(Re)Framing Madame X: Art, Narrative, and the Ethics of Neo‑Victorian Revivification

This article situates John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X (1884) alongside two textual accounts of Madame X the historical figure, to examine hybrid life-writing genres’ possibilities and limitations in recapturing the nineteenth-century past. Our texts are Gioia Diliberto’s biographical novel I am Madame X (2003), and Deborah Davis’s creative non-fiction Strapless (2003). Their authorial attempts to restore the enigmatic woman in the painting to cultural memory–particularly in the absence of substantial archival evidence–illuminates the collision of history, fiction, art and narrative, thus providing a framework to interrogate biofiction and the politics of memory.