Mapping modernity: The feminine middlebrow and the belle époque

Mike Kelly’s manifesto-style introduction to the first volume of French Cultural Studies (February 1990) made it clear that part of the journal’s project was to balance the heavily literary emphasis of most existing French Studies journals, and to make space for other aspects of ‘culture’ in the broad, Raymond Williams sense of ‘the whole range of forms and representations through which French people … live their everyday lives’ (French Cultural Studies 1(1): 2). If literature could be understood as part of this, it would be literature read as firmly embedded within a social and political context, and (though this is less explicit) a literature that would extend beyond the established canon. The contents pages of the 70-plus volumes published so far reveal this has indeed been the case. Articles on literary texts or writers form a small but regular proportion of the whole, and display a recurring emphasis on the relationship between literature and socio-political events, and on genres and authors more significant for their representation and shaping of a collective, mainstream French ‘imaginaire’ than for their impact on the canon. Thus the literature of war has been a recurring focus, from Margaret Atack’s article on ‘Narratives of disruption’ in volume 1 (1(3): 233–46), to Catherine O’Brien’s study of women writers’ responses to World War 1 in 1996 (7(20): 201–13), Bill Kidd on Vercors in 1998 (9(25): 115–20), and Atack’s special issue on ‘War and Occupation 1940–1944’ in 2011 (22(3)). Crime fiction inspired a special issue in 2001 (12(36)) as well as several articles including two on women and the polar: Stephen Noreiko in 1999 (10(28): 89–105); Véronique Desnain in 2001 (12(35): 175–92). Popular fiction has appeared in, for example, Nick Hewitt’s work on images of Montmartre in French writing (1993: 4(11): 129–43), Martyn Cornick’s on adventure fiction (2006: 17(2): 137–54) and the special issue on storytelling and the popular novel edited by myself and David Platten in 2010 (21(4)).

The study of what the French term ‘littérature de grande consommation’ remains an important dimension of the project the journal embarked on 25 years ago. In France itself, the hierarchical model of culture that equates popular appeal with commercialism and ‘dumbing down’ is still alive and well, particularly in the literary field, and though there are now significant pockets of interest in those genres and authors that have been considered sub-literary, but have nonetheless entered the public imagination through mass readership, they are still rare. ¹ Under the Third, Fourth and Fifth Republics (though with a partial but significant shift since the ministry of Jack Lang), the democratisation of culture has been interpreted essentially as a levelling upwards, as the extension to all citizens of access to a demanding but rewarding ‘high’ culture. Conversely one of the major achievements of anglophone Cultural Studies, a critical movement largely ignored or deplored in France, has been to attribute interest and value to the cultural texts and practices of the majority, most of which fall outside the sphere of the ‘high’. ² Part of the remit of a French Cultural Studies is surely then to map and study the place of narrative fiction, for the past century and more the most widely consumed of literary forms, in the cultural landscape and in the circulation and negotiation of ideas, values and identities – to think, in other words, in terms not only of texts but also of readers. Consonant with this agenda, the present article addresses the question of the aesthetics and function of the mainstream or ‘middlebrow’ fiction of the early decades of the Third Republic.

It is at the belle époque that the conditions of production and readership first combined to produce literature as a form of mass entertainment: a massive expansion in print and publishing responded to near universal literacy and both fed and intensified an insatiable appetite for stories. Not only the four great dailies (Le Petit Parisien, Le Petit Journal, Le Matin and Le Journal, by the 1900s each selling in the region of a million copies a day), but also the plethora of smaller dailies, weekly magazines and reviews all carried at least one feuilleton or serialised novel, for the need to know ‘what happens next’ ensured customer fidelity. Some of the weekly magazines, such as the hugely successful Les Veillées des chaumières (founded 1877) were largely composed of serialised fiction. After publication in episode form, most novels were then repackaged in volumes and marketed by one of the entrepreneurial publishers such as Calmann-Lévy, Dentu, Fayard, Rouff or Tallandier who flourished under the economic and social liberalism of the new Republic.

