Pyramus and Thisbe in the 19th century: When the Tale of Innocence Leaked Shameful Sex

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In the 19th century, the Ovidian tale of Pyramus and Thisbe was repeatedly associated with adultery or forbidden sex in literature and art, albeit the story relates a perfectly innocent story of impossible love, thwarted by the parents of the two young neighbours for unknown reasons. Thereby, one can wonder how, by a strange process of subversion, the lovers reappeared in fiction connected to stories of adultery and obscene sexuality. La Tisbe is a harlot actress in Victor Hugo’s play Angelo, tyran de Padoue (1835). In Zola’s novel Madeleine Férat (1868), images of the Ovidian tale decorate the bedroom walls where the eponymous character cheats on her husband. In the short-story “Le Lit” (1882) by Maupassant, the tapestry with the two lovers on the protagonist’s bed covers her illicit sexual frolics with a priest. The connection between the tale and sexuality due to its appearance in fictional bedrooms has already been pointed out by academic research, but the reiterated urge to adulterate the tale of innocence and the exposure entailed require further developments. The viewpoint will be intermedial, since the same paradigm is to be found in visual arts. By the turn of the century, Guillaume Apollinaire’s short poem, « Pyrame et Thisbé » in L’œuvre libertine des poètes du XIXe siècle (1910) was nothing but overtly obscene. The poet used a pen name though: unveiling sex still demanded secrecy.