Grisette (woman)
In 19th century French literature, the term grisette referred to a young, unmarried woman of lower class, mostly from the upper part of the lower class, who earned her living independently as a cleaner , but also as a seamstress ( midinette ), laundress or factory worker. She lived alone, without the supervision of her parents, which was considered unconventional at the time. The name is derived from a gray, cheap and hard-wearing wool fabric called Grisette , which they often wore as a dress and which they could afford from their low earnings.
In Paris, the expression was associated with a not entirely honorable way of life. Some women who, as lovers of students, artists, etc., lived together with their lovers for some time unmarried in the Latin Quarter were referred to as grisettes du Quartier latin . The grisette is the literary counterpart to the male bohemian , but is in contrast to the cocotte, the professional prostitute .
The best-known literary grisette figures include friends Mimì and Musetta , main characters in Puccini's opera La Bohème . In the operetta The Merry Widow by Franz Lehár , the evening amusements of the young Grisettes in " Maxim’s " are described. Another typical description of the Parisian grisette is found in the portrayal of the rigolette in Eugène Sue's novel Secrets of Paris or in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables . Grisetten also play a role in Georg Büchner's play Dantons Tod as Rosalie, Adelaide and Marion.
In his book The Single and His Property (1844) Max Stirner laments the fate of sexually frustrated young women and closes the paragraph with the exclamation "A free grisette against a thousand virgins who have turned gray in virtue!"
Web links
- The merry widow, as it were, as a Catholic staging in keeping with the carnival season: free from asceticism, carefree from culturally critical overload. Ulm University, accessed on August 22, 2008 .
- Hanna Manchin: The Grisette as the Female Bohemian (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ursula Hermann: Origin dictionary: Etymology and history of 10,000 interesting words . Orbis Verlag, 1983, ISBN 3-572-00636-8 , pp. 184 .
- ↑ LSR project by Bernd A. Laska