Irreducible: Lessons Regarding Psy Patients, Treatments and Cures Drawn from
the Life of Sculptor Camille Claudel
Kristen Hollon
Susan Hippensteele, PhD, J.D.
WS 434, Women and Madness
3 December 2012
Late 19th and early 20th century sculptor Camille Claudel exhibited signs of what
was probably manic depression, in her case characterized by cyclical heightened and
depressed emotional states, as well as periods of financial recklessness. However, she
also possessed an indomitable spirit and a penchant for defiance, traits peculiar for a
woman of her era. Although modern analysts of Camille’s life tend to attribute one of
these characteristics to the other, neither her illness nor her will can or should be reduced
away. She was always herself, a woman not only with a mental disorder, but also an
indomitable will. Camille’s irreducibility is her lesson to modern practitioners who have
the potential to engage in similar practices of diagnosis and reduction; her story teaches
us that framing patient problems inherently presents an ethical issue because its
consequences can be drastic for the patient, as well as the world at large.
Evidence of Manic-Depression
Camille displayed cyclical patterns of heightened and depressed emotional states,
as well as other symptoms of manic-depression, which mirrored her patterns of artistic
productivity. Often, joy inspired creation. In her childhood home of Villeneuve, the home
Camille spent the rest of her life missing, the then-novice sculptor was so consumed by
her joy in creating art that her first biographer described her love for sculpting as “a
violent passion” (Ayral-Clause 14). This passion grew when Camille moved to Paris, and
Ayral-Clause labels this time in the artist’s life “an intense artistic period” in which she
created numerous sketches, original works, and works under Rodin’s name (48).
Similarly, as Camille’s friendship and love for Rodin grew, she created some of her most
noted sculptures, including La Valse, Vertumne et Pomone,and Sakuntala (Ayral-Clause).
However, Camille also found motivation to work in her life’s darker eras. Ayral-Clause
notes that “the decade following [Camille’s] break-up with Rodin [encompassed] the
most prolific years of her career” (118). During this time she created L’Age mûr, for
which she received a coveted commission from The French Ministry of Fine Arts, and
numerous other works (Ayral-Clause 145). Still, the strongest link between Camille’s
artistic production and her mood might come from her letters written on her work at quai
Bourbon. Upon hearing about her cousin Henri Thierry’s death, she writes that
“I got so mad that I took all my wax studies and threw
them in the fire. It made big flames, I warmed my feet
at the fire, that’s the way it is when something
unpleasant happens to me, I take my hammer and I
squash a figure. Henri’s death cost me a lot. More than
10,000 francs…many other executions occurred
afterward, and a pile of rubble accumulates in the
middle of my atelier, it is a real human sacrifice”
(Ayral-Clause 182).
In Camille’s distressed state at quai Bourbon, she engaged in an endless cycle of
frenzied creation and destruction which even she connected to her moods. For Camille,
life’s struggles could be represented by her sculptures, and destroyed through them as
well; Ayral-Clause estimates that as many as 100 of Camille’s 260-280 life works were
lost at quai Bourbon (255).
Although these heightened and cyclical emotional cycles – evident through both
her behavior and her art – seem indicative of manic-depression, Camille displayed
another symptom of the disorder, extreme financial irresponsibility, which corresponded
to possible periods of elevated mood. In an earlier era, specifically the era of her
affiliation with Rodin, Camille lived a life of relative excess; she took international
vacations, had fashionable outfits, and had multiple sittings with the expensive and
famous photographer Carjat (Ayral-Clause 70,73). She never tempered her spending to
save for a poorer era without Rodin, even when she chose to slowly distance herself from
him and could foresee the possible state of her life without his direct financial support
(Ayral-Clause). Recognized as someone often imprudent with money during times of
financial excess, a friend of Camille’s labeled her “the one who offered champagne to her
guests without thinking of tomorrow” (Ayral-Clause 158). Later in life, Camille’s
financial risks became more obvious. Even though a friend described quai Bourbon
Camille as wilted “mercilessly” by poverty, the sculptor planned to give New Year’s gifts
to her mailman, garbage man, and street cleaner, spent 1,000 francs on dresses within
days of their receipt, and invited homeless men into her atelier late at night for
extravagant dinner parties (Ayral-Clause 158-9). At this time, Camille was taken to court
for non-payment of bills (Ayral-Clause 159-60). She clearly neglected her financial
obligations to pursue her financial whims, a trend that worsened in tandem with her
paranoia.
