While women’s proximity to absinthe often prompted depictions of transgressive femininity, these abject concerns are pacified by Privat-Livemont’s presentation of the woman in Absinthe Robette (fig. 1) as an art-object. Exemplary of the nineteenth-century commercial use of women in popular images to promote absinthe consumption, the print demonstrates strategies employed to engage with contrary discourses for and against absinthe consumption, women in public drinking spaces, and Art Nouveau aesthetics. In Henri Privat-Livemont’s 1896 advertisement, Absinthe Robette, a woman in semi-transparent drapery holds a fluted glass in the air. Her attire evokes the shifts worn by prostitutes—as seen in Félicien Rops’ Song of the Cherub (fig. 2)—signalling …show more content…
Echoes of this green and white colour scheme heavily influence Privat-Livemont’s image, with the woman’s unblemished white skin—a suggestion of her purity, and by extension, that of the drink—contrasted against the green background. With the contours of her body outlined by the drapery and her hair thrown into an artfully dishevelled bun, both of which matched popular stylings of prostitutes, a link is suggested between the promise of sexual fulfilment and the promotion of absinthe. Beyond the body, a nature motif is introduced by the repetition of stylized wormwood plant which serves both as a decorative border and promotes the natural quality of absinthe. Notably, while not much documentation …show more content…
While modern chemical analyses of nineteenth-century absinthe categorize the drink as a neurotoxic chemical stimulant—no more or less harmful than general alcohol—medical journals from the 1850’s adopted a disease model of absinthe that warned against the radical effects of its consumption. While the 1860’s toted a primarily scientific concern, medical literature nonetheless used physiognomy to pathologize absinthe drinkers, noting “their fierce, restless, troubled looks” that resulted from the plague of absinthe consumption. In Absinthe Robette, this emancipated expectation is subverted by the woman’s apparent health, distancing absinthe in the public’s imagination from medical literature’s pathology. While popular culture often differed from scientific texts in imagining absinthe as a decadence rather than disease, there were nonetheless some aesthetic writers who shared the perception that alcohol was a threat to the very fibres of the French race. Degeneration theory proposed a direct link between the moral and generational degradation of European society and chronic absinthe consumption, distinct from the acceptable consumption of boisson hygiéniques. Novels, such as Marie Corelli’s Wormwood, proposed that so much as one encounter with absinthe was enough to overwhelm the subject with sudden cravings. Despite medico-moral discourse’s defamation of