GLR May-June 2025

These elegant creatures, rare in com parison with other fowl on the lake, rhyme with the equally remarkable couple in the boat. Abbéma made numerous portraits of Bernhardt, and Bernhardt, a talented visual artist herself, reciprocated. In 1875, the two artists exchanged bronze medallions bearing each other’s profiles in bas-relief. The same year, they made a plaster mold of their interlaced hands and then cast it in bronze. The hands, emblematic of artistic creation as well as lesbian eroticism, sacralize the inter lacing of their creative and romantic lives. The sculpture appears promi nently in a photograph by Thérèse Bon ney taken in Abbéma’s home shortly after Bernhardt’s death. The interlaced hands share a privileged position on the mantle along with a bust of Abbéma sculpted by Bernhardt. Abbéma, one elbow on the mantelpiece, leans her head on a hand conspicuously adorned with another lesbian signifier, a pinky ring. Both Abbéma and Bernhardt were affirmative scenes that Bernhardt and Abbéma staged for their photogra phers’ visits. The photo of Bernhardt in the act of creating Abbéma’s bust was commercialized by Mélandri— printed as a “cabinet card” (a mounted enlargement) and displayed in the window of his studio along with portraits of other celebrities. It was also published as a postcard. Bernhardt’s lesbian fans were un doubtedly among the clients who made the portrait a top seller. Bernhardt, famous for her trouser roles as well as for a repertoire of femmes fatales, insouciantly cross dressed both on- and off-stage, to the delight of her lesbian devotees. A photograph of the actress taken in the 1890s demonstrates that her travesty was not exclusively confined to gen der crossing. The portrait presents the thespian resplendent in the bat cos tume conceived for a dramatic read ing of poems from a gay-male classic, Les Chauves-Souris (“The Bats”), by

the dandy-æsthete Robert de Mon tesquiou-Fezensac. The bat-costume portrait circulated widely. It was used on the cover of a contemporaneously published artistic biography by Jules Huret, with preface by the popular dramatist and poet Edmond Rostand. The bat photograph, too, was marketed as a cabinet card and then a postcard. The bat-costume image cemented Bernhardt’s identification with gay male culture while boldly claiming one of its tropes as her own. The bat, a quintessentially queer creature (a mam mal with wings who sleeps upside down and does not come out until dusk) subsequently signified homosex uality for lesbians in the know. When in 1899 the Parisian courtesan Liane de Pougy offered the American expatriate and lesbian cultural crusader Natalie Clifford Barney a ring that featured a moonstone encircled by a silver bat, the implications of this motif would have been apparent to the gift’s recipient. At the same time, the queer-coded offer ing acknowledged Barney’s reverence “ Les Amoureuses de Cléopâtre ” (“Cleopatra’s female lovers”). The influence Bernhardt exerted on the nascent lesbian culture of the late 19th century cannot be overstated. An international celebrity and one of the first to capitalize on photographic images, Bernhardt modeled possibil ities of creative and sexual freedom and self-determination for women. These possibilities included the for mation of sexual and emotional rela tionships between women. § I NTHE LATE 19 THCENTURY , feminists demanded rights and freedoms on be half of a widening cross-section of women, forswearing the privileges of exceptionalism that Bernhardt, Ab béma, and other celebrated women of their generation had enjoyed. In Eu rope and the U.S., under pressure from an increasingly powerful femi nist movement, educational opportu nities (including in the arts) expanded

Fig. 2: Achille Mélandri. Sarah Bernhardt sculptrice , c. 1877.

keenly aware of the camera’s potential to commemorate li aisons, to construct artistic personas, to enhance careers, and to challenge social norms. Bernhardt had famously posed for the photographer Achille Mélandri in an immaculate, man-tailored suit beside the pedestal where she was working on Abbéma’s bust (Figure 2). There is nothing accidental about the lesbian

for Bernhardt. Barney restaged, at garden parties to which she invited members of her lesbian circle, versions of Bernhardt’s signa ture performances, such as Hamlet, L’Aiglon , and Cléopâtre . Bernhardt’s lesbian fans were visible enough in theaters to at tract notice in the press, where one critic described them as

Fig 3: Martha Stettler & Alice Dannenberg at the Academy Julian, 1894.

TheG & LR

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