Although her paranoia also worsened with time, I see possible instances of it in
her earlier years. For example, Camille’s persistent fear that Rodin’s life partner Rose
posed a threat to the continuity of their relationship partially caused his and Camille’s
separation, despite the fact that Rodin’s ideal romantic situation had roles for both of
them, “security with his older companion, love and creativity with the younger one,” and
despite the fact that Rodin had many lovers simultaneously and semi-successfully
throughout his life (Aryal-Clause 112, 201). Also, Camille was excessively conscious of
the perceived similarities between her work and Rodin’s, and constantly took precautions
to distinguish her work from his, to keep him away from her atelier in efforts to protect
her ideas, and to create a professional separation between them after their personal
separation. In 1893, Camille writes to Paul of her impending project, and stresses the
dissimilarity of her work from Rodin’s, as well as its secrecy: “you see that it is not at all
like Rodin, and it is dressed…I share these findings only with you, so don’t show them”
(Aryal-Clause 121). This level of warning seems hardly necessary; although Paul
sometimes erred in his advocacy for his sister’s lifestyle, he always marveled over her
work, and stated numerous times that he preferred it to Rodin’s (Ayral-Clause). Over the
years, Camille’s paranoia, especially her paranoia about Rodin stealing her work, grew.
At quai Bourbon she implicated numerous people in spying on her work for Rodin, or
robbing her of it to give to him, including: the neighbor, the boy who brought her wood,
the cleaning woman, and imagined burglars, who she thought were Rodin’s Italian male
models (Ayral-Clause 183). These suspicious about Rodin continued well through her
institutionalization. In the asylum, Camille believed that her caregivers, Rodin’s
supposed gang, and “millionaire art dealers” wanted to “force her to sculpt” for their own
gain; although she was given clay during her 30-year institutionalization, her paranoia
was so strong that she never touched it (Aryal-Clause 221).
Still, it should be noted that Camille’s paranoid delusions always had their origins
in over-exaggerations of the truth. Camille was very familiar with Rodin intervening on
her behalf during her career, and when they got along, she even urged him to use his
power and connections to her advantage. Indeed, in an 1885 love letter, Rodin promised
Camille to
“protect her alone through all the means [he had at his
disposal through his friends who will be hers especially
through his influential friends],” and to “accept no
other students so that no other rival talent could be
produced by chance,” and that “at the exhibition, [he
would] do everything [he could] for..placement…and
the newspapers” (Aryal-Clause 71).
It is no wonder that, when Camille’s mind suffered long after their relationship turned
awry, she might think that Rodin was still intervening – but this time for her harm instead
of her good. Rodin was still intervening heavily on her behalf, sometimes for good, and
sometimes for ill. Camille’s most successful and acclaimed work during her lifetime
was L’Age mûr, but Rodin’s dislike of how intricately it seemed to expose their affair led
him to ask The French Ministry of Fine Arts not to have it cast in bronze (Ayral-Clause
147). The Ministry obliged his request, and a casting that would have been extremely
beneficial to Camille’s career and financial situation was abandoned (Ayral-Clause
147).Although no proof exists to support Camille’s belief that Rodin endeavored to steal
her work, he definitely had no problem sabotaging it. Camille was definitely right in
thinking that Rodin kept a rather watchful eye on her, and was definitely right in thinking
that this watchfulness was not always beneficial.