The novels that reached the largest audience were undoubtedly these feuilletons first published in the major dailies or in wide-circulation story magazines. Set mainly (though not only) in contemporary France, they told stories of love, crime, murder, family break-up and reunion, structured to produce a series of cliff-hanging narrative moments that would leave the reader eager for the next episode. They employed the techniques of melodrama to produce a satisfying sense of a world full of meaning and emotion, one that in the end was also morally coherent. Thus stories were peopled by strong brave heroes and diabolical villains, vile seducers and virtuous virgins, devoted mothers often cruelly parted from their angelic children; the pathetic fallacy was extensively deployed so that weather and landscape always held figurative meaning; emotional crises translated into physical symptoms as lovelorn heroines wasted away, while happiness took the visible form of rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes; coincidence moved the narrative on in ways that defied credulity yet affirmed some deeper pattern in the apparently random nature of experience. These fictional worlds in which every element is thick with meaning bespeak what Marc Angenot (1975: 65) calls a ‘frénésie sémiologique sans retenue’. The narrative voice is normally omniscient and addresses the reader directly, though without disturbing the fictional illusion, evoking that complicity between narrator and listener reminiscent of oral storytelling: ‘Laissons le jeune homme en observation et retournons, rue de Seine, au rendez-vous des Boulangers’ exhorts the narrator, taking the reader by the hand, in Xavier de Montépin’s bestselling La Porteuse de pain (Montépin, 1884: 473).

Feuilletons in the popular press were assumed to be read primarily by working-class readers, though actual readership undoubtedly extended further. But the belle époque is also the time when middlebrow literature becomes an important if unnamed category in France. ‘Middlebrow’ has no full equivalent in French, but ‘littérature moyenne’ conveys something of the term’s derogatory force: since its coinage in the 1920s, ‘middlebrow’ has been used to classify certain works as aspiring to high cultural status, but in fact too bland, conformist, formally unexciting or ideologically tame to qualify as literature proper. At one level middlebrow can be seen as simply a matter of reception: ‘It is not a fixed designation, there is no such thing as “middlebrow literature”. It is a category into which texts move at certain moments in their social history’, as Nicola Humble, a scholar of the British interwar middlebrow, put it in an interview (2011: 260). The category is certainly both fluid and permeable in its boundaries, with some authors (Hugo? Zola? Colette?) moving in and out of the middlebrow band depending on critical and ideological perspective and shifting literary fashions. However, my contention here is that ‘middlebrow’ does also correspond to something real at the level of production and aesthetics: it is ‘both a material and an ideological form’ (Radway 1997: 367) and, I will argue, it displays a certain consistency in terms of narrative techniques, function for readers and thematic scope that begins and is clearly visible at the belle époque.

Middlebrow fiction developed in the decades around 1900 because those years saw the development of a large middle-class readership who (like their proletarian counterparts) sought the pleasure of virtual adventures in imaginary worlds more thrilling and coherent than their own, and at the same time sought the means to map and understand a very rapidly changing social world. This is not the place to summarise the social history of the early Third Republic, but it is well established that in the decades leading up to World War I, France, like other West European countries, was moving towards the sort of mobile, urbanised, consumption-driven world that would develop fully in the course of the next century, and that with these developments came the emergence of a new social stratum of managers, engineers, mid-ranking civil servants and professional men, educated, aspirational and enjoying a reasonable amount of disposable income and leisure – for the most part in the company of wives whose domestic and maternal roles were assumed to exclude them from paid employment. This was the readership that astute publishers and press editors addressed with the romans à idées and romans de mœurs that proliferated from around 1880. Like the American Book of the Month Club between the two wars, studied by Janice Radway (1997), or the inter-war English middlebrow evoked by feminist critics such as Nicola Humble (2001), Nicola Beauman (1983) and Kate Macdonald (2011), belle époque middlebrow corresponded in material and narrative form to bourgeois readers’ sense of their own identity. Though (as we shall see) sharing many characteristics of the popular, these were novels published in ‘serious’ magazines, then in smart, moderately rather than cheaply priced volumes, which dealt with the lives of people like their readers and with the sorts of issues that concerned them. Though derided by the literary avant-garde, their authors achieved institutional legitimacy, in several cases by election to the Académie Française: Paul Bourget (1894), René Bazin (1903) and Henry Bordeaux (1919), for example.

