Divas, Transgresoras E Intoxicadas

von Sofía Barrón Abad

208 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Luisa Casati, Carmen Tórtola Valencia, and Teresa Wilms Montt were transgressive women reluctant to conform to established bourgeois norms. At the end of the 19th century, all three embraced novel concepts such as anarchism, apathy, spleen, occultism, and hyperesthesia. Their beauty was captured by European and Latin American portrait artists, and their understanding of art was recorded in texts written by the leading literary figures of the time. Luisa Casati (1881-1957), Tórtola Valencia (1882-1955), and Teresa Wilms Montt (1893-1921) shared a devotion to the effects of toxic substances. They embodied the ideal of the cosmopolitan and elegant woman, straddling respectability and a thirst for unknown pleasures, a duality partly marked by their constant use of psychotropic drugs and their open display of sexual freedom. The three women, whose lives were completely different, were united by their transgressions and by the mixture of fascination and repudiation they garnered in their wake. The extravagant Marquise Luisa Casati--a woman easily identifiable by her red hair, kohl-lined eyes, white face, and baroque wardrobe inspired by the Russian Ballets--was the heiress to the largest Italian fortune at the beginning of the 20th century. The care she took in cultivating an ambiguous image, somewhere between cultured and frivolous, led the marquise to explore the wide range of fin-de-siècle affections, among which drugs are depicted as the triumph of the artificial over the natural. Neat and extravagant, the figure of Tórtola Valencia possesses the charm of duality: the dancer was addicted to morphine, had multiple lovers to disguise her latent homosexuality, and became a regular at disreputable slums. Teresa Wilms Montt, a Chilean poet and storyteller, was known in Spanish intellectual circles as Teresa de la Cruz. Art, beauty, independence, freedom, and rebellion were the writer's cornerstones. She lived a rootless life on the margins of society. She was a "true bohemian."