The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan

Cathy Marie Buchanan’s The Painted Girls combines four elements to tell a compelling story of three sisters.  The grinding poverty of late 19th century Paris, the spreading belief in biological determinism, the emerging art of Edgar Degas, and the world of ballet at the Paris Opera are woven together to form the backdrop of the stories of Marie, Antoinette, and Charlotte von Goethem, three real young women who all danced in the ballet.  Though Charlotte had the most successful dance career, Marie was immortalised in Degas’s series of works based on models from the ballet.  She was the model for Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (among many others), one of the most successful sculptures to emerge from the era.  

Buchanan constructs a fictional story of the relationship between the sisters but most compellingly their relationship to the social forces at play around them.  In her story, Antoinette falls in love with headline-grabbing convicted murderer of the time, Emile Abadie.  Marie’s innate goodness crashes headlong into a world that shows very little kindness.  All of them confront the limited options of the poor, and particularly of poor women, of their times.  

Around them, ‘scientists’ are publishing papers linking physical characteristics like brow lines and jaws to criminal tendencies.  Others see the root of poverty as a flaw in moral character attributable to evolutionary flaws.  In the minds of many, character and behaviour are fixed, pre-determined by forces deep inside us.  In a world like this, Buchanan shows us that to simply hope is to struggle and fight. 

It’s a time where Emile Zola creates works that show the ceaseless struggles of the working poor.  But it’s also a time in which many believe that their ‘condition’ is part of the natural order of things.  The most poignant and powerful moment of the book is when Marie sees the reviews (real reviews from real newspapers and magazines of the time) praising Little Dancer Aged Fourteen.

With bestial impudence she thrusts her face forward.  Why is her forehead, half hidden by her bangs, already bearing the signs, like her mouth, of a profoundly heinous nature? Perhaps Degas knows of the dancer’s future things we do not.  He has picked from the hothouse of the theatre, a sapling of precocious depravity, and he shows her to us withered before her time (p. 317, from Le Temps).

As with most historical fiction, it’s the setting that counts most and Buchanan has made it the villain in the novel, a powerful and conniving force that her heroes must confront.