In her asylum years, Camille’s paranoia expressed itself in a more extreme
manner. She feared sculpting because she had convinced herself that the aforementioned
“millionaire art dealers” were waiting to profit from her artistic labor, which she likened
to “sweat[ing] blood and tears” (Aryal-Clause 221). While millionaire art dealers had not
taken up asylum residence, Paul’s friend Philippe Berthelot had stolen Camille’s plaster
of L’Age mûr to make himself a copy of it without paying her (Ayral-Clause 220).
Because of the piece’s emotional relevance to her relationship with Rodin and her
decline, because of how much Camille – now a third-tier asylum resident – could have
used a commission, and because of the thief’s relationship with her brother, it seems
inevitable that this incident would have had a negative psychological impact on Camille.
Although I hesitate to judge anyone’s expression of grief, using this incident to support
decades of creative anorexia seems slightly excessive. To Camille, sculpting used to be
worth her mother and sister’s scorn, her most serious romantic relationship, her life of
relative poverty, her continued status as a social deviant; in her later years, her paranoia,
perhaps partially caused by her devotion to her art, began to outshine even art itself.
While the triumph of Camille’s manic-depressive paranoia over her art may
represent her life’s saddest truth, in a way, her obsession with creation and creative lack
were vital to her existence and identity from childhood until death. For young Camille,
sculpture was life. She saw it in the rocks of Villeneuve, in nature, as an inherent part of
existence (Aryal-Clause 15). Throughout her most productive years, Camille turned to
nature and thoughts of nature – Islette, the Loire Valley, the English countryside, the Isle
of Wight, the country feel of Quai Bourbon, the healing waters of Lourdes, the memories
she had of Villeneuve – as a source of inspiration, recovery, and strength in some of her
most trying times, including her separation from Rodin (Aryal-Clause 114, 111, 152, 170,
218). For an aged Camille, her love of sculpting was a paradox; to protect her work and
to protect herself, she chose not to do that which she loved the most. In the asylum
world, emotional protection was certainly necessary. A contemporary of Camille’s noted
that “hope [for freedom] too long deferred made them so sick of life that they yielded
themselves up to desperation as a natural, inevitable result” of their existence (AryalClause 220). Even after 30 years of institutionalization, isolation, and madness, Camille
was never a woman who yielded. Her views about sculpting, however paranoid, however
pathological, prove to me that her identity as a sculptor was intact, vital, and relevant to
her existence to the very end.
Irreducible
Camille’s story is one of two extremes: extreme mental illness, and extreme
personal strength. It is a sign of her time and of ours that we were and are so quick to
reduce one side of Camille to the other; the truth is that she is irreducible. Camille was
clearly mentally ill – as her mother liked to point out, at one point her paranoid delusions
were so strong that Camille had boarded up her apartment, and would only receive
necessities and food through a single window (Ayral-Clause 214). Throughout her life,
Camille also displayed other symptoms of what we now call manic-depression; intense,
and often mercurial, emotional and creative cycles, and periods of rash financial decisionmaking. Some might label her mad.
However, Camille was also extremely stubborn, gifted, and intelligent, and her
delight in social deviance rivaled her madness in strength. Her peers hailed her as “one of
the most authentic sculptors of [her] time” and “a great artist” (Aryal-Clause 172).
Camille was indeed great, and her contemporaries aptly suggested that her greatness
resided in her ability to be true to herself. However, to be herself – a single female artist
in the 19th century – she had to do the impossible, “live outside the values of her time”
(Aryal-Clause 182). Camille was ridiculed for everything from smoking to getting an
abortion, and the art world’s criticisms of her work were often milder than her mother
and brother’s criticisms of the lifestyle her work required (Aryal-Clause 47, 114-5)
Pursuing her art required social deviance, and it is a good thing for the world that Camille
enjoyed it; to say that this pursuit took immense personal strength is a mild
understatement.
