Alexandre Dumas fils, _Camille_, tr. Edmund Gosse

THIS SEMESTER I debuted a course on literature about illness (Sick Lit, a colleague dubbed it) created in hopes of attracting some of our school's many undergrads contemplating careers in the health care field. (And it did--the class filled promptly.) I put this on the syllabus because its heroine, Marguerite Gautier, the beautiful young Parisian courtesan dying of consumption, became an archetype (cited by, for instance, Susan Sontag and Leslie Jamison, whom we also read). I had never taught it before, and probably never would have taught it at all had this particular course never been proposed. It felt like a gamble, though, not likely to appeal to millennial tastes, archetype though it was. I was actually a little surprised it was even in print.

Well...guess what? It was probably the biggest hit of the semester. The class (80% women) was as keen to discuss the situation, motives, and feelings of Marguerite as they might have been to discuss those of Daenerys Targaryen or a Kardashian. They loved her. Something about a beautiful young woman with a mortal disease living a life of luxury while also being a public scandal finding true love and sacrificing herself to save her beloved's future just clicks, even here in the 21st century.

The novel, published in 1848 when Dumas fils was in his early 20s, was actually not that great a commercial success, compared to the play he turned it into a few years later, or the opera Verdi turned the play into, or the Garbo film of 1936, but it's ingeniously set up. It begins with several chapters narrated by a third party after the death of Marguerite; circumstances bring about a meeting with Marguerite's bereaved lover Armand, who takes over the narration to tell the story of their affair as flashback.  In the final chapters, through letters and journal entries, Marguerite's voice takes over. We have the effect of getting closer and closer to the real Marguerite as the novel proceeds, and it still works.

It seems unlikely that anyone in Hollywood is contemplating the possibilities of reviving something this whiffy of 19th century sentimentality, but to judge from the reaction of my students, it could be a hot property once again.