The formal specificity of middlebrow can best be defined by a rapid comparison with the period’s high and low strata. These are the years when the avant-garde moves away from narrative realism towards what we might broadly term modernism: from story and mimesis towards a purer focus on the aesthetic. Decadents and Symbolists utterly opposed the worldview of the Third Republic, with its belief in democracy and progress, and thus rejected the depiction of the social fabric as a valid aim for art. Poetry rather than narrative enabled the invention of fantastical imaginary worlds, proudly autonomous rather than imitational. Where the Decadents did use the novel form – and apart from a desire to renew the genre, the need to survive financially in a fiction-driven market ensured that they did – their narratives favoured stasis over progression, spectacle over the drive towards closure. Huysmans’ À Rebours (1884) for example, has its hero withdraw from a society that bores and disgusts him into a self-created, artificial world where narrative event is reduced to a series of sensory experiments, while Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus (1884) works more as an accumulation of shocking tableaux than as a suspenseful story. The rollercoaster plots and ‘semiological frenzy’ of the popular novel, on the other hand, celebrated all that the avant-garde despised.

The roman de mœurs, like the feuilleton, answered the majority preference for mimetic, immersive and plot-driven fiction, drawing readers into a fictional world authenticated by its resemblance to their own lived experience, yet highly patterned to produce suspense and resolution. Thematically, too, there was much common ground between popular and middlebrow: love and desire, family relations and class conflict drove both levels of narrative. The differences lay, first, in the social milieu in which the stories were set: popular feuilletons favoured the dramatic contrast between aristocracy and proletariat; middlebrow novels were largely set among the Third Republican bourgeoisie, so that plots hinged on property, marriage and family alliances, contemporary shifts in the rules that governed these such as the new divorce laws (1884), industry, the arts and new currents of ideas. In terms of narrative techniques, the melodramatic mode with its use of devices such as coincidence and the pathetic fallacy plays its part in middlebrow, but discursive discussion, both through dialogue and narratorial commentary, is much more prominent than in the popular.

Daniel Lesueur (pen-name of Jeanne Loiseau), a highly unusual writer in that she was successful both as a novelist of ideas and as a popular feuilletonniste, refused to acknowledge any intrinsic difference of quality between middle- and lowbrow novels. To write a novel that will be ‘tout à fait compréhensible et captivant pour un public illettré’, she insisted in 1899, demands nothing less than ‘un immense génie’ (Aziza, 1992: 1278). Indeed, she argued, the ‘roman romanesque’ (popular novel) may well succeed better than its more illustrious cousin in their shared aim of representing life in all its ‘mouvement et complexité’ (Lesueur, 1900: ii). For whereas the roman psychologique or roman à thèse proceeds through analysis of thought and feeling, the roman populaire translates these into action, event and material form: ‘les péripéties, le mouvement, les effets extérieurs des passions, y tiennent plus de place que l’analyse des caractères’ (1990: i). This rendering of psychology and emotion through external event, which she terms ‘objectivation’, comes closer for Lesueur to the complex interplay of inner and outer realities than does the more esteemed ‘roman psychologique’, with its ‘pure analyse des sentiments’ and ‘simplicité exagérée de la trame’ (1900: ii). The distinction is useful, but by no means absolute. Lesueur’s own success in both categories owed much to her ability to underpin thrilling, page-turning feuilleton plots with astute social and emotional analysis, and conversely to dramatise the novel of ideas and ‘psychology’ through narrative suspense and compelling mimesis. But her point holds true: one key difference between the roman romanesque (popular) and roman psychologique/à thèse (Lesueur employs both of these terms to designate her ‘middlebrow’ work) lies in the degree of ‘objectivation’, or the extent to which the abstract is rendered in terms of action, event and materiality.

Thus, to take an example from Lesueur’s own work: both Le Cœur chemine, a 1903 roman de mœurs and Calvaire de femme, a 1907 feuilleton first published in Le Petit Parisien, feature heroines whose lives are severely constrained by the authority that law and custom ascribe to their husbands, and make suspicion of the wife’s adultery central to the plot. In Le Cœur chemine, the heroine’s emotional infidelity produces the husband’s cold withdrawal of affection, and leads to her loss of any place in the social world – a sort of exile vividly depicted in terms of place and through the narrator’s reflective commentary. In Calvaire de femme, the husband’s rage leads to a violent murder and the disappearance of a child, the quest for whom will then structure the lengthy narrative and provide its sense of teleological purpose.

