L’Assommoir

We open in a hot, busy laundry in Paris. A dark and pretty washerwoman named Virginie gets into a quarrel with her coworker Gervaise Macquart, who has just been jilted by her lover in favor of Virginie’s sister. Gervaise throws a bucket of water at her, and Virginie’s response, at least in the uncut edition, is to tell her:

‘It is lucky for you that your dirty soapsuds only went on my feet, for I would have taken you over my knees and given you a good spanking if one drop had gone in my face.’

Putting it in those terms perhaps seals Virginie’s fate. There’s a fight and Gervaise ends up treating Virginie like a piece of washing: she beats her with a laundry paddle.

‘She seized Virginie by the waist, bent her over, stuck her face to the flagstones, her bottom in the air; and, in spite of her struggles, she lifted her skirts high. Underneath were pantaloons. She put her hand in the slit and tore them off, showing everything: bare thighs, bare bottom. Then she raised the paddle and began to spank. The wood landed on the soft flesh with a wet noise. With each whack, a red mark marbled the white skin.’

It’s a sequence from the opening chapter of Emile Zola’s realist novel L’Assommoir, first published as a magazine serial in 1876, and then as a book in January 1877. The title is hard to translate: the verb assommer means to get smashed out of your head on alcohol; l’assommoir is the place where you do it. The story concerns Gervaise’s decline into debt and alcoholism, and its stark portrayal of poverty and degradation caused controversy when it was new. Some readers were especially disgusted by the spanking scene, and most of all by the baring of Virginie’s bottom. For them, this wasn’t high literary art – it was filth from the gutter.

It’s tempting, but would be cynical, to say that one prude’s filth is another entrepreneur’s commercial opportunity. In 1879, a stage version of the novel was produced, adapted by William Busnach (1832-1907) and Octave Gastineau (1824-78). Afterwards Zola said that he had agreed to this on condition that he should have no connection with the adaptation. In fact, he was an active collaborator on the script, including in ways that were significant for our particular interest, but didn’t want this to be public knowledge because this version toned down aspects of the story’s perceived ‘immorality’. He also took more interest in the practical side of the production than his collaborators would have liked – the project was almost abandoned after he and Busnach disagreed about the casting of Gervaise – and he regularly attended rehearsals during the fortnight before the play opened at the Théâtre de l’Ambigu on January 19, with Hélène Petit as Gervaise and, as Virginie, Line Munte, later the first actress to play Oscar Wilde’s Salome.

When the play was announced, some Parisian eyebrows were raised: were they really going to stage the laundry scene, spanking and all? Surely, it was assumed, the curtain would descend at the crucial moment! Afterwards, Zola crowed that L’Assommoir, and the spanking in particular, had finally broken the prissy bourgeois belief that some things were literally obscene, could not be represented onstage. Actually it was a lot more complicated than that.

In the novel, the incident is significant enough to be remembered: when Virginie comes back into the story later, Gervaise recalls her as ‘the girl whose skirts she had turned up at the laundry’. In the play, it’s even more important. Brusnach altered the initial situation so that the ‘other woman’ in the case is Virginie herself rather than her sister, giving Gervaise a stronger reason to get into the fight in the first place. The spanking then becomes the central motivation of the rest of the story, in which Gervaise is not destroyed through supine human weakness, as in the book, but by Virginie’s obsessive pursuit of revenge:

‘Let her remember today. I won’t forget it, and I’ll have vengeance if it takes me the rest of my life.’

This put paid to any notion of omitting the spanking: Zola pointed out that without it, the audience would be asked to accept the effect without being shown the cause. Brusnach had one reservation: he felt that, in view of the fatal lengths to which Virginie eventually goes, a mere spanking was too trivial a provocation, and he suggested that Gervaise should instead throw bleach in her face, causing permanent disfigurement. Zola vetoed that: it had to be a spanking, and it was.

The scene was considered a triumph, the foundation of the play’s long, successful theatrical life. The demand for tickets was astronomical, and wasn’t affected by the theater management’s predictable decision to raise the price of admission; the play had a long run and was frequently revived until as late as 1933. This impact arose partly because of its quest for authenticity in the wash-house: real soap suds, real hot water…

Real spanking?

That’s what you might have expected on the basis of the poster for the show.

