Clara (Mirbeau)

Clara
The Torture Garden character
Clara, by Jeannette Seelhoff, 1931
Created by	Octave Mirbeau
Information
Gender	Female
Nationality	English

Clara is the main character in the French Novel The Torture Garden ((in French) Le Jardin des supplices, 1899), by Octave Mirbeau.

Clara, who has no last name or civil status, is an English woman with red hair and green eyes--“a greyish green of the young fruits of the almond tree.” Single, rich and bisexual, Clara lives near Canton, and leads an idle existence, entirely devoted to finding perverse pleasures. She is fully emancipated, financially and sexually, and freed from oppressive laws and taboos prevailing in the West and which, according to her critique of anarchist inspiration, prohibit the development of the individual. Clara thus claims to enjoy complete freedom. She particularly enjoys visiting the city prison every week, which is open to tourists on Wednesday. Clara delights in watching the death row inmates, many of whom are innocent or guilty of minor offenses, being brutally tortured and put to death.

This protagonist meets the anonymous narrator, a petty political crook, aboard the Saghalien, where the pseudo-embryologist was sailing to Ceylon, as part of an official mission. In reality, his primary goal is just to distance himself from France. She seduces him, awakening his sexual desire along with the need to unburden himself, and becomes his mistress. She takes him with her to China, where both the narrator and Clara share a lover, Annie.

Two years later, the narrator, who had fled from Clara's pernicious embraces and went to Annam, returns. Clara regains her power over him and is pleased to dominate and humiliate him. She takes him to visit the torture garden of the prison, where they wander around. During a crescendo of horror, Clara experiences waves of ecstasy and has a hysterical fit. She then feels almost purified after climaxing. The scene takes place in a "flower boat", a floating brothel, where orgies take place. According to the narrator, the area is more like a place of punishment than a garden of delights. But, as Ki Pai, the boatman who regularly accompanies Clara, says, "It will start all over again!"

The enigmatic character of Clara, "fairy of mass graves, angel of decomposition and decay", seems to be based on pure fantasy, unrelated to a plausible reality that the novel would be expected to reproduce mimetically, to the point at which the narrator becomes haggard wondering whether she is not a figment of his imagination: "Does she really exist?... I wonder, not without fear... Was she not born out of my debauchery and fever?... Is she like one of those impossible images, like a child in a nightmare? ... A criminal temptation, lust sparking the sick imaginations of murderers and madmen?... Could she be nothing but my soul, escaped outside of my body, despite myself, which materialized in the form of sin?... "