Marie-Laure Ryan argues that all immersive fiction demands of the reader an ‘amphibian’ stance that combines imaginative entry into the virtual world (immersion) with a maintained awareness of its fictional status (interactivity). Ryan proposes a spectrum of types of reading practice, from cerebral, non-immersive ‘concentration’ at one extreme to ‘addiction’ in which, like Don Quixote, the reader confuses the fictional and the real, at the other (Ryan, 2001: 98–9). Most reading of fiction, though, belongs between these two points, mixing ‘imaginative involvement’ (absorbed in the virtual world yet aware of the writing itself) with ‘entrancement’ (where awareness of language disappears). The modernist text, with its self-reflexive emphasis on form, would sit towards the ‘concentration’ end of the spectrum, while fully ‘popular’ fictions would lean towards entrancement. Middlebrow fiction, I suggest, sits between these two middle stages, oscillating between imaginative absorption in the fictional world and awareness of its implied or explicit commentary on the world beyond the text.

Lesueur’s defence of the feuilleton as different but equal to the middlebrow was as unusual as her choice to write in both genres. On the whole, the popular novel was deplored more than analysed, by both high and middlebrow writers: the novel’s development into a form of mass entertainment was accompanied by a highly critical and very public discourse of condemnation, in which the desire to defend artistic freedom against the creeping mercantilism of the age was entangled with a less disinterested desire to maintain the status of a highly educated and materially privileged elite. A fiction that was accessible to the mass of minimally educated readers surely could not be ‘art’, and by the same token the avant-garde regarded with contempt the sorts of novels enjoyed by the ordinary bourgeois reader. This discourse of condemnation carried a potent sub-text of gender: as Bourdieu demonstrated, definitions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture tend to mirror common characterisations of masculinity and femininity, ‘high’ being associated with culture as opposed to nature, hard as opposed to soft, intellect as opposed to emotion or instinct (Bourdieu, 2001: 138, n. 10). Immersive reading in itself is frequently characterised as feminine, for to get lost in a fictional world suggests a kind of swooning passivity that is far from virile. Attacks on the popular or middlebrow novel generally reserved their harshest words for those women who had the temerity not just to read but to write: the critic Frédéric Loliée published a lengthy article and survey in 1899 on ‘Les industriels du roman populaire’ in which he fulminated against women authors whose literary production he reduced to reproduction by calling them ‘pondeuses de copie’:

les femmes, qui s’entendent fort bien à soigner leurs intérêts … ont fait incursion là comme ailleurs, les unes pour brocher des romans-feuilletons avec une fécondité malheureuse, les autres pour exploiter le genre en douceur, à l’exemple de leurs grands confrères masculins. L’abondance dans les paroles et la prolixité dans les discours passent généralement pour être le péché mignon des personnes du sexe. Or, une faculté de noyer le vide de la pensée sous des flots de discours ne saurait se donner nulle part avec plus d’avantage que sous cette forme de production kilométrique. (Loliée, 1899: 1263)

Women writers (a small but significant minority of the whole literary workforce – see Constans, 2007) found themselves in a particularly difficult and contradictory position that mirrored and intensified that of their readers. They were educated, particularly once the Ferry laws of the 1880s had democratised state schooling, and as receptive as their male counterparts to the public affirmation of liberty and equality as the principles that informed the state. Modernity had opened up both geographical and social space with new forms of transport and public forums for female interaction such as the big department stores and a press and publishing trade that had the good commercial sense to recognise the sizeable female component among their readership, and to address their concerns. Yet all women were still excluded from civil, legal and political rights, including the right to vote, and this took particular forms for women struggling in many cases to make a living by writing but patronised, marginalised, underpaid and doubly despised on grounds of both writing for a mass readership and being women. It is perhaps unsurprising that it should be a woman writer, Lesueur, who chose to defend a form of popular storytelling almost universally condemned and strongly associated with the ‘feminine’ attributes of prolixity, sentimentality and romantic fancy, and to defend it in a manner that also contested the widely accepted view that literary quality increased as one ascended the ‘brows’.

