“Little Dancer Aged Fourteen” by Camille Laurens

I had been meaning to pick this book up for a while, it was recommended reading from the book Don’t Think Dear and I thought it sounded fascinating. This book tries to tell the true story of Degas’ iconic sculpture “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen,” or as I knew it growing up, “Marie in Fourth Position.”

The book covers many aspects of Paris at this time. There’s the treatment of young dancers like Marie, who came from impoverished families trying to sell their daughters to the Paris Opera to make more money. There’s what we know about Marie’s family, she’s the middle daughter of a family where the father is missing. She moved around a lot, likely rent hopping.

Then there’s Degas. His eyesight is going so he is moving from painting to sculpture with specifically wax. He is the odd one out of the Impressionists since he prefers dark scenes and horrifying reality instead of pretty pictures. When this sculpture is unveiled, it shocks and horrifies the public. This was the heyday of phrenology and thinking that personalities, and criminal tendencies especially, were written on a person’s face. The little dancer happens to have exaggerated criminal characteristics, and may not even reflect what the model looked like very well. It isn’t totally clear what Degas intended with this work, he has other sketches of criminals where he exaggerates their features so he may buy into this nonsense, but he also displayed the sculpture like a doll and emphasized her age in its name. He’s calling attention to the fact that she’s a child, barely hit puberty, and she’s in an environment where she’s likely being driven to prostitution to make money.

The book ends with Laurens trying desperately to know what became of Marie. We have her birth date, and the death dates of both her sisters and mother, but we have no idea what became of her. After modeling for Degas and other painters, she misses so many days at the Paris Opera that she’s fired as a dancer. That same month her older sister steals money and they’re caught as the family tries to get away. The older sister spends time in jail after that. And Marie disappears.

Since there is just so little we know about Marie, the book is full of speculation and rumination on the sculpture more so than her life. There’ll be a discussion of some aspect of Paris society or whatever, and then we’ll be back to how that is reflected in the sculpture. Some of it does appear to be grasping at straws, I’m not entirely convinced that Degas wanted this little dancer to reflect all of life and death in her face. But I’m not ungrateful for the thoughts, I think art like this can be molded and remolded to reflect whatever the audience is thinking about.

And I am grateful for Laurens’ tenacity to stick to the facts. There’s a lot of fictionalized accounts of this work. She stubbornly refused to do that, even documenting how hard she was trying to find out information about Marie. The extent of the speculation is pretty clear, she asks questions throughout or talk about what she imagines the interactions between Degas and Marie to be. I wish we knew more about her life as well.

It is so interesting to me how the reception to this work of art has changed. It horrified the people of Paris when it was unveiled, and now every dancer knows it and loves it. This was a fascinating perspective on the work, and a much needed reality check for what it was intended and who it is portraying.