocative title:  Pornography: Men Possessing Women, by Andrea Dworkin.  A serendipitous find, considering that the disconnected puzzle pieces of a feminist criticism had been silently swirling in the great red spot of my mind’s ether - so I rescued it from potential oblivion.  On another day, in another time, in another state of mind, I might well have passed it by; or, from a different perspective, the universe might not have taken the same pains to insure that the book would find me.  Whichever the case, it was, upon reflection, a strange book to find at random; I wondered what its story was, this paperback; what shelves had it rested on for the past forty years; how many and whose eyes had glided silently across its stream of little black marks, its words and sentences; and how did it finally end up in a book pile at the dump in my quiet little town in the country, far from the bustling loci of critical theorists in the centers of education that lie a long day’s ride to the south?  

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>Bring up a host against them, and make them an object of terror and a spoil.  And the host shall stone them and dispatch them with their swords ... Thus I will put an end to lewdness in the land, that all women may take warning and not commit lewdness as you have done.
    —Ezekiel 23

>WHEN a Man has Married a Wife, he finds out whether
Her knees & elbows are only glewed together.
    —William Blake

A scathing and unapologetic feminist polemic - is how I would describe Dworkin’s book, which was originally published in 1981.  Each chapter beings with a detailed description of the sexual violence found in a specific sample of pornographic material, along with testimony from its female victims, who invariably have been subjected to violence and sexual abuse since childhood.  So while not at all a pleasant read, it was helpful in that it elucidated two concepts fundamental to the depiction of women in pornography, and in literature, and thus to a feminist literary criticism: woman as object, and woman as mirror.  Dworkin argues that the objectification of women by men as a means to suppress and control them simultaneously creates a mirror in which men can express their fear and insecurity:

>Men want women to be objects, controllable as objects are controllable. Women who deviate from the male definition are monstrous, sluts, depraved. Since all women do deviate to some degree, all women are viewed to some degree as monstrous, sluts, depraved, with appetites that, if unleashed, would swallow up the male, destroy him. Men know that the object does breathe, but rather than face up to the meaning of this knowledge, they prefer to believe that under the object lurks a hungry, angry viper ... Suddenly, one is confronted with the fragile, vulnerable male, threatened by reptilian female genitalia, ... or the devouring mother, or the insatiable lust of the nymphomaniac. The fear that what men have suppressed in women will emerge to destroy them makes the control of women an urgent and absolute necessity. Men dare to claim not only that they are fragile but that the power of women over them is immense and real. (Dworkin, 65)

I found this critique helpful in clarifying my instinct, which I alluded to in my previous essay, that Homer’s depiction of Circe in the Odyssey is openly and absurdly chauvinistic.  Franz, we may recall, invokes the spectre of Circe in order to caution Albert during his aggressive pursuit of a tryst with the “peasant girl” in Rome, since, in the Odyssey, Circe, a dangerous female possessing a magical power, uses her sexuality to lure unsuspecting men into her lair, at which point, with a touch of her wand, she transforms them into utterly servile pigs that grovel at her feet and in the mud.  However, Homer’s lesson is that if a man acts manly, like Ulysses, and threatens the dangerous woman with physical force, the frightening object is transformed; she will yield to this threat of violence, offer up her body for your sexual gratification, and then feed, bathe and care for you as a mother would her child. Thus, as viewed through the lens of Dworkin’s criticism, Homer, in depicting Circe as an object, also creates a mirror for the expression of masculine fear and desire: his fear of being emasculated by a woman’s sexual power, and his corresponding desire to forcefully take possession of her, and to physically dominate her for his own pleasure - a domination that she in fact craves and enjoys, and which is an essential component of her femininity.  Homer’s lesson mirrors what the poet and feminist Adrienne Rich calls “the pernicious message” of pornography:  that “women are natural sexual prey to men and love it, that sexuality and violence are congruent, and that for women sex is essentially masochistic, humiliation pleasurable, physical abuse erotic.” (Rich, 1596)

But fifty years prior to the publication of Dworkin’s Pornography, Virginia Woolf, from whom Dworkin quotes liberally, had also expressed, with rich irony, this idea of the objectified woman providing a mirror for male insecurity, in her essay A Room of One’s Own:

>Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown. We should still be scratching the outlines of deer on the remains of mutton bones and bartering flints for sheep skins or whatever simple ornament took our unsophisticated taste. ... Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilizing natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is? (Woolf)