Here’s a closer look:

But, despite that advertising and despite Zola’s own account, there’s some doubt about whether the audience actually saw any such thing. Later scholarly discussion of the play seems to agree that the management grew pusillanimous about how the censor might react, and staged the spanking with all the other washerwomen huddled around, screening it from view. That’s certainly what happens in the 1908 film version with Eugénie Nau as Gervaise and Catherine Fonteney as Virginie,

though at least there is a helpful chap in a striped jersey who comes out and mimes what is going on where we can’t see!

However, the film (which you may be able to see here) is based directly on the book: it includes elements that were cut out of the stage version of the scene, such as Gervaise’s son, so it doesn’t tell us anything for sure about what did or didn’t happen on the Parisian stage 29 years earlier.

One person who saw the play was the London theater manager John Hollingshead, who suggested that the novelist Charles Reade (1814-84) should script an English version. The rights were purchased (at some expense), plans were announced as early as April 1879 and the play, entitled Drink, premiered at London’s Princess Theatre on June 2. Reade later wrote Zola (who had lost out financially through declining to be publicly acknowledged as co-author of the stage version) to send him a gratuity of 600 francs. Drink had gone down very well with London audiences, he said, and he was confident that it would run for 200 performances; in fact, it had more than a thousand, and was Reade’s most successful play. It toured the English provinces (with Amy Roselle as Gervaise), opened in Boston, Massachusetts, in December 1879 (with Rachel Noah as Gervase and Florence Chase as Virginie), and went down under in 1880 in a production whose Virginie was the Melbourne actress Flora Anstead. According to an early reviewer, the spanking scene caused a sensation:

‘at this edifying spectacle the delight of the gallery was unbounded, and the curtain had to be raised in order that another look might be had at Miss Anstead being pommelled by Mrs Bates.’

Like its French ‘parent’, Drink had a long afterlife, from which it is worth drawing out the production at Sydney in 1888, with Isabel Morris as Gervaise and Jenny Watt-Tanner as Virginie, not just because of the mildly amusing coincidence of her surname but also because there’s a surviving picture of her:

Other English-language Assommoirs were available. By the summer of 1879, five illicit, unauthorized adaptations were playing in the provinces, and ultimately there were at least 28 of them. Meanwhile, within the law, the US rights to the French play were sold to the impresario Augustin Daly (1838-99). He wrote his own independent adaptation, which opened on April 30, 1880, at the Olympic Theater, New York; it was not a success, and closed May 17. Drink ultimately prevailed.

Both John Hollingshead and Charles Reade were members of London’s Garrick Club, a fact which has been advanced to explain why the club has in its art collection this splendidly erotic ten-inch plaster model:

The club’s art curator rightly identifies it as the spanking scene in L’Assommoir, and thinks it might be connected with Drink, possibly a private joke between Reade and Hollingshead about how the scene should have looked but couldn’t, owing to the prevailing Victorian mores; accordingly, the piece is speculatively dated to around 1880 during the run of the play at the Princess.

However, it could alternatively be a copy of a life-size statue of the scene made by a Parisian sculptor in 1898. (I haven’t seen this, if it still exists 125 years later, so can’t make a comparison.) It was offered to the Salon, the annual exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris, but at this time the Salon was deeply conservative, and the sculpture was rejected. Unabashed, the artist offered it as a separate exhibit in the Olympia Music Hall, charging one franc per viewing – and one person was heard to say, coming out, that it was less shocking than many of the pictures to be seen at the Salon!

By then, the spanking scene had been making an impact on the visual arts for two decades. In 1878, the novel was reprinted with pictures, including this one by André Gill (1840-85), which exists in two variants:

In 1899, there was an edition illustrated by Eugene Dété (1848-1922):

Comparison of these with the plaster model shows how the restriction to two dimensions allows the choice of a more modest viewing angle, but that wasn’t to remain the case forever. Here’s a version by Paul Ballariau (1860-1917) in 1905:

Modesty still prevails in one respect: there’s no bare flesh inside the slit of the bloomers, only more cloth. But attitudes shifted further after the First World War. The erotic artist Leon Courbouleix (1887-1972) was commissioned to illustrate the 1931 edition, and drew the scene with no bloomers at all:

Gus Bofa (1883-1968) took the same approach in 1957:

And finally, here’s an illustration by Wilhelm M. Busch (1908-87) for the 1975 edition:

L’Assommoir also reached the screen before the 19th century was over. A one-minute version of the laundry scene was made in 1897, and there was a 6-minute film of Reade’s Drink in 1902, and another in 1917 (with Irene Browne as Gervaise and Alice O’Brien as Virginie).