For there is a broad but significant difference between male and female-authored middlebrow at this period that corresponds to the subordinate position of women writers and readers, and hence to their more oppositional stance in relation to the dominant culture. The function of the middlebrow novel is both to entertain and to chart and make sense of a changing social reality: that ‘making sense of’ can also mean defusing, reducing to more comfortably familiar patterns. Some of the most successful middlebrow novelists of the belle époque such as Georges Ohnet, Henry Bordeaux and Paul Bourget managed to combine compelling narratives of modernity with moral and political reassurance for a middle class at once thrilled and disorientated by change. If their plots were often spiced with exciting depictions of modern immorality, this was generally identified with a sophisticated Parisian milieu, often with the now marginalised upper class of the landed aristocracy, and was ultimately shown to lead to unhappiness or ruin. What triumphed in the end were traditional values, neatly aligned with those of the Republican bourgeoisie: hard work, thrift, a meritocratic social structure within the limits of class hierarchy, and at the heart of this the patriarchal family. ³ Plot devices shared with its lowbrow cousin the feuilleton ensured that the roman de mœurs kept its readers captivated; the moral sobriety of an Ohnet, a Bordeaux or a Bourget reassured readers that they were part of a stable order that would survive material and social transformation.

But this is also an era of feminist contestation, much of it from within the moderate Republican bourgeoisie. ‘Femmes nouvelles’ were visible on the stage, heading up the series of feminist congresses, publishing La Fronde (1897–1903), riding bicycles and working in offices – even gaining some limited rights such as, in 1907, that of married women to dispose of their own earned income. The gender question, intensified by a ferocious male backlash (Bard, 1999; Maugue, 1987), was polarised, inflammatory and a source of curiosity, excitement and anxiety. The realist middlebrow novel was a genre well suited to the representation of the shifting legal and social contexts that shaped relationships, and to the modelling of alternative emotional scenarios. The small but on the whole well-networked group of middlebrow women novelists ⁴ produced a whole series of commercially successful titles during the years at the turn of the century, of which some of the more revealing are Les Sévriennes (Reval, 1900), La Rebelle (Tinayre, 1905), Nietzschéenne (Lesueur, 1908) and La Vagabonde (Colette, 1910). Colette’s deeply irreverent Claudine series (1900–7), so widely read that the Pléaiade edition qualifies their success as ‘au sens quantitatif et commercial du mot … l’un des plus grands, sinon le plus grand, de toute la littérature française’ (Colette, 1984, I: lxvii), may also be seen as part of the phenomenon of middlebrow ‘new woman’ fiction.

These are all novels set firmly in contemporary France, centred on empathetic, spirited heroines who work through the conflict between the aspiration to personal fulfilment and the social imperative to marriage and maternity. New forms of female agency are imagined, and lived vicariously by readers, through heroines who in many cases work outside the home: Josanne, Marcelle Tinayre’s ‘Rebelle’ is a journalist, Colette’s ‘vagabond’ Renée Néré is (like her author) both a dancer and a writer, and Lesueur’s Nietzschéenne, Jocelyne, excluded by sex from the professional roles for which she is clearly fitted, throws her energies into social housing projects for workers. Most readers’ real lives, however, were shaped by marriage, and the romance plot is at the heart of the feminine middlebrow: heroines also seek fulfilment and a sense of agency through love. The extent to which the traditional love story is reworked to accommodate ‘new women’ is variable. In some, the generic imperative to leave the reader happy produces a final restoration of order with the heroine in the arms of an enlightened male hero. This is the case in Marcelle Tinayre’s La Rebelle, in which after an unhappy marriage, betrayal by the father of her illegitimate child, and a period of courageous independence and single motherhood, the heroine is rewarded by the love of a male feminist author who acknowledges and overcomes his own patriarchal conditioning: the novel can conclude with the traditional ending of romance because ‘ils avaient, l’un et l’autre, bâti leur amour sur les fondements inébranlables de la confiance et de la sincérité’ (1905: 370). Tinayre had ended her earlier Hellé in a similar vein, with her spirited and erudite young protagonist having learned through hard experience that masculine charm can conceal deeply conventional prejudice against emancipated women. The gruff but ethically scrupulous scholar, Antoine Genesvrier, provides Hellé’s happy ending: ‘Lui-même rayonnait, beau de son bonheur, de sa force, de sa jeunesse ressuscitée, beau de son âme héroïque – et dans l’ombre où nos yeux seuls brillaient encore je reconnus celui que j’attendais’ (1898 : 285). In Tinayre’s work romantic love requires mutual respect and recognition of equality, but remains a woman’s only truly happy form of dénouement.

