Skylar's Diary #3: The Cursed Woman
This painting appeared in my Substack feed this morning. I loved it so much that I restacked it. Then I looked it up and decided to write this post.
The first thing I thought when I read the painting's name was that she didn't look cursed or damned. In fact, it looked more like she was having a pretty mind-blowing experience.
Nineteenth-century painters had a trick for getting their more erotic work past society's gatekeepers: slap a “moral” title on it and pass it off as a lesson in sin. Writers played the same game. And they all knew that guilt and shame were part of the fun.
In Diary #3 I dig into Octave Tassaert's La Femme damnée (1859): a possible homage to Baudelaire's banned “Femmes damnées,” the man behind the painting, and what it teaches the erotic writer.
What do you think? Are they damned? Or are they floating in a blissful euphoria?
New to my diary? Every entry is collected, in order, on the Skylar's Diary series page.
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