Alice O’Brien

We’ve already seen how the scene was done in 1908, but it was another matter in the 35-minute 1921 version with Louise Storza as Gervaise and Blanche Altem as Virginie.

Blanche Altem

This time the spanking was played for real, with the result that Mademoiselle Altem couldn’t sit down for days afterwards!

The first feature-length version was made in 1933, with Line Noro as Gervaise and France Dhélia as Virginie,

and later there was a Russian TV production, Zapadnya, with Larisa Pashkova and Agnessa Peterson in the same parts.

Agnessa Peterson

But pride of place among the screen versions must go to René Clément’s award-winning 1956 film Gervaise, made with the blessing of Zola’s son Jacques (who attended the rehearsals for the spanking scene, accompanied by his own 10-year-old granddaughter). The scene was considered one of the highlights of the film: not only was it illustrated on the main movie poster along with several other moments,

but it even got its own dedicated poster, with a different drawing!

This version starred Maria Schell in the title role, and Virginie was mostly played by Suzy Delair.

Suzy seems to have been quite comfortable with sexy roles,

and there was one other thing about her that was helpful for playing the role of Virginie in particular, as revealed by this front-page newspaper story of 1948:

Suzy Delair Loves Spanking

But there’s a reason why I said she ‘mostly played’ Virginie. It has been suggested that, by 1956, she had decided she didn’t aime la fessée quite so much, though I think it more likely that René Clément decided that he didn’t aime les fesses de Suzy, who was now in her late 30s. In any event, it is a fact that she doesn’t appear in the shots of the spanking.

During the fight, it looks at first as though it’s Gervaise who’ll be getting the worst of it, as Virginie gets her prone on the wash-house floor, procures a paddle and starts to whack her on the bottom with it.

But then Gervaise gets the upper hand, and Virginie’s skirts go north:

Then we cut to close-up as the bloomers are ripped open.

And that’s not Suzy: she has temporarily made way for a younger woman. Here she is:

She’s the 20-year-old Folies Bergere dancer Rita Cadillac, though I should record that the botty double has also been identified as the 24-year-old ballerina Liliane Montevecchi:

However, nice as she might look over someone’s knee, I don’t think she has quite the upholstery for the Gervaise close-up. To give the question proper scrutiny, you might like to compare this rear view of Rita

with this behind-the-scenes shot of the pre-spanking déculottage:

No history relates whether Rita Cadillac also aimée la fessée, but luckily for her, she didn’t need to: once Gervaise gets to work, Virginie is kept firmly below frame level,

meaning that no actress, or dancer, or pretty-bottomed stand-in, was hurt in the making of the scene.

But no such tricks can be played in a live stage performance, and that’s where we now return to finish off this eventful history. Here’s our Gervaise, Kate Gartside:

And here’s Virginie, Christabelle Dilks:

These worthy successors to Maria Schell and Suzy Delair featured in the adaptation by Stephen Wyatt that premiered in Leeds at West Yorkshire Playhouse in November 1992 under the title A Working Woman. This time the spanking scene was staged a little differently from any previous version, with use made of the ironing board that Gervaise is working at here:

The directors, Jane Gibson and Sue Lefton, who helped Wyatt with the creation of the show, were specialists in what they called ‘movement theater’, so they staged the spanking, along with many other elements of the show, with a strongly choreographic dimension. Here’s what happens:

(Gervaise comes up behind her and forces her over one of the ironing boards. She grabs a wooden beater from one of the other women, pulls down Virginie’s drawers and starts to beat her.)

GERVAISE: I’ll tan your arse for you! You won’t sit down for a week!

(The other women roar approval and dance mockingly around the beating to can-can music. Finally Gervaise, exhausted and satisfied, throws down the beater. Virginie crawls away, sobbing with humiliation.)

And that’s the long history of L’Assommoir!