Daniel Lesueur’s romans de mœurs, on the other hand, deploy the structure and offer the pleasures of romance but refuse the reader any happy ending: the incompatibility between authentic love and sexual inequality in the end renders romantic love impossible, and her female protagonists end their stories in emotionally sterile marriages (Lèvres closes, 1898), in lonely exile (Le Cœur chemine, 1903), or simply dead (Justice de femme, 1893; Nietzschéenne, 1907). Lesueurian heroines are largely married, like (we can only surmise) the majority of their readers; their husbands on the whole are kind, reasonable men who love them, but who are deeply imbued with the patriarchal values of their culture, and incapable of treating a woman as an equal. The relatively sympathetic portrayal of the husband is important, for thus the novels offer a quiet critique not of marital abuse but of the normative model of masculinity itself, and of the institution of marriage. If Lesueur’s women seek agency and fulfilment in love, this is on the whole through extra-marital affairs with younger men not yet established in the patriarchal role, and their fleeting happiness comes into collision with powerful taboos on female infidelity, at once social, legal and internalised. ⁵ Colette, characteristically, takes the subversive reworking of romance the farthest, though she too acknowledges the appeal of a secure, socially blessed union and the comfort of male protection through the dramatisation of her heroine’s conflicting desires. Renée Néré, in love with the younger, adoring and seductive Max, finally reverses the narrative logic of romance and rejects his passionate proposal of marriage in favour of freedom: even though ‘Vagabonde, et libre, je souhaiterai parfois l’ombre de tes murs’ (Colette, 1984: 1232). Whatever their degree of reassuring closure, these novels invite readers’ empathy with heroines whose sense of integrity and desire for fulfilment demand some resistance to the socially sanctioned model of a female life. Their plots make the patriarchal family the problem rather than the solution.

Renée is a modern woman, at ease in the city, on solitary travels across France, within the cross-sex camaraderie and liberal sexual mores of the music-hall. It is noticeable how, unlike the equally middlebrow Bourget or Bordeaux, the most widely-read women novelists of this period welcome modernity. Tinayre’s heroines rejoice in the fast-moving bustle of Paris streets: Josanne grows restless in the quiet provincialism of Chartres, preferring ‘la lutte, les risques, les fièvres de Paris au doux enlisement provincial’ (1905: 67). Lesueur’s plots are often centrally concerned with new developments in industry and technology (car production and industrial relations in Nietzschéenne, engineering and mass-marketing – the success of a new aperitif is the source of the hero’s wealth – in Haine d’amour (1894), the mass-publishing industry itself in Gilles de Clairevoie (1911)), and her novels celebrate what might be termed the everyday poetry of the new electrified age. Thus the hero of Nietzschéenne mentally extols the thrilling energy of the factory he owns: ‘Une vibration se propageait à travers les murs, les vitres, les planchers, tout frémissant d’une vie secrète’ (1907 : 27). Urban living, industry, technology and new forms of transport play a surprisingly large role in these novels: technological innovation is implicitly seen as a form of challenge to ‘natural’ laws, and thus as an emancipatory force that might, in its turn, translate into social freedoms.

The modernist orthodoxy that prevails in France from around this period insists on the inseparability of ideological radicalism and formal experimentation: the mainstream realist novel in particular is seen as incompatible with any effective challenge to the dominant order. But the belle époque, era of modernism’s birth, demonstrates that the immersive, mimetic novel that reaches a wide readership can play an important role in disseminating and negotiating contestatory ideas by providing a virtual forum in which to test out the solidity of old structures and the implications of new ones. In his defence of the kind of fiction reviled by the modernists, Pourquoi la fiction? (1999), Jean-Marie Schaeffer argues for the power of immersive fiction’s ‘fonction modélisante’: ‘l’exemplification fictionnelle de situations et de séquences comportementales … met à notre disposition des schémas de situations, des scénarios d’action, des constellations émotives et éthiques … susceptibles d’être intériorisés par immersion’ (1999 : 47). In other words we can achieve an internalised understanding of hitherto unfamiliar experiences, attitudes and feelings through their imaginary and to some extent bodily simulation provided by fiction.

During the belle époque, the feminine middlebrow novel became a space in which the implications of modernity for women could be explored, and new ‘constellations émotives et éthiques’ internalised, through the pleasures of virtual experience.