Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal

Celine Sciamma's 2019 film Portrait of a Lady on Fire depicts a nineteenth-century romance between women as a looming marriage plot which threatens to overturn passion in favor of tradition. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is an original work, though it is filled with echoes of and allusions to classic romance novels and marriage plots from the time of its setting—something made clear immediately from its title's evocation of Henry James's classic novel The Portrait of a Lady. The original French title of the film is Portrait de la Jeune Fille en Feu, translating directly to "Portrait of an Unmarried Young Woman on Fire," as opposed to "femme," the literal translation of "lady." Despite this, Sciamma, in "No Man's Land: Celine Sciamma on Portrait of a Lady on Fire," tells Isabel Stevens that the title was intentionally chosen because, in English, it "evokes Henry James. And I love James by the way … I feel so connected to his characters"¹—creating an intertextual link both as an influence and conversation in conflict as her title sets fire to his.

Sciamma's Portrait is queerer, smaller, and almost entirely absent of men. Her crew was predominantly female, and the film's cast of characters gives no significant speaking roles to any male characters, relegating men instead to the looming power of patriarchy briefly escaped on the island where Portrait of a Lady on Fire takes place. This isolated, fleeting romance told by and about women is, in effect, a cinematic act of setting fire to the canon of queer men: colliding with the influences of this tradition while building the female canon through exploration of the queer female gaze.

In Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick "proposes that many of the major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth-century Western culture as a whole are structured—indeed, fractured—by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century."² Her approach helped to establish the language and scope of queer studies—through a focus on works like Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle," Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Herman Melville's Billy Budd—seeking to make "salient the homosocial, homosexual, and homophobic strains and torsions in the already existing master-canon."³ The master-canon, compiled largely by and focusing on men, thus frames this study in a disproportionately male-centric manner, male-gazes predominantly looking at men. Sedgwick notes the void this leaves in her otherwise foundational research:

It seems inevitable to me that the work of defining the circumferential boundaries, vis-à-vis lesbian experience and identity, of any gay male-centered theoretical articulation can be done only from the point of view of an alternative, feminocentric theoretical space, not from the heart of the male-centered project itself. However interested I am in understanding those boundaries and their important [End Page 24] consequences, therefore, the project of this particular book, just as it will not assume their geography, is not the one that can trace them. That limitation seems a damaging one chiefly insofar as it echoes and prolongs an already scandalously extended eclipse: the extent to which women's sexual, and specifically homosexual, experience and definition tend to be subsumed by men's [experience] during the turn-of-the-century period most focused on in my discussion.⁴

Sedgwick lays groundwork by omission for the kind of feminocentric canon building and subsequent analysis that might follow.

This decision has been cause for criticism among subsequent queer theorists like Marilee Lindemann, who, in "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Witch? Queer Studies in American Literature," criticizes emergent queer theory (and Sedgwick in particular) for establishing the field without carving out space to diversify its canonical focuses. Lindemann argues that these moves ultimately aren't moving literary criticism forward in any productive way if the end result is reexamining the same canon—specifically picking on the preoccupation with James...