Meanwhile in 1949, at a midpoint between Woolf and Dworkin, Simone de Beauvoir, in her book The Second Sex, argues that myth is the key to the pervasiveness of this objectification-mirroring of the feminine by the male:

>The myth of woman, sublimating an immutable aspect of the human condition—namely, the "division" of humanity into two classes of individuals—is a static myth. It projects into the realm of Platonic ideas a reality that is directly experienced or is conceptualized on a basis of experience; in place of fact, value, significance, knowledge, empirical law, it substitutes a transcendental Idea, timeless, unchangeable, necessary. This idea is indisputable because it is beyond the given: it is endowed with absolute truth. Thus, as against the dispersed, contingent, and multiple existences of actual women, mythical thought opposes the Eternal Feminine, unique and changeless. If the definition provided for this concept is contradicted by the behavior of flesh-and-blood women, it is the latter who are wrong: we are told not that Femininity is a false entity, but that the women concerned are not feminine. The contrary facts of experience are impotent against the myth. (de Beauvoir, 1265)

At the risk of making a faux pas, having never formally studied or practiced in the visual arts, it nevertheless strikes me that the pervasiveness of the female nude in western art is an expression of the myth of femininity that de Beauvoir describes.  If, for example, a redditor subscribes to “r/museum”, the sheer ubiquity of female nudes rendered by male artists over the centuries, when extracted from the civilized conceit of the art gallery or museum and woven by algorithmic whim into the scrolling stream of vapidity on the screens of our stupid smart phones, strikes one once again - instinctively - as absurd.  But even within a proper museum such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, in 2025 “less than 8% of the artists in the modern art sections are women, but 67% of the nudes are female” (Guerrilla Girls).  Yet we are assured by the male art critic that the female nude in art has a special purpose, that it is a matter of aesthetics, that it is normal and proper and good - which may in some cases be true.  However, in the justifications of the critic for this surfeit of female flesh, one can sense the underlying fear - and the corresponding desire to control - that Dworkin, Woolf and De Beauvoir allude to, leading to howlers such as “ladies in paintings do not have hair in indecorous places”:

>The manipulation of the signs of hair and hairlessness is a delicate matter for a painter of the nude. Peculiar matters of decorum are at stake, since hair let down is decent, but unequivocal: it is some kind of allowed disorder, inviting, unkempt, a sign of Woman's sexuality - a permissible sign, but quite a strong one. Equally, hairlessness is a hallowed convention of the nude: ladies in paintings do not have hair in indecorous places, and that fact is one guarantee that in the nude sexuality will be displayed but contained: nakedness in painting is not like nakedness in the world. (Clark, 270)

Clark’s dictum that feminine sexuality be “displayed but contained” seems a fair summary of the objectification targeted by the feminist critic; and Clark’s “nakedness in painting” a reflection of what de Beauvoir’s describes as man’s platonic idea of woman - a mythical femininity - rather than the reality of “nakedness in the world.”  So the female body in art, once it has been “displayed but contained”, will adhere to “the conventions of the nude” as defined by the male artists who paint them, and the male critics who critique them, so that even Clark will freely admit of the female nude that “the body is regularly offered as a fluid, infinite territory on which spectators are free to impose their imaginary definitions.”  (Clark, 269)  However, as Chadwick points out, the background of this “long history in which the representation of the female body has been organized for male viewing pleasure” creates a problem for the feminist critic whose goal is not the prohibition of nudity in art, and who is appreciative of the importance of the male and female nude, because of the “difficulty of distinguishing between overtly sexualized (i.e., voyeurism, fetishism, and scopophilia) and other forms of looking.” (Chadwick, 282)

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>Patriarchal societies do not readily sell their sons, but their daughters are all for sale sooner or later.
    —Elaine Showalter, Toward a Feminist Poetics

So, to return to Dumas’ birds - shot, stuffed and mounted - and to Mercédès, who herself is trapped somewhere within this sprawling hotel, an object robbed of her vitality, and perhaps no longer desired after the production of the male heir; a trophy, a token of a dishonest and treacherous male triumph, she takes her place among the other discarded objects: the unused weapons, the armchairs, the dried plants, the minerals, the neglected piano.  It is risky to analyze a not quite half read novel; perhaps before the end of the story Mercédès will be shown to possess and display a power and control beyond the immediate household.  But to this point, the text has provided ample support for a contrary view.

