What would you do if you were locked up alone in a prison cell for a crime you know you are guilty of? One obvious answer is that you might spend a lot of time fantasizing about life on the outside. Another thing you might do is masturbate. This is what Jean Genet does in Our Lady Of the Flowers.
The prisoner Jean awaits trial for theft. He sticks pages from magazines on his cell wall and, while pleasuring himself, he uses his imagination to construct lives for them and stories about who they are. Divine is the protagonist of the non-linear narrative. He is a gay, cross-dressing prostitute who lives in an attic apartment with his lover, a pimp named Darling. Divine is close to thirty, worried about aging and wracked by insecurities, a decaying mental state that is made worse by living in a society that despises gay people. His friends are spiteful and mean and Darling does not pay him the attention he deserves. Divine is marginalized in the underclass of homosexuals and criminals and that underclass is marginalized by the host society so there is nowhere else for him to go except into fantasies.
Genet constructs his narrative along strings of associations. Jean’s prison cell is easily transformed into Divine’s attic apartment. The other characters in Divine’s story are aspects of Jean’s personality. Notice how he physically describes Divine’s and Darling’s physical appearance using identical wording and then look at a picture of Jean Genet; you will find that they correspond exactly. Divine, in his imagination, associates the downtrodden society he belongs to with the heavenly realm of Catholic saints and scatological references to farts, shit, and toilets are transmuted into pearls, gems, and sunlight. After Divine gets rejected by the church for his sexuality and criminal behavior, he seeks transcendence in the imminent world of prostitutes and thieves; in his fantasies he sublimates his reality by canonizing these outcasts so that he both transubstantiates them and transgresses Catholic dogma. Jean creates a chain of association between his own imagination and Divine’s dreams of security and acceptance.
The links of this chain are rooted in Divine’s childhood with the narrative shift being demarcated by switching to the child’s given name of Louis Culafroy. He grows up in rural France as much an outcast there as he is in Paris. His mother neglects him and his father is absent; take note that there is no God or Heavenly Father in Divine’s mysticism. The other children bully him and ignore him but he lives in the nicest house in the town. Culafroy’s family descended from the old aristocracy and as a child he imagines himself in relation to nobility and royalty to compensate for his loneliness. To his mother he is an outsider just as much as he is at school. Jean’s cell becomes Divine’s apartment which becomes Culafroy’s bedroom where he spends his time pretending. He asks his mother to buy him a violin but she says no so he makes one out of cardboard. In his fantasies, the unplayable violin becomes a vehicle for him to imagine playing a real violin, mastering the art of music, and becoming a world-class violinist. The chain of contrasts and wish-fulfillment fantasies is again realized in the narrative.
Culafroy’s first sexual experience is with an older man who catches snakes by the river. When Culafroy touches one of the snakes, he feels the essence of a whole collection of serpents entering his body and becoming a permanent part of him. The symbolism is both unmistakably Christian and homoerotic. Culafroy’s fall from grace initiates a chain of association between him and religious imagery. Jean builds on this association by telling the story of how Culafroy got put into a juvenile detention center for stealing. He escapes by stealing again, this time from the laundry room where he puts on a nun’s habit and walks out; thus we see how dressing as a woman helps him escape the ugly reality he does not want to belong to. Of course, as Divine finds out later in Paris, as he sits in a cafe with both gay and straight people who all seem to despise him, cross-dressing does not actually resolve the problems he wishes to solve.
Eventually Darling falls in love with another gay prostitute and moves out of Divine’s apartment, abandoning him. This is when a teenage boy who killed an old man during a burglary moves in. Divine falls in love and christens him Our Lady Of the Flowers. At about the same time, Divine’s mother arrives in Paris, searching for her son who she had not seen for a very long time. Notice the connection between Our Lady Of the Flowers, an alternate name for St. Marie or the Virgin Mary and Culafroy’s neglectful mother. The aging Divine seeks for atonement with a teenager to compensate for the love he never got from his uncaring mother. But Our Lady Of the Flowers fall in love with an attractive Black man and then gets sent to prison. Divine’s mother, horrified to see the life her son is living, shoots him. The illusions are shattered and Divine never fulfills his ultimate dream; he spends his life trying to please other people and never gets his ultimate wish: the acceptance and love he desires. Despite being a thief, he never wanted to hurt anybody and his only true crime was being different.
The crime of theft is a central and reoccurring theme throughout the novel. The teenager Culafroy gets sent to a detention center for stealing and he escapes by stealing the outfit of a nun. Divine makes money as a streetwalker but he also earns a living by shoplifting items to be fenced. Towards the end of the novel, Divine is shoplifting in a department store. The items he steals are luxury goods like wallets, perfumes, and expensive scarfs. Being the outcast that he is, the host society has stolen the opportunity for Divine to make an honest living so that he can buy these items legally. Theft is a means of compensating for the place in society he has been denied because of his sexuality. Likewise he steals imagery from the Catholic church and uses it to ornament the people he associates with because the church has denied him membership and the sense of belonging he craves. For Jean, Culafroy, and Divine stealing is as central to his identity as fantasy. Then he gets caught by the department store’s policeman only then he isn’t dressed as a woman. Divine isn’t Divine anymore because Divine is Jean and Jean is on his way to a prison cell. The illusion is pierced, the fantasy collapses, Divine’s attic becomes Jean’s prison and everything has come full circle.
Our Lady Of the Flowers is a lot more than a portrait of a gay man in French society. It examines the nature of an outcast’s identity, thrown into a world of modern, existential alienation. It examines the nature of creativity and the writing of literature. It shows how fantasy can make a person complete when they are denied the chance to obtain what they should be allowed to have. It shows how imagination is necessary. There is one passage in the book where Jean and a Black cellmate, who may or may not be imaginary, are painting an army of toy soldiers blue as if they are gods creating human beings. But underneath the blue paint and metal surfaces, the toy soldiers are hollow, they are something wrapped around nothing, a synthesis of being and nothingness. The soldiers are the world of people where the illusion of reality is a cover for the emptiness of life. In the end, the illusion may not be real but without it there is nothing so the illusion may be all that Jean has to cling to in order to stay alive. That is how a reader with nothing in common with Jean can find a way to relate to him.
Genet, Jean. Our Lady Of the Flowers. Panther Books, London: 1969.
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