Gamiani
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Gamiani, ou Deux Nuits d'Excès, is a French novella first published in 1833. Its author is supposed to have been Alfred de Musset, and the eponymous heroine a portrait of his lover, George Sand. It became a bestseller among nineteenth century erotic literature.
The novel was illustrated with unsigned lithographs whose authorship remains unknown. They have been attributed to Achille Devéria, Henri Grevedon and Octave Tassaert.
Outline
Supposedly modeled after George Sand, this work gives us a young man observing the Countess Gamiani and a young girl named Fanny (an obvious reference to Fanny Hill, Gamiani emulates its avoidance of coarse words and use of sexual euphemisms) engaged in their lesbian bed. Having watched them and provoked by their abandonment, he reveals himself, joins them, and they spend the night alternately sharing their intimate histories and their bodies. The stories they tell include the rape of one in a monastery and the nearly fatal debauchment of another in a convent, as well as encounters with a number of animals, including an ape and a donkey.
Author Edith Wharton had an unpublished work based on this text.
Themes
- Lesbianism
- main theme, expressed as tribale.
- Bestiality
- Gamiani includes two scenes of bestiality described with a luxury of detail. One is with a jackass and one with an ape. The donkey scene is thematically preceded by the climactic scene in The Golden Ass by Apuleius and by Nerciat's Le Diable au corps.
- Asphyxiation
- que la pendaison produit son effet ordinaire. Émerveillée de la démonstration nerveuse, la supérieure monte sur un marchepied et, aux applaudissements frénétiques de ses dignes complices, elle s’accouple dans l’air avec le mort, et s’encheville à un cadavre ! Ce n’est pas la fin de l’histoire. Trop mince ou trop usée pour soutenir ce double poids, la corde cède et se rompt. Mort et vivante tombent à terre, et si rudement que la nonne en a les os rompus et que le pendu, dont la strangulation s’était mal opérée, revient à la vie et menace, dans sa tension nerveuse, d’étouffer la supérieure.
See also
- Illustrated book
- Gamiani/Source
- Love affair between Alfred de Musset and George Sand
- Etude sur le Gamiani de Musset
- Je meurs dans la rage du plaisir, dans la rage de la douleur !… je n’en puis plus !… heu !…