Camille’s strength and her irreducibility are her lesson to us; someone, perhaps
especially a woman, can be considered both brilliant and mad. First, her life proves that
mental illness and defiance are not only separate entities, but also entities capable of
coexisting within a single person. Second, her story teaches us that confusing these
entities has the potential to deprive the world of beautiful and inspired work; imagine
how many works she destroyed at quai Bourbon, and imagine how many works she could
have created in all the years she was forced into creative abstinence in asylums. Third,
her story also teaches us that confusing “mad” with “bad,” mental illness with a
proclivity for defiance, has the potential to rob individuals of decades of personal
freedom.
The Ethics of Framing Patient Problems
Like Camille, all people and all patients are irreducible. Framing patient
problems, a largely subjective pursuit, consequently presents an ethical dilemma. A
distinct difference existed for Camille between her problem – probably manic-depression
– and the problem others thought she had: an unfeminine, and therefore deviant, and
therefore unsightly, fortitude of spirit. This difference has the potential to exist for all
patients, and everyone – from families to mental health professionals – should be aware
of their biases to help the mentally ill avoid Camille’s fate.
In Camille’s case, her manic-depressive symptoms were often mistakenly
attributed to her fortitude of spirit, thought of as inappropriate for her feminine gender.
This biased assumption was her family’s reason for pursuing Camille’s terminal
institutionalization; for Louise and Paul Claudel, paranoia was less of a problem than
embarrassing the family. Louise, highly responsible for Camille’s committal and
continued asylum residence, often received correspondence from the sculptor’s doctors
communicating a lull in Camille’s symptoms and a recommendation for her release. In
response, Louise wrote of the “extravagant ideas” her daughter had before the asylum; it
is only after she ridiculed her daughter’s ambitions, nature, and behavior that she wrote of
Camille’s justifiably sad life at quai Bourbon as a reason for continued committal, despite
the fact that she had been repeatedly told that Camille’s symptoms were in regression
(Aryal-Clause 213). In one letter after she repeats this pattern, Louise insisted that
Camille “ha[d] every possible vice,” and claimed that she used these vices to do “as much
harm [to the family] as possible” when she lived free (Ayral-Clause 213-4). No evidence
exists of Camille ever attempting to harm her family, whether free or not; indeed, Camille
loved her mother and all of her siblings, and longed throughout her institutionalization to
see them as much as possible, seemingly not caring about their role in her committal and
their refusal to allow for her longed-for release (Aryal-Clause 214). Still, Camille knew
of her family’s failure to distinguish between her illness and her indomitable will. “They
reproach me (oh dreadful crime) of living alone,” she wrote to a friend, “of spending my
life with cats…It is on the strength of these accusations that I have been incarcerated”
(Aryal-Clause 215).
Unfortunately, despite their inherent biases, these accusations were strong enough
to keep Camille committed until her sad death more than three decades later. Regardless
of her emotional strength and endurance, Camille’s story is ultimately a tragedy. Forced
to live in asylums through periods of relative stability, the great sculptor died alone and
was eventually buried in a mass grave far from the land she loved, never to return (AyralClause 253).
Conclusion
Camille’s final resting place leaves us with a sobering reminder of the utter
nothingness to which the world relegates those for whom brilliance is reduced to illness.
For Camille, neither dominated the other, as she possessed both separately and
simultaneously; like Camille, modern psy patients have this potential. Camille’s story
teaches us that never in the name of science – let alone best interest, treatment, or cure –
should the experiences and efforts of psy patients be reduced to descriptions of their
illness. Patients deserve more than diagnoses, because they live – as Camille teaches us,
often quite brilliantly – outside of them, irreducible.
Works Cited
Ayral-Clause, Odile. Camille Claudel: A Life. Ed. Barbara Burn. New York: Harry N.
Abrams, XXZZZ2002. Print.