For example, it can be argued that the moral center of the novel is represented by Abbé Faria, who is overtly influenced by Rousseau and his concept of natural law, which holds that man, when in a pure state of nature, reflects the moral perfection of God; but that since those glorious, primitive days of his past, he has been thoroughly corrupted by modern civilization.  However, as Chadwick points out, parcel to Rousseau’s imagined natural state of man is his judgement that, in this primitive paradise, women are naturally inferior and submissive to men: “Believing that women lacked the intellectual capacities of men, [Rousseau] argued that they had no ability to contribute to art and the work of civilization apart from their domestic roles. The influence of Rousseau lay behind an increasing identification of femininity with nature in the second half of the eighteenth century.” (Chadwick, 40)  Perhaps it is no coincidence then, that in the portrait we described previously, of the now domesticated Mercédès, this connection of the female to nature, and the subtle influence of Rousseau’s philosophy is present: “She was looking at the sea, and her form was outlined on the blue ocean and sky.”  Rousseau’s pernicious influence was able to influence western culture despite the best efforts of Mary Wollstonecraft, who, gathering no moss, called bullshit on Rousseau as early as 1792, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman:

>Rousseau declares, that a woman should never, for a moment feel herself independent, that she should be governed by fear to exercise her NATURAL cunning, and made a coquetish slave in order to render her a more alluring object of desire, a SWEETER companion to man, whenever he chooses to relax himself. He carries the arguments, which he pretends to draw from the indications of nature, still further, and insinuates that truth and fortitude the corner stones of all human virtue, shall be cultivated with certain restrictions, because with respect to the female character, obedience is the grand lesson which ought to be impressed with unrelenting rigour.
    What nonsense! When will a great man arise with sufficient strength of mind to puff away the fumes which pride and sensuality have thus spread over the subject!

But for a concrete example of sexual bias at work in The Count of Monte-Cristo, we can compare the parallel abductions of Rita and Albert by Roman bandits; in fact, by the very same band of bandits.  There are differences of circumstance; the abduction of Rita was orchestrated by Cucumetto; of Albert, presumably by the Count, in conjunction with Vampa; and clearly, Albert plays a more significant role in the plot.  But through the lens of a feminist criticism that we have considered thus far, it is instructive to observe how the text is consistent in treating Albert as an active human subject, and Rita as a passive object.

First of all, when we do meet Rita, the text does not provide her name; she is introduced as a “young girl”, along with her father’s occupation, which immediately places her in a context of commerce and paternalism/ownership:

>One day he carried off a young girl, the daughter of a surveyor of Frosinone ...

The next mention of the “young girl” is juxtaposed to the introduction of a male character, who, given his importance as an active subject, is immediately named by the text:

>The young girl’s lover was in Cucumetto’s troop; his name was Carlini. 

From here the text shifts to Carlini’s point of view; Cucumetto is in debt to Carlini, and therefore Carlini “hoped the chief would have pity on him” (emphasis mine).  Thus, even though it is clear that the terrible destiny of the “young girl” is to be raped and murdered by the gang of bandits, Carlini hopes Cucumetto will pity him, since, if the “young girl” is to become a mirror, her misery must be reflected and experienced through the suffering of Carlini.

Next the text, which to this point has given no description whatsoever of any distinguishing qualities of the “young girl”, informs us that, in the presence of the bandits, she covers her face: so the “young girl” is simply an object with a potential utility for male sexual gratification - she has no name, no description, no voice and no face.

Finally, nine paragraphs after the “young girl” is introduced, the text finally reveals her name - but only in conjunction with her comparative monetary value as an object: “Carlini besought his chief to make an exception in Rita’s favor, as her father was rich, and could pay a large ransom”.  

At this point the text finally describes Rita taking an action, although not an independent one.  At Carlini’s instruction, she writes a letter to her father to request that he pay her ransom.  When Carlini returns from delivering the letter, he hears from a distance “a woman’s cry” - this is the sole vocal utterance from Rita in the text.  He soon finds Rita “senseless in the arms of Cucumetto”.  Here the text has completed its transformation of Rita into a pure object of possession; she is inert, incapable of resistance, and carried around by the men as if she had transformed into a sack of flesh, which, before long, she becomes in reality.  The text does not describe her pain; it does not mention her tears; it does not mention blood, bruises, scratches, torn clothing, fear, anguish, desperation or terror - nothing to indicate that Rita is more than an insensate object.

