Marie Bashkirtseff’s romantic fantasy about Duke H

Marie Bashkirtseff’s romantic fantasy about Duke H. is not a relationship formed through conversation or shared experience, but an imagined romance in which the hoped-for lover’s admiration confirms Marie’s own idealized image. Simone de Beauvoir uses it to show how a woman’s desire to be loved can become entangled with self-admiration—and how social limits on women’s independent achievement direct ambition toward a man whose imagined recognition seems to confer value.

The imagined romance

Marie’s attachment to Duke H. begins without an encounter: she is in love with him despite never having spoken to him. From the age of twelve, as de Beauvoir describes it, Marie wants both to be loved and to inspire adoration. The distinction between attracting a man’s gaze and loving her own image blurs. Her fantasy gives this mutual reinforcement a dramatic form: the Duke is imagined prostrating himself before her, dazzled by her splendor and convinced that she is the woman he deserves.

The scene is addressed to a man who has no independent part in the evidence beyond Marie’s imagination. He functions as the audience for the woman Marie intends to become. His admiration would not simply satisfy romantic longing; it would ratify her own estimation of herself. De Beauvoir links this pattern to Marie’s earlier devotion to her image: from childhood through adolescence, Marie lavishes love on her hands, face, and grace, and writes, “I am my own heroine.” Her ambition to become an opera singer similarly joins public admiration with the wish to return a proud gaze of her own. The imagined Duke carries that structure into romance.

Ambition and the narrowness of women’s choices

De Beauvoir calls Marie’s case almost pathological, while treating it as an intensified example of a more general process. The fantasy answers a conflict: Marie wants to become someone through her own capacities, yet the period and class to which she belongs leave women little opportunity to succeed through an independent existence. At eighteen, Marie writes that she would like to be a man because she believes she could achieve something, but sees no comparable destination available to a woman. She reduces the prospects starkly to one route, marriage, against the many chances she attributes to men.

The imagined romance therefore gives ambition a socially permitted direction. If Marie cannot readily acquire public standing in her own right, she can imagine receiving distinction through the love of a man who already possesses standing. She insists that a man beneath her position could never please her, and describes her imagined beloved as rich, independent, self-assured, capricious, conceited, and cruel. His prestige matters because it makes his recognition seem capable of confirming her own exceptional status.

Self-admiration and imagined submission

The fantasy’s central paradox is that Marie imagines herself submitting to a superior man in order to exalt herself. In a further reflection, quoted by de Beauvoir, she describes a woman’s annihilation before the superiority of the loved man as an intense form of self-love. De Beauvoir interprets this as narcissism turning toward masochism: the more powerful the imagined beloved, the greater the value Marie can imagine acquiring through his love. If the man is treated as a figure of extraordinary power, his devotion would seem to make her extraordinary too.

But this surrender remains imaginary. De Beauvoir distinguishes kneeling before a distant god shaped by oneself from giving oneself over to a real man. Marie never meets a man whom she considers sufficiently superb to serve this role. The imagined Duke can be made to adore her without challenging the image she has constructed; a real relationship would involve a person not entirely controlled by that fantasy. The absence of an encounter is thus not a minor missing episode. It marks the boundary between self-authored romantic exaltation and the risks of an actual relationship.

Narrative significance

De Beauvoir presents Marie’s fantasy as a concentrated illustration of how social position can shape desire. The Duke appears to be the object of Marie’s love, but the imagined romance chiefly stages her wish to become someone whose worth is acknowledged by a powerful consciousness. Its promise of self-fulfillment depends on a man’s imagined authority, even as the fantasy keeps that man at a distance and under Marie’s imaginative control.

The episode also clarifies why romantic longing and self-admiration are not opposites here. Marie’s desire to be loved gives her self-image an audience; her self-image determines what sort of lover could count as worthy. The fantasy offers a private solution to the public restriction de Beauvoir identifies, but it cannot supply the independent achievement Marie longs for. Its unresolved ending is built into its premise: Duke H. remains an imagined admirer, and the hoped-for confirmation never becomes an experienced relationship.