Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/72944
Title: Fiction as autobiography, autobiography as fiction : Alexandre Dumas fils and La dame aux camélias
Authors: Frendo, Maria
Keywords: Autobiographical fiction -- History and criticism
Dumas, Alexandre, 1802-1870 -- Bibliography
Dumas, Alexandre, 1824-1895. Dame aux camélias
Operas -- Scores
Issue Date: 2010
Citation: Frendo, M. (2010). Fiction as autobiography, autobiography as fiction: Alexandre Dumas fils and La dame aux camellias. Mediterranea 2010, 69-80
Abstract: On 2 February, 1852, Alexandre Dumas the Younger’s play La dame aux camélias was produced at the Vaudeville Theatre in Paris. It was an instant success, made Dumas’s name – he was twenty-seven – and became one of the most popular French plays of the nineteenth century. It was a landmark in French theatre for several reasons: it was one of the first dramas to take contemporary life as its theme; it was one of the first plays to show a modern – as opposed to a historical – courtesan in a sympathetic light; finally, it was well-known that much of the play was autobiographical. The significance of autobiography in Dumas’s work is that it directs us as readers towards a deeper appreciation of an aesthetics whose origins lie deep within the personal experiences of the author. In 1848, Dumas fils had already published a novel bearing the same title and had not concealed the fact that it was based on his own life, on his own love-affair with the courtesan Marie Duplessis, who had died of consumption in 1847. Many patrons in the first-night audience had known her, a few even figured as minor characters in the play; certainly everyone knew all about her, for her life and death had been subjects dear to journalists, men about town, and everyone interested in gossip – in other words, all of Paris. People still remembered Marie Duplessis’s frequent appearances in a box at the theatre, when she was the cynosure of all eyes; they remembered her smart blue coupé, drawn by magnificent English thoroughbreds, in which she used to drive to the Bois de Boulogne. They remembered, too, the suction held in her apartment after her death to pay off her numerous creditors, when crowds of people, Dickens amongst them, had gone to wonder at the elegance and luxury in which a courtesan had lived, and to speculate about the scenes which had taken place against that sumptuous decor.
URI: https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/72944
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