After a brief stand-off between the men, Cucumetto leaves Carlini alone with Rita, and the point of view changes to Cucumetto:

>Cucumetto fancied for a moment the young man was about to take her in his arms and fly; but this mattered little to him now Rita had been his; and as for the money, three hundred piastres distributed among the band was so small a sum that he cared little about it. 

So Carlini is completely free at this moment to rescue Rita and escape with her - Cucumetto admits that would not pursue them.  But instead, Carlini murders Rita.  Having been sexually violated, she no longer has value to Carlini - she is ruined, desecrated - and thus he discards her.  Her life no longer has value to Cucumetto, and no longer has value to Carlini, and thus has no independent value.  Rita, described by the text as “senseless”, has no volition, no say in this presumed act of “mercy” by Carlini.  Perhaps, if Rita was not an inert object, and was presented with a choice, she might well have chosen death.  But by being “senseless”, she lives or dies at Carlini’s.  

In the aftermath of the murder, Carlini reclaims ownership of Rita’s body, a senseless object of possession in death as it was in life (‘Does anyone dispute my possession of this woman?’ - ‘She is yours’, says Cucumetto).  The text then elaborates Carlini’s reaction, and unlike Rita, we see his tears flow in this dramatic passage: “Carlini threw himself, sobbing like a child, into the arms of his mistress’s father. These were the first tears the man of blood had ever wept.”  And so Rita’s dreadful personal misfortune merely serves as a mirror for Carlini’s expression of emotion, since his pain and suffering, unlike hers, is notable and important.  Thus Rita can be considered an example of what Chadwick refers to as “the dying muse ... an ideal of quietly suffering femininity”, upon which men can project their emotions. (Chadwick, 22)

Considering that Albert is kidnapped by the very same gang of bandits, albeit with a change in top man, we can make a direct comparison of how the text treats Rita and Albert in a similar scenario.  Throughout his ordeal, Albert is portrayed as an active and self-directed individual: he makes a pass at the disguised Beppo, bravely resists his captors, and, as a brave Frenchman, smiles “even in the face of grim Death.”  His primary concern throughout the ordeal is not, like Rita, being raped and murdered, but to return to the party in time to dance the galop with the countess G⸺.  Though he is inert when rescued, it is not due the trauma of sexual assault; he is so secure in his personal identity that while in captivity, he falls into a peaceful sleep.  

This examination of how the text treats the parallel kidnappings of Albert and Rita supports a consistent pattern of discrimination identified by Dworkin:

>What happens to men is portrayed as authentic, significant, and what happens to women is left out or shown not to matter. Women are portrayed as the shadows that tamely follow or maliciously haunt men, never as the significant beings who matter. (Dworkin, 80)

When using a feminist literary analysis to identify the type of bias we find in the Rita/Albert abductions, one quickly becomes aware of how ubiquitous it is, so much so that once one has a grasp on the concepts of object, mirror, and the myth of femininity, the analysis quickly becomes rote; both deliberate and unconscious sexual bias against women in art and culture is so pervasive that, in an unfortunate irony, feminist criticism is very susceptible to being labeled as “reductive” - a fancy word to describe the old adage: to a man or a woman with a hammer, everything looks like a nail - even when there are in fact everywhere nails that need hammering.

It is perhaps for this reason that feminist scholars soon began to specialize in areas of study beyond the identification of hidden or overt misogyny in the cultural artifacts of patriarchy, such as issues around the representation of women writers in a western canon under the control of a male-dominated industry, and more esoteric concerns inspired by the inscrutable French theorists of the late 20th century such as “modes of textuality based in gender”, and “the deconstruction of the premises of both patriarchy and feminism.” (Richter, 1345)  As far as Dumas and The Count of Monte-Cristo, the point of a feminist critique such as that which we have engaged in here is not, in my view, to provide a justification for a self-righteous denunciation of Dumas and his work as misogynist; its value, rather, is in deepening one’s understanding of how unconscious bias operates in even our most cherished literature, and in all of our arts, and in our politics and culture, and, most importantly, in our own habits of thinking; and how it continues to maintain and perpetuate cruelty and injustice in our world.

Works Cited

Dworkin, Andrea. Pornography: Men Possessing Women.  Penguin, 1989

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200791h.html

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Women. www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3420/pg3420-images.html

Guerrilla Girls. Naked Through The Ages. guerrilagirls.com

Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, Society. Thames and Hudson, 2005

Clark, T.J. “Preliminaries to a Possible Treatment of Olympia in 1865.” Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology.  Edited by Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison, Harper and Row, 1982